Young blue eyes...

Nancy Sinatra is back in town. Frank’s eldest child, whose most famous hit, These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, topped the charts around the world in 1966, has been in the UK to bang the drum for a show at the London Palladium that will celebrate the centenary of her late father’s birth.

At the age of 74 she’s aged a little from the platinum blonde whose boots were ‘gonna walk all over you’, but there remains a spring in her step, courtesy of a new knee (more of which in a moment). Dressed in a royal blue crew-neck sweater, black leather biker jacket and black trousers, the ensemble is offset by a pair of black-and-cream patent lace-ups.

And while you might expect a tendency to Californian babblespeak, Nancy having lived on the west coast all her adult life, her New Jersey origins help explain her incisiveness. She’s sharp as a tack with instant recall for the names and dates that litter her many anecdotes, all of them overlaid with a natural warmth.

It’s no accident, she says, that the show will be at the Palladium. It’s where Frank Sinatra performed his first concert ever outside the States on 10 July 1950. ‘The audiences were so astonishingly supportive. He fell in love with London and they with him. It was two-way. So this venue couldn’t be more fitting.’

With its multimedia presentation and the inclusion of rare master tapes and unseen video footage from the Sinatra archives, never mind a 24-piece live orchestra and a company of 20 dancers, the intention, says Nancy, is that audiences should go away feeling that they’ve seen her father in concert.

‘Dad loved the Palladium; loved the UK.’ He also frequently appeared at the Royal Albert Hall. ‘In fact, he appeared there so often, there was a joke going round about renaming it the Francis Albert Hall, those being his first two names.’

The family is trying to coordinate a global toast on what would have been Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday on 12 December. ‘I think we’ll be together at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. Don’t ask me how this is going to be possible, it will probably involve the internet, but the idea is for a toast to happen simultaneously around the world. We want it to go viral.’

Nancy Sinatra has been famous all her life, both as a daughter and as a singer and actress in her own right. But she resists the idea that she was born into showbiz royalty on the not unreasonable grounds that Frank Sinatra only became the elder statesman of music – Chairman of the Board, as he came to be known – later on in his career.

In the 1940s he made teenage bobby-soxers, as they were known, swoon in their millions. In the 1950s his film career took off when he played Maggio in From Here To Eternity, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He had his second wife Ava Gardner to thank for that even though the marriage had already hit the buffers. It was she who recommended him to film director Fred Zinnemann.

Sinatra had walked out on his first wife Nancy when Nancy Jr was 10. The couple had two other children, Frank Jr and Tina. Nancy Sr is 97 now and still trucking, says her elder daughter. But he remained very much a part of his children’s lives, clearly evident when she speaks of a father she adored.

‘Frank combined strength with softness. He was a gentle man. What he also had was drive and ambition and the biggest talent possible to back it all up. I don’t have to watch his films or play his recordings to remember him. I was a real Daddy’s girl. I will always carry his blood in my veins,’ she says, her voice thickening with emotion, ‘his life’s music is in my heart. For me, and millions of others, he has never left us and never will.’

She breaks off. ‘Forgive me. I have to massage this knee.’ Without further ado, she rolls up the leg of her black trousers to reveal a livid scar stretching some eight inches from below to above her right knee.


‘It’s been almost a year since I had this knee replaced and, if I don’t massage it, the pain radiates down. It’s caused by inflammation.

‘There was no alternative to the operation. I was collapsing walking down stairs; the knee would buckle. I damaged the knee in the first place about 30 years ago when I slipped on an oil slick in my garage.’

When Nancy embarked on her own career, she made the wise decision, endorsed by her father, to pursue a different singing style. She had minor success until she met songwriter/producer Lee Hazlewood. ‘What a talent! And such a respected musician.’

She baulks slightly, though, at the suggestion that he handed her a career. ‘But he did pull me out of bubblegum, that’s for sure. He used to tease me. He’d take all the credit for everything. I wasn’t having that. I’d tell him he didn’t have a hit record until I came into his life. He’d recorded a lot of the songs – Summer Wine, for instance – but they weren’t hits until I sang them.

‘So I was teasing him, too, although what I said was true.’ When Boots topped the charts around the world, Lee paid her the greatest compliment. ‘He said to me: “You know, your name could have been Nasty Jones and you’d still have got to Number One with that record.” After that, he always called me Nasty.’

Like Frank before her, Nancy once went to Vietnam to entertain the troops. It proved to be a searing experience. ‘It broke my heart. When I came home, I flew straight down to Miami where Dad was performing. I needed to be with him. From the stage, he introduced me to the audience, then invited me up on stage.

‘I sang a song called My Buddy, which I struggled with because the lyrics are pretty emotional. After the show, I told Dad about what I’d seen in Vietnam and we both had a good cry. He understood what I’d been through because, of course, he’d been to army bases many times himself. He didn’t give me any advice; that wasn’t his way. He simply said: “I’m proud of you, Chicken.” He always called me Chicken.’

Nancy now lives in the desert, in Palm Springs, but she’s in LA often to see her mother and one of her daughters, Angela Jennifer, known as AJ , by her late second husband, dancer Hugh Lambert. Her younger daughter, Amanda, is a photographer. Nancy has one granddaughter by AJ , three-year-old Miranda, ‘the most beautiful little girl in the world’.

Of her own career, she says that she has a couple of albums in the can, one jazz, one Christmas-themed. ‘I’ll start working on my stuff once this 100th birthday year is done. For the moment, all my energies are directed at keeping Dad’s flame alive.’

For details of the London Palladium show, which runs from 10 July to 10 October: www.sinatraonstage.com

Ultimate Sinatra is available in CD, vinyl double LP, deluxe 101-track 4CD and digital editions. Sinatra 100, by Charles Pignone and Tony Bennett, is published by Thames & Hudson on 28 September, priced £40.