I was Milan on business on May 14, 1998, the day Frank Sinatra died at age 82. The story topped the Italian national news broadcast during which President Clinton, visiting Germany, responded to a reporter’s question about Sinatra and America. Only then did Clinton go on to discuss new U.S. sanctions against India, which had just exploded a nuclear bomb underground. Jacques Chirac, making a statement from Paris, said he considered himself lucky to have met Sinatra. That November, Hofstra University sponsored the first academic conference on Ol’ Blue Eyes: 43 panels, 120 papers, more than 70 discussants in all. The attendance was twice the size of that school’s 1997 conference on the presidency of George H. W. Bush.
James Kaplan exaggerates when saying that Sinatra is “perhaps, the most chronicled human in modern history,” but Frank: The Voice benefits from the challenge to differentiate itself from the pack. In one sense, Kaplan’s striving for status among the established critics and biographers mirrors his subject’s long pursuit of “class.” In the early 1960’s, Sinatra owned three private jets, the first of which he christened “El Dago.” By that point, he had conquered Hollywood and risen from near demise in the early 1950’s to unprecedented heights as a mature singer. Kaplan chooses to focus on the background, unflagging ambition, shifting attitudes and personality of his subject, from his birth in 1915 to 1954 when his career made a remarkable comeback.
Sinatra was the consummate performance artist – and an entertainment enterprise. He worked with the tenacity of a businessman who had watched his personal franchise all but crash by 1950. He’d been fired from MGM. He suffered a vocal chord hemorrhage and had to cancel his gig at the Copacabana. His trusted PR agent died. The story usually reads – as does Kaplan’s especially dramatic version — that Sinatra bounced back in 1953 after his separation from Ava Gardner and signing a new record contract with Capitol, since the following year “Young At Heart” became his first top-5 hit in eight years and he won an Oscar for his portrayal of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. Kaplan emphasizes the role of Gardner in pushing Sinatra toward his movie career and the emotional ripening of his music.
But Sinatra attributed the spark of his comeback to a TV appearance on a 1950 Bob Hope special where he sang “Come Rain or Come Shine” (he would not record that song for another 11 years). Later that year, Sinatra began hosting his own TV series. Performing in this new medium, he felt his confidence swell, projecting a revised image on the small screen. Although his intonation and pitch were now slightly frayed, he used these qualities to project the psyche of a man who would never quite recover from the disillusionment of love, even as he revved himself up to try again. Kaplan mentions this early TV opportunity but only to underscore the emotional and professional lows of the pre-1954 years (“The broadcast limped along from late 1950 to early 1952, often sponsorless, until CBS pulled the plug”).
Nevertheless, no Sinatra biographer has done a better job on the whole of narrating the texture and pace of his life — by way of a feature writer’s quick-stepping prose style. Kaplan’s undistinguished but functional sentences often sound like this: “Where his fans were concerned, Frank, who knew where his bread was buttered, didn’t mind the idolatry.” He entertains with stories about Sinatra’s bad self and his bleak, depressive days on the skids, but his mode is appreciative; he nestles himself close to the man. For instance, the New York Daily Mirror reviled Sinatra for having “found safety and $30,000 a week behind a mike,” but Kaplan is quick to underscore the political motivations for the paper’s attack.
Despite headlining “The Voice” in his title, Kaplan’s scattered comments on Sinatra’s vocal stylings add nothing to the insights of previous writers, such as the well-known influence of Tommy Dorsey’s playing on Sinatra’s sustained legato lines, or later, the importance of Nelson Riddle’s arrangements. Will Friedwald’s Sinatra: The Song Is You (Da Capo, 1997) is generally regarded as the authoritative take on Sinatra’s singing, styling, and musicianship. But there are passages in John Rockwell’s Sinatra: An American Classic (Rolling Stone Press, 1984) that are unsurpassed in this regard.
Rockwell notes that Sinatra was the first pop singer to understand that the microphone is an instrument. On some occasions, the microphone turned against him – namely when he was giving testimony on alleged mob connections. Here’s my favorite Sinatra mob story:
In 1981, Sinatra testified before the Nevada Gaming Commission. The commission chairman, Harry Reid, asked Sinatra to corroborate a story that he carried $2 million in an attaché case to Lucky Luciano. An annoyed Sinatra replied, “If you could get $2 million in an attaché case, I’ll give you $2 million.” Norman Mailer decided to find out if such packaging is possible. He found that a $100 bill measures 6.2 inches by 2.6 inches and 350 bills may be pressed down to a $35,000 one-inch packet. Six packets may be laid along the 17-inch axis of a standard attaché case. Four additional packets fit lengthwise into the space left on that first layer. Ten packets per layer amount to $350,000, with five layers in the 12-by-17-by-5-inch case, adding up to $1,750,000. But with half-inch packets of hundreds stuffed in the corners, Mailer proved you can fit $2,012,000 into an attaché case.
[Published by Doubleday on November 2, 2010. 786 pages, $35.00 hardcover.]