FRANCIS ALBERT SINATRA
12 December 1915 – 14 May 1998
While he did not serve as a catalyst for major cultural shifts in the same way that his predecessors Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby or his successors Elvis Presley and The Beatles did, there's no denying that Frank Sinatra was and remains, more than two decades after his death, an important cultural figure whose musical influence continues to be surprisingly pervasive. The fourteen LPs he recorded for the Capitol label between 1954 and 1961, featuring his flawless interpretations of material drawn from The Great American Songbook, are still considered to be some of the greatest vocal performances ever recorded by any Western recording artist — performances unequivocally adored by modern audiences who continue to revere them for their nuanced sensitivity, infectious sense of swing and sheer unadulterated beauty.
Sinatra would go on, after leaving Capitol to start and oversee his own Reprise label (a version of which remains in business today), to enjoy a career that would last another thirty years — a significant achievement in itself, given the fickleness of the music-buying public and of an entertainment industry unapologetically obsessed with youth and novelty. It was inevitable that Sinatra's longevity as a performer, combined with his sometimes combative personality and status as one of the world's most controversial celebrities, would make him the subject of a slew of biographies, tributes and exposés of the grimy, scandal-driven variety. In fact, it's difficult to think of another popular male recording artist, with the exceptions of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, whose life and career have spawned as much accompanying biographical literature of wildly varying style, length and quality. What follows is a small sampling of what's out there and what, in my view, is worth investigating for the light it sheds on the character and career of this supremely gifted if sometimes contradictory performer.
I FALL IN LOVE TOO EASILY
FRANK SINATRA
Columbia Records mx. CO33931-1
Recorded 1 December 1944
featured in the 1945 MGM film
Anchors Aweigh
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| Michael Joseph Ltd first UK edition, 1962 |
Sinatra (1962) by ROBIN DOUGLAS-HOME
Attempts to analyze Sinatra's appeal began almost as soon as his career itself was properly launched with his 1940 RCA recording — as featured vocalist of the immensely popular Tommy Dorsey Orchestra — of the endearing romantic standard Polka Dots and Moonbeams. While the track was not his first commercial release — that was From The Bottom Of My Heart, which he recorded for the Columbia label as a member of the Harry James Orchestra in March of the previous year — it was his first notable hit, ushering in the early 'Sinatramania' phase of his career which saw him become the idol of millions of swooning teenage girls and the focus of a near riot at New York's Paramount Theater when, having gone solo by this time, he appeared there on 30 December 1942 as an 'extra added attraction' at a concert featuring the Benny Goodman Orchestra. 'The Voice,' as he was affectionately known, clearly had something special to offer and audiences, female and male alike, clamoured to know what made him tick.
Robin Douglas-Home, Scottish-born journalist, novelist and jazz pianist son of aristocrat parents (as well as being the nephew of British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home), shared the curiosity of these early Sinatra fanatics. Becoming fascinated by the singer after purchasing a copy of his classic 1956 LP Songs For Swinging Lovers and playing it virtually non-stop for months, Douglas-Home quickly found himself frustrated by the lack of serious efforts to contextualize Sinatra's artistry. 'From 1956 onwards,' he explains, 'I bought every Sinatra record available, and absorbed every note he recorded, in an attempt to analyse the man's unique power of communication. I read all the so-called profiles on him in British and American publications, but my search for an explanation of his particular talent was invariably fruitless; every writer seemed far more concerned with what girl he was dating at the moment than with an analysis of his professional approach, his artistic ability, or his unique lyric interpretation.'
Determined to change this, Douglas-Home contacted the singer's agent, seeking permission to write an in-depth profile of him, only to receive a polite rejection letter for his trouble — a situation that persisted until June 1960 when he found himself invited to a dinner also attended by two of Sinatra's closest friends, Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff and his wife Gloria. The Romanoffs promised to mention the profile idea to Sinatra and subsequently did so, but no invitation to interview him was forthcoming until the following year when an article Douglas-Home had written in praise of Nelson Riddle, generally regarded as being the singer's most gifted arranger, was published in Queen magazine. The Romanoffs gave Sinatra a copy of the article and six weeks later Douglas-Home was summoned to Claridges Hotel in London to meet him. This short but illuminating book was the product of that initial meeting.
What differentiates this study of Sinatra from later, more exhaustive studies of his life and career is the fact that it captures him at the crucial point between his departure from Capitol Records and the shift to his own Reprise label. (It's also quite pithy, running to a mere 64 pages, many of which are devoted to glossy black and white photographs.) Sinatra is portrayed, not as the cantankerous, reporter punching thug he was so frequently portrayed as by the muckraking popular press, but as an articulate, intelligent artist whose self-imposed quest for musical perfection never robbed him of his sense of humor in or out of the recording studio. He was also surprisingly candid with Douglas-Home about his childhood at a time when top drawer celebrities were not in the habit of doing this. 'Undoubtedly psychiatrists would say that his great need for affection from others and his deep urge to give affection to others could spring from an emotional starvation or lack of affection as a child,' Douglas-Home speculates at one point. 'He talked occasionally of gang escapades with his High School friends and his work after graduation as copy-boy on a local newspaper. But he plainly preferred to recall even his adolescence within a musical framework.'
While it is this focus on Sinatra the musician that makes the book relevant and still worth reading, it also contains many pertinent comments about Sinatra's parallel careers as film star and philanthropist plus a detailed examination of a November 1961 nightclub performance at The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas — the onset of the legendary (or grossly overrated, depending on whom you choose to believe) 'Rat Pack/Clan' era that saw him, fellow vocalists Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr, comedian Joey Bishop and actor Peter Lawford (brother-in-law of John F Kennedy) inflict their love of ad-libbing and booze inspired high-jinks on an equally well-lubricated and, for the most part, thoroughly delighted middle-aged audience.
Again, it's the immediacy of Douglas-Home's impressions of the era which makes them so compelling. Nobody suspected in 1962 that Sinatra would remain at the top of his profession for another three decades, transforming himself into the bonafide entertainment legend known as 'The Chairman of the Board' in the process. That said, the occasionally overwhelmed Scotsman does a fine job of dissecting Sinatra's unique and often contradictory appeal. 'He has,' he states at the end of the book, 'by the peculiarly potent chemistry of his nature and image, become the living symbol of an ideal that millions subconsciously would like to emulate, but consciously realise that it would never work out in practice… The paradoxes in his make-up are all part of it — the swashbuckling toughness together with the poignant tenderness, the idolised hero yet simultaneously the small boy underdog, the family man yet the emanicipated charmer of the world.' Many other books would go on to be written about the phenomenon that was Frank Sinatra, but few if any were so immediate or so prescient in their analysis of what would become his lifelong popularity.
Sinatra is currently out of print.
ROBIN DOUGLAS-HOME (1932–1968) was also the author of three novels including Hot For Certainties published in 1966.
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| Scribner first US edition, 1995 |
Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art (1995) by WILL FRIEDWALD
In a sense, this rivetting piece of musical scholarship could be said to pick up from where Robin Douglas-Home's extended magazine article left off. Already the author of a well regarded study of jazz singing titled, fittingly enough, Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond (1990), Will Friedwald was able to bring the skills that made that earlier book so valuable — enthusiasm, erudition, attention to detail and a penchant for making controversial statements that challenged the preconceptions of readers and critics alike — to bear on the entire recorded output of one of the twentieth century's top selling recording artists. Published in the singer's eightieth year, it investigates 'the way he used his voice to invigorate American popular music with innovative phrasing and a mastery of range and emotion.' It is, in my view, the best book written about Sinatra the musician and what made him a consummate interpreter of songs which, in many cases, came to define the first half of the twentieth century.
Friedwald wisely chooses not to restrict his focus to Sinatra himself, emphasizing the vital contributions made to his success by his former bandleading bosses Harry James and Tommy Dorsey and, even more crucially, by his many talented arrangers including (but not limited to) Axel Stordahl, the aforementioned Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, Johnny Mandel, Neal Hefti and Billy Costa. It was Costa's unenviable task to help Sinatra re-invent himself as a performer of contemporary pop material as the market for traditional standards of the Tin Pan Alley variety began to shrink following the emergence of The Beatles and their domination of the charts throughout the 1960s — a period that saw Sinatra tackle, and not always successfully, songs originally recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles themselves and, as the 1970s arrived, artists like Neil Diamond and Joe Raposo whose It's Not Easy Being Green, released in 1973, had originally been recorded by Jim Henson in the guise of his Muppet alter-ego Kermit the Frog.
Friedwald is particularly enlightening on the subject of Sinatra's groundbreaking 1950s Capitol work — it is probably more accurate to define it as a collaboration — with Nelson Riddle. 'Sinatra and Riddle remained essential to each other,' he notes, 'because each man pushed the other to heights neither could achieve individually. It remained for Riddle to develop both the ballad side and the swinging side of Sinatra, or rather to extend the legacies of Axel Stordahl and George Siravo (and before him, Sy Oliver)… Anyone with half an ear can hear what Riddle did for Sinatra, but it takes a little more digging to ascertain what Sinatra did for Riddle — apart from making him a national name by letting him ride on the coattails of one of the most phenomenal comebacks in showbiz history.' These are shrewd and thought-provoking observations, delivered by a critic whose passion for his subject is clear in every word he writes, even when his tone borders on the vituperative because the music he's describing is less than artistically satisfying as was the case with much of the frequently forgettable material Sinatra recorded prior to his short-lived retirement from the entertainment business in 1970.
But the most astute review of Sinatra! The Song Is You comes from one of its contributors, the session guitarist Al Viola who worked closely with the singer for a quarter of a century. 'I've never heard of a book like that,' he confided to Friedwald after being interviewed by him, 'a book on Frank where they talked to guys like me. The people that were really there with him, sweating it out. That's the one book on Frank that hasn't been written. And I think that's the soul of his music.' It is and this fine study does much to affirm the truth of that statement.
Sinatra! The Song Is You was last reissued, with a new introduction by vocalist TONY BENNETT, in May 2018 by the Chicago Review Press.
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| Little, Brown & Company first US edition, 1998 |
Why Sinatra Matters (1998) by PETE HAMILL
This celebration of Sinatra's life and art — again, quite short by biographical standards — appeared shortly after the singer's death in May 1998 when many of his fans, including its author the North American novelist and journalist Pete Hamill, were mourning not only his long expected passing but the passing of the epoch he embodied and his status as the defining male celebrity of their generation. For many males of Hamill's vintage, including my own father in Australia, Sinatra was the touchstone during their adolescence and early manhood — a trendsetting n'er-do-well whose distinctive personal style they avidly sought to emulate and a performer whose music seemed to have been tailormade to serve as the soundtrack to their exciting new post-war lives. As Sinatra's fame grew during the latter half of the 1950s, so did the reverence these young fans felt for him and his music, particularly for the Capitol material which, as should be obvious by now, represents the pinnacle of his career as a recording artist.
Hamill was uniquely qualified to write about this phenomenon because he knew Sinatra personally and was fortunate enough to have interviewed and occasionally socialized with him over a period of several years. Despite this level of access, he baulks at describing himself and the singer as friends. 'To be sure,' he says, 'we were not friends in any conventional way; I did not visit his home and he did not visit mine… But I liked him enormously… He was wonderful with children, including my two daughters. He was funny. He was vulnerable. I never saw the snarling bully of the legend. That Frank Sinatra certainly existed; on the day that his death made all those front pages, there were too many people who remembered only his cruelties… Like all great artists, Frank Sinatra contained secret places, abiding personal mysteries, endless contradictions.'
Hamill writes very movingly about his subject's life, beginning with his childhood as a second generation Italian-American in the New Jersey town of Hoboken, just across the river from the city of New York that he would one day come to epitomize in the eyes, minds and hearts of so many of his fans. Hamill is at his best, however, when he relates the facts of Sinatra's life to his music, a task to which he brings a keen eye for detail and a great deal of insight. 'As an artist,' he observes, 'Sinatra had only one basic subject: loneliness. His ballads are all strategies for dealing with loneliness; his up-tempo performances are expressions of release from that loneliness. The former are almost all fueled by abandonment, odes to the girl who got away. The up-tempo tunes embrace the girl who has just arrived. Across his long career, Sinatra did many variations on this basic theme, but he got into real trouble only when he strayed from that essentially urban feeling of being the lone man in the crowded city.' Hamill goes on to link this characteristic theme to the circumstances of Sinatra's upbringing as an only child in a neigborhood and a culture in which large families were considered the norm and any deviation from that norm was viewed with disdain if not with outright suspicion. It is a minor point perhaps, but a significant one that seems to cut to the core of what Sinatra would ultimately go on to achieve as a performer. It was the singer's uncanny ability to affect and to a certain extent define the emotional lives of his audience that Hamill's book celebrates and it's written with skill, taste and, above all, compassion.
Why Sinatra Matters was last reissued, with a new introduction by PETE HAMILL, by Little, Brown & Company in January 2016.
Sadly, North American journalist, novelist, essayist and editor PETE HAMILL died of heart and kidney disease on 5 August 2020 at the age of eighty-five.
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| Little, Brown & Company first US edition, 1986 |
Frank Sinatra: A Celebration (1985) by DEREK JEWELL
Derek Jewell (1927–1985) was a British novelist, broadcaster and critic who wrote a weekly music column for the London Sunday Times for nearly a quarter of a century. A longtime Sinatra fan, beginning with the singer's rise to prominence in the 1940s when he was affectionately known as 'The Voice' to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Jewell was ideally placed to produce what remains a very readable pictorial biography, generously illustrated with dozens of black and white photographs, that deals intelligently and dispassionately with the many controversies that, at times, seemed to plague its subject's life if not define it — his four marriages, his alleged links with the Mafia, his ego-fueled run-ins with various members of the press and, on more than one occasion, his fellow celebrities.
While Frank Sinatra: A Celebration is probably not a must-own book for anyone but the most dedicated of Sinatraphiles, it does include a full filmography prepared by Jewell's colleague George Perry, listing all 57 of the singer's appearances on film between 1941 — when he appeared backed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in a now forgotten Paramount production titled Las Vegas Nights — and 1980 when he starred as Detective Edward Delaney in the poorly received police thriller The First Deadly Sin alongside Faye Dunaway, David Dukes and Brenda Vacarro. The accompanying essay, again generously illustrated in black and white with many film stills and publicity shots, is well worth reading, particularly for those who may be less familiar with the singer's film work than they are with his music.
Sinatra was a major presence on the world's movie screens throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s, having proved his cinematic worth by winning the 1953 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Angelo Maggio in the Columbia Pictures adaptation of James Jones's bestselling 1951 novel From Here To Eternity. After co-starring as a shy, love-starved sailor in the MGM musicals Anchors Aweigh (1945) and On The Town (1949) and less successfully in a number of other, less prestigious films in which he was variously cast (or miscast) as an aspiring playwright, a returned GI, a Catholic priest and a neuraesthenic college graduate determined to prove his mettle in the Old West, the role of Maggio proved to be the turning point in what, following his highly publicized divorce from his childhood sweetheart Nancy Barbato and re-marriage to actor Ava Gardner, had become a stalled career which had seen him dropped by Columbia Records and its subsidiary television network and also by his agent who claimed he was owed $40,000 in unpaid commissions. Sinatra's performance as Maggio, a role he worked extremely hard to get and agreed to play for the paltry fee of $8000, re-established him as a major star and led to him being re-signed as a recording artist by Capitol Records. It also bolstered his credentials as an actor, seeing him star in at least nine more films –– including the acknowledged classics The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), The Joker Is Wild (1957), Pal Joey (1957) and the controversial political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) — that remain well worth viewing today. Perry also discusses some of the film projects, such as Carousel (1956) in which he was replaced by Gordon MacRae after arguing with the studio over its decision to film every scene twice to accomodate a new projection system, that may have challenged him more as an actor than much of his subsequent cinematic output managed to do.
Frank Sinatra: A Celebration is currently out of print.
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| Oxford University Press first US edition, 1995 |
The Frank Sinatra Reader (1995) by STEVEN PETKOV and LEONARD MUSTAZZA (editors)
This is a different kind of Sinatra biography in that, technically speaking, it's not really a biography at all. Rather, it's a chronologically arranged collection of essays, interviews and journalistic pieces covering all phases of the singer's career from the emergence of 'Sinatramania' in the early 1940s up to the gala 1995 tribute concert held at Carnegie Hall in New York City to mark his eightieth birthday. Its contributors include the aforementioned Sinatraphiles Will Friedwald, Pete Hamill and Derek Jewell and they're joined by some of North America's most perceptive jazz and pop critics including Leonard Feather, Robert Palmer, Ralph J Gleason, Johnathon Schwartz, Gene Lees and Whitney Balliet, all of whom have fascinating things to say about the Sinatra phenomenon.
Good as these writers are, my favourite piece is a 1974 essay by Martha Weinman Lear titled The Bobby Sox Have Wilted, but the Memory Remains Fresh in which she recalls the time when she, along with all her friends, was a swooning teenage fan. 'Ah, Frankie everlovin',' it begins, 'here we are at the Garden dancing cheek to cheek and the lights are low and it's oh so sweet. We haven't been this close since the old days when I played hookey from school to come see you in the RKO-Boston. You remember me, don't you? I was the one in the bobby sox.' The piece is affectionate and amusing and also a semi-serious attempt to explain the benign form of mass hysteria that gripped so many young female Sinatra fans when he was, for them, not only their beloved 'Voice' but the epitome of romantic sophistication with his boyish charm and superb portamento phrasing, spinning soft romantic dreams for a generation of young women trying to grow up amid the turmoil and uncertainty of World War Two. But Ms Weinman Lear is less dewy eyed when it comes to describing post-Reprise, mid-career Sinatra: 'A few years later, it started getting… seamy. Tacky. With the henchmen and the talk of mob connections, the mean-mouthed confrontations with the press, the public degrading of women, the spectacle of baggy-eyed, boozed-up, middle-aged men trying to make it New Year's Eve forever: We're gonna have fun if it kills us. The Kennedy White House, into whose Camelot he had drifted for a time, dropped him. The Clan faded, maybe of age. His third marriage, to nymphet Mia Farrow, broke up. A lifelong Democrat, he got chummy with Reagan and then, good grief, with Agnew.' But, unsurprisingly, the writer's abiding love of the music overrides even these regrettable associations. 'The blue eyes still burn,' the piece concludes, 'the cuffs are still incomparably shot, the style, the style, is still all there, and what's left of the voice still gets to me like no other voice, and it always will.'
The Frank Sinatra Reader is one of the more interesting books published about its subject, offering a mosaic of perspectives on his life and career along with a full discography of his Capitol and post-Capitol recordings (the earlier Columbia and Victor years are ignored for some reason), a complete filmography (which, unlike the George Perry filmography mentioned above, includes what was to be his final film appearance, a cameo in Cannonball Run II released in 1984), a selected bibliography and engaging linking material penned by its non-specialist editors. The book is a labor of love and reads like one, demonstrating yet again why Sinatra remains a captivating yet enigmatic performer whose appeal has never truly faded and probably never will.
The Frank Sinatra Reader is currently out of print.
FRANK SINATRA
c 1960
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