You may have heard this news yesterday, but I couldn’t resist commenting on it. Frank Sinatra’s last ex wife, Barbara Sinatra, has a new memoir out in which she writes of her 22 year marriage to Old Blue Eyes, ending when he passed away in 1998 at the age of 82. Barbara is now 84 and is ready to reveal what it was like to be married to the famous crooner. While she remembers plenty of romantic moments it wasn’t always easy going. Frank would sometimes drink gin and she said she avoided him then, but she didn’t get into the details too much. I saw an interview with Barbara on ABC News (below) and I found her story really fascinating. It’s clear that she loved Frank up until the end, and that she misses him terrible. ABC reports that her memoir doesn’t have any details of Frank’s troubled relationship with his daughters at all, and that she steered clear of that topic.

Frank Sinatra had an interesting quirk that he managed to keep hidden from the public for his entire life: He was obsessed with being clean.

“He was a guy who took about 12 showers a day,” his widow, Barbara Sinatra, said in an interview with ABC News.

The singer, who died in 1998 at age 82 following a heart attack, was “neat” and “always smelled like lavender,” she added.

Barbara, his fourth and last wife, is promoting her new memoir titled, “Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank,” which delves into the couple’s romantic, but oftentimes difficult, 22-year marriage….

“He made me feel special,” she told ABC, adding that “he would think of every little thing to make it romantic.”

But alcohol often affected the nature of their relationship.

“I didn’t want to be around him if he drank gin,” Barbara admitted. “Gin, I think, made him mean. So when I’d come out of my room and see the gin bottle on the bar, I’d turn right around, go back in my room, lock the door, because I didn’t want to deal with it.”

Still, when Frank was on what would turn out to be his deathbed, she was convinced they would still be together for years to come.

“I kept saying, ‘You’ve beaten tougher things than this. I think you can beat this, too,’ ” she recounted. “He just looked up at me and he said, ‘I can’t.’ That was it.”

[From NY Daily News]

Showering 12 times a day sounds like an obsessive compulsive disorder to be sure. Twice a day is understandable, but anything more than that is excessive. I wonder how else Frank’s obsessiveness came though and if he had any other bizarre repetitive behavior.

In an excerpt of Barbara’s memoir posted on ABC News, Barbara details how Frank, her then-neighbor, wooed her away from her husband of 12 years, who had been cheating on her anyway.

Having been nothing but courteous for months, Frank first came looking for it my way at a gin rummy party he hosted at his house across the fairway from ours in Palm Springs, California. My husband, Zeppo, sat a few feet away, oblivious to the drama that was about to unfold. Our twelve-year marriage had long been dead.

Twenty-six years older than me, Zeppo had been successful in vaudeville and manufacturing, but once he retired he preferred a routine of golf or sailing followed by early nights. Unable to relinquish the swinging lifestyle of his fraternal youth, he also dated other women. The Marx name and financial security he’d offered me and my son, Bobby, were all that was left of our once promising romance. I was bored and lonely by the time Mr. Sinatra aimed those eyes in my direction. The spark he ignited inside jerked me from my slumbers.

Frank had been watching me all night as if he was seeing me for the first time. Sitting close, he called me “Barbara, baby” in that killer voice and flashed me a lopsided smile. He asked if anyone wanted “more gasoline” and offered to fix me a fresh martini. Taking my arm, he led me to the den. It was my turn to watch as he swirled vodka around a glass, reached for an olive and then some ice. A cigarette balanced on his bottom lip, a curl of blue smoke rising. He handed me my drink with a Salute! and then added softly, “Come sit with me awhile.”

Thrown off guard by his sudden change of tack, I found myself directly in the path of that extraordinary force of nature. There was nowhere to run. Once he turned on the charm, my defenses rolled away like tumbleweed. Inhaling his heady scent of lavender water, Camel cigarettes, and Jack Daniel’s, I could do nothing but savor the moment of intoxication, oblivious to the consequences.

As we settled onto a couch, our eyes met, and then he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. I knew with that first kiss that I was about to become another Sinatra conquest, and the thought snatched away what little breath he’d left me. Nothing more would happen that night. Not for weeks, months even.

[From ABCNews]

It sounds really romantic and I love her writing style. You can’t blame her for leaving her husband when he had a bunch of women on the side too I guess.

Here’s that ABC interview with Barbara promoting her book. She looks so frozen and it’s clear she’s had a ton of work done. When I get to be that age I want to look like Betty White, like I’ve had a lift (or two) but it’s subtle. I find her story and affect very genuine though, and she’s definitely got some incredibly interesting stories to tell. She hung out with the rat pack and in her book she writes that she was romanced by John F. Kennedy. The bastard was probably married at the time, although she only mentions it briefly and it’s hard to tell.