Category Archives: Frank Sinatra

Ending at Annabel’s

Annabel’s

 44 Berkeley Square, London


Our tour of Mother’s ’70s London art/society/music life ends this week, fittingly, at Annabel’s the members only nightclub and disco in the basement of the Clermont Club (a casino) where many of Mother’s evenings with Marian and Silvio and members of her ex-pat moms crew ended.  The club was founded in 1963 by Mark Birley and named after his then wife Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart.  It is fifty years old this year and apparently still going strong–drawing the likes of Lady Gaga, Tom Cruise and Brian Ferry just as it once drew Princess Anne, Frank Sinatra, Aristotle Onasis, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and Tina Turner.  It was exactly the kind of place Mother loved and in London in the 70s being a beautiful young American divorcee with money and some talent was all it took to get her in.  The expat community was open to Mother in a way society in New York wasn’t and she really flourished there.
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The Summer Wind Winds Down: Georgann Rea and Frank Sinatra

The Summer Wind Winds Down

Frank Sinatra headlines (bien sur) the Chanel Bonfire Spotify Playlist.  He was a steady voice, a soundtrack to my mother, Georgann Rea’s life — from a girl in Kansas City dreaming off his songs of getting away to another world to a lonely soul living out some of his saddest sentiments.  Fittingly, it was Sinatra and his daughter who optioned Mother’s unpublished autobiography “Someone Turn Off The Wind Machine”.  It was indevelopment at Fox for much of the 1980s with Frank to play the role of my crusty grandfather.  Alas, it never came to be.  I listened to a lot of his music while working on sections of Chanel.  The beginning of the playlist reflects the music of my mother which dominated the earliest years of our lives and then the list shifts to the music of my sister and me which then takes over the last part of the book.  We all have playlists for our lives.  What’s on yours?

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Spotify Playlist Added to Chanel Bonfire!

The first half of the list is 60s New York and early 70s London — my mother’s music.  Then we transition to the glam and glitter of my London experience and into the punk and new wave Boston rock scene of the late 70s that we listened to on WBCN.

I hope you like it.  Feel free to make your own variations on Spotify!



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