While the world celebrates Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday (Dec 12), it begs the question: Did Ol' Blue Eyes ever smoke the green? He certainly had the chance during his marriage to pothead Mia Farrow.
Thirty-one years his junior, Farrow was a hippie to Sinatra's alcohol-guzzling, cigarette-smoking hipster. He wanted the flower child to ditch her budding acting career so she could dote on him like a traditional wife. Sinatra abruptly ended the marriage after Farrow refused to walk off the set of Rosemary's Baby to shoot a film with him. Their marriage lasted just two years (1966–1968).
In Kitty Kelley's unauthorized Sinatra biography, His Way, she writes:
He drank Jack Daniel's; she smoked marijuana. He got drunk; she got stoned. He gave her diamonds; she wore wooden love beads. He enjoyed nights out at Jilly's; she liked disco dancing at the Daisy. He valued boxing; she studied transcendental meditation. He liked eating Italian; she picked at yogurt and bean sprouts. He gambled; she did needlepoint. He thrived in Vegas; she flourished in India with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Dr. Frank Cinque writes on his blog:: "(Sinatra) may have tried marijuana a few times, especially when he was married to Mia Farrow, since that was her drug of choice, but he was no reefer addict either."
In his post, "Was Sinatra a Stoner?" Steven Hager comments on Paul Anka's memoir, My Way: "There are many revelations in this book, but one of the biggest is Sinatra actually liked smoking pot. Anka doesn’t make a big deal out of it, just mentions it in passing one time, but obviously many if not most of the professional musicians in the '30s and '40s were vipers at one point. We always heard Sinatra didn’t care for illegal drugs, but, in fact, that may not have been true when it came to marijuana. The Rat Pack spent a lot of time in the steam rooms, sweating out the booze they were drinking, but marijuana would also have provided some much needed hangover relief."
Among the Rat Packers, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. were known to smoke pot. "(They) embraced the '60s mod style wholesale, complete with swinging parties, flower-child jargon, and experimentation with LSD and marijuana," former Count Basie Band road manger Milton Ebbins recounts in James Spada's Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept the Secrets. "Peter considered marijuana a godsend, a way to get high without drinking and further damaging his liver."
In 2013, Farrow tweeted: "Oh just legalize weed it's not really a problem."
