Sooner or later, Nancy Sinatra was bound to show up on The Sopranos. Her younger brother, Frank Jr, appeared in a memorable card game episode in the show's second season. Paulie Walnuts calls him "chairboy of the board". In the show's final season, Nancy showed up playing herself, singing an apposite composition called Big Bossman (Take My Hand). Nancy is Italian-American royalty, the daughter of the man who bestrode mid-century US popular culture - movies, records, nightclubs, even politics - like the proverbial Colossus. But, and this is a rare thing among the children of the superfamous, Nancy managed to establish for herself an entirely separate musical and cultural identity in the mid-1960s: as a pre- or proto-feminist sex kitten with claws.
And, of course, those boots.
Timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of his death, there's an extensive campaign unfolding, conducted under the auspices of Warner Bros, to transform Frank Sinatra into a posthumous brand in the manner of such multimedia category-jumpers as Jay-Z or Jennifer Lopez. He now appears on a US postage stamp, and a new greatest hits package, called Nothing But the Best, has just been released. What's more, Frank's many movies are still with us, having just been showcased by the BFI and the TV channel TCM.
Given all this, and the enduring appeal of Ol' Blue Eyes, I have to ask: what was it like being the daughter of Frank Sinatra? More normal than you might expect, it turns out. "He wasn't quite on the map when I was a baby," says Nancy. "He was on the road all the time with the band. We were living in a flat in New Jersey when I was born. They didn't have any money. But once he hit, he really hit. Later, we moved to Hasbrouck Heights and had a lovely little house there, but you could get to the windows from the street - once people knew he lived there, they would come to get a glimpse, which worried my mother [Sinatra's first wife, Nancy Barbato] because I was a tiny little toddler, and she didn't want anybody stealing me from the front yard." This was no baseless fear: in 1963, Frank Jr, then 18, was kidnapped from a Lake Tahoe casino and released two days later, after his father paid a $250,000 ransom.
When the Hollywood studios came calling for Frank, it was time to make the move out west. "My dad found a place on Toluca Lake [in LA]. It was such a great childhood. We had this huge lake and a kayak and a little sailboat and a big raft and a rowboat." Frequent guests included comedians Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, as well as Frank's musical director Axel Stordahl, with whom he used to play cards on the raft. "It was the only place you couldn't hear the phone."
Despite coming of age in the taboo-smashing 1960s, Nancy was, by her own account at least, a good girl. She studied music from the age of six: "I wanted to continue my classical education in college, but instead I got married, like a fool [to Tommy Sands, a now-forgotten teen idol]. Because you didn't have sex in those days if you weren't married - at least, not if you were a good girl." But, I suggest, the 60s must have afforded you many chances to be a bad girl. "Well, I wish I'd taken some of them," she says, with a hint of regret, "because then I probably wouldn't have gotten married."
When her marriage started falling apart, her father encouraged her to take up music again. "I hadn't the faintest idea, but he encouraged me to follow my musical instincts. He said to me - wise words - 'Just stay away from what I do. You'll be up for comparisons, and it'll be ridiculous.'" Her greatest blessing was to hook up with a lean, rangy, Oklahoman producer named Lee Hazlewood, who took the woman he sarcastically dubbed Nancy Nicelady, made her sing six notes below her usual register, and turned her into a gogo-booted, dyed blond sex bomb for the easily panicked mid-60s mainstream.
"Isn't it funny?" she says. "Lee used to call us Beauty and the Beast. He was very respectful and polite; he smoked, which I didn't much like, drank Chivas Regal, and he had very specific taste in clothes - his boots were always the most expensive leather or snakeskin. But he was not at all the shit-kicking hillbilly he pretended to be, this country bumpkin. He was highly intelligent, he served in Korea, and he had a well-rounded background as a DJ and a producer."
Finding a template for the Nancy and Lee project took a while. "I first did bubblegum, which I thought was kind of silly. And then, with Lee's backing, Nancy Nicelady did, I guess, the first white-girl version of what the black girls had been doing: a rebel kind of music. People like Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker, singing stuff like, 'Don't give me any shit, man, get lost!' It was that attitude we went after, 'Your cash ain't nothin' but trash!' I grew up listening to all of that."
The finest fruit of this collaboration - belatedly recognised as a groundbreaking sound - was the album Nancy and Lee, which to the untutored ear can sound like a series of duets between Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop. Then there was Nancy's imperishable appearance on TV show Hullaballoo: alongside a bevy of gyrating cuties in knee-high boots and thigh-length sweaters, she purred the lyrics: "These boots are made for walkin' ... "
For a while, she was a ubiquitous presence in a cultural scene that now seems to have toppled straight out of an Austin Powers movie. She sang the theme song for You Only Live Twice. She co-starred in Speedway with Elvis Presley, whom she'd nervously picked up from the airport when he arrived back in Hollywood from the army, en route to a Frank Sinatra TV special ("I was like every girl my age - head over heels in love!"). She and Frank had a huge hit in 1966 with Something Stupid: "Some people call that the Incest Song, which I think is, well, very sweet!" And she starred in The Wild Angels with fellow top-drawer Hollywood brat Peter Fonda ("I called him Peter Honda"), and in The Man From UNCLE, as Coco Cool.
By that point, she was the most popular pinup for the GIs in Vietnam. She would often go on tour in the war zone, and has kept faith with survivors of the war, especially victims of Agent Orange: "My heart was there from the start. When you're anti-war and everyone in your generation is running away from it - or being drafted, or coming back wounded, or not coming back at all - you want to get involved in some way. I don't think it's a contradiction to be anti-war and pro-troops. And here we are all over again."
She still attends the annual Rolling Thunder Ride, a motorcycle gathering of mainly Vietnam vets in Washington DC, and even met George Bush at the White House: "Eight of us on four bikes roared up the White House driveway!" Bush was polite, but didn't earn Nancy's respect. "We were so let down because he made promises - 'We will get on this' - and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs was the same. And nothing happened." She tells me about a friend's daughter, poisoned by Agent Orange: half a face at birth, 60 reconstructive surgeries, eye sockets rebuilt. "And you know what her father got as government compensation for Agent Orange? Forty-two dollars! It just isn't right."
Today - after Morrissey ("a good and true friend") tapped her for London's 2004 Meltdown festival, after Quentin Tarantino resurrected her cool credentials by using her version of Bang Bang in Kill Bill, and after her 2004 Nancy Sinatra album (with Morrissey, Sonic Youth and Calexico) - Nancy has become an icon across many demographics: retro-hipsters, 60s archaeologists, record-production geeks and gay men. No one would doubt that she is her own kind of Sinatra. And she did it her way.
· Nothing But the Best is out now on Reprise.
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