Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank

by Barbara Sinatra Narrated by Lorna Raver

Overview

Barbara Sinatra's first public love letter to the husband she adored, she celebrates the sensational singer, possessive mate, sexy heartthrob, and devoted friend that she found in Frank in Lady Blue Eyes.

For more than two decades, Barbara was always by Frank Sinatra's side, traveling the globe and hosting glittering events for their famous friends, including presidents, kings, queens, Hollywood royalty, and musical legends.* Among them were Sammy Davis, Jr., Princess Grace of Monaco, Bob Dylan, and Ronald Reagan. Each night, as Frank publicly wooed his bride with love songs from a concert stage, she'd fall in love with him all over again.
*
From her own humble beginnings in a small town in Missouri to her time as a fashion model and her marriage to Zeppo Marx, Barbara Sinatra reveals a life lived with passion, conviction, and grace. A founder of the Miss Universe pageant and a onetime Vegas showgirl, she raised her only son almost single-handedly in often dire circumstances until, after five years of tempestuous courtship, she and Frank committed to each other wholeheartedly. In stories that leap off the page, she takes us behind the scenes of her iconic husband's legendary career and paints an intimate portrait of a man who was variously generous, jealous, witty, and wicked. Coupled with revealing insights about many of Frank's celebrated songs, this is much more than the story of a showbiz marriage. It is a story of passion and of a deep and lifelong love.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Barbara Sinatra, the fourth and final wife of Frank Sinatra, offers a heartfelt and moving memoir. She starts with her small-town Missouri youth; modeling career; stint as a Vegas showgirl; first marriage to a wealthy gambler, Zeppo Marx; and growing infatuation with her neighbor Frank Sinatra, whom she married in 1976 and lived with until his death in 1998. Relating her interactions at countless dinner parties, tennis matches, and golf outings, the author captures the personalities of such insiders as Gregory Peck, Spiro Agnew, Dean Martin, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. She casts Frank as a loving, volatile, generous, and obsessive creative genius who surrounded himself with a coterie of understanding and compliant friends to shield him from the constant pressures of his iconic status. VERDICT Though shedding little new light on Frank Sinatra musically, this memoir ably captures the character of the singer and provides an enjoyable romp through pop culture of the 1950s–80s. It complements the autobiographies of Sinatra's daughters, Nancy (Frank Sinatra, My Father, o.p.) and Tina (My Father's Daughter).—Dave Szatmary. Univ. of Washington, Seattle

JULY 2011 - AudioFile

Barbara Blakely Marx Sinatra, a divorced single mother, became Frank Sinatra’s final and most enduring marriage partner. Her memoir is a loving, intimate appreciation of their multifaceted life together. Narrator Lorna Raver inhabits this “woman of a certain age” and is aptly cast with her capable, if somewhat nasal, performance. Raver‘s straightforward narration allows opinions and reactions to be strictly those of the listener. The content is largely a coquettish and spoiled account of a life of great privilege. The incessant name-dropping, sometimes listing dozens of celebrated people attending a single event, is tiresome. But the author deals candidly with her destitute early life and marriages ending in divorce. Sinatra fans will enjoy the behind-the-scenes glimpses. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Glamorous days and nights in a privileged bubble with the Chairman of the Board.

Sinatra's memoir begins engagingly, as the former Barbara Ann Blakeley recalls her hardscrabble Midwestern childhood, her early modeling career in California and her showgirl days in Vegas, where she first encountered Frank and his Rat Pack. The author details her bumpy marriage to Zeppo Marx, who introduced her to the leisurely life in Palm Springs, where Frank was a neighbor. Flirtation with the singer, then in the midst of a brief early-'70s "retirement," turned into an affair after an assignation in Monaco, depicted here with admirable honesty. Unfortunately, after recounting Frank's ardent courtship, her divorce from Marx and a protracted march to the altar (finally triggered by Barbara's ultimatum) in 1976, the book turns breathless and the prose gets mauve. The author drops big names by the dozen, recalling an endless whirl of globetrotting concert appearances, charity events, lavish dinners and late-night hijinks. She also catalogs every glittering Cartier bauble the singer ever purchased for her. Though she considers Frank's hot temper, pugnacity and oft-boorish behavior, the author dutifully soft-pedals his worst transgressions and sidesteps the sensational elements. Sinatra's dealings with mobsters are foisted off on his late pal Jilly Rizzo, while the shadowy connections of fixer Sidney Korshak are left unmentioned. However, the author is unable to resist a dig at former First Lady Nancy Reagan, whose relationship with Sinatra was much whispered about. After a couple hundred pages of rapturous encomia, the book gains some force in the late going as Sinatra's increasing infirmity and death in 1998 are poignantly delineated. Ultimately, readers learn little about the complex inner workings of the driven, very private entertainer.

A sometimes diverting and funny yet unsatisfying book about what it was like to be, in the writer's words, "the luckiest girl alive."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169406580
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/31/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

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