Frank Closer takes a look inside legendary crooner Frank Sinatra’s retro California abode.
The Chairman of the Board liked to relax in a California compound
Regrets — he had a few — but for Frank Sinatra, buying his modern Rancho Mirage, Calif., spread wasn’t one of them. “It was a place of the happiest times we ever had with him,” his youngest daughter, Tina, revealed.
Frank had built a house in nearby
Palm Springs in 1947. Then, for more privacy, he bought what he thought was a secluded two-bedroom abode next to the Tamarisk Country Club golf course on Wonder Palms Road in the mid’50s. Unfortunately, his new place had a handicap: “Sometimes golfers actually walked in,” his daughter Nancy recalled. “One clown drove a golf cart into the pool” — so the man who once sang “Don’t Fence Me In” built a fence to solve the problem. After more additions and land acquisitions, his homestead grew to twoand-a-half acres and became known as the Compound, at 70588 Frank Sinatra Drive.
Frank expanded his main house to include a dining room that fit 24 people, a huge modern kitchen, a wine closet, a walk-in fridge/freezer and nine guest rooms that would host the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Outside, he added a couple of two-bedroom cottages on either side of his
swimming pool, each with his-and-hers baths and a professional salon hair dryer for the ladies.
“Orange is the happiest color,” Frank said, so it could be found in his carpeting, drapes, tiling, sofa and other decor, which he arranged as immaculately as he dressed. “I live my life in certain ways that I could never change for a woman,” Frank said in 1965, after his marriages to first and second wives Nancy Barbato and Ava Gardner and just before his brief union with Mia Farrow. “I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault. My clothing must hang just so. I demand everything in its place.”
And when he expanded his property, Frank made sure he had a place for everything: an office for his many awards, a projection room to screen films, a pad to land his two helicopters, a one-bedroom cottage with a studio for painting and a four-bedroom bungalow called the Christmas Tree House (named for the pine tree outside) that he built for his children, Nancy, Tina and Frank Jr. In 1971, several employees bought a caboose for their train-loving boss; Frank equipped it with a sauna, a barber chair and more.
Each building was initially named for one of Frank’s regular guests, including
Brynner (for star Yul Brynner). But they were eventually renamed for his songs, such as “The House I Live In” (his main house) and “Send in the Clowns” (his projection room). A different kind of addition was made in 1976, however: his fourth wife, Barbara Marx. They lived at the Rancho Mirage place until 1995, three years before his passing, and while they had other houses in Malibu and Beverly Hills, leaving the Compound was a sad moment for Frank. “That was his home,” Tina recalled, “and you could feel it.”
“I don’t believe in self-indulgence as a performer. That goes for my life, too.”
— Frank