Ol' Blue Eyes wasn't a bad father

By BRIAN VINER

As something of an amateur Sinatrologist, I find it humbling to be ushered into the presence of the world's greatest Sinatrologist, 52-year-old Tina Sinatra.

She is elegantly dressed in black and there are two industrial-size silver crucifixes around her neck. But it would be rude to ask whether she is heading for an Archbishop Makarios theme party. And I am eager to make a good impression. So I have brought her a bunch of delphiniums, not least because my father would have been hugely tickled by the idea of his lad walking into a suite in the Savoy with flowers for Ol' Blue Eyes daughter.

But Tina has brown eyes. They are curiously lifeless. One might even call her Ol' Dead Eyes. But, in fairness, she has reached the final engagement on the very long final day of a tour to plug her book, My Father's Daughter (Simon & Schuster, $45).

"Thank you, how sweet," she says, somehow cranking up the energy to glance at the flowers, before passing them to an obliging PR. I'm impressed. There is something intoxicatingly regal about this woman.

I ask her, just to break the ice - of which there seems to be rather a lot - whether she is seeing a psychotherapist. Los Angelenos don't mind that question. "No," she says, "but I used to in my teens." That much I already know. After all, the odds were against her growing up emotionally balanced even before her father left her mother for Ava Gardner when Tina was a baby.

But Frank also had plenty of plus points as a father and the book is a moving account of their relationship. It is also shockingly candid. For example, when Tina was 22 and unmarried, she went into hospital for an ovarian operation, during which the surgeon, Red Krohn - "gynaecologist to the stars" - discovered that she was pregnant.

She came round to find her father at her bedside - Krohn evidently thought Frank should know before Tina. There was evidently no question of keeping the baby. But Krohn, presumably with Frank's blessing, declined to perform an abortion, instead inducing a painful miscarriage.

Still, there were compensations in being a Sinatra child, albeit the child who, unlike her older siblings Nancy and Frankie, inherited no singing ability. The name must still come in handy, I venture. "Not really," she says. "They get pretty excited in Italian restaurants sometimes, particularly in New York and Chicago. And as an actress maybe it helped get me straight to the director. But that was not necessarily a good thing."

On the subject of pulling strings, it is often assumed that the way in which Frank was cast in the 1953 film From Here To Eternity (it is rumoured that the Mob used their influence), for which he won an Oscar, made him the model for Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather, the crooner whose gangster friends make the director an offer he can't refuse. Did he assume likewise?

"I guess that in Hollywood everybody knew it was a joke, although Dad didn't find it funny. It stirred up some unpleasant stuff from the 1940s and 1950s. In any case, he was not one to ask for favours. But later in life he found a sense of humour about it."

Tina does not deny that the old man fraternised with gangsters. "Nobody ever proved, and plenty tried, that he was involved in anything unlawful."

But he was certainly involved in things unethical, even helping to put John F. Kennedy in the White House with the collaboration of Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana. Tina's book says that Joe Kennedy, JFK's father, asked Frank to ask Giancana for help delivering the Mob-controlled union vote in the all-important state of West Virginia and that Giancana obliged.

Only a year later, the Kennedy administration cracked down heavily on the Chicago Mob. "Dad was stunned," Tina writes, adding that he "ultimately mollified Giancana by performing, along with Sammy and Dean, at the Villa Venice nightclub in Chicago." It's amazing what a tune can do. By the way, does she watch The Sopranos?

"I'm not its biggest fan, even though my friends produce it. There have been a few episodes when the language even got to me, and my brother always said that as a child I had a Scrabble set with 25 extra Fs.

"It wore me down. Is The Sopranos realistic? I don't think so."

Tina is beginning to thaw. She says she's thrilled to be in London because her father told her everyone should take a river suite at the Savoy at least once before they die. Personally, I couldn't afford to die if I took a river suite at the Savoy.

I ask her about the huge crucifixes. No, she's not particularly religious, she says, she just likes them. Crucifixes also feature in the book, for the chief mourners each held one at Frank's funeral. But when Tina tried to pass one to her father's lawyer, Bob Finkelstein, her stepmother Barbara snatched it from her, slicing her palm.

This is the most dramatic manifestation of the loathing between the two, which Tina carefully chronicles. She is eager to add that she is close to Frank's third wife, Mia Farrow, and liked his second wife, Ava Gardner. But Barbara did not invite her to her father's 80th birthday party. And, an even bigger crime, she ensured that Frank did not see the 1992 mini-series Sinatra, for which Tina was executive producer.

Tina refers to the mini-series a lot and I get the impression that she considers it the apogee of her career, if not her whole life, which in a way seems rather sad. Perhaps it is her birthright, not the crucifixes, which has truly weighed her down.

I ask what she has inherited from her father? "An inability to sleep and his temperament, to a degree." Does she punch newspaper men, then? "There were always those stories. Much of it was myth. But when one reporter asked, 'Is it going to be a white wedding, Miss Gardner?' the guy got punched. I have it in the mini-series."