Legendary singer’s first wife ‘a fighter until the end’
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.
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 Saturday.
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-year-old 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.”
Frank and Nancy were married Feb. 4, 1939, in a Catholic church in Jersey City.
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. As newlyweds, Nancy was working as a $25-a-week secretary and Frank was working as a $25-a-week singing waiter.
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 Nancy reportedly was frequently humiliated by her husband’s flings and affairs. They divorced in 1951. Frank Sinatra died in 1998. Biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli wrote in Sinatra: Behind the Legend: “It wasn’t easy” for Nancy “because he was so selfcentred, wanting what he wanted without any thought given to the hurt it could cause her ... she attempted time and time again to overlook his faults.”