Remembering ‘Big Nancy’ Sinatra
The first wife of Frank Sinatra, who died at age 101, pre-dated the invasions of fame, and survived with grace what came next.
She was, a friend of hers once noted, “a great wife, a great ex-wife, and a great widow,” and when Nancy Barbato Sinatra died at 101 on Friday, she took with her perhaps the last living link to a world that knew Frank Sinatra not as a legend but as an impossibly skinny fireman’s son from Hoboken, who would sing for a pack or two of cigarettes and a sandwich, but dreamed of more.
And from the moment she first laid eyes on him, while filing her nails on
