Between the Pages

The author is the widow of Frank Sinatra.  She was his fourth wife, and their marriage lasted longer than his previous three put together (and longer than her previous two marriages put together).

In this book, she not only talks about her life with Frank, but also describes growing up in the sleepy town of Bosworth, Missouri, from where she moved to Wichita with her parents and became a model.  She decribes her unhappy marriage to Bob Harrison Oliver, with whom she had her son Bobby, and her second marriage to Zeppo Marx (of Marx Brothers fame).  Finally, she describes her relationship with Frank, how it started, progressed to marriage, and how they apparently had a very happy life together.

There are some good things about this book.  It’s an undemanding read, and even the parts of Barbara Sinatra’s life that happened before she met Frank Sinatra were illuminating.  However, the vast majority of the story is understandably given over to their life together.

Unfortunately, I found it difficult to warm to, or even like, the author very much.  I suspect that she wants the viewer to believe that she and Frank were the absolute loves of each other’s lives, and nobody who they had relationships with before even really mattered.  It also seemed like she was trying to convince the reader that nothing she ever did wrong was her fault.  Ever.  She cheated on both of her first two husbands – the first time with Joe Graydon, the television host, who was a married man himself.  While married to Zeppo Marx (and poor old Zeppo does not come out of this account very well), she flew to Monaco for a holiday and said that she worried about what Zeppo might get up to with other women while she was away – but this was while she herself was flying away for an illicit liaison with Frank Sinatra!

She claimed at one point to be ‘joined at the hip’ to her son Bobby, but this is the child who she dumped on her parents when he was just a small toddler, while she swanned off to Vegas with her married lover, and became a Vegas showgirl.  Later in life, Bobby moved to Switzerland and met a girl who he wanted to marry.

Her love of money and the glamourous life is also plain to see.  Barbara describes in detail many of the pieces of jewellery that Frank bought for her (yet his children and grandchildren barely get mentioned in this book, and his daughters Nancy and Tina are never mentioned by name.  This may of course be because Barbara famously did not get on with Nancy and Tina Sinatra.  Far from the account of a very happy marriage that is described here, Tina believed that Barbara made Frank’s life a misery.  Nobody who was not there can really know the truth, but there’s no reason to suppose that both women aren’t telling the truth as they see it; after all, different people can have widely differing perspectives on the same situation).  She more or less admits that she married Zeppo for his money, and when she wanted to leave him at one point, she decided not to, because after all, she could have gone back to work if she had to but after years of not having to earn her own money, that would be very tough on her.

However, while I still have not been able to warm up to Barbara Sinatra at all, I did enjoy the latter part of her story, because that is where – to me at least – Frank Sinatra was portrayed as less of a personality, and more of a person.  I even shed a tear when reading about how devastated he was when his old friends Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr died, and the respective stories of Frank’s mother Dolly’s death in a plane crash, and his own death also made me cry.  I think it was during these moments that I could see a flash of how Barbara must have actually loved her husband very much (although I’m not sure if she would have loved him so much if he had not been rich and famous).

There are some funny anecdotes in the book – not just about Sinatra, but about the many famous people who were his friends.  Initially the name dropping got on my nerves a bit, but I can forgive it, because if Barbara Sinatra’s life with Frank involved mingling with celebrities, it would be hard to discuss that life without mentioning those people.  There’s little doubt though that this is a sanitised version of Frank Sinatra, and there are no real new insights for fans.  The book demonstrates his immense charisma, the fact that he could be difficult to work with, but also generous to a fault.  An interesting read, but there are better biographies of Frank Sinatra out there.