Born Adelaide Gail Sloatman, she was the widow of musician and composer Frank Zappa. The daughter of a nuclear weapons research physicist with the U.S. Navy, she lived with her family in London as a teenager and got a job as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development rather than attend college. She met Doors frontman Jim Morrison at a very young age, in kindergarten, since they both had high-ranking naval officials for fathers. In the mid-1960s, she moved to New York where she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and immersed herself in the music scene before hitchhiking to Los Angeles where she met and befriended future Runaways manager Kim Fowley, and recorded an album with him billed as 'Bunny and Bear'. In 1967, she made a very brief appearance in the documentary film 'Mondo Hollywood'. She met Frank Zappa when she was a secretary at the Sunset Strip mainstay, the Whisky-a-Go-Go, and the couple married on September 21, 1967, while she was pregnant with her first child, Moon. The couple would go on to have three more children; Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva Zappa. After Frank's death in 1993, she set up the Zappa Family Trust and issued 38 albums between 1994 and 2015 of previously unreleased music that Frank had recorded. This year's 'Dance Me This' was billed as his final album and is significant for being his 100th record. Gail had reportedly been suffering from lung cancer.
Born Adelaide Gail Sloatman, she was the widow of musician and composer Frank Zappa. The daughter of a nuclear weapons research physicist with the U.S. Navy, she lived with her family in London as a teenager and got a job as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development rather than attend college. She met Doors frontman Jim Morrison at a very young age, in kindergarten, since they both had high-ranking naval officials for fathers. In the mid-1960s, she moved to New York where she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and immersed herself in the music scene before hitchhiking to Los Angeles where she met and befriended future Runaways manager Kim Fowley, and recorded an album with him billed as 'Bunny and Bear'. In 1967, she made a very brief appearance in the documentary film 'Mondo Hollywood'. She met Frank Zappa when she was a secretary at the Sunset Strip mainstay, the Whisky-a-Go-Go, and the couple married on September 21, 1967, while she was pregnant with her first child, Moon. The couple would go on to have three more children; Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva Zappa. After Frank's death in 1993, she set up the Zappa Family Trust and issued 38 albums between 1994 and 2015 of previously unreleased music that Frank had recorded. This year's 'Dance Me This' was billed as his final album and is significant for being his 100th record. Gail had reportedly been suffering from lung cancer.
