In late November 1967, Mia Farrow was weeks away from finishing the role that would define her career, playing a frightened young wife in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, when her husband’s lawyer walked onto the Paramount set carrying divorce papers. The husband was Frank Sinatra, and they had been married for little more than a year. “I just thought it wouldn’t happen, but it did,” Farrow, now 81, said on The Drew Barrymore Show in November 2024, as People reported. “His lawyer came on set, served me with divorce papers.”
If you were reading the papers back then, you remember the marriage of Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra as one of the most talked-about pairings of the decade. She was 21 and he was 50 when they wed on July 19, 1966, at Jack Entratter’s home in Las Vegas, and Farrow told Barrymore she only learned the date the day before, so she “had to wear whatever I had in my closet.” What ended it was a movie schedule, not the haircut most people blame, and the way the two of them carried on afterward is the part of the story that rarely gets told.
Why Would Sinatra End a Marriage Over One Movie?
Sinatra had a picture of his own waiting. He planned for his wife to co-star with him in The Detective at 20th Century Fox, the studio that held her contract and had loaned her to Paramount for Polanski’s film, according to the American Film Institute’s catalog. Rosemary’s Baby started shooting in New York on August 21, 1967, and by early November the Los Angeles Times reported it was 22 days behind schedule. The Detective, meanwhile, was running ahead and needed her sooner. The AFI notes that Fox even offered to cover Paramount’s costs if Polanski would pause production so she could leave.
She would not go. “He left me because I wouldn’t leave the movie when he told me to leave it,” Farrow said on the Barrymore show, per People and Parade. “I said, ‘How can I leave it?’ You know, I’m the daughter of a director and an actress.” Her father was the director John Farrow and her mother was Maureen O’Sullivan, Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, and she added that she was in every shot with about a month left to film.
Paramount’s production chief Robert Evans took credit for keeping her there. Speaking at a Producers Guild event in 2013, he said he showed her footage and told her, “Mia, you’ll win the Academy Award for this,” as TheWrap reported. “She left Frank to play the devil’s mom,” Evans said. “It seems like a phony story, but it’s true.” On November 23, 1967, Sinatra’s press agent announced the separation, and the Los Angeles Times reported days later that Farrow had learned of it on set from his attorney, Mickey Rudin. The role in The Detective went to Jacqueline Bisset. So where does the famous haircut fit in?
Did That Pixie Cut Really Have Anything to Do With It?
For decades the legend has held that Vidal Sassoon gave Farrow her cropped look for the film and that Sinatra hated it. Paramount did stage a splashy publicity event with Sassoon and his scissors, which helped the myth along. Farrow set the record straight in a 2013 letter to The New York Times, saying she had cut it herself with fingernail scissors while working on a TV series for Fox, and that Sassoon only trimmed her already short hair for the cameras. He “had nothing to do with my haircut,” she wrote, and the divorce “did not have to do with my haircut” either, according to both the AFI catalog and PinkNews.
Even Sassoon, speaking to NPR’s Fresh Air in 2011, agreed she had already cut into her own hair before she ever sat in his chair. Either way, that cropped look became the look of 1968, and the film was about to make her a star in her own right.
Was ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Worth the Price?
When Rosemary’s Baby opened in New York on June 12, 1968, it was a sensation. Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and Farrow earned Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Best Actress. Evans’s Oscar promise did not come true, but the career did. The divorce was finalized in August 1968, and she went on to play Daisy Buchanan opposite Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby in 1974 and to work for years as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
She has never stopped working. In 2024 she returned to Broadway opposite Patti LuPone in Jen Silverman’s The Roommate, and at 80 she received the first Tony nomination of her life for it. Through all those decades, one old connection never quite went away.
How Did Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra Stay in Each Other’s Lives?
Farrow has always taken a share of the blame. She later said she was far too young for the marriage, and she told Britain’s Express that she wanted nothing from it in money, only “his respect and friendship.” When she faced a painful custody fight in 1992, Sinatra picked up the phone himself. Alan Dershowitz, her lawyer, wrote in his book Taking the Stand that Sinatra called him and asked, “What can I do to help?” as Fox News reported in 2013.
That same year, Farrow told Vanity Fair that she and Sinatra “never really split up,” and when asked whether her son Ronan, born in 1987, might be Sinatra’s, she answered with one word, “Possibly,” according to the Associated Press and Fox News. No test has ever been done, and Nancy Sinatra later called the idea “nonsense.” Sinatra died on May 14, 1998, at 82, and in a 2017 interview with Ireland’s RTÉ Radio 1 Farrow said, “I loved him ’til the day he died and beyond, he was the love of my life.”
The sweetest detail came out on his birthday in December 2023. Farrow shared photos of Eliza, the dog Elizabeth Taylor gave the couple, who stayed with Sinatra after the divorce and went to his recording sessions while he mailed Farrow pictures of her in England. Farrow also revealed the private name she used for him, “Charlie,” short for Charlie Brown, “because he could make an adorable face like Charlie Brown,” according to People. Then she signed off the way she still feels: “Happy Heavenly Birthday C.B. I will always love you.”
