Frank Sinatra and his daughter, Nancy, in 1966.

TV KEYNOTES

MIAMI It was 40 years ago, but the memory still shimmers: Exhausted and incognito, Nancy Sinatra was sitting at a back table at the Fontainebleau relaxing the best way she could imagine — listening to her dad sing. Suddenly the show took an unexpected turn. “My daughter’s here, just back from Vietnam,” Frank Sinatra told the audience. “Chicken, why don’t you come up here and sing one?”

“He always called me Chicken,” Nancy remembers, amusement and affection rippling through her voice. “That was the last thing I wanted to do, sing at a fancy venue like the Fontainebleau. I wasn’t dressed properly. My hair wasn’t done. And I was tired. Vietnam had been difficult.

“But he wanted to show his support. I think he was very proud I had done that trip, singing for the troops. So I reluctantly got up and went to the stage.” She huddled briefly with Bill Miller, her father’s pianist, and moments later Miller hit the first wistful notes of a song that echoed from the swank La Ronde tables to the muddy Quang Tri foxholes, “My Buddy”:

“Nights are long since you went away”

“I think about you all through the day”

“My buddy, my buddy, no buddy quite so true …”

“The reaction … it was something,” she murmurs, lost in the recollection.

It was perhaps the first time the tough teenybopper chick singer had reached out across generations to her father’s aging hepcat audience, but far from the last. And with the 10th anniversary of Frank’s death, Nancy’s role as her dad’s biographer and chief celebrant has never been more urgent.

Today’s anniversary will kick off a major commemoration of Frank, starting with a new stamp bearing his jaunty Rat-Pack-era image, a CD with 22 remastered recordings from the final 30 years of his career, three DVD collections of his movies, and a month-long film festival on Turner Classic Movies.

Sinatra’s children are right at the heart of the campaign: Tina, 59, runs the business affairs; Frank Jr., 64, tours, performing his father’s songbook with the original big-band arrangements; and Nancy, 67, maintains FrankSinatra.com and does most of the public appearances.

Drumming up interest in a singer who hasn’t had a chart record (or, for that matter, an actor who hasn’t had a starring role) since 1980 isn’t as hard as you might think. Wannabes like Michael Buble and Harry Connick Jr. have introduced not only Frank’s music but his style to a new generation. Of the literally hundreds of homemade Sinatra videos on YouTube, a surprising number feature teenagers in sharkskin suits and tilted-just-so fedoras, swinging to “Fly Me To The Moon” or “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do, to project to young people what it was all about,” says Nancy. “The old-timers, the generation of my father, they certainly remember. I think my generation already knows, and I think my kids’ generation is generally pretty hip to it. Now we’re trying to reach the next one …

“It’s a handful, but it’s important, I think, because that legacy is so brilliant and the standard of excellence is so high. I’d like to teach a class to get some of this across.”

She does, in a way. Nancy hosts Siriusly Sinatra each Sunday on Sirius Satellite Radio, a show on which she plays an eclectic stream-of-consciousness mix of music that links her generation to her father’s, while dispensing what she calls “my little stories” about him. Some of those same anecdotes will be mixed into the Turner Classic Movies screenings of films from the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity to the Rat Pack romp Ocean’s Eleven.

Perhaps the most surprising of the little stories is that Frank didn’t think he deserved the best-actor Oscar he won for playing the runty, pugnacious and doomed soldier Maggio in 1953’s From Here to Eternity.

“But he thought he DID deserve it for The Man with the Golden Arm,” the 1955 film for which he was nominated but lost out to Ernest Borgnine in Marty, Nancy recalls. “He felt he was extraordinary in that film. I do, too. It’s a great portrayal of a drug addict.”

Nancy’s personal favorites, though, tend to run to the light musical comedies her father made earlier in his career.

“Anchors Aweigh, where he and Gene Kelly are dressed up as sailors,” she says. “That was the first movie I ever saw. Or The Kissing Bandit, the Western. Everybody makes fun of that one, they’re ruthless. Even my dad — he made fun of it, too. But I thought he was so gorgeous in those costumes. I was a little girl in love with her dad.

“I like some of the action pictures like The Manchurian Candidate or Von Ryan’s Express. But the ones I watch over and over are the comedies. He was wonderful in those. The Tender Trap, High Society, Hole in The Head. (all of which air tonight on TCM beginning at 8 p.m.) I tend to put a movie on in the background when I’m working, and all I have to hear is a snatch of dialogue to make me smile.”