[Dixielandjazz] Frank Sinatra books reviewed - London Guardian, November 24, 2015

[Robert Ringwald]

Frank Sinatra, ‘the Medieval Monarch of Showbiz’ 


by Neil Spencer

    


Frank Sinatra’s favourite time of day was dawn, especially the ice-blue desert dawn of Las Vegas, the signal that he had slaked his gargantuan thirst for fine music, fast company, beautiful women and booze. His customary bedtime was 7am, at which point the perpetual party he led and underwrote would evaporate.


Sinatra’s need for distraction and his terror of solitude are a central theme of Sinatra: The Chairman, James Kaplan’s meticulously researched biography, this second volume marking the singer’s centenary. Kaplan takes up his story in 1954, when Sinatra’s Oscar for From Here to Eternity began “the greatest comeback in showbusiness history”, taking him from over-the-hill crooner to worldwide icon. Kaplan draws from previous biographies and the memoirs of Sinatra’s lovers and fellow travellers, but the pithy narrative is his own, as are his persuasive critiques of the music.


Sinatra couldn’t read scores but had an intuitive grasp of musical dynamics that meant he worked easily alongside gifted arrangers such as Nelson Riddle, Billy May and Quincy Jones. All attest to Sinatra’s brisk professionalism and the interpretive skills he brought to the great canon of mid-century American song, some of which -- including Come Fly With Me and All the Way -- were written for him by the team of Sammy Cahn and Jimmy van Heusen. Both men became members of Sinatra’s “clan”, though that didn’t stop Sinatra, in a booze-fuelled rage, destroying van Heusen’s most prized possession, a painting of himself by Norman Rockwell. Such was life around Frank, “a cauldron of oversensitivity and insecurity”, a man who could ooze charm and wring tenderness and joy from a song only to erupt into fury at a trivial slight -- though Sinatra, a slender physical presence, mostly had his bodyguards do his fighting.


For a decade or more, Sinatra ruled US showbiz like a medieval monarch, “welcoming worship and demanding fealty”. Las Vegas, then little more than a clutch of casinos stretched along a two-lane blacktop, became his favourite playground, the home of the self-styled Rat Pack led by Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. His work schedule was unrelenting, involving up to four live shows a night and three movies a year (mostly Hollywood schlock studded with a few fine performances), quite aside from his cheesy TV programmes and carefully crafted recording sessions. His personal life was just as intense. There were endless flings with starlets and hookers, more serious affairs with Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe and, later, an ill-advised, short-lived marriage to Mia Farrow, 30 years his junior. Yet Frank remained entangled with his second wife, Ava Gardner, the woman who “taught him how to sing a torch song”, as Nelson Riddle observed. “She taught him the hard way.”


Vegas helped Sinatra become rich but became the focus of his alleged involvement with organised crime and mafia boss Sam Giancana, associations that cost him his licence to own his Lake Tahoe casino, or to own a stake of Vegas’s Sands, home to the Rat Pack’s inebriated, inane performances. Kaplan concludes that “Sinatra’s Mob associations had more to do with mutual admiration than affiliation... the gangsters basked in his aura and he in theirs”.


Not everyone saw it that way, notably Robert F Kennedy, attorney general during his elder brother’s presidency and the mafia’s fiercest opponent. Sinatra, raised a Democrat, had campaigned for JFK and the two struck up a putative friendship, sharing a taste for women, though, as one aide remarked: “Sinatra thought Kennedy was going to be a great president, Kennedy just wanted to get laid.”


Sinatra’s links to the mob proved toxic for the Kennedys, and a planned presidential stay at Sinatra’s Beverly Hills home was nixed by Bobby (Bing Crosby hosted instead), triggering a festering resentment that saw Sinatra turn Republican a few years later, overcoming his revulsion for Ronald Reagan “and his gee whiz, golly shucks crap” to play at Reagan’s inauguration as governor of California.


By then the cultural insurrections of the 1960s had left Sinatra stranded. He had survived the advent of rock’n’roll, which he condemned as “ugly, degenerate, vicious, imbecilic”, but the Beatles and their aftermath turned the King of Ring A Ding Ding into an ossified relic of an era “mired in a fog of conformity and nuclear fear”, as Kaplan puts it. There was fine later work, with Count Basie and Brazil’s Antonio Carlos Jobim, several retirements and comebacks, and even hits with Strangers in the Night and My Way, both numbers despised by Frank, but his last 20 years were a comfortable coast downhill.


Sinatra 100, “the official centenary book”, is a handsome slab of coffee table gloss, laden with evocative photographs and memorabilia but overly curated by Sinatra’s family. Ava Gardner is here and Farrow (just) but not Bacall or Monroe. Of  Frank’s mercurial, darker moods there is no sign or mention. -30-


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