Stevie Nicks Gave Frank Sinatra’s Daughter the ‘Cold Shoulder’: ‘That Was Painful for Me’
Stevie Nicks and Nancy Sinatra were both highly successful musicians. Despite this, Sinatra said that other artists, including Nicks, didn’t always respect her. She detailed a time when Nicks was less than welcoming to her and speculated on why the Fleetwood Mac artist may have behaved in this way.
Stevie Nicks always had a close circle of women around her
While touring, Nicks was nearly always accompanied by a tight-knit group of women. The singer valued close female friendships.
“My first impression of touring with Fleetwood Mac was seeing Stevie and her acolytes,” Kenny Loggins said, per the book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams, and Rumours by Zoë Howe. “She seemed to collect talented, young, beautiful girls who would then dress like her and follow her around all the time.”
The women reportedly also dressed and behaved like Nicks.
“Stevie’s girls — Robin Snyder, Mary Torrey, Christie Alsbury, and others — dressed like Stevie, in long skirts and long hair with lots of accessories and drop-dead shades,” Stephen Davis wrote in the book Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks. “They smelled like her, too, redolent of patchouli oil and sandalwood.”
Nancy Sinatra said the Fleetwood Mac singer iced her out
Despite the emphasis Nicks placed on female friendships, Sinatra said that she did not behave warmly toward her. She explained that while she was at the height of her fame, other women in the music industry did not know what to make of her.
“My contemporaries – girl singers – they sort of looked down on me,” she told The Independent. “I don’t think they knew what to make of me and my so-called career. They shunned me a little bit, which I found hurtful. And I didn’t quite understand why they did.”
She said she met Nicks years later and experienced the same coldness.
“I wasn’t really allowed in,” she explained. “I was at an event at the White House when it was the Clinton White House. I met Sheryl Crow and Stevie Nicks, and they gave me a cold shoulder. That was painful for me. It’s like they didn’t want to be friends. They just virtually ignored me. I tried to make an effort to shake hands, ‘so nice to meet you’ kind of thing, but they weren’t interested.”
Sinatra wondered if Nicks and Crow didn’t believe she was an “authentic artist.”
“I don’t want to put words in their mouths,” she said, “but yeah, I think there was definitely some of that. I felt like an interloper.”
Stevie Nicks is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Nancy Sinatra has been left out
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has embraced Nicks, making her the only woman inducted twice. Sinatra, on the other hand, has not been inducted. In fact, she all but received confirmation that she never would.
“A few years ago I was talking to Phil Spector about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” she told Pop Matters. “He was on the Board of Governors and he told me, ‘You don’t have a prayer. It’ll never happen.’ He didn’t go into details, but I knew what he meant. There are artists in there that do not have my track record, who have not accomplished what I have, but that doesn’t matter.”
