How Frank Sinatra died in 1998

The burial was private. CNN reported that his widow, Barbara, and a group from the family would take the casket afterward to the Palm Springs area. There it would be placed in a burial vault at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, at a service for family only. His parents, Natalie “Dolly” Sinatra and Anthony Martin Sinatra, were already buried in the same cemetery. The report noted that the cemetery lies near Frank Sinatra Drive and the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center for abused children. The family Web site said a military honor guard would escort the casket to the grave because Sinatra had received the Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Wikipedia dates those two honors to 1985 and 1997.

Barbara Sinatra had been married to him since July 11, 1976. Her Wikipedia entry records that it was his fourth marriage and her third, and that for both of them it was the last and the longest. When he died she received $3.5 million in assets and houses in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Palm Springs. She also received the rights to his Trilogy recordings, most of his possessions and control over his name and likeness. The couple had founded the children’s center in Rancho Mirage in 1986, and it offers therapy to young victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. She died in Rancho Mirage on July 25, 2017, at 90, and was buried next to him at Desert Memorial Park. His first wife, Nancy Barbato, died on July 13, 2018, at 101.

Two earlier wives also appear in the later record of his last years. Wikipedia states that after Ava Gardner had a stroke in 1986, Sinatra wanted to pay for her to see a specialist in the United States, even though she could afford her own medical bills. She let him arrange a private plane with medical staff on board. The same entry says Gardner had used her influence with Harry Cohn to get him cast in his Oscar-winning part in From Here to Eternity. She died of bronchopneumonia in London on January 25, 1990, at 67. The publisher of John Brady’s Frank & Ava (2015) says the book traces a secret relationship the two kept up after their divorce, right to the end. Mia Farrow married Sinatra on July 19, 1966, when she was 21 and he was 50. In 2013 she told Maureen Orth of Vanity Fair that he had been the great love of her life and that “We never really split up.” When Orth asked whether her son Ronan might be Sinatra’s child, Farrow answered “Possibly.” Vanity Fair noted that no DNA tests had been done. The end of that marriage is covered in why Sinatra and Farrow divorced.

Library catalogs record the death in their own way. Open Library lists books published during his lifetime under the subject heading “Sinatra, Frank, 1915-1998.” These include Anthony Scaduto’s Frank Sinatra, published by Michael Joseph in 1976, and A Man and His Art, the collection of his paintings that Random House issued in 1991. Random House’s description of the 1991 volume says he had painted seriously for more than 20 years, and that the book reproduces 60 of his oil and acrylic works. James Kaplan’s Frank, published by Anchor in 2010, carries the same heading. Its publisher says it follows him from Hoboken through his fall from grace to his Oscar-winning return.

That fall came in 1952, when Columbia and MCA both dropped him. What happened to Frank Sinatra follows the collapse and the comeback that From Here to Eternity began.