Biography of Frank Sinatra - Personal Life

Personal Life

See also: Relationships of Frank Sinatra

Sinatra had three children, Nancy, Frank Jr., and Tina, all with his first wife, Nancy Sinatra (née Barbato) (m. 1939–1951). He was married three more times, to actresses Ava Gardner (m. 1951–1957), Mia Farrow (m. 1966–1968), and finally to Barbara Marx (m. 1976-1998; his death).

Throughout his life, Sinatra had mood swings and bouts of depression. Avoiding solitude and unglamorous surroundings at all cost, he struggled with the conflicting need "to get away from it all, but not too far away." He acknowledged this, telling an interviewer in the 1950s: "Being an 18-karat manic depressive, and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation." In her memoirs My Father's Daughter, his daughter Tina wrote about the "eighteen-karat" remark: "As flippant as Dad could be about his mental state, I believe that a Zoloft a day might have kept his demons away. But that kind of medicine was decades off."

Although beloved as a hero by his hometown of Hoboken, Frank Sinatra rarely visited it. According to one account, Sinatra returned once in 1948 to celebrate the election of Hoboken's first Italian mayor and was not well received by the crowd. He stated he would never come back, and in fact did not return until 1984, to appear with Ronald Reagan.

Read more about this topic:  Biography Of Frank Sinatra

Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:

    ... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.
    Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)

    The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better.... Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.
    Václav Havel (b. 1936)