Nancy Sinatra Sr., first wife and muse of Frank Sinatra, at age 101
Nancy Sinatra Sr., the first of Frank Sinatra’s four wives and the mother of the legendary singer’s three children, died Friday. She was 101.
Ms. Sinatra’s daughter, pop singer Nancy Sinatra, who had a 1966 hit with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” confirmed her mother’s death on Twitter and the Sinatra family’s website.
“Our mother was a fighter until the end when her brave, loving heart gave out. She is survived by her sister, her daughters, her grandchildren and her great grandchildren. She made a difference,” Nancy Sinatra Jr. wrote on Twitter yesterday morning.
Nancy Sinatra Sr. was 17-yearold Nancy Rose Barbato, the dark-haired daughter of a Jersey City, N.J., plastering contractor, when she met a skinny, 18-yearold fledgling singer from Hoboken in the summer of 1934 while they were vacationing on the Jersey Shore.
“I was a poor, lonely and discouraged kid when I met her,” Frank Sinatra told American Weekly in 1952. “In Nancy, I found beauty, warmth and understanding.”
They continued dating, and the following summer, he took her to see Bing Crosby at a theater in downtown Jersey City.
“Bing had always been his hero,” Nancy recalled in “Frank Sinatra: An American Legend,” her daughter Nancy’s 1995 book. “‘Someday,’ he told me on the way home, ‘that’s gonna be me up there.’ ”
Frank and Ms. Sinatra were married Feb. 4, 1939, in a Catholic church in Jersey City, where they set up housekeeping in a threeroom apartment.
The frugal young bride bargain-hunted at the grocery store and sewed her own clothes; she once cut up one of her dresses and used the material to make a bow tie for Frank that would match what he planned to wear on a singing job. During their early years, she later said, she made all of his bow ties.
As newlyweds, Ms. Sinatra was working as a $25-a-week secretary and Frank was working as a $25-a-week singing waiter and master of ceremonies at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Several months after the wedding, trumpeter Harry James heard Frank sing and hired him to be the featured male vocalist in his new orchestra.
As Frank’s singing career took off and then soared — he was named top male band vocalist by Billboard in 1941 — Ms. Sinatra gave birth to their children: Nancy in 1940, Frank Jr. in 1944 and Christina in 1948.
The Sinatras’ marriage, however, was a far cry from the storybook image presented in fan magazines.
Frank, whose work frequently took him away from home, was a legendary womanizer, and Ms. Sinatra reportedly was frequently humiliated by her husband’s flings and affairs.
Biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli wrote in “Sinatra: Behind the Legend”: “It wasn’t easy” for Ms. Sinatra “because he was so self-centered, wanting what he wanted without any thought given to the hurt it could cause her. At the same time, because he possessed enormous charm … she attempted time and time again to overlook his faults.”
“Unfortunately, my married life with Frank has become most unhappy and almost unbearable,” she said at the time.
Shortly after the Sinatras were divorced in 1951, Frank married Ava Gardner. In 1966, when Sinatra was 50, he married 21-year-old actress Mia Farrow, though the union was short-lived. He was married to his fourth wife, Barbara, when he died in 1998 at age 82. Ms. Sinatra never remarried.