Did Frank Sinatra Ask the Mafia To Rub Out Woody Allen?
Few people ever saw Frank Sinatra’s sensitive side, complained his ex-wife Mia Farrow. She called it the ‘wounding tenderness’ — so deeply felt it hurt him to express it — which only came out publicly when he sang.
He had also, the actress gushed, a ‘child’s sense of outrage at any perceived unfairness and an inability to compromise’.
It was this ‘powerful sense of Sicilian propriety’, as she carefully termed it, that landed him in fights. And it may, a new book reveals, have prompted what must be one of the most shocking episodes in the singer’s turbulent life.
Twenty-four years after their unhappy two-year marriage ended, Farrow turned to Sinatra — who remained a close friend — in 1993 after discovering her boyfriend, Woody Allen, was having an affair with her young adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.
Farrow was involved in a vicious custody battle in which she accused the filmmaker of sexually abusing another of her adopted daughters, seven-year-old Dylan. The controversy continues to this day, with Allen denying the adult Dylan’s allegations that he abused her.
Sinatra’s solution, it is now claimed, certainly showed off that ‘Sicilian propriety’. He tried to have the Oscar-winning director of Annie Hall rubbed out by the Mafia.
The allegation was made to David Evanier, author of Woody, a new biography of the actor and director.
It has long been rumoured that Sinatra had threatened to punish Allen over his treatment of his ex-wife. Farrow testified in 1993 that she had told a therapist one of her ex-husbands had offered to break Allen’s legs.
Farrow’s lawyer stopped her answering a question about which husband made the offer (the choice was between Sinatra and conductor Andre Previn). ‘It was a joke,’ Farrow reassured the court.
But Len Triola, a concert producer, says the singer Frankie Randall, a close friend of Sinatra, confided to him that, ‘livid’ over Allen’s behaviour, Ol’ Blue Eyes went a lot further than making an idle threat.
‘Frank wanted him f***ing clipped. Taken out. That’s what he wanted,’ he told Evanier. ‘Frank loved Mia. He spoke to three people every day’ — his wife, his daughter Nancy and Mia.
According to Randall, Sinatra — whose close links with the Mob are well-documented — tried to call in a favour from his Mafia contacts, only to find he was asking too much.
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