Nancy Sinatra
by David Krell
david@davidkrell.com
Seductive songs.
Soft sounds.
Sex symbol.
Sinatra.
No, not that one!
Nancy Sinatra.
Any discussion of Nancy Sinatra logically begins with the song turned anthem for the women’s lib set. Undeniably, Nancy Sinatra secured her place in popular culture with These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.
She traveled a journey in those boots, before and after her signature song. It’s a journey worth exploring.
From her only number one song to her recreation some two decades later on China Beach.
From her appearance on the historic television special Welcome Back, Elvis to her co-starring position with the King in the film Speedway.
From the innocent girl who shyly appeared on her father’s television show to the older and bolder woman who graced the cover of Playboy in her mid-50’s.
Throughout her career, Nancy Sinatra has left some pretty big bootprints on the show business landscape.
Walkin’ Boots and Soldier Boots
These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ spent one glorious week in February 1966 at the number one slot on the pop chart. Lee Hazelwood wrote and produced Boots, revealing his country & western leanings over the words and beat, particularly if you eliminate the horn section.
Quoting Time, Fred Bronson included the song’s genesis and Hazelwood’s career counseling of Nancy Sinatra in his compendium The Billboard Book of Number One Hits (3rd Edition, 1992). Hazelwood addressed a vital part of any performer’s success -- image.
You’re not a sweet young thing. You’re not the virgin next door. You’ve been married and divorced. You’re a grown woman. I know there’s garbage in there somewhere.
Released by father Frank’s Reprise label, Boots induces historians and psychologists to identify the song’s meaning. Nora Ephron explores this subject in the June 4, 1966 edition of the New York Post Weekend Magazine section. The Name -- And a New Ingredient directly references the sadomasochistic aura of Boots.
Both Hazelwood and Miss Sinatra put the sado-masochistic (sic) charges into the ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ school of record interpretation, where it is in good company with songs like ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’
‘I wrote it as a fun song,’ Hazelwood explained. ‘But the psychologists, who should be givin’ tests, and other people who have over a 120 IQ start to analyze somethin’. It’s like sellin’ newspapers in the Mojave Desert -- you’ve got a helluva bad corner.’
‘It’s tongue-in-cheek and fun,’ says Miss Sinatra, ‘and anyone who says anything else has a warped mind.’
More than two decades after reaching number one, Nancy Sinatra relived her ’66 triumph. She appeared as herself and sang Boots in the China Beach episode Chao Ong (First Aired: ABC, June 8, 1988). Nancy’s appearance reinforced the show’s already strong verisimilitude concerning an army hospital during the Vietnam War.
In addition, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket featured Boots.
In real-life, Nancy Sinatra performed for the troops in Vietnam, but not before doing serious soul-searching. An NBC press release dated April 1, 1968 quoted the vivacious singer on this subject. NBC distributed the press release to promote the repeat airing of Movin’ With Nancy on April 15, 1968. Movin’ With Nancy originally aired on NBC on December 11, 1967.
I signed up to go on a public appearance tour. I became frightened and cancelled. I went home and cried hysterically. I used yoga to calm myself and analyze my feelings. I realized that I was suffering because of my decision not to go. I was sick. I went to Dad and said, ‘I have to go.’ He said, ‘Then let’s work it out.’ The show I was going with had fallen apart, which had been part of the problem. Dad helped me put a new show together. We missed our plane in San Francisco by 30 seconds. I wondered whether God was trying to tell me something.
Fate stepped in as a clergyman saw Nancy and told her, I make that trip twice a month. You will get much more from it than you will give.
Nancy assimilated her Vietnam tour into her performances back in the United States. Variety reviewed her appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in its March 1, 1967 edition.
Of major interest was Nancy Sinatra, who has been making headway in entertainment orbits. Recently returned from Vietnam, Miss Sinatra showed a feeling as well as a sound in her two-part recital. In each instance, she was backed by heavy production, the first part was montaged with shots of her GI tour, and the second with honky-tonk atmosphere. She has enough to get by on her own.
Movin’ With Nancy
NBC agreed with the Variety review and contracted with Nancy for a one-hour music special.
Sponsored by Royal Crown Cola, Movin’ With Nancy aired on December 11, 1967, fifteen years before MTV made permanent the nexus between music and television. Movin’ With Nancy experimented with some of the same techniques used today in music videos.
Predictably, Nancy used her family connections by having the core of the Rat Pack -- Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and her father -- appear on the special.
In an NBC press release dated November 28, 1967, Nancy explains the idea behind the special and the deliberate attention to visual detail. After all, television is a visual medium.
If it’s not going to be me, I might as well phone it in.
A special has to reflect the performer, the person. Otherwise, there’s no reason for me to be here at all.
Guest shots on other people’s programs are different. The star sets the mood, the personality of the show. You’re hired, you’re paid to sing one or two songs, you do what you’re told to do and yourself doesn’t become particularly involved.
So we decided to shoot the special like it was a musical motion picture, with a prevailing theme -- moving -- and with a lot of visually exciting scenes in the background.
For example, we drove half way up the coast of California to sing in front of the prettiest waterfall I’ve ever seen, and the entire scene is only on camera for about 30 seconds.
Father and Daughter
Nancy Sinatra initially became known to audiences of her father’s generation through the song Nancy With the Laughing Face. Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers wrote the song, originally titled Bessie With the Laughing Face. Silvers changed the title as Nancy’s 4th birthday gift.
About fifteen years later, the Frank-Nancy link again appeared to audiences. Nancy filled in for her sister Tina on the Valentine’s Day edition of The Frank Sinatra Show (First Aired: ABC, February 14, 1958).
A special, sincere, and memorable moment occurs when the once thin-as-a-rail Hoboken heartthrob transforms into a father seeing his daughter grow up to be a young woman and he sings My Funny Valentine.
In 1965, Nancy played a familiar role in Marriage on the Rocks, a film starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. She played Frank’s daughter.
In 1967, Sinatra father and daughter reached number one on a collaboration with their respective producers, Jimmy Bowen and Lee Hazelwood. Also released on the Reprise label, Somethin’ Stupid occupied four weeks at the top slot. C. Carson Parks wrote the song.
Nancy joked about her father’s tough guy, high life reputation on Jack Benny’s New Look (First Aired: NBC, December 3, 1969), a variety special featuring the eternal thirty-nine year-old responding to the mod look and feel of the mid-to-late 1960’s.
In an exchange with Jack Benny, Nancy responds to the host’s inquiry on her father’s staying power.
Benny says, But tell me something, Nancy. You know, so many of the young singers today, they come and they go. But your dad, Frank Sinatra, he’s been right there at the top of the heap for thirty years. How do you account for that?
Clean living, Nancy says.
Kodak sponsored the special which parodies the times with psychedelic art, musical arrangement indicative of the era (including a mod version of the comedian’s theme song Love In Bloom), and Jack Benny dressed as a hippie in the show’s intro.
Benny made an excellent choice in Nancy Sinatra who personifies the mod set like nobody else of her generation. In the April 7, 1968 edition of The New York Daily News, Kay Gardella explains the Nancy Sinatra phenomenon in her article Nancy a Miss With a Modern Image.
N in Nancy stands for now. She’s contemporary. She’s in tune with the times. And she’s making a fortune because she’s found a musical style, and a way of dressing that today’s youth recognizes. She knows what she’s doing, too.
In the aforementioned 1968 NBC press release, Nancy expounds on the younger generation’s feeling in a musical context and the consequent power of music to represent the events of a particular time.
Every era in this country’s history is reflected in the folk music of its time. Our show deals with today and today’s folk music. The entire show is based on the theme of love. In essence, that’s what the younger world is saying: ‘Love each other, give to each other.’
The younger world isn’t searching. It’s the older generation that’s looking for meaning. I think the young people know exactly what they are doing and thinking. I’m not talking to them but speaking for them. They’re telling me, and I, in turn, am telling the rest of the people.
The young people are against hypocrisy. They are honest. They’re asking others to be honest and face themselves and find truth.
Nancy sang two songs on New Look. Both performances feature mirrors in the scenery -- The Best Is Yet to Come and Here, There and Everywhere.
Gary Puckett and the Union Gap also perform on New Look. After the group sings The Beggar, Nancy joins for a rendition of Spinning Wheel.
Television queen Lucille Ball makes a cameo at the end of the special and confronts Jack Benny. How dare you do a special without me? she exclaims. She then slaps her comedy contemporary.
Benny and Ball were also neighbors in real-life. They lived next door to one another on North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, Benny at 1002 and Ball at 1000.
The Chairman’s Daughter and the King
When Nancy Sinatra co-starred with Elvis Presley in the 1968 film Speedway, she fulfilled a prophecy of sorts begun about eight years prior.
Frank Sinatra and Timex teamed for a series of specials on ABC logically titled The Frank Sinatra Timex Show. (First Aired: ABC, October 19, 1959, December 13, 1959, February 15, 1960, and May 12, 1960.)
Elvis Presley’s much anticipated return from the Army serves as the topic for the last installment appropriately subtitled It’s Nice To Go Traveling: Welcome Home, Elvis.
Nancy Sinatra joins her father and fellow Rat Pack personnel Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis, Jr. in the variety show taped at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen produced the special.
She sings You Make Me Feel So Young with Frank Sinatra and dances a soft shoe to the song and another song, Young At Heart, with the Tom Hansen Dancers.
Actually, Nancy already welcomed Elvis home in person as the ‘official greeter’ at McGuire Air Force Base on March 3, 1960 when he returned from Germany. She acted as a proxy for her father who would, in turn, act as a proxy for America by welcoming Elvis home on the special.
A grown woman by the latter half of the decade, Nancy joined Shelley Fabares, Ann-Margret, and Stella Stevens on the list of the King’s female co-stars. She plays IRS agent Susan Jacks in Speedway.
Speedway parallels Elvis’ 1967 film Clambake in an upside-down-and-backwards kind of way. In Clambake, Elvis plays Scott Heyward, a rich oil heir who masquerades as an average water ski instructor in Miami to prove to himself that there’s more to him than money. Shelley Fabares plays a woman on vacation in search of a potential rich husband. She falls in love with Scott and faints when she learns he’s rich. Bill Bixby plays Elvis’ rival in romance and speedboat racing.
In Speedway, Elvis plays Steve Grayson, a successful race car driver with $145,000 in debt to the IRS. Nancy’s character also goes after money, albeit for her job. She falls in love with Steve, a generous type with a propensity to give away money. Bill Bixby co-stars as Elvis’ sleazy manager.
With Speedway, Nancy Sinatra achieved a position where others failed. She became the only artist to make a guest appearance on an Elvis Presley album in his lifetime -- the Speedway soundtrack. Running true to the Elvis movie standard, songs generously balance the story in Speedway.
Examples include Elvis and Nancy in the duet There Ain’t Nothin’ Like A Song and the Sinatra songstress singing Your Groovy Self. Boots scribe Lee Hazelwood wrote Your Groovy Self.
Nancy Sinatra also appears in a film starring an icon a year prior to Speedway. Sort of. She sings the theme song for the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice.
Comeback
In 1995, Nancy made a comeback culminating in the cover slot for the May issue of Playboy. She toured for the first time in more than two decades, made a new album, and re-released vintage tunes.
Nancy Sinatra secured her place firmly in popular culture. But where exactly is that place? What is its context?
It begins and ends with These Boots Are Made For Walkin’. Nancy Sinatra certainly achieved success beyond Boots with appearances on variety shows, her own television special, and films.
She reached a certain status in the entertainment industry not merely in addition to Boots, but arguably, because of it. However, she never quite matched the initial impact on the popular culture.
She did not sustain the success of Boots, a song defining her professional persona as a woman of strength, independence, and power.
One might argue that Nancy Sinatra was nothing more than a one-hit wonder, Something Stupid notwithstanding.
The argument rings hollow because the one hit has enormous repercussions.
Song and performer are synonymous. You cannot think of one without thinking of the other.
Pepsi selected Boots to show the difference between hard rock and other forms of popular music in the Hard Rock segment of its 1985 syndicated offering Pepsi Walk Thru Rock. In this program, segments approximately seven minutes in length depict the history of rock music through film clips and music videos.
Lee Hazelwood is directly on point in analyzing Nancy’s need for a breakout song. The choice would graduate her from Frank Sinatra’s little girl to a full-fledged woman.
Further, Boots represents a highly significant segment of women in the 1960’s. One can formidably suggest Boots jump started the women’s lib movement because the lyrics state that women will not put with mistreatment by men.
When Nancy made her mid-1990’s comeback, the April 16, 1995 edition of The New York Times ran an article in its Styles section highlighting her. Judith Newman’s article These Boots Apparently Think They’re the Energizer Bunny references the women’s lib angle in the introduction.
Before Helen Reddy taught women to roar, before Gloria Gaynor urged them to survive and way before Cyndi Lauper pointed out, quite sensibly, what girls just want to have, there was Nancy Sinatra and her boots.
One of Nancy Sinatra’s songs from Speedway just about sums it up -- There Ain’t Nothin’ Like A Song.