A friend of the late great singer Frank Sinatra is speaking out this week to say that the star never got over the death of Marilyn Monroe.
Tony Oppedisano, who was Sinatra’s friend and manager, spoke to Fox News in order to promote his new memoir titled “Sinatra and Me: In the Wee Small Hours.”
“He had a special place in his heart for Marilyn,” Oppedisano explained. “He felt she was a fragile girl who had been exploited by a lot of people. That’s part of the reason why he said, ‘Even though as pretty as she was, as attracted as I was to her, I just couldn’t bring myself to go there physically.’ That’s something she even tried to pursue with him. But he said, ‘I just couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I didn’t want to be another older guy who appeared to take advantage of her and then leave her flat. I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to do that.’”
“He cared about her too much,” Oppedisano added. “And again, his protective nature kept him from doing that.”
A friend of Sinatra’s once told Oppedisano that the singer went so far as to consider asking Monroe to marry him weeks before she died “in an effort to save her from herself.”
“No one will mess with her if she is Mrs. Frank Sinatra,” the friend said. “No one would dare. He felt that if she were his wife, everyone else would back off, give her some space and allow her to get herself together.”
Oppedisano alleged that just one week before Monroe’s death in 1962, Sinatra told a friend he tried to encourage her to start life again, but she said, “Why bother? I’m not going to be here much longer.”
Monroe was found dead of a “probable suicide” caused by an overdose of sleeping pills, according to coroners. It has been claimed that she was last seen heading to her bedroom alone where she played her favorite Sinatra records and made a series of phone calls to friends.
Oppedisano claimed that while Monroe and Sinatra were close friends, they were never lovers, and her death left the singer deeply disturbed.
“He felt that her death was something that didn’t need to happen,” he said. “He did not believe she had an overdose. He believed the one huge point was that she had announced that she was going to do a press conference and she would not give people an inkling as to what the press conference was going to be about. And so, there were concerns about what she might say, but nobody could figure it out.”
“Nobody really knew why she was having this press conference all of a sudden,” Oppedisano alleged. “Some people believed Marilyn was going to share details of her relationships with President John F. Kennedy or his brother Robert Kennedy. She had very little to do with any of the wise guys that were in the mix so people didn’t think it had anything to do with that.”
“At the end of the day, the press conference was going to be a positive announcement,” he said. “She was going to announce that she was getting back with her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio. Frank knew that much because she had spent the weekend before her passing at the Cal-Neva Lodge, which he partially owned, and he believed she was quietly meeting with DiMaggio, or at least trying to put her life back together with him. At that time, her life had become a bit of a circus.”
“He felt her death was a real disaster that didn’t need to happen,” Oppedisano concluded. “And he never got over it.”
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