Barbara Sinatra: “We were at a dinner party one night with Bennett Cerf and Betty Bacall when Frank wandered into a guest room to collect a pack of cigarettes from his overcoat. There he found the producer Arthur Hornblow finishing up a telephone call to a woman. ‘I hope she’s pretty,’ Frank said softly. Arthur replied that she was; it was his mother, Susie, who was in poor health in Florida but still excited about the latest Yankee scores.
‘What I wouldn’t give for one more telephone call with my mom,’ Frank told him wistfully.
At his suggestion, they called Arthur’s mother back and put Frank on the line. ‘Is this really Frank Sinatra?’ she asked. ‘You sound too much like him not to be. I love your voice.’
‘Well, I love your voice too, Susie,’ Frank said. ‘Tell you what—I’m going to call you every Saturday night at six o’clock, and we’ll chew over the Yankees’ performance, okay?’ He kept his promise and never missed a Saturday evening call to Susie Hornblow until the day she died. For good measure, he sent flowers to her on Mother’s Day and to other widowed mothers in the same hospital. Frank added her name to his list of lonely women he’d call on a regular basis. They included a relative of Freeman Gosden’s and several single mothers. Few believed them when they claimed that Ol’ Blue Eyes was a frequent caller, but they knew the truth and that was all that mattered.”
Credits: Rosa ter Braake