When Frank and Mia Got Married

Dear Prudence: I’d like to introduce you to my Auntie Mame.

These delightful Sinatra-Farrow wedding-party photos got me thinking about Mia's younger sister Prudence -- who was born Jan. 20, 1948, in Los Angeles to film director John Farrow and actress Maureen O'Sullivan. Prudence Anne Villiers Farrow Bruns is an author, meditation teacher and film producer. 

From left: Rosalind Russell, Patrick Farrow (brother) and wife Susan, Mia and Prudence

Prudence Farrow (front left) with Ringo Starr (center) and Paul McCartney (right) and their wives at an Indian ashram in March 1968.

She was the subject of the Beatles song "Dear Prudence," which references her time studying Transcendental Meditation in Rishikesh, India, with the Beatles in early 1968.

Prudence Farrow and Robert Durst 

What many don't know is that like Mia, she also has great taste in men -- having been Robert Durst's other woman at the time first wife Kathie McCormack Durst "went missing" in 1982, never to be seen or heard from again.

The New York Post reports that she too was married (to Albert Morrill Bruns) during the three-year affair and lived in a Durst-family-owned brownstone on West 43rd Street. 

Prudence Farrow (far left) -- seen here with the Beatles, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and others in March 1968 -- recalls her interactions with the Fab Four in her memoir, 'Dear Prudence.'

“Prudence wanted Kathie to give Bob up,” Eleanor Schwank, a college friend of Kathie’s, told the tabloid in June 1982. She wanted him all to herself, friends said. Prudence is lucky Kathie refused as she might be one of the few women to be intimate with Durst who lived to tell about it.

Although Durst was never charged in his first wife's disappearance and was acquitted even after admitting dismembering onetime roommate Morris Black in 2003, the real-estate heir was convicted in 2021 of murdering longtime friend Susan Berman and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, at which point Woody Allen probably started to look pretty good. 

Follows appreciated on Threads, Bluesky and Instagram.