For two hours Wednesday afternoon, the icons of a vanishing era assembled one last time to celebrate the life and career of their friend Frank Sinatra in a starry formal funeral that drew mourners from Hollywood's geriatric set to the Gen-X fans who stood quietly across the street, craning their necks for a glimpse of magic.
From the pallbearers (Don Rickles among them) to the honor guard of friends who lined the steps of the Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church (including Tony Bennett, Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck) to the celebrant (Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles), there was nothing ordinary about the occasion, and half a dozen helicopters hovered overhead to watch Sinatra's gardenia-covered coffin be carried into a waiting hearse.The roster of mourners was a casting agent's dream, from Quincy Jones to Jack Jones, from Jack Lemmon to Jack Nicholson. There were old touring partners, like Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme and Liza Minnelli, old friends like Angie Dickinson, Robert Stack and Robert Wagner. There were old co-stars like Betty Garrett, who sang "You're awful - awful good to look at" with Sinatra in "On The Town," and Debbie Reynolds, who fell in love with him in "The Tender Trap" and arrived Wednesday in a little black hat and veil.
There were public figures, from former first lady Nancy Reagan to former Gov. Hugh Carey of New York, for whom Sinatra once raised campaign funds at Madison Square Garden and who can still be prevailed upon to sing "New York, New York" in public.
"I did appreciate the fact that if Frank had been there I think he would have enjoyed it, if such a thing was possible," Lemmon said afterward of his old friend, who died of a heart attack last Thursday. "It was more a tribute and a celebration than it was a downer."
But among the crowd of 400 who filled the old stucco Spanish-style church, there were plenty of people whose faces would have been familiar only in the Sinatra circle itself, like Pepe Ruiz, the bartender at Chasen's when it was Hollywood's hangout of choice and a regular stomping ground for Sinatra and his Rat Pack pals Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
The Sinatra family was there in force, beginning with the singer's widow, his fourth wife, the former Barbara Marx, and his three children, Frank, Nancy and Tina. Also present was Mia Farrow, to whom he was briefly married in the 1960s. His second wife, Ava Gardner, with whom he shared a tortured relationship that informed his bluest ballads, died in 1990.
In his tribute at the church, Frank Jr. called his father "an original anomaly" and a "reckless, rogue, sentimental fella." For 60 years, the younger Sinatra said, his father sang for the world, while now, "Everyone sang for him and he listened," according to the Associated Press.