The showgirl who married Frank Sinatra
Barbara Sinatra 1927-2017
Known Barbara as Sinatra “Lady was Bluea formerEyes”,
Las Vegas showgirl who
became Frank Sinatra’s fourth and final wife. Married to him for almost 22 years, longer than any of his other wives, she was credited with taming the notoriously temperamental star, and persuading him to moderate his drinking. Later, with his support, she established herself as a major philanthropist, chiefly known for her work with abused and neglected children.
Born in 1927, Barbara Blakeley grew up first in Missouri, and then in Wichita during the Depression, said The Washington Post, giving her an early taste of poverty that would inform the rest of her life. Her father was a butcher and, with many of his customers going hungry, he often accepted IOUS in lieu of payment. In the 1940s, they moved to California, where she found work as a model, before opening her own charm school. She’d been a Sinatra fan as a teenager, and her first husband, Bob Oliver, was a singer who, she said, reckoned he sounded like Sinatra. They had one son before divorcing. She then moved to Las Vegas with another boyfriend – also a Sinatra soundalike – where she first encountered Ol’ Blue Eyes in person. He was propping up the bar with his Rat Pack friends when she walked by. “I heard someone say, ‘Hey, Blondie! Come over here. Join us!’ But I just kept walking. One of the girls with me said, ‘Do you know who that was? That was Frank Sinatra.’ And I said, ‘I don’t care, I don’t want to deal with drunks.’”
Around the same time, she also caught the eye of Zeppo, the youngest of the Marx Brothers – who had by then given up show business to spend his time gambling, womanising and playing golf in the desert enclave of Palm Springs. He was 26 years her senior, and she admitted that she was never in love with him – but she was tired of the “monthly scramble to pay the bills”. They married in 1959 and settled in his mansion in the Tamarisk Country Club. “That’s when I first started meeting Hollywood-type people,’’ she recalled. Sinatra had a house nearby, and became a friend; some years later, they became lovers. “When he pulled me into his arms, I was caught completely off guard. Such was the power of the Sinatra magnetism that I didn’t really have a choice.” On the other hand, she knew what she was getting into: she described Sinatra – who was notorious for his temper – as a “55-year-old living legend who’d grown accustomed to getting his own way”. She turned a blind eye when he was unfaithful, and kept out of his way when he’d been drinking gin, as it made him “mean”. “I don’t know that I handled his moods,” she said, “I lived with them.”
They married in 1976, when he was 60 and she was 49. A decade later, she opened the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Centre with money that he’d helped raise. It has since treated more than 20,000 children. But her relations with her three stepchildren were fractious, said The Daily Telegraph. The trouble is believed to have started in 1988, when she persuaded Sinatra to change his will, so that his two main properties would be left to her alone. There were further clashes over merchandising rights and royalty payments. Sinatra eventually sought to put an end to the bickering by inserting a clause in his will which meant that if any of the beneficiaries contested it, they’d immediately forfeit their share.