The author of a new book on Frank Sinatra tried to put to rest a rumor that apparently won’t die: that the entertainment legend, not Woody Allen, is the biological father of Mia Farrow’s handsome, blue-eyed son Ronan.
In an interview Monday on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show,” James Kaplan, author of the second volume of “Sinatra: The Chairman,” said there is no way the “My Way” singer could have gotten together with ex-wife Mia Farrow and conceived Ronan, 27, around March 1987.
That’s because, at the time, Sinatra was incapacitated and impotent following a major abdominal surgery three months earlier that involved removal of 12 feet of intestine. He was recovering in Hawaii with his fourth wife, Barbara, and wearing what was essentially a colostomy bag, Kaplan said.
“He was not the father of Ronan Farrow,” Kaplan said with great emphasis.
At the time of her son’s conception, Mia Farrow was living in New York City and in the latter half of her 13-year personal and movie-making relationship with Allen. That relationship ended acrimoniously after Farrow learned that Allen was having an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. A custody battle erupted in which Farrow accused Allen of molesting Dylan, their then 7-year-old adopted daughter. Ronan, born Satchel Ronan Farrow, sided with his mother and sister and cut off his relationship with Allen.
In a 2013 Vanity Fair story, Farrow says she and Sinatra had “never split up.”
The two made headlines when they married in 1966. At the time, she was 19 and the picture of a waifish 1960s hippie chick, soon to star in “Rosemary’s Baby.” Sinatra was 49, a 20th century music icon who often grumbled that his American songbook style of music was losing ground to rock and roll.
Though the Farrow/Sinatra marriage was short-lived because she wouldn’t be a dutiful young housewife, Farrow suggested that she and Sinatra had stayed more than friendly over the years and that Ronan could possibly be Sinatra’s biological son.
Many noted that Ronan Farrow, an activist and journalist, shared Sinatra’s bright blue eyes. Ronan Farrow himself joked about the Sinatra father rumor, tweeting after Mia’s comments came out that “we’re all *possibly* Frank Sinatra’s son.”
While Kaplan says he doesn’t have DNA tests to say with 100 percent-certainty that there is no relationship, he mentioned the assertion of Sinatra’s daughter Tina: that her father had a vasectomy years before Ronan’s birth.
Kaplan also points out Ronan Farrow is the “spitting image” of Mia Farrow’s father, Hollywood journeyman director John Farrow.
Martha Ross provides celebrity commentary for the Bay Area News Group. Follow her at twitter.com/marthajross.