Nancy Barbato Sinatra

That didn't take long. Margalit Fox's last day at the NYT writing obituaries was June 29. The first of her advance obituaries to bob up to the surface was in today's paper, for Nancy Barbara Sinatra, 101, Frank Sinatra's first wife, and the mother of his three children.

I had forgotten his first wife's name was Nancy. I knew the oldest daughter is named Nancy, and I knew I always liked the song 'Nancy' so much that my wife and I named our first daughter Nancy, after Frank's song.

Frank also sang about Emily, and Elizabeth, but we liked the song 'Nancy.' I've always liked a 'smiling face.'

And according to Margalit, Frank and Nancy, the wife, always liked a smiling face—each other's smiling faces, long after they were divorced in 1951, and long after Frank had his way with countless women, some of whom he even married.

The jazz vocalist Tierney Sutton once remarked that we wouldn't have all those great Sinatra torch songs if he and Ava Gardner hadn't split up. Ava being who he chased and married after Nancy. Over the years, Ava was the one subject Frank would never discuss publicly.  She was off-limits.

Perhaps it's like the Dylan Thomas poem, "after the first their is no other." I once heard the director Peter Bogdanovich tell us that Cybill Shepherd left Elvis Presley for him. She later left Peter, but he could always say she left Elvis for him.

Frank never had any children with anyone other than his first wife. And his first wife apparently never settled for anyone other than Frank. Obituaries can end with a final word. And Ms. Fox lets this one end with Nancy's.

"Let Mrs. Sinatra, who hewed so long to steadfast midcentury propriety, have the last word. As Pete Hamill reported in his book "Why Sinatra Matters," first published in 1998, she was asked, later in life, why she had never remarried.

Her answer was impeccable:

'After Sinatra?'"

You can hear the Jersey City accent.

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