Sinatra tournament needs to live on with stories from his pals
In the 1980s and ‘90s, you could set your seasonal clocks by the covers of Palm Springs Life magazine.
The late publisher Milt Jones had a tradition that the first three cover portraits of every year had to be Bob Hope in January, Frank Sinatra in February and Dinah Shore in March.
They were the premier mid-century modern personalities of their respective fields. But what set them apart from local legends like Lucille Ball, Elvis Presley and Gene Autry was their golf tournaments.
Hope had the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, Sinatra had the Frank Sinatra Celebrity Invitational, and Dinah Shore, the winner of more Emmy Awards than anyone in her lifetime, had the Colgate or Nabisco Dinah Shore LPGA tournament.
The Hope and Dinah have undergone major changes since their namesakes’ deaths in 2003 and 1994, respectively. The Hope is now the CareerBuilders and the Dinah is the ANA Inspiration. As I reported last month, the Sinatra is about to undergo a major change. It's being postponed until December and, when it returns, it will be the Barbara and Frank Sinatra Classic at Bighorn.
The changes expected to be discussed at a Wednesday board meeting are bigger than that.
Most significantly, the Sinatra gala — which attracted some of the best entertainment in Coachella Valley history, including pairings of Frank Sinatra and Willie Nelson while Sinatra was still touring, and the top interpreters of the Great American Songbook after he stopped — will be discontinued. In its place will be an awards dinner with entertainment that could be “a Howie Mandel-type comic.”
They're retaining the Friday fashion luncheon, chaired by Nelda Linsk, and the Sunday tour of the Barbara Sinatra Center for Abused Children. Fashion has become a significant local industry and the lunch evolved organically. Linsk and Barbara Sinatra modeled together in Palm Springs before Barbara married Ol’ Blue Eyes. Tournament board chairman Andy Gladstein said it will “definitely” be part of the Barbara and Frank Sinatra Classic at Bighorn.
“That’s going to be a standard for us,” he said. “People love it and Nelda’s done a wonderful job with it. I can’t remember how many people it drew last year, but I think they oversold it, quite frankly.”
The tours will continue because they reveal the reason for the fundraiser. Barbara has always greeted people at her center's open house because it's her passion. She was inspired to start and finance the Eisenhower Medical Center facility after viewing drawings by abused children revealing their hurt and low self-esteem. The center has grown into a force to help child abuse victims and stop predators from hurting others.
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“We’re doing this to help the kids in the Coachella Valley,” Gladstein said. “I don’t think people realize that, because of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center, we put guys in Folsom Prison. I was talking to a couple sheriff’s deputies and they were like, ‘Do you realize what you do? Do you realize how many guys you put away in the major penal institutions in our state?’ Some real bad guys are behind bars because of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center. And people don’t want to think of it in that way.”
Barbara Sinatra will be 90 on March 10 and many of her board members also are getting up in age. The Sinatra Center and tournament boards have added new members, including novelist Hal Gershowitz, Merrill Lynch financial adviser Rondi Edwards, and Missie McCarthey, a Kansas University grad who has given $2.5 million to KU with her husband, Kent. They have to raise funds as best they can, and that apparently means finding alternatives to the events where celebrities pose for pictures on the golf links and converse with strangers at dinner tables.
Stars aren’t as amenable to interacting with the public as they were in Palm Springs’ golden era. Harold Matzner, who is on the Sinatra Center board, secures contractual commitments for honorees to show up to his Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala. The Patrick Warburton Tournament, which has become the desert’s premiere celebrity golf tournament as a benefit for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, has a stellar lineup of stars March 9-12 at the Classic Club, including a half-dozen Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. But the public can't watch them.
So the Sinatra Tournament board considered switching from a celebrity-driven event.
“Getting celebrities is not the way it used to be when Frack could call up and say, ‘Play in my tournament,’” Gladstein said. “All the celebrities now are working. Most of the celebrities we had playing, a lot of them couldn’t play anymore. A lot of them were wonderful supporters, but they were just getting up in age and couldn’t play.”
The decision about whether to remain celebrity-driven or not was taken out of their hands when the board was invited to move their tournament to the Bighorn Golf Club in Palm Desert, site of the nationally-televised Skins Game in the 1990s. Bighorn also offered to let the Sinatra present the first social event at its under-construction, state-of-the-art clubhouse. But it said it couldn’t accommodate the Sinatra format of pairing four paying golfers with a celebrity because fivesomes play too slowly.
“So we just decided, ‘Hey, we’ll just do four players,’ all paying customers, so to speak,” Gladstein SAID. “In order to make the numbers work, we can’t have three players and a celebrity.”
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He said a few stars, such as past tournament host Joe Mantegna, will probably show up to support Barbara Sinatra. The board is considering a celebrity host, but Gladstein said even that presents challenges.
“If we do that, it will be somebody who will do it for a number of years in a row,” he said. “We don’t want somebody for just one year and it’s very hard to get somebody for five years. Bighorn has committed to us for five years, (and) we don’t want this to be a flash-in-the-pan-type thing.”
Bighorn offered to let the Sinatra hold its pairings party at The Vault, a combination reception area and museum-quality garage showcasing vehicles ranging from a 1933 Cadillac Chrome Limousine to contemporary sports cars and luxury sedans. So, ostensibly, the celebrities would be replaced by collectible cars.
The Friday night party, which was sort of a mini-gala without formal attire, is scheduled to be replaced by a concert at The Show at the Agua Caliente Casino Resort Spa, thanks to a sponsorship from the Agua Caliente Indians. Gladstein said the board plans to spend six figures to get the kind of performer the McCallum Theatre gala gets around the same time, meaning someone like Barry Manilow, Diana Ross or Liza Minnelli. An all-access pass would include two tickets to that concert and a pre-cocktail party in a front lounge area.
Sadly, there won't be any place for fans to hang out with celebrities and bask in the Sinatra aura. One of the most fun parts of a Sinatra party was sitting with someone who had a connection, however tenuous, to Sinatra. I've talked to people from Burt Reynolds to Bono who treasure their Sinatra anecdotes. Not providing a proper forum to swap those stories can only diminish Sinatra’s local legacy. The Modernism Committee had a benefit Sunday at Sinatra's first Palm Springs house and it sold out before I even heard about it. But I doubt if any of those guests had first-hand Sinatra stories.
I’d love to see a kick-off party with a panel discussion of Sinatra pals swapping Sinatra stories just to set the mood for the weekend. Friends like Mantegna, Tom Dreesen, Robert Wagner, Dick Van Dyke, Rita Vale, Elke Sommer and Suzanne Somers have too many great stories to let go to waste. They could create the best pairings party of any celebrity golf tournament anywhere.
Of course, they'd also have to talk about their motivation for coming to this tournament, which is to support the Barbara Sinatra Center for Abused Children. That can’t be overshadowed by the golf, the concert or even a Howie Mandel-type comedy act.
“I think sometimes with all the hoopla that goes on with Bighorn or Fantasy Springs and all the celebrities," Gladstein said, "we lose sight of what we’re doing, and that’s helping these kids that are in pain. We’re really a valued part of our community and we don’t charge them for it. No child is turned away.”