Palm Springs

It’s been like this all afternoon. A car slowly cruises the cemetery, parks beneath an old carob tree, and the occupants—usually an elderly couple—tiptoe across the grass. This time it’s a small, rotund gentleman and an elderly woman with orange I-Love-Lucy hair. They stop a few yards short of me.

“How come he doesn’t have a bigger marker?” asks the man in a Jersey accent.

“They don’t do that here,” says his wife, annoyed.

“Why not?”

She sighs as if she were listening to a child ask why the sky is blue. “I don’t know why not. They just don’t.”

“Not even for him?”

“No,” she says emphatically. “Not even for him.”

“Him” is Francis Albert Sinatra. Beloved husband & father. 1915 to 1998. So says the modest marker in front of the couple. It also says The Best is Yet to Come.

Sinatra's gravestone in Rancho Mirage. Photo by David Lansing.

I am sitting on the cool grass above Frank’s grave, using my fingernails to scratch off the chalk and crayon marks left behind by someone who, no doubt, did a gravestone rubbing. There is a big yellow stain—like spilled orange juice—between the “s” in Francis and the “A” in Albert. No big deal, but it looks untidy. Tacky. So I have been trying to clean it off while just hanging out with Frank all afternoon out here at the Desert Memorial Park in Rancho Mirage.

The older couple slowly approaches, as if I might be a black bear foraging in a trash can. The guy whispers, “Did you know him? Sinatra?”

And, ridiculously enough, I actually hesitate before answering.

“You bet,” I tell him. In fact, it seemed like he lived with us when I was a kid. His voice was as familiar to me as my father’s. My mother played Songs Just for Lovers so often on the German stereo my dad bought from his blackjack winnings that she had to replace the album twice.

Did I know Francis Albert Sinatra? Let me tell you: He was there at my father’s 30^th birthday, a surprise party, crooning “Night and Day” and “Luck Be a Lady.” That was the party where my mother had everyone come as his or her favorite Rat Pack character. Mom was Mia Farrow. She had her naturally curly black hair pixied and dyed blond. My buxom aunt wore a low-cut sundress and came as Ava Gardener. Our next-door neighbor, Ikey Martinez, a tiny little man from Chihuahua who worked as a shoe salesman at Sears, put black polish on his face, pompadoured his hair, and became Sammy Davis Jr. He called me a “hep cat” all night which, in his Spanish language, came out sounding like “ep cot.”

Did I know Sinatra?

What a silly question. Was not my father the blue-collar Frank Sinatra? Did he not swagger and call my mom a “broad” in front of his poker-playing buddies, smoking Camels, swilling bourbon, unabashedly singing “The bells are ringing for me and my gal?”

Yeah, I knew him. I knew him well.

That’s why whenever I’m out here in the desert, one of the first things I always do is to drive out to Rancho Mirage and spend a little time with him beneath the shade of the carob tree. And I am not alone. In the years since his death, his grave has become a regular desert tourist attraction. With no say in the matter, Frank is forced to do something that he could never stand to do when he was alive: welcome his fans. Allow them to snap photos, mumble on and on about their favorite songs, their favorite movies, even cry over him. Which he would have hated.

My mother carried the torch for Frank her whole life. Even after The Fall, those messy years in the ‘50s when he lost Ava, stopped working, drank too much. A period that would be painfully mimicked by my own father a few years later.

I want to tell you a story about the time my father met Frank Sinatra in Vegas. This happened sometime in the early ‘60s. Sinatra was playing at the Sands and my father, who had been unemployed for almost a year at this point, emptied our savings account to go to Vegas for one last run at the craps tables. Somehow, in his mind, Sinatra was going to help him change his luck. But nothing could change his luck at this point in his life and he lost everything in a matter of hours.

Stunned, inconsolable, he was in the casino’s restroom, sitting on the floor with his head in his hands when Sinatra came barreling in along with a couple of gorillas carrying some poor schmuck between them. Sinatra cursed the guy relentlessly, threatening to turn him into a eunuch. The man apologized profusely for whatever his transgression was and the gorillas let him go. He fled like a bat out of hell out of the restroom and, no doubt, the casino as well. Sinatra went over and washed his hands, combed his hair, straightened his tie.

Looking in the mirror, he spotted my dad, still huddled on the floor in the corner. “Coming to the show?” Sinatra asked him.

“Can’t,” my dad said.

“Why not?”

“Busted. Luck has not been a lady.”

Sinatra turned around, smiled, and motioned for one of the gorillas to come over. Without saying anything, he snapped his head towards the gorilla, who reached into an inside pocket of his sportscoat like he was drawing a gun, and handed Sinatra something—a ticket to his show—which he then dropped in my dad’s lap.

“Enjoy,” he said. And then he was gone.

That night, with not a cent left to him, my father sat in a red leather booth drinking champagne sent over by the Chairman of the Board, and when the show was over—a “spectacle,” my dad later called it; “The greatest fucking spectacle you’ll ever see”—he drove across the desert all night, getting home shortly before dawn. My mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table eating corn flakes when my father stumbled in. He looked exhausted and crazed, but he also looked happy. I actually thought for two minutes that maybe he’d hit paydirt for once in his life and everything was going to be okay. My mother must have assumed the same thing.

“Did you win?” she asked him.

“I lost everything,” he said, a madman’s grin on his face. “But I saw Sinatra. And it was a fucking spectacle. The greatest goddamn show ever.”

“I wish I’d been there,” my mother said icily.

“Next time, babe,” he said. “Next time.”

And, perhaps because of that chance encounter, my parents managed to stay together for a few more years. Before my father really did lose everything and we had to sell our house and everything in it—except for the German stereo and my mother’s collection of Sinatra albums—and move to a mobile home in Oregon, far, far away from the creditors.

So. Did I know Frank Sinatra?

Damn straight.

Francis Albert Sinatra died May 4, 1998, and is buried in row B-8, plot 151, at Desert Memorial Park in Rancho Mirage, California.