Nancy With The Laughing Eyes

Cooked for him, cleaned for him, sewed his bow ties back together when the bobby-soxers tore ’em to shreds, all that old-school Italian wife shit: Nancy did that for her Frank. There’s wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her Frankie, and he was particular. Liked his steak this way, and his eggplant that way. Like his mother used to do. Frank’s mom did a number on him. She was, as we used to say in New Jersey, a real piece of work. Nancy didn’t mind. Anything for her Frankie.

They met in ’35, and got married in ’39. He was a singing waiter at the time, so she needed to work, too. She didn’t care. Frank was gonna be a star–anyone who couldn’t see that was some sort of asshole–and she’d support the family until then. When he got hired by the Big Band leader Harry James, she hopped on the bus and traveled the country with the troupe. No one else could make Frank’s supper right, you see. He liked things a certain way.

And, O, then comes the money.

And, hey, here comes the fame.

And Frank dives in dick-first.

Nancy…well, you know about Nancy. She was pretty for a Jersey girl. But they’re in Hollywood now, and no way Nancy Barbato from Hoboken could compete with Juliet Prowse or Lana Turner. Or Ava. How could Nancy Barbato compete with Ava Gardner? All she ever did was give Frank three kids and a home and all of her heart every single second. The studios sent some aestheticians over to glam her up. Fixed her teeth. Shaved down her thick nose. There was eyebrow work, to be sure.

But the heart wants what the heart wants–that’s something men say when they’re listening to their dicks–and Frank’s heart was with Ava. Nancy wouldn’t give him the divorce for two years, and it wasn’t to be cruel or petty. She loved him, and didn’t want to let him go.

But she did, and then he never left. Frank went through three more wives, but holidays were always at Big Nancy’s place. (After their daughter, Nancy, was born, she became Big Nancy.) Birthdays, too, and when things went wrong with Frank’s life–generally because Frank had punched someone or driven a golf cart through a casino while screaming racial epithets–he always showed back up on the doorstep of the Holmby Hills mansion she got in the divorce. For all their carousing, Dean Martin wasn’t Frank’s best friend. He didn’t have one. He had Big Nancy.

Frank died in 1998, which means this is the part where I write “Ha, ha, she outlived the sonofabitch by 20 years,” but that isn’t how this story goes. She missed him every day of those two decades, and if they’re reunited in the afterlife, she’ll make him his eggplant the way he likes it. Anything for her Frankie.