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There are Hollywood-style weddings that still make headlines, and then there is the one Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra had in 1966. The famous actress who rose to fame in the 60s got married at just 21, wearing a very unconventional wedding dress to say "I do" to a showbiz legend 29 years older than her. The quiet civil ceremony took place in a secret spot at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, but what we didn’t know is that this choice was made at the very last minute.
A recent interview on The Drew Barrymore Show provided us with additional details about Farrow and Sinatra’s whirlwind wedding. As Mia casually revealed, "I only knew the day before when we were going to get married, so I had to wear whatever I had in my closet.”
Despite this, her look continues to draw attention today. Skipping all the bridal trends of the moment, Mia showed up in an effortlessly chic ivory mini dress with a bow at the waist, a round-neck jacket with sparkly buttons, white heels, and that now-iconic pixie cut by Vidal Sassoon. Reporters covering the big day couldn’t stop talking about it. Frank, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly a fan of the haircut—but it made history anyway.
With her androgynous beauty, delicate aesthetic, and natural talent (her father was a film director and her mother an actress), Mia Farrow became both a style icon and a symbol of the era’s counterculture. But what we did not know until now is that she did not even know where they were getting married until the day before, as she revealed on the set of The Drew Barrymore Show.
So why did they decide to get married less than two years after meeting? It is a question fans have asked for decades, and now finally Mia is giving us the answer.
“We were engaged, but he had gone to England to finish a movie, and I was left alone in a little two-bedroom rental house,” Mia Farrow recalled. Mia Farrow, alone and unprotected from the press, unexpectedly found herself surrounded. “The press had surrounded the place. There were cameras pointed at every window, and I didn’t even have curtains. I’d crawl on the floor so they wouldn’t see me—literally crawl to the fridge, which I’d open from the ground, not an easy thing to do, just to try and grab a pizza or whatever I could eat.”
Despite the unusual circumstances, she attempted to maintain a brave demeanor. “Then he’d call, and I’d pretend everything was fine. It was all pretty surreal.”
Sinatra, watching from across the Atlantic, clearly took notice. “I guess he saw it all on TV from England because then he called and said, ‘I think we should get married tomorrow.’ And I just said, ‘Oh, okay.’”