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starting to wear on her. She made bargains with herself: She would lose the weight. (It wasn’t easy.) She would look the other way as long as he came home to her. (He didn’t come home very often.) What made it all so terribly difficult was that she still loved Frank, she was closer to him than to anyone else on earth: they were soul mates—except that the part of his soul that that bitch Dolly owned would never be satisfied. And not only did Nancy love him, but (and this made her furious sometimes) she had stuck by him since the beginning, since the days when they’d lived on spaghetti and meatless tomato sauce because meat simply cost too much. Now that he was really beginning to make some money, why should she share any part of his success with another woman?

But in George Evans, Nancy Sinatra found an ally. He looked at her appreciatively, he saw her as a woman, not just the suffering wifey. In truth, a great part of Evans’s appreciation was professional: the woman had possibilities. Frank Sinatra had to be made to see those possibilities. Evans squinted at Nancy through his horn-rims, seeing the changes in his mind’s eye. And then he went to work.

He took her to Bonwit Teller to shop for dresses—an unimaginable expense for a woman who had made her own clothes forever. He took her to Helena Rubinstein to have her hair done, and for a makeup consultation. He took her to a Park Avenue dentist to have her teeth capped. And then there was the matter of her generous Barbato nose: just a little thinning of the tip and she would be perfection itself. Louis Mayer would be testing her for the screen.

She gave him a level look. She had lived with this nose for twenty-five years, and it had worked just fine for her so far.

But she was a beautiful woman. Why not make the most of what she already had?

Was there a moment between them? He came to appreciate, more and more, the beauty that flowered under his ministrations. (Meanwhile, his own wife was sullen and resentful these days about the long hours he spent away from home.) And Nancy Barbato Sinatra longed—ached, really—to be looked at again that way. It had been such a long time. She melted a little when George called her beautiful, but at heart she was practical and decisive. As was he.

Then there came a day, in early April, when Frank looked at her with her new dress and her hair and her makeup and her teeth (and the five pounds she’d tortured herself to lose), and it was that look again. He took her into the city, to go dancing at El Morocco (Hank Sanicola, at a nearby table, shooed away the girls), and for a late supper at Le Pavillon, and they laughed together and looked in each other’s eyes just the way they used to down the shore, down at Long Branch. Later they drove back to Hasbrouck Heights and paid the babysitter, and a month later she was pregnant again.

Warm Valley. Frank posts the sign he made himself on the front lawn of the Hasbrouck Heights house, April 1943. Big and Little Nancy look on adoringly. (photo credit 11.2)

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Frank at the Riobamba, February 1943. “You better push the walls of this joint out. I’m gonna pack ’em in.” (photo credit 12.1)

Even as Sinatra soared, he encountered occasional turbulence, not to mention other highfliers. Handsome Dick Haymes (who was dogging Sinatra’s trail, having followed him with both Harry James and Tommy Dorsey) had now also gone out on his own, and was selling an awful lot of records on Decca. A new kid named Perry Como was on the rise. Nor was it clear, yet, that Frank Sinatra was anything more than a national fad. He had the hysteria market locked up; the girls would buy his records. But would the grown-ups listen?

On this count, he failed at first. In February 1943, Sinatra’s management moved heaven and earth to book him into the Copacabana, a big new club on East Sixtieth Street. These were the days when Manhattan was the center of the popular-culture universe, and nightclubs were the white-hot core of Manhattan sophistication. And the Copa was the hottest of the hot. The club was secretly owned by