Her legendary former lover Frank Sinatra “had no choice but to let it all hang out,” actress Angie Dickinson told an audience at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.
At an event sponsored by Citi credit cards on Wednesday night, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz coaxed the 83-year-old star of TV’s “Police Woman” into speaking frankly about what she described as a “20-year, on-and-off” romantic relationship with Ol’ Blue Eyes.
It began with a 1953 appearance on the “Colgate Comedy Hour” when Sinatra’s bodyguard summoned her to his dressing room.
“Are you attached?” she quoted Sinatra as asking.
When she replied yes, he came back with, “Shall I take your number?”
Dickinson replied affirmatively, and “he did take my number,” she recalled with a wink 62 years later.
She called Sinatra “one of the most charismatic men that ever was — and he had that amazing voice, too. He had no choice but to let it all hang out,” Dickinson told her blushing interviewer. “He was just magic — he said it like it was, walked the walk.”
Dickinson played his wife in a cameo in the 1960 film “Ocean’s 11,” and after one of their scenes was shot, the director was looking for a second take.
“We knew we had it right the first time,” Dickinson said of Sinatra, who was famously impatient with filmmaking. “So he went home.’’
Dickinson was less interested in a pass from Richard Burton, her co-star in the 1960 flick “The Bramble Bush.”
“He was famous for having sex with his leading ladies,’’ she recalled. “I got to know him and Elizabeth Taylor, and they fought and loved as intensely as any of us can imagine.’’
And then there was Marlon Brando, with whom Dickinson appeared in 1966’s “The Chase.”
“He invited me to his dressing room to talk about sex,” Dickinson recalled. “I won’t repeat what we said, but he liked to ask you about things that would make you uncomfortable.”