07-15-2018, 09:51 PM
First wife of what may have been the greatest entertainer of the 20th century (FRANK SINATRA):
The church in Jersey City where they married held a portent in its very name: Our Lady of the Sorrows.
It was the thick of the Depression — 1939 — and they were poor, so poor that just two days after the wedding they returned to their jobs, she as a secretary in a printing plant, he as a singing waiter.
She was an ordinary young woman, a plasterer’s daughter from a large Italian-American family, born in Jersey City in 1917. Her given names were Nancy Rose, her maiden name Barbato.
He was a far-from-ordinary young man, a scrappy, skinny kid who played the ukulele and sang, born to a small Italian-American family in Hoboken in 1915. His given names were Francis Albert. By now you know his surname.
For a dozen tumultuous years Frank and Nancy Sinatra were man and wife — a swath of time that included hearth, home and children for her and, for him, unparalleled fame and fortune, record deals, motion pictures and a string of extramarital romances that were grist for the gossip columns.
What is surprising, given the circumstances, is that for nearly half a century — from the end of their marriage in 1951 until his death, at 82, in 1998 — Nancy Barbato Sinatra, who died on Friday at 101, remained her ex-husband’s cherished friend and quiet confidante, displaying a fealty that was noteworthy even for a woman of her time.
More at the New York Times.
The church in Jersey City where they married held a portent in its very name: Our Lady of the Sorrows.
It was the thick of the Depression — 1939 — and they were poor, so poor that just two days after the wedding they returned to their jobs, she as a secretary in a printing plant, he as a singing waiter.
She was an ordinary young woman, a plasterer’s daughter from a large Italian-American family, born in Jersey City in 1917. Her given names were Nancy Rose, her maiden name Barbato.
He was a far-from-ordinary young man, a scrappy, skinny kid who played the ukulele and sang, born to a small Italian-American family in Hoboken in 1915. His given names were Francis Albert. By now you know his surname.
For a dozen tumultuous years Frank and Nancy Sinatra were man and wife — a swath of time that included hearth, home and children for her and, for him, unparalleled fame and fortune, record deals, motion pictures and a string of extramarital romances that were grist for the gossip columns.
What is surprising, given the circumstances, is that for nearly half a century — from the end of their marriage in 1951 until his death, at 82, in 1998 — Nancy Barbato Sinatra, who died on Friday at 101, remained her ex-husband’s cherished friend and quiet confidante, displaying a fealty that was noteworthy even for a woman of her time.
More at the New York Times.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.