Frank Sinatra’s wife, Barbara, dies
LOS ANGELES — Barbara Sinatra, the fourth wife of singer Frank Sinatra and a prominent children’s advocate and philanthropist who raised millions of dollars to help abused children, died on Tuesday at 90.
Sinatra died of natural causes at her Rancho Mirage, California, home surrounded by family and friends, said John Thoresen, director of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center.
With her husband’s help, Barbara Sinatra founded a nonprofit centre in 1986 to provide therapy and other support to young victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
More than 20,000 children have been treated at the centre in the desert city of Rancho Mirage and hundreds of thousands more throughout the world through videos it provides, Thoresen said.
A former model and Las Vegas showgirl, Barbara Sinatra was a prominent Palm Springs socialite before she married her husband in 1976 when he was 60 and she was 49.
They remained wed until Frank Sinatra’s death in 1998 at age 82.
She met the singer through her previous husband, Zeppo Marx of the Marx Brothers comedy team. Marx and Frank Sinatra had been close friends and neighbours in Rancho Mirage until she left Marx. It was her third marriage, Sinatra’s fourth and the most enduring union for both.
Frank Sinatra had previously been married to Nancy Sinatra (mother of their children Nancy and Frank Jr.), as well as actors Ava Gardner, who died in 1990, and Mia Farrow.
Frank and Barbara Sinatra played an active role in the children’s centre. “Frank would come over and sit and read to the kids,” Thoresen said of the sometimes volatile entertainer.
“But the best way she used Frank was, she would say: ‘I need a half-million dollars for this, so you do a concert and I get half the money.’ ”