Veteran reporters love to tell the

Veteran reporters love to tell the behind-the-scenes stories behind their great scoops but I’ve rarely enjoyed one as much as Sandra White’s tale about her 1988 Frank Sinatra exclusive.

Then working for the Sunday Mirror, she was tasked with inveigling herself into a charity weekend event hosted by Sinatra and his wife, Barbara Marx, at their Palm Springs home.

Her undercover assignment worked out better than she - along with editor Eve Pollard and deputy editor Bill Hagerty - could ever have expected.

Sinatra, believing he was with “an ordinary mum from Sevenoaks” (her description), took a shine to White and invited her to spend the night alone with him to listen to his stories.

The result: an astonishing insight into a man who despised journalists and gave few, if any, interviews. Who knew until she revealed it that he was a model train enthusiast?

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The book cover Photograph: PR

Sinatra was so relaxed in her company that he talked candidly about his childhood in Hoboken, his career and his film star friends. He told how Robert Mitchum stepped in to save him from an assault in a restaurant.

As White notes in her memoir of the scoop, Strangers In The Night: My Secret Weekend With Frank Sinatra (in paperback* and on Kindle): “All our wish list had come true.”

The problem she faced, however, was in trying to keep a record of all that Sinatra told her while she sat beside him at dinner, not least because she was liberally supplied - at Sinatra’s insistence - with the Italian liqueur, Strega.

As the alcohol was poured, so the anecdotes poured from Sinatra. But how could she take notes without a notebook or tape recorder? White writes:



“Every anecdote sent me to the ladies. I had soon used up all of the place card. I tried writing on toilet paper but it was taking too long and kept tearing. I flushed it down the loo.

Sitting on the toilet, I looked around for something to write on. It was there right in front of me: my thighs. I scribbled quote after quote above my stocking tops.

I fell into a bizarre routine: Strega, anecdote, toilet, write on thighs. Strega, anecdote, toilet, write on thighs. The other guests probably thought I had bladder problems.”

There are also some great walk-on roles for Jeff Bridges and Dudley Moore. And who remembers the singing cowboy Gene Autry?

I was through the book in half an hour, chuckling all the time.

*Published by lulu.com.