What falls away : a memoir (14 page)

I was so unprepared and thoroughly terrified that I didn't say a word, not to him or to Frank. I knew that the

man would never in a million years have dared to attack me had he not assumed I was on my way out of Frank's life.

This couple, friends of Ronald Reagan, were eventually instrumental in securing Frank's support for Reagan and the Republican Party. Back in 1966, the war in Vietnam had polarized our positions and joined the list of things it was not safe to discuss. And to my dismay, over the next years, Frank, an old liberal in the best sense, moved steadily toward the right.

My gift to him that Christmas was a real London taxi purchased while I was making A Dandy in Aspic. It had taken months to have it converted to U.S. specifications, and in that time a lot had happened. Nonetheless, Yul had planned a grand presentation ceremony and even rented snappy livery uniforms for himself and for George, the houseman: at five that afternoon, when everyone was sitting around the bar and living room, Yul was going to toot the horn and I would get Frank and everybody outside, where Yul and George, with as much fanfare as possible, would present the taxi.

I was beyond excitement by the time five o'clock rolled around and the horn sounded, and the guests who were in on the secret and the spirit of the occasion trooped out the front door, followed by Frank, who was grumpy—he didn't like being told what to do—and me, tugging his arm. But the second we stepped out the door, Frank said it was cold: I'd have to go back inside and put on a sweater. A svocater? Now? That's okay, I'm not cold, just please come on. But he was getting mad, and he wouldn't budge, and neither could I, until I put on a sweater. By now all the guests had gone quiet and they were turned around facing us. I could feel my face all hot and my smile was stuck to my teeth. So I ran back, dug a sweater out of my bottom drawer, and dashed back with it around my shoulders and everybody was still there trying to keep the ball in the air. Frank said. No, put the sweater on, so I quickly put my arms into the

sleeves, and he waited, and everybody waited, until I buttoned every single button. Then we went down the path and the guests moved aside. Yul was smiling m uniform, bowing, presenting papers rolled up like a scroll, and George was beaming and saluting like crazy and everybody was clapping, they were so relieved, and Frank and I just stood there, locked into that moment, with the bones of our relationship completely exposed, as we stared at the shiny London taxi cab.

That New Year's Eve, the whole gang, dressed to the nines and already tanked up, climbed aboard private planes headed for a party in L.A. I was worried because, as I said, we had never discussed what was going to happen after the holidays. Alan Lerner and Joshua Logan came up to me at the party: they'd seen parts of Rosemary's Baby and they paid me lavish compliments, even asking me to be in their movie Paint Your Wagon. This was remarkable, just the way they were looking at me and talking to me. Frank said nothing, and soon my circuits jammed, and I was quiet too. Before midnight Frank said he was leaving, and I asked, Can I come too? and ran along after him. He drove me to the house in Bel Air and there he said good night and that he was leaving for Acapulco.

I laughed into the pale face in the mirror—he was right, my arms were thin, even I could see that now. The telephone was ringing. I delicately unwrapped a Wilkinson razor that was lying by the sink, then I couldn't think why I did that and neatly I refolded the paper around it. I couldn't concentrate for long. The house was just space and a lot of unrelated, meaningless objects. In my mind nothing was recognizable. I didn't know how to proceed. There was nothing to move toward, nothing to return to. Here was a mess of my own making.

Without warning, one evening Frank arrived at the front

door wearing a dark suit and shiny shoes and he smelled of the aftershave lotion that reminded me of my father. (I can say it now, they had the same identical smell.) I wished I had known he was commg so I could have put on nice clothes or something, my eyes were all puffy. But he was smilmg and had brought me a present, a really wonderful one, not jewelery or anything, it was the nicest thing I ever had—a beautiful antique music box. He showed me how to crank it, and we listened to the seven songs. Afterward I offered him Sara Lee chocolate cake, although I knew he wouldn't eat it. I didn't know what else to do. I wished he didn't have to leave.

Word was spreading beyond the gates of Paramount that Rosemary's Baby was going to be a hit, and a dream movie career was being handed to me, with respected directors, interesting scripts and roles, exotic locations, pots of money, and costars of legendary proportions. Even John Wayne, on whose tall chair I had been stranded as a little girl, now wanted me to do True Grit. But at twenty-one I had lost my husband, my anonymity, and my equilibrium, and it was peace I yearned for.

Every hour seemed like dusk inside the Bel Air house of our highest hopes. Exhausted, I lay on the practically new king-size bed. There was a fireplace in our bedroom but we had never got around to lighting it. The logs were fake— who even knew how to turn it on? I tugged the Porthault sheets tight around my chin. Tiny yellow flowers were embroidered all along the border. The house was cold. The housekeeper or the Japanese cook who looked at me strangely would know how to turn on the heat but I couldn't bring myself to ask. I hated that they were there. I was never remotely comfortable with them, not in my highflying times, and certainly not now. At night I crept down to the refrigerator for Sara Lee chocolate cake, passing

Frank's favorite room, the one with the big television and a bar, and five tall stools with orange leather seats, and a custom-made backgammon table and three squishy couches, also orange, like the carpets.

" 'Evening, Mrs. S.," said the guard, no matter what. He had a gun.

When certain guests came over—those who were older than Frank, or with whom he didn't feel comfortable—he put on a tie and we would sit with our drinks and cigarettes in the formal living room, which was actually not orange but white and yellow and had a lot of antiques in it. Every single thing in every single room had been chosen by the decorator, except for the encyclopedias, which were my anniversary present. It felt like somebody else's house. I was careful never to break anything.

I had come to Frank Sinatra as an impossibly immature teenager without any person or system I could rely upon. With the best of intentions, Frank brought me into his own complex world and I, with the best of mine, gratefully clung to him there. I loved him truly. But this is also true: it was a little bit like an adoption that I had somehow messed up and it was awful when I was returned to the void.

My life had fallen away, and I could not envision a future. Work and religion suggested themselves, but extended thought about either left me in a tangle of confusion and suspicion. It seemed to me that my brief acting career had summoned all the selfishness, arrogance, and shortsightedness inherent in me, and these unworthy elements had conspired to destroy what I needed and wanted most. I was not a pediatrician in Southeast Asia, or a Carmelite nun in England: I was a lightweight—a Hollywood starlet on the verge of divorce.

Take all the pictures you want (flash). Be my guest, no problem. Pardon me? Oh yes, I was married to Frank Sina-

Mv mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, and her father, Charles.

My mother and grandmother, Mary Frazer O'Sullivan, m Ireland, 1958.

-^«

The oval portrait of my father's mother, Lucy Farrow, m the year of her death at the age of nineteen.

Me at four with Raggedy Ann and Mickey.

The Farrows in 1949: my father, my mother with baby Prudence m her arms, Mike, Patrick, me, and Johnny.

A shared fifth birthday with my father.

Mike, me, and Patrick in a boat in our Beyerly Hills swimming pool.

J

Johnny and me in Malibu, 1955.

The day of my First Holy Communion, with Billy the dog.

OPPOSITE: My father brmgs me home.

INSET: A polio ward in the 1950s.

(Courtesy of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University)