Whatever happened to the 'Miracle Baby'? - Subud Voice

Whatever happened to
the ‘Miracle Baby’?
When Subud first arrived in England in 1957, it attracted
a great deal of publicity. Much of this was due to the
cure of the film star Eva Bartok. She had a stomach
tumour which disappeared after she began the latihan
and she subsequently gave birth to a healthy daughter.
Whatever became of this “miracle baby”?
Eva Bartok left Hollywood for a spiritual calling in
Jakarta. Forty years later, her daughter, Deana, has
returned to the city.
By Bruce Emond (First published in The Jakarta Post
WEEKENDER www.thejakartapost.com).
“I am back in Jakarta and I don’t know why,” Deana
Sinatra says with mock exasperation. The city she left
in 1971 as a 14-year-old resembled a small town with
big aspirations, with kampongs backing on to rice fields
and Hotel Indonesia the main landmark of note.
Today’s sprawling capital is almost unrecognizable and,
she says, “very stressful” compared with how it was
during her four happy years here.
The only child of the late Hungarian-born actress Eva
Bartok, Sinatra has lived in many places – her birthplace
London, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Hawaii and
Sydney, where she
moved with her British
husband and raised two
sons.
Looming large in her story – always the case for the
scions of famous people – is Bartok, the stunning darkhaired
beauty who appeared in a string of Hollywood
and European movies during the 1950s and 1960s.
Bartok survived scandal and near-death during her
pregnancy with Deana to become one of the most
prominent international ambassadors for Subud, the
Indonesian-based spiritual movement.
On their travels, Bartok’s own forceful mother was
always in tow. Curiously, in this company of women,
three male figures retained a strong presence: Bartok’s
father, who disappeared during World War II;
Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, the founder of
Subud; and Frank Sinatra, the man Deana recognizes as
her biological father but whom she never met.
Coming to Town
Deana Sinatra still remembers the day in London in
1967 when her mother proposed moving to the Wisma
Subud compound in Jakarta. “She told me that there
would be no electricity or hot water, but there would be
freedom.”
Then barely 10 years old, Sinatra was used to babysitters,
chauffeurs and the high-walled existence of
celebrity. It was lonely and protected, she says, and she
was thrilled at the possibility of an escape.
They embarked on the long journey across continents,
her mother still travelling like a film star with a
About 18 months ago, in
her early 50s, divorced
and with her sons in college,
she gave up her job
as a diversional therapist
and relocated to Jakarta
to teach.
“I have a very soft spot
in my heart for this
country,” says Sinatra, a
tall, attractive blond with
piercing blue eyes. “I
felt that I had unfinished
business here, not only
having to do with Mum
but the fact is I’ve
always been comfortable
here. There were things
that motivated me to go
out of Australia. I didn’t
want to go back to America or Europe, but Indonesia.”
Deana Sinatra in front of the latihan hall in Wisma Subud, Jakarta
(Photo by R Berto Wedhatama, courtesy of Jakarta Post)
SUBUD VOICE PAGE 14 FEBRUARY 2011

heap of suitcases, her grandmother suffering not so
silently. They arrived in Jakarta and were put in the
only guest room available. The next afternoon, jetlagged,
they went to meet Pak Subuh.
Pak Subuh had always been part of Deana’s life. At the
same time Bartok discovered she was pregnant, she
learned she had a potentially life-threatening ovarian
cyst. Doctors recommended surgery for its removal,
which would have killed the fetus.
Bartok, then already involved in
Subud, moved from Los
Angeles to its compound
at Coombe
Springs outside
London, where she
awaited a visit from Pak
Subuh. Following his
instructions, she put off the
surgery and the cyst miraculously
disappeared. He also
decided that the child would
be called Donald if a boy, or
Deana if a girl. Deana Grazia
was born in October 1957.
“He was beautiful and warm,”
she says of Pak Subuh. “There
was light all around him when he Eva Bartok
walked into a room. He loved children,
and he called me over and asked me
in Indonesian how I liked Wisma Subud.
He was so revered. His wife was fantastic,
too, we became very close, and she
loved Mum a lot.”
She calls Wisma Subud a “little
island” of calm from which she
would venture out to the sidewalk
stall along Jl. Fatmawati to buy ice
cream. The transition to the tropics
was sometimes daunting, Sinatra
admits, describing the differences –
curious smells, birds singing, house
lizards scurrying across the walls –
as “gobsmacking”.
Frank Sinatra.
Respected Sinatra
biographers support Deana's
contention that Sinatra was her father
(Courtesy of Jakarta Post)
While Deana attended Jakarta International School, her
mother threw herself into Subud activities. “I think she
wanted to become a better person and let go of all the
trappings of being a film star,” she says. “She always
believed in a much higher power ... she came into this
world with a spiritual thread.”
Omar Martinez, who has created an extensive online
tribute to Eva Bartok, agrees. “From the time she was a
child she was questioning her place in the universe,” he
says. “She was very intelligent and sensitive.”
The idyllic Jakarta interlude ended in 1971. Pak Subuh
asked Bartok to spread Subud’s philosophy throughout
the world. The family moved to Los Angeles, and later
to Hawaii. “My mother left here on a mission that was
asked of her. And she never ended up coming back here
to live.”
Perhaps, Deana Sinatra says, that is why she has come
back. She has also returned to Subud after several
years’ absence, adding that its way of living and
viewing the world always remains part of its followers.
The city, and her small circle of friends, is
helping her tie up the loose ends of the past.
Meaning over Movies
Bartok’s spiritual quest led her to put aside her
acting career, Martinez says from Los Angeles.
Bartok had first gained international fame starring
in The Crimson Pirate with Burt
Lancaster (1952). Her Eastern European
background made her a favorite to play
World War II heroines and Cold War
escapees in such films as Operation
Amsterdam (1959) and Beyond the
Curtain (1960).
Fluent in many languages, she continued
to make movies in Italy and
Germany in the 1960s;
her last lead role was
in the Israeli film
Sabina in 1967, with
Deana making her acting
debut.
“I believe that her newfound
connection with
Subud made her less interested
in pursuing her career.
After all she had found in that
movement what she had been
looking for all of her life: the
meaning of her existence,” says
Martinez, drawing on Bartok’s
1959 autobiography Worth Living
For.
Deana Sinatra, who also had a brief acting
career, says her mother was a very good actress,
although not great. Unlike her fellow Hungarians, the
Gabor sisters, Bartok set out to lose her accent when
speaking English by taking elocution lessons.
But she never looked back wistfully on her Hollywood
years. “She had realized the fakeness of it,” Sinatra
says. “It was just a phase that she went through. But
she did love the stage.”
Bartok’s search for meaning also stemmed from the
SUBUD VOICE PAGE 15 FEBRUARY 2011

losses that shadowed her life. Born Eva Ivanova
Szoke in Budapest in 1927, she was the daughter of a
prominent Jewish journalist father and Roman Catholic
mother. World War II destroyed the family’s comfortable
existence. Her beloved father continued to write
articles critical of the Nazi regime; when Eva was barely
a teenager, he disappeared forever.
Father Figure
Eva Bartok lived life on her own terms, eschewing convention.
She dated an Indian prince when relationships
between Asian men (even noble ones) and white
women were frowned upon, and ignored friends who
told her she was crazy to give up her career to move to
the politically tumultuous Jakarta of the mid-1960s.
To avoid her mother and herself being sent to a concentration
camp, the 15-year-old Eva entered into a brief,
loveless marriage with a local Nazi official.
After the war, she drew on connections with Hungarian
émigrés in London to leave her homeland and pursue her
acting ambitions. She married the producer Alexander
Paal in 1948, but they
divorced three years later.
The void from losing both
her father and her country
remained. Many of her
relationships were with
much older men (including
Paal and her fourth husband,
the actor Curt
Jürgens, who was 12 years
her senior), as though seeking
a replacement for her
missing father.
“Men would fall in love
with her beauty, and also her soul, but they could never
really love her completely,” Deana Sinatra says.
She reflects on her mother’s personality, a mercurial,
sometimes frustrating bundle of contrasts. She was not
a homey person – she chose furnished apartments or
hotels, and her disastrous, thankfully rare forays in the
kitchen still make Sinatra chuckle.
While drama followed her in everyday life, she could
laugh at herself and she was a loving mother: She read
her daughter bedtime stories and they slept in the same
bed. “Of course, I didn’t see her the way other people
saw her, as a film star,” Sinatra says. “She was just my
mum to me. It was normal to me.”
Although Bartok loved her adopted homeland of Britain
and believed in its values, Sinatra says, she also pined
for her birthplace, which suffered more bloodshed during
the 1956 Soviet invasion. Yet Bartok never
returned. She died in August 1998, aged 71.
“The things she experienced made her a stronger person,
because she questioned things more, about why
things happened in her life,” Sinatra says. “And that’s
how you grow as a person.”
‘
Eva Bartok’s
search for
meaning
stemmed from
the losses that
shadowed her
life.
’
Bartok needed that self-belief during her pregnancy
with Deana, as she was already separated from Jürgens.
Gossip columns kept tabs on Hollywood stars, who
were then expected to toe the moral line. Sinatra says
Jürgens urged Bartok to identify him on her birth certificate
to quiet the scandal, although she laughs that it
reads “father unknown” next to the Austrian actor’s
family name.
The document was just a
formality (she met Jürgens
only once in her life). She
says her real father was
Frank Sinatra: At 41, the legendary
singer allegedly had
an affair with 29-year-old
Bartok when she was working
with Hollywood “Rat
Pack” member Dean Martin
on the movie Ten Thousand
Bedrooms.
Deana claims she knew who
her father was instinctively. As a toddler, she rifled
through her mother’s stacks of LPs and picked out a
Sinatra album. “Daddy,” she says she pronounced to a
dumbstruck Bartok.
As a restless teenager, then in Los Angeles, she
pressed her mother to contact the singer. At an
appointed time, he called; Deana, listening on the
extension, heard him say he was busy but they
would meet the following week. He never called
again, and her mother let it rest.
A few years later, a request for contact sent to Sinatra’s
lawyer met the response that Sinatra was preoccupied
with other responsibilities. Deana says her mother never
said a bad word about Sinatra, or sought financial gain.
And so it was just the women, Eva and Deana (her
grandmother died in the late 1980s).
Using her legal name, Deana made several Hollywood
B films in 1983 and 1984, including one produced by
Frank Sinatra Jr, the singer’s son. Her mother sometimes
visited her during filming, once advising her
about dealing with an ornery co-star before a love
scene. “She told me to have my morning coffee, and
then to eat a clove of garlic,” she says.
SUBUD VOICE PAGE 16 FEBRUARY 2011

Coming of Age
Deana was not interested in the all-consuming actor’s
world. She wanted instead the settled family life she
had never known as a child, but away from her mother.
In 1985 she married a fellow Subud member and they
moved to Australia. She admits her long-distance relationship
with her mother, who lived in California and
then London, was not always easy, with each dealing
with her own problems and finding it difficult to connect
emotionally in stilted
conversations from
halfway across the world.
Bartok, still active in
Subud, worked in an art
gallery toward the end of
her life. “Oh, she could
always turn on the charm,
she could sell anything,”
Deana says. Her mother was unhappy when Deana
went public about her parentage in a newspaper interview
in the mid-1990s. “She wanted to know why I did
it, and she also was worried for me for the possible
repercussions. She didn’t call again for a few months.”
Despite the distance, Deana noticed her mother’s health
and spirit gradually waning. But she was shocked by
condolence messages left on her answering machine in
May 1998, for another loss; Frank Sinatra had died,
aged 83. “It was astounding,” she says of the outpouring
of concern for her for a man she never met. “But
the hope [of meeting him] died then.”
Three months later, Bartok had a stroke and was hospitalized
in London. Deana Sinatra begged the doctors to
keep her mother alive until she arrived from Australia,
but a second massive stroke and heart attack took
Bartok’s life as Deana was still trying to arrange her
ticket. “I had told the doctor to whisper in her ear that I
loved her,” she says, breaking down.
In London, she found that her mother had spent her last
few years “living like a monk” in a dingy hotel room.
She had got rid of all her possessions over the years,
and everything she owned fitted into three plastic bags.
In one of them, Deana found Bartok’s birth certificate,
the date of birth changed by hand to make her older and
thus eligible to migrate to England. In another was a
beautiful ring, a gift from the Marquess of Milford
Haven, with whom she was close in the 1950s.
Materially, Bartok was poor – the press reported the
onetime movie star died penniless and homeless – but
at the funeral the pews were filled with friends and
strangers. Sinatra saw how her mother had touched
many lives with her kindness and films.
streaming down their faces,” she says. Sinatra says she
realized she too was alone, except for her sons. “It’s
tough becoming an orphan,” she says simply.
Divorced, she subsequently changed her name by deed
poll to Sinatra. It was easy to do, she adds, merely formalizing
what she sees as her rightful parentage, “the
other half of me”. She emphasizes that she has never
sought a share of the Sinatra estate, only recognition.
She shows a photo of her
‘ ’
Both Eva Bartok
and Deanna Sinatra
have done things
their way...
younger son next to one of
Frank Sinatra; there is a
striking resemblance in the
color of their eyes and the
shape of their lips.
Sinatra’s three children have
never commented on her
claims. But if they did
address the issue? “It would be wonderful, I would welcome
it,” says Deana. She also bears a strong resemblance
to ol’ Blue Eyes, who she always refers to as
Frank, in her eyes and the shape of her face. But she is
clearly her mother’s daughter, shaped by all the delights
and disappointments they shared.
The similarity is evident not only in her attractiveness
but also in her willingness to make her own decisions
and follow her heart, including back to Jakarta. Both Eva
Bartok and Deana Sinatra have done things their way.
Our thanks to Bruce Edmond and Jakarta Post for permission
to republish this article.
Editor's Note: Frank Sinatra's celebrated biographers
Robbyn Swan and Anthony Summers are convinced
that Sinatra has at least one authentic lovechild –
Aussie claimant Deana Sinatra.
Summers reveals, "She is the daughter of the actress
Eva Bartok and we're rather satisfied, short of DNA
proof, that her claim is truthful and accurate.
"The sad thing is Sinatra rebuffed all her attempts to get
in touch before he died, even though she made it completely
clear she didn't want anything material from him
– no money, nothing. She simply wanted to have spoken
to her father before he died."
◆
The Beetle
I met a beetle on a path
& stopped to talk to it, wished it
a happy day & found
a tear was in my eye, for oh,
the shortness & the beauty of this life
“People walked off the street, I think they had read
about the service in the papers. There were tears
Sofyan Armytage
◆
SUBUD VOICE PAGE 17 FEBRUARY 2011