Mrs Basil Rathbone's News about Ole Blue Eyes

Reading a book by Maureen Orth, a Vanity Fair Reporter, called "The Importance of Being Famous," I came across this chapter on Woody Allen and Mia Farrow.

"There was nothing fragile about Mia," her mother says. And nothing remotely conventional. By the time she was eighteen, she was a porcelain beauty eating butterflies at the Saint Regis Hotel with her dear friend Salvador Dali. At nineteen, as a budding flower child and ingenue star of the most popular prime-time soap of the mid 1960s, Peyton Place, she made sure she caught the eye of 49-year-old Frank Sinatra on the Fox lot one day and promptly flew on his jet to Palm Springs for a weekend. About a year later, her mother got a frantic phone call from one of her neighbors in New York: Mrs Basil Rathbone. "She said, 'Something terrible has happened to Mia.' I said, recalls [Maureen] O'Sullivan. "Tell me what. Is she dead?" 'No, she's married to Frank Sinatra.' "Oh, I said, 'is that all?'

The marriage started falling apart when Mia landed the starring role in Rosemary's Baby, made the hot new director Roman Polanski. When they divorced in 1968, Mia astounded Sinatra by not asking for a penny of alimony."