Barbara Sinatra, Frank’s 4th wife and children’s advocate, dies at 90
LOS ANGELES — Barbara Sinatra, the fourth wife of legendary singer Frank Sinatra and a prominent children’s advocate and philanthropist who raised millions of dollars to help abused children, died Tuesday. She was 90.
Sinatra died of natural causes at her Rancho Mirage, Calif., home surrounded by family and friends, said John Thoresen, director of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center.
With her husband’s help, she founded a nonprofit center in Rancho Mirage in 1986 to provide therapy and other support to young victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
In the years since, Thoresen said, more than 20,000 children have been treated
at the center and hundreds of thousands more worldwide through videos it provides.
A former model and Las Vegas showgirl, Barbara Sinatra was a prominent Palm Springs socialite in her own right before she married her husband in 1976, when he was 60 and she 49. They remained wed until his death at 82 in 1998.
It was her third marriage, Sinatra’s fourth and the most enduring union for both.
Born Barbara Blakely in Bosworth, Mo., she recalled growing up poor and friendless.
She moved with her family to Wichita, Kan., when she was 10 and to Long Beach, Calif., at 18. It was in Wichita where, like millions of other teenage girls in the 1940s, she fell in love with a voice on the radio.
“Frank Sinatra had always been part of my life — from when I first heard the singer everybody was talking about as a 15-year-old butcher’s daughter,” she said.
She is survived by her son, Robert Oliver Marx, and a granddaughter, Carina Blakeley Marx.