Ava Gardener, Frank Sinatra and Relationship Longevity

July 11^th – Stuff can slip by if you don’t pay attention. I don’t mean important things, things like where have you parked the car? I mean the little things; things that go up to making life interesting, providing you pay attention… So, perfect couples in show-biz; can you name any? OK, a starter.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson (Rita who?) have been married 35 years, and one of the reasons for their longevity is that there’s not more than a dozen folk could name her if asked. Keep clear of love-controversy and the tabloid effect and all will be well, it seems…mind you, given his track record (his reply to a question about the high number of girlfriends versus marriage, Mr. Hanks said:

‘Just because you need a quart of milk doesn't mean you have to go out and buy a whole cow’

and

‘My notion of a wife at forty is that a man should be able to change her, like a bank note, for two twenties’.

It has to be said that Annette Benning’s 22 year marriage to Warren Beatty remains something of a mystery…and I’d like to think that, at the end of a busy day when Marilyn Manson scrapes off his make-up and snuggles up to Dita von Teese, she discovers a wonderfully caring and deeply sensitive…person.

I can also think of people who ought to be together thereby saving four people from being miserable for the rest of their lives; Miley Cyrus and Chris Brown for instance, or Lindsey Lohan with Justin Bieber or Ke$ha with a bottle of urine and…well, Ke$ha, anybody who spells their name like that deserves avoidance…or me and Aishwarya Rai; no misery in this last one, just wishful thinking on my part

Given the edge of the seat liaisons that slebs and ents get involved in you’d think they’d either

a) pick very carefully

b) stay single

c) not make the same mistake…repeatedly.

Not with a lot of them, no, and certainly not with ol’ blue eyes.

Remember the Marx Brothers? (C’mon! Keep Up!) Harpo, Chico, Groucho and Zeppo? I like their gag-fests and such like but, as actors…? Out of them all, Zeppo was the one who always looked uncomfortable on screen, the one with least screen presence…and with those three brothers he had some stiff competition, which wasn’t surprising given that he set himself up as the romantic brother in their films and so started from a disadvantage as most of their films were billed as comedies; romantics always get their arse kicked…sorry, romantics are always the butt of jokes…oh, same thing really. Thing is, he was the fourth member of a zany troupe of comics, the other three of whom, forgive me, left a lot to be desired in the classic beauty stakes, clowns the lot of ‘em with faces that looked like train-wrecks; but Zeppo was different (have you seen his wedding photo?) and yet he married a Hollywood beauty, and did he ever?

Frank Sinatra took a long while to sort out the meaning of marriage. His first wife, Nancy (they named their daughter after her and she went on to make…?) lasted in the relationship for 12 years, until Mr. Sinatra met Ava Gardener. She called Mr. Sinatra the love of my life and never remarried after they split. Ms. Gardener had been married to Mickey Rooney, so maybe she was due something special, trouble was she didn’t find it with Frank; she got preggars twice and had them surgically removed both times (you think the studio would put up with their highest-grossing star becoming pregnant and so not able to work? Not a chance and those sorts of clauses in your contract can really cramp your style).

It has to be asked what Ms. Gardener saw in Mr. Sinatra, who was hardly a great catch given the his-and-her listings they were on at the time they got together. It took the reply to a question from a reporter, who asked Ms. Gardner what she saw in him, referring to Mr.Sinatra as;

‘A 119 pound has-been’

to which Ms. Gardener replied;

‘Well, I’ll tell you. Nineteen pounds is cock’.

For the relationship to be fathomed…and then he saw Mia Farrow on set. When they first met she was nineteen and he was forty-eight but she succumbed to the crooner’s charms, and according to Ms. Gardner we know what they were, and she became wife number three, but only after a series of approaches, tantrums and gifts had made their way to her doormat. It was Shirley MacLaine who summed it up; after she’d been introduced to Ms. Farrow by her husband she said to a friend;

“What do you say to someone who looks like a twelve-year-old boy?” The Sinatra/Farrow relationship was stormy to say the least, culminating in Ms. Farrow being served with the divorce papers whilst on the set of the movie she was making which was…Rosemary’s Baby…timing; it’s everything…as Barbara Marx, Mr. Sinatra’s fourth wife, was about to find out.

Pursuing her with a certain amount of cool (after all, this was no kid, in fact almost the same age as Mr. Sinatra and certainly as worldly-wise as him) they finally married on this day in 1976. They were together until Sinatra’s death in 1998 and out of that union came the setting up, at her insistence and with his money, of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Centre which provides individual and group therapy for young victims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; so you could say she got it her way.