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

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

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