[Dixielandjazz] NYTDBR: 'Sinatra: The Chairman, ' His World, His Way

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML & Musicians and Jazzfans list
From:  Norman Vickers

Interesting review of a 900+ page book about Sinatra.  I'm not likely to
purchase this book, but if our library obtains it, I'd like to examine and
read parts.

About a year ago, Sinatra's valet died.  The obituary mentioned a book the
valet had written and published, of course, after Sinatra's death.  I was
curious and obtained that book on inter-library loan.  It was certainly
revealing  One of the valet's chores was paying the prostitutes and driving
them home.  ( These women didn't stay the night.)

Here's the NYTimes review!




Review: 'Sinatra: The Chairman,' His World, His Way
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/books/review-sinatra-the-chairman-his-worl
d-his-way.html

Books of The Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Sinatra
The Chairman
By James Kaplan
Illustrated. 979 pages. Doubleday. $35.

He was America's greatest vocalist: a consummate artist who redefined the
possibilities of popular music, bringing to it an intimacy, an urban swagger
and an emotional vulnerability that stamped songs as indelibly his own. A
voice--no, the Voice--who could deliver "In the Wee Small Hours of the
Morning" and "I've Got the World on a String" with equal authority and
self-knowledge. A tough guy with Bond-like sophistication and savoir-faire,
who sang with uncommon tenderness about loneliness and yearning. A
ring-a-ding-ding Vegas showman, rarely without his posse, who could
articulate the heartache and existential solitude of the human condition
with more conviction than any singer on the planet.

The challenges of capturing the magic of Sinatra's art and the
contradictions of his life are daunting. His career spanned decades as he
continually explored his gifts and tried to adapt to changing times, and his
life, as the son of Italian immigrants, embodied the American dream of
success, while his persona, with its nimbus of dangerous glamour, came to
define one generation's ideal of masculinity.

In the first volume of his Sinatra biography ("Frank: The Voice")-- which
ended with Sinatra's comeback from a career slump and his winning of the
1953 Academy Award for his supporting role in "From Here to Eternity"--James
Kaplan provided a gripping, novelistic account of the singer's roots and the
development of his craft, deftly mapping his assimilation of early
influences and his discovery of his own voice.

"Sinatra: The Chairman," the concluding volume to that biography, does a
similarly nimble job of tracing the singer's continued rise to international
fame, and credibly explicates the alchemy behind the singer's collaboration
with Nelson Riddle and their amazing achievement during the Capitol Records
years with masterpieces like "Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely" and
"Songs for Swingin'
Lovers!"

Mr. Kaplan helps us understand the evolution of Sinatra's voice over the
years, his perfectionism and commitment to his craft, and his matchless
ability to interpret songs and to turn them into stories animated by his own
deepest emotions.

But as this more-than-900-page book increasingly turns from Sinatra's music
to his life in Hollywood, Vegas and Palm Springs, it bogs down in gossipy
anecdotes and details that feel tedious and beside the point. It's as if Mr.
Kaplan had decided, with the second part of this volume, to go for
inclusiveness rather than insight, encyclopedic compilation rather than
interpretive analysis. Perhaps this was motivated by a desire to write not
merely the biography of a musical genius but to capture the changing times
he transited, but the overall effect is lugubrious and bloated--the very
antithesis of Sinatra's own precise and shapely art.

Not only are minor albums and even more minor movies laboriously recounted,
but Mr. Kaplan also spends an inordinate amount of space on Sinatra's
alcohol-fueled brawls and his tangled relationships with the Kennedy family,
assorted mob figures and a parade of women.

A lot of this material seems recycled from F.B.I. files about the singer
(released in 1998) and from two shallow, leering biographies:
one by Kitty Kelley ("His Way"), and another by Anthony Summers and Robbyn
Swan ("Sinatra: The Life")--the very sort of superficial works that serious
Sinatra fans hoped that Mr. Kaplan's portrait might supplant. Toward the end
of this volume, the writing also grows increasingly glib and maudlin--two
qualities the singer, even at his lowest, assiduously avoided. Chronicling
Sinatra's workaholic schedule, Mr. Kaplan writes: "another week, another
hundred grand." And of the post-retirement Frank: "Tougher than ever on the
outside, still a molten puddle within."

This is the main theme to emerge from this biography: that there was "a
lunar loneliness" just beneath Sinatra's Rat Pack swagger; that his
insecurities as a poor, skinny boy growing up in Hoboken, N.J., never
healed; that the hole Ava Gardner left in his heart gave his singing a new
depth and dimension. These are hardly new insights.
Mr. Riddle famously pointed out that Sinatra's tortured relationship with
Gardner taught him how to sing a torch song, and Pete Hamill wrote
succinctly about Sinatra's "profound understanding of human loneliness" in
his 1998 book, "Why Sinatra Matters" (recently reissued with a new
introduction in honor of the singer's 100th birthday this December).

We do get some telling glimpses of Sinatra in "The Chairman," but they
mostly come from other people's writings. Passages about the singer's
musical artistry are heavily indebted to Will Friedwald's illuminating book
"Sinatra! The Song Is You" (now sadly, it seems, out of print), while those
about his daily life draw at length upon "Mr. S.," a lively memoir by George
Jacobs, his former valet, and William Stadiem. As for Sinatra the man, the
most revealing insights come from memoirs written by his daughters Tina and
Nancy, and from his third wife, Mia Farrow, who wrote in her autobiography,
"What Falls Away," about the "wounding tenderness that even he can't bear to
acknowledge--except when he sings."

Sinatra never wrote a memoir himself. But his best self is already there in
the hundreds of songs he recorded. As Bob Dylan, who helped celebrate his
80th birthday, once observed, "Right from the beginning, he was there with
the truth of things in his voice."