Nancy Sinatra 1995 Interview: The Truth About Her Father Frank

Filmed on November 1, 1995, this broadcast of The Dini Petty Show has Nancy Sinatra on her father Frank Sinatra, the boots that made her a star, and the twenty-five years she spent building his life story. She came to promote Frank Sinatra: An American Legend. What she stayed to do was answer the rumours.

She takes them in order. The Mafia ties. The nine pages of garbage that reduced her to tears. And one night in December 1963 that she still sees in her father’s face — when he went to collect his kidnapped son and the boy was not where the kidnappers had promised he would be. The detail that makes the story land is local rather than criminal: two of the three men who took Frank Sinatra Jr. turned out to be her own high school classmates, and one of them later sat on her reunion committee. She talks about the ransom, and about what the whole thing did to her family.

The rest is a daughter and a professional entertainer talking shop. She discusses posing for Playboy at 54 and the advice Frank gave her about the fee — which is the funniest moment in the hour — and his Oscar for From Here to Eternity. She describes trying to get an eighty-year-old Sinatra off the road, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and a childhood spent around Red Skelton and Jack Benny.

Unseen since its original 1995 broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show, safeguarding a first-hand account of the Sinatra family from the person who spent a quarter-century documenting it.