Mia Farrow

The late Frank Sinatra was one of the most influential entertainers of the twentieth century. He was Italian-American and was linked to the mob.

He was on record as being someone who would have ended up in the mob had he not become a successful singer. The US Federal government questioned him probably repeatedly about his known social connections to well-known mobsters and either he actually was innocent or he was too slick for the US Federal government to nail him.

Whatever is true there, what we can reasonably verify looks to me like strong evidence he was extraordinarily socially savvy. He either escaped the mob without earning their ire or was a mobster while extremely famous and never got convicted.

He had a short-lived marriage to Mia Farrow, daughter of John Farrow -- a director, producer and screenwriter -- and Maureen O'Sullivan, an actress probably best known as Jane in several Tarzan films.

As a child of two career film industry veterans, unsurprisingly, Mia Farrow began acting as a child. Child stars don't necessarily go on to become successful adult actors and the way to bet is one or more adults is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the career of a child star. 

It's not really the child setting goals and strategizing about how to achieve them.

Mia Farrow was 21 and Frank Sinatra was 50 when they wed. Their marriage lasted slightly over two years. Wikipedia indicates Frank Sinatra expected her to give up her acting career and she left a soap opera role at his behest. 

Then she "got bored" and accepted a career-making role in Rosemary's Baby which also led to Frank Sinatra filing for divorce.

Farrow later blamed the demise of the marriage on their age difference and said she was an "impossibly immature teenager" when she married Sinatra.The two remained friends until Sinatra's death.

She was married to him from age 21 to age 23. Age 21 is not a teenager. Neither is age 22 or 23. 

I'm guessing that is a slip of the tongue admitting the relationship began while she was still a teenager. 

Mia Farrow's career was made because she very publicly chose career over obedience to her husband who was a real catch in the late 1960s when women's lib was born and most likely the film was successful largely because of the publicity that grew out of that "coincidence."

I can't help but look at that and feel like that looks very much like a carefully crafted publicity stunt and the way to bet is that Frank Sinatra was the mastermind behind it, not Mia Farrow.

Soap opera roles don't typically make you a big star. She had some press from it at a young age, but staying on a soap opera wasn't likely to give her a big acting career and it is on public record that Frank Sinatra advised her to quit.

I mean nominally it was because he was an older, old fashioned guy and expected her to be the little wifey. But if you believe big Hollywood careers are accidental successes born of the whimsy of "impossibly immature teenagers," well, I have some oceanfront property in Arizona I would like to sell you.

That looks to me like a carefully crafted maneuver to play to public sentiment where women's lib is all the rage and set her up to become the hot new idol that all the young girls want to be like.

If Mia Farrow really was singlemindedly devoted to her career, why marry a much older man expecting her to be the little wifey to begin with? And if it was really such a terrible offense in his eyes as to promptly inspire him to divorce her, why remain friends until his death many years later?

The problem is that if it was a PR stunt masterminded by Frank Sinatra, then it's all smoke and mirrors and she's not actually at all what she appears to be that made her a star because women were in search of a role model for how to be liberated women.