The story of Frank Sinatra

Hoboken beginnings

Francis Albert Sinatra was born on the twelfth of December 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the only child of two Italian immigrants. His mother Dolly came from the Genoa region, and his father Marty from a Sicilian town called Lercara Friddi. The birth nearly went badly wrong. The baby weighed thirteen and a half pounds and had to be pulled out with forceps, which scarred his left cheek and neck and damaged his left eardrum for life. His baptism was put off until the following April. Marty could not read. He had boxed as a bantamweight and later rose to captain in the Hoboken Fire Department, and he dreamed that his son would study engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in town.[1] [2] [3]

Dolly was the driving force in the house. She was energetic and ambitious, a Democratic Party ward leader with real pull in Hoboken, and biographers see her as the main source of her son's self confidence. His fourth wife Barbara later claimed that Dolly knocked him around a lot as a boy. She also spoiled him. During the Depression she gave him money for outings and good clothes, and neighbours called him the best dressed kid in the neighbourhood. Young Frank loved big band music and idolised Bing Crosby, and an uncle gave him a ukulele for his fifteenth birthday. School did not suit him at all. He lasted forty seven days at A. J. Demarest High School before he was thrown out for general rowdiness.[1] [2]

To please his mother he tried a business school, and left after eleven months. He delivered newspapers for the Jersey Observer, worked as a riveter in a shipyard and sang for free on local radio. His break came through a Hoboken trio called the 3 Flashes. One of them, Fred Tamburro, later admitted they only took the skinny kid along because he had a car and could drive them to gigs. On the eighth of September 1935 they appeared on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio show, billed together as the Hoboken Four, and Frank sang Cole Porter's Night and Day. The act won easily, reportedly with more than forty thousand votes from listeners, and it earned a place on one of Bowes's touring companies.[1] [2]

The tour paid fifty dollars a week each, more than any of them had ever earned, but it turned ugly. Frank got the girls' attention and the others grew jealous. Tamburro knocked him down after Frank joked about him on stage, and he and Jimmy Petrozelli took to beating Frank up from time to time. Before the end of 1935 he quit and went home to Hoboken. By 1938 he was singing at a New Jersey roadhouse called the Rustic Cabin. An incident there led to his arrest, and a married woman brought a case claiming he had slept with her. It failed, and he agreed to marry Nancy Barbato, whom he had met in 1934 at the seaside town of Long Branch. They married on the fourth of February 1939 in Jersey City.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band singer

In March 1939 a saxophone player named Frank Mane, who knew him from local radio, arranged his first solo studio recording, a song called Our Love. That June the trumpet star Harry James, who had heard him on the radio, signed him for seventy five dollars a week. James wanted to rename him Frankie Satin. Frank flatly refused. His first commercial record with the band, From the Bottom of My Heart, came out in July and sold no more than eight thousand copies, and All or Nothing at All did little better at first. Frank was impatient for bigger things. Within months James let him out of his contract so he could replace Jack Leonard as the singer in Tommy Dorsey's orchestra, one of the top bands in America.[1] [2]

He made his first appearance with Dorsey on the twenty sixth of January 1940, at a theatre in Rockford, Illinois. Dorsey later said the crowd's excitement over this skinny kid with big ears amazed him so much that he almost forgot to play his own solos. Dorsey became a father figure. Frank copied his perfectionism, took up his hobby of toy trains, and asked him to be godfather to his first child, Nancy, born in June 1940. Frank later said the only two people he had ever been afraid of were his mother and Tommy Dorsey. Above all, he studied how Dorsey breathed while playing trombone, carrying a phrase for bar after bar without a visible breath, and he built his own phrasing on it.[1] [2]

The hits came fast. Polka Dots and Moonbeams was his first, and in July 1940 I'll Never Smile Again reached number one and stayed there for twelve weeks. It was his first appearance on the first officially published Billboard chart. On the road he roomed with the band's fiery drummer Buddy Rich, and the two fought, sometimes with their fists, over who was the real star of the show. They stayed friends for life anyway. His bandmates also nicknamed Frank Lady Macbeth, because he showered and changed his clothes so often. By May 1941 he was topping the male singer polls in both Billboard and DownBeat, and he was starting to wonder why he needed a bandleader at all.[1] [2] [3]

In January 1942 Dorsey let him record four songs on his own, arranged by Axel Stordahl, and when Frank heard the playback he could hardly believe how good he sounded. He wanted out, to take on Bing Crosby directly. The obstacle was his contract, which gave Dorsey forty three percent of his lifetime earnings. After a legal battle a settlement came in August 1942, and on the third of September Dorsey said goodbye, reportedly telling him he hoped he would fall on his backside. Frank took Stordahl with him as his arranger, at five times his Dorsey salary. The two men had been very close, and they never truly made peace. How that contract really got broken became one of the darkest legends of his life.[1] [2]

The Voice and the bobby soxers

On the thirtieth of December 1942 Frank opened at the Paramount Theatre in New York, as an extra act on a bill led by Benny Goodman. The screaming stunned everyone. According to Nancy Sinatra, the comedian Jack Benny said he thought the building was going to cave in. The booking was extended from four weeks to eight, and within weeks about a thousand Sinatra fan clubs had appeared across America. The papers called it Sinatramania, and called him The Voice, or Swoonatra. His fans were teenage girls in bobby socks, a brand new audience for a business that had mostly sold records to adults. His press agents later admitted they had hired a dozen girls to scream, only to find hundreds more screaming louder for free.[1] [2]

He signed with Columbia Records as a solo artist on the first of June 1943, in the middle of a musicians' strike. Columbia reissued his old Harry James recording of All or Nothing at All, and this time it climbed to number two. Because orchestras were on strike, his first Columbia sessions used a vocal group behind him, and seven of the nine songs still charted. He starred on the radio show Your Hit Parade, played the Waldorf Astoria, and by the end of 1943 he had beaten Bing Crosby in a DownBeat poll. Hollywood came calling. After small parts he had lead roles in Higher and Higher and Step Lively in 1944, then Anchors Aweigh with Gene Kelly in 1945, a major hit.[1]

The madness peaked on the twelfth of October 1944, Columbus Day, when Frank opened another season at the Paramount. Girls started queuing at midnight. Inside, hardly anyone left after the first show, so the crowds outside could not get in, and a mass of roughly thirty thousand fans swarmed around Times Square in what became known as the Columbus Day Riot. Fans wrote his song titles on their clothes, bribed hotel maids for a chance to touch his bed, and stole clothing he had worn. The editor Bruce Bliven compared the hysteria to the dancing manias that swept medieval villages. The Guardian later called that day the moment Sinatra became the first modern pop star.[1] [2]

Frank did not fight in the Second World War, and some resented a young idol out of uniform. He was ruled unfit for service, and Army files later showed that doctors had also judged him unacceptable on psychiatric grounds, a finding hushed up at the time. Late in the war he toured for the troops with the comedian Phil Silvers, and in Rome he met Pope Pius XII, who asked him whether he was an opera tenor. At home he campaigned hard for Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and spoke out against racism. In November 1945 he went to Gary, Indiana, to try to settle a strike by white students protesting their new principal's pro integration policies. Some critics called him a communist for it, which he denied.[1] [2]

The fall

Fame brought scrutiny. At the end of 1946 he flew to Havana, Cuba, with Al Capone's cousins, the Fischetti brothers, and turned up at a gathering that the press soon learned was a summit of top American mobsters around the exiled boss Lucky Luciano. One newspaper ran the headline Shame, Sinatra. The columnist Lee Mortimer kept linking him to the Mafia and even to communism, and on the ninth of April 1947 the two men clashed outside Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood. Sinatra was held for trial over the fight. He always insisted he barely knew such men, and later called any report that he mixed with racketeers a vicious lie. The stories never went away.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the same time his records were slipping. By the end of 1948 he had fallen to fourth in the DownBeat poll of singers, and the next year he dropped out of the top spots for the first time since 1943. His marriage was also in trouble. He had a string of affairs, and gossip magazines printed the details. Then came Ava Gardner, the Hollywood star. In January 1950 his publicist George Evans, the man who had shaped his image as a shy boy from Hoboken who made good, died, and within weeks the press broke the news of the affair. On Valentine's Day 1950 Frank and Nancy announced their separation. Columnists, fans and the Catholic Church all turned on him.[1] [2] [3]

Then his voice gave way. In April 1950, booked at the Copacabana in New York, he suffered a haemorrhage of the throat and had to cancel shows. Evans had once said that whenever Sinatra lost his voice, the cause was always emotional strain. He owed back taxes and had to borrow two hundred thousand dollars from Columbia after his agency, MCA, refused to lend it. Hollywood had lost interest, so he tried Las Vegas, opening at the Desert Inn in September 1951 to half empty rooms. In Chicago only about one hundred and fifty people turned up in a twelve hundred seat club. Columbia's Mitch Miller said he could not give the records away. In 1952 Columbia and MCA both dropped him.[1]

His divorce became final in October 1951, and on the seventh of November he married Ava Gardner. It was a wild, jealous marriage full of public fights. The lows were very low. A 1951 visit to the Cal Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe made national news when he overdosed on sleeping pills, and at least one author describes a suicide attempt that year. In March 1951 a Senate crime committee investigator questioned him at four in the morning about photographs of him with gangsters, though he was never called to testify. And on the fourth of October 1951 his early patron Willie Moretti, a New Jersey mob underboss, was shot dead in a restaurant in Cliffside Park, killed by mobsters who feared what he might reveal.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

From Here to Eternity and the Capitol comeback

He knew exactly which role could save him. It was Angelo Maggio, a scrappy Italian American private in the film of James Jones's novel From Here to Eternity. Frank pleaded with the Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn, and Ava reportedly used her influence too. He got the part. The film opened in August 1953 and won eight Oscars, among them best supporting actor for Frank Sinatra. His co star Burt Lancaster said the bitterness and defeat of Frank's lost years poured straight into Maggio. On set he became close to Montgomery Clift, from whom he said he learned more about acting than from anyone, and he stayed lifelong friends with Ernest Borgnine, who played the brute who beats Maggio to death.[1] [2] [3]

Months earlier, on the thirteenth of March 1953, the Capitol Records executive Alan Livingston had signed him to a seven year deal, against the wishes of some colleagues. The first Capitol sessions with his old arranger Axel Stordahl went nowhere. Then on the thirtieth of April 1953 he recorded for the first time with Nelson Riddle, who had been arranging for Nat King Cole. The first song was I've Got the World on a String. After the playback Frank reportedly cried out that he was back. The partnership would define the next decade. Songs for Young Lovers followed in January 1954, the single Young at Heart reached number two, and by the end of the year Billboard, DownBeat and Metronome all named him favourite male singer.[1] [2] [3]

The comeback came just as his marriage fell apart. On the twenty ninth of October 1953 MGM announced that Frank and Ava had separated. He was devastated. According to the biographer Kitty Kelley, that November his friend the songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen found him in the elevator of his New York apartment with his wrists slashed. He survived, and he poured the heartbreak into his work. In 1955 came In the Wee Small Hours, one of the first twelve inch pop albums and often called one of the first concept albums, a late night cycle of loneliness and lost love. Nelson Riddle believed that the new brooding sadness in Frank's ballads came straight from Ava.[1] [2] [3]

He balanced the sad records with swinging ones. Songs for Swingin' Lovers! arrived in March 1956, featuring a Cole Porter song, I've Got You Under My Skin, which reportedly took twenty two takes to get right. In 1958 came Come Fly with Me, arranged by Billy May, a musical trip around the world that spent five weeks at number one. That September he released Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, a bleak set of saloon songs arranged by Riddle, who had just lost his mother and his daughter. It spent one hundred and twenty weeks on the Billboard album chart, and years later Frank named it his favourite of all his albums. In 1959 Come Dance with Me! won the Grammy for album of the year.[1] [2]

The films kept coming. He earned an Oscar nomination as the heroin addict Frankie Machine in The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955, and later said that role deserved the award more than Maggio did. He played Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls opposite Marlon Brando, whom he resented for landing the part he wanted, and won a Golden Globe for Pal Joey. From October 1953 he played the Sands in Las Vegas, and later bought a share of it. There he noticed that Nat King Cole always ate alone in his dressing room, because black guests were barred from the dining room. Frank threatened to have the waiters fired and invited Cole to dine with him the next evening.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Chairman: Reprise, the Rat Pack and the Kennedys

The Rat Pack began in the early 1950s at the Holmby Hills home of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a loose circle of hard drinking Hollywood friends. After Bogart died in 1957, Frank took over as leader. He grew very close to Bacall, and they were reportedly engaged in March 1958, though he denied planning to marry her and the romance ended. By 1960 his pack meant Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and the comedian Joey Bishop. Early that year they shot Ocean's 11 in Las Vegas, and at night they took over the Copa Room at the Sands, crashing each other's sets with songs, drinks and jokes. Those shows, known as the Summit at the Sands, are seen as the birth of the Rat Pack.[1] [2] [3]

In 1960, after feuding with Alan Livingston at Capitol and a failed attempt to buy the jazz label Verve, Frank founded his own company, Reprise Records. He promised artists creative control and eventual ownership of their work. His first Reprise album, Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, came out in February 1961 and reached number four. He worked with new arrangers such as Neal Hefti, Don Costa and Quincy Jones, and teamed up with Count Basie. On their 1964 album It Might as Well Be Swing, Jones turned Fly Me to the Moon into a straight swinger, and that recording later travelled with the Apollo astronauts. Reprise grew into an industry powerhouse, and Frank eventually sold it for an estimated eighty million dollars.[1] [2]

Frank was close to John F. Kennedy, whose brother in law Peter Lawford was in the Pack. Frank called him Brother in Lawford. The group campaigned for Kennedy in 1960, and in January 1961 Frank and Lawford staged the inaugural gala in Washington on the eve of the swearing in. Then it soured. In March 1962 the president was due to stay at Frank's Palm Springs home, and Frank had a helipad built for him. Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, who was waging war on organised crime, urged his brother to cut ties over Frank's friendship with the Chicago boss Sam Giancana. The president stayed with Bing Crosby instead. Frank reportedly took a sledgehammer to the helipad, and he never forgave Lawford.[1] [2] [3]

Frank had bought into the Cal Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe in 1960, and by 1962 he reportedly owned half of it. Giancana was said to be a silent partner. In the summer of 1963 Giancana, who was banned from Nevada casinos, stayed at the lodge with his girlfriend Phyllis McGuire of the singing McGuire Sisters. The Nevada gaming authorities moved against Frank's licence, and he agreed to give up his stakes in both the Cal Neva and the Sands. The FBI had been watching him since the 1940s, and its files eventually ran to two thousand four hundred and three pages. Agents recorded that the mob no longer trusted him because he had grown so close to the Kennedys.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The end of 1963 was brutal. On the twenty second of November Kennedy was assassinated, and Frank reportedly sobbed in his bedroom for three days. On the eighth of December his nineteen year old son Frank Jr. was kidnapped at gunpoint at Harrah's Lodge at Lake Tahoe, where he was singing. The kidnappers insisted on talking only through pay phones. Frank offered a million dollars, but they asked for two hundred and forty thousand, which he paid, and his son was freed beside a Los Angeles freeway on the tenth of December. The FBI caught the three men, Barry Keenan, Joe Amsler and John Irwin, within days. Keenan, later ruled legally insane at the time, served about four and a half years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Strangers, My Way and walking away

Frank turned fifty in December 1965 and made age his subject. September of My Years, a reflective album, won the Grammy for album of the year, and its single It Was a Very Good Year won best male vocal performance. The CBS special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music won an Emmy and a Peabody Award. That winter the writer Gay Talese spent three months trailing him for Esquire. Frank refused to be interviewed, so Talese watched and talked to everyone around him instead. The result, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, ran in April 1966 and is still called one of the greatest magazine profiles ever written, a portrait of a moody king with a personal staff of seventy five.[1] [2] [3]

On the nineteenth of July 1966 Frank married the actress Mia Farrow at a friend's home in Las Vegas. She was twenty one and he was fifty. That summer Strangers in the Night gave him his first number one single in eleven years, topping the charts in both America and Britain. It was made in a rush. His producer Jimmy Bowen learned that Jack Jones was about to release the same song, so he took over an orchestra session booked for Dean Martin, Frank arrived at eight in the evening, and the recording was done by nine. Copies were flown to radio stations the next day. His improvised scat at the fade became famous. Frank despised the song and cursed it privately for years, yet it won Record of the Year.[1] [2] [3]

In September 1967 his time at the Sands ended in violence. Howard Hughes, who had just bought the hotel and loathed Frank, cut off his unlimited casino credit. During a weekend long rampage Frank confronted the casino boss Carl Cohen, and Cohen punched him in the face, reportedly knocking out two teeth. Frank never played the Sands again under Hughes and moved to Caesars Palace. His marriage was collapsing too. Mia chose to finish Rosemary's Baby rather than join his film The Detective, and in November 1967 his lawyer served her with divorce papers. The year still brought beauty: a bossa nova album with Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Somethin' Stupid with daughter Nancy, the only father and daughter duet ever to top the Hot 100.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Paul Anka had heard a French song called Comme d'habitude on holiday in France, and secured the rights to adapt it for a token sum. Over dinner Frank told him he was sick of the business and was getting out. Anka went home and stayed up until five in the morning writing English words with Frank in mind, the voice of a tough man looking back on his life. Frank recorded My Way on the thirtieth of December 1968, in one take, with an arrangement by Don Costa. It only reached number twenty seven in America, but in Britain it spent seventy five weeks in the top forty, a record. Frank came to dislike it. His daughter Tina said he found it self serving and self indulgent.[1] [2] [3]

The late sixties were uneasy. In 1970 he made Watertown, a concept album with the Four Seasons songwriter Bob Gaudio about a small town man whose wife leaves him and their two boys. It sold poorly, the only major Sinatra album to miss the top hundred, though many now rank it among his finest. That September he walked out of Caesars Palace after an executive, Sanford Waterman, pulled a gun on him. In June 1971, at a charity concert in Los Angeles, he announced his retirement. He closed with the torch song Angel Eyes, sang its final line, and walked off as the spotlight went dark. He told a reporter the first thing on his list was to do nothing at all for eight months.[1] [2]

Ol' Blue Eyes is back

Retirement did not last. Politically he had drifted right, endorsing Ronald Reagan for a second term as governor of California in 1970 and backing Richard Nixon in 1972. In 1973 he returned with a television special and an album called Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back, and began a vast world tour. In July 1974 in Australia, hounded by reporters, he called them bums and parasites along with sexist and homophobic slurs. Unions struck back by cancelling his concerts and grounding his plane, leaving him stuck in the country until his lawyer Mickey Rudin arranged a conciliatory statement and a televised final show. That October his Madison Square Garden concert, The Main Event, was broadcast live across America.[1]

On the eleventh of July 1976 he married Barbara Marx, a former model and showgirl and the ex wife of Zeppo Marx, at the Rancho Mirage estate of the publisher Walter Annenberg. It would be the longest marriage of his life. That September he stunned Jerry Lewis on live television by bringing out Dean Martin, reuniting the old comedy partners after about twenty years apart. Then, in January 1977, came tragedy. His mother Dolly was flying to Las Vegas to see him perform at Caesars Palace when her plane crashed into San Gorgonio Mountain in California, killing her. Frank cancelled two weeks of shows. He had long kept the church at arm's length, but after her death he turned back to Catholicism.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the fourteenth of March 1977 he recorded with Nelson Riddle for the last time, and the two men later had a serious falling out. They made up only in January 1985, when Frank asked Riddle to make another album, but Riddle died that October before they could begin. Meanwhile Frank Military, a longtime associate at his publishing company, kept urging him to try the theme from Martin Scorsese's film New York, New York, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb for Liza Minnelli. Frank began singing it in concert in 1978 and kept moving it later in the show because audiences loved it. His recording on the 1980 triple album Trilogy became his final top forty hit and a lasting signature.[1] [2] [3]

Honours and controversy arrived side by side. In 1980 he played to what was billed as the largest paying audience ever for a solo performer, at the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. In 1981 he took two million dollars for ten days at Sun City in Bophuthatswana, breaking the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. That February his Nevada gaming licence was restored with the support of Ronald Reagan, whose campaign he had helped fund. In 1983 he received the Kennedy Center Honors, and in 1985 Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He sued the author Kitty Kelley before her unauthorised biography His Way was even published, then dropped the case, and in 1986 the book became a number one bestseller.[1] [2] [3]

The last curtain

His health began to fail in 1986, when he collapsed on stage in Atlantic City and was treated for diverticulitis. In December 1987 he announced a reunion tour with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Dean was in a bad way. His son Dean Paul Martin had been killed in March 1987 when his jet fighter crashed on San Gorgonio Mountain, the same mountain where Dolly had died, and Dean was drinking heavily. At the press conference Frank scolded a reporter for using what he called that stupid phrase, Rat Pack. The tour opened in Oakland in March 1988, but Dean quit after five shows, and Liza Minnelli replaced him. Frank and Dean never spoke again.[1] [2] [3]

Frank kept working, with his son Frank Jr. putting his own career on hold from 1988 to serve as his musical director and conductor. Old friends began to go. Ava Gardner suffered a stroke in 1986, and Frank arranged a medically staffed private plane to fly her to a specialist in America. She died in London in January 1990. Sammy Davis Jr., who had recovered in Frank's home after the 1954 car crash that cost him an eye, died of cancer in May 1990 and was buried with a gold watch Frank had given him. Still Frank toured, playing sixty five concerts in 1990, seventy three in 1991 and eighty four in 1992, across seventeen countries.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1993 he returned to Capitol for Duets, pairing his new vocals with stars such as Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand and Bono. The partners recorded their parts separately, many sending them in over digital phone lines, which some critics disliked, but it became his best selling album and his only one certified triple platinum. At the 1994 Grammys, Bono presented him with the Legend Award and called him the chairman of the bad attitude. His memory was starting to fail on stage, and he fainted during a show in Richmond, Virginia, in March 1994. His last public concerts were in Fukuoka, Japan, that December, and he sang in public for the last time on the twenty fifth of February 1995, in Palm Desert.[1] [2]

For his eightieth birthday in December 1995, the Empire State Building glowed blue. He made no public appearances after a heart attack in early 1997, and he was also treated for breathing problems, pneumonia and bladder cancer. On the evening of the fourteenth of May 1998 he suffered another heart attack and died at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, aged eighty two, with Barbara at his side. She said his last words were I'm losing. His daughter Tina later wrote that the children had not been told of his final hospital stay, and she believed that was deliberate. That night the Las Vegas Strip dimmed its lights, and the Empire State Building was bathed in blue for three days.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His funeral was held on the twentieth of May 1998 at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, with about four hundred mourners inside and crowds of fans outside. Gregory Peck, Tony Bennett and Frank Jr. spoke. Kirk Douglas, Robert Wagner and Don Rickles were among the pallbearers, and Mia Farrow came to say goodbye. He was buried beside his parents at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California, dressed in a blue suit with a red and blue tie in honour of the Genoa football club. By his family's account he also went to his grave with ten dimes in his pocket, the habit he had kept since the night of the kidnapping. His marker read The Best Is Yet to Come.[1] [2] [3]

After Frank

Within months of his death the FBI's long secret file on him was released under freedom of information requests, and it detailed decades of surveillance, death threats and extortion attempts against him. His family was fighting too. Barbara inherited homes in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Palm Springs, money, and control of his name and likeness, while Tina told the BBC she had made sure during his lifetime that his master recordings stayed with his children, and accused Barbara of scheming. On the mob question Tina was blunt. She did not deny that her father knew such men, she said, but he never drove the getaway car. He was, she added, sorry he had not been a better husband and father.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The family followed him one by one. Frank Jr., who spent his life in his father's shadow and lived with rumours that his kidnapping had been a publicity stunt, died of cardiac arrest on tour in Daytona Beach, Florida, on the sixteenth of March 2016, aged seventy two. Barbara died at Rancho Mirage in July 2017, aged ninety, and was buried beside Frank. Nancy Barbato Sinatra, who never remarried and still cooked for her ex husband when he dropped by, died in July 2018 at one hundred and one. In 2021 someone tried to chisel the word husband off his grave marker, and it was replaced with a new one reading Sleep Warm, Poppa, words Tina had buried with him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

His legacy is everywhere. The critic Robert Christgau called him the greatest singer of the twentieth century, and he sold an estimated one hundred and fifty million records. He won an Oscar, thirteen Grammys and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In October 1989 a Soviet spokesman jokingly named Moscow's new hands off policy toward Eastern Europe the Sinatra Doctrine, after My Way. In 2008 Congress designated the thirteenth of May as Frank Sinatra Day, and in 2021 Hoboken unveiled a six foot bronze statue of him on its waterfront on his birthday. A Martin Scorsese film about him and Ava Gardner has long been planned, and in 2024 Variety reported that Leonardo DiCaprio was lined up to play him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra and Nancy Barbato. They met at the Jersey Shore in 1934 and married in 1939, and she gave him all three of his children, Nancy, Frank Jr. and Tina. His affairs humiliated her, and they separated on Valentine's Day 1950 over Ava Gardner. Yet the bond never fully broke. He kept visiting for late night talks and family dinners, and their granddaughter recalled her thawing eggplant to make him sandwiches. She never remarried and died in 2018 at one hundred and one.[1] [2]

Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. Ava Gardner was the great passion of his life, and in her autobiography she called him the love of hers. They married in November 1951, fought loudly and often, separated in 1953 and divorced in 1957. She reportedly helped him land From Here to Eternity, and the heartbreak fed his finest ballads. They stayed friends. He handled her business affairs for years and arranged a medical flight for her after a stroke. She died in 1990.[1] [2] [3]

Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow. They met on the set of Von Ryan's Express and married in July 1966, when he was fifty and she was twenty one. He wanted her to stop acting. She chose to finish Rosemary's Baby instead of joining his film The Detective, and he had divorce papers served on her. They divorced in 1968 but stayed close for the rest of his life. She attended his funeral, and in 2013 said they never really split up.[1] [2] [3]

Frank Sinatra and Barbara Sinatra. Barbara Marx, a former model and showgirl once married to Zeppo Marx, became his fourth wife in July 1976, and the marriage lasted until his death, the longest of his life. She once said he would not let her sing or even hum at home, since there could be only one star. Her relations with his children were bitter, above all over his estate and his final days. She died in 2017 and lies beside him.[1] [2] [3]

Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey. Dorsey made him a star and showed him, by example, the breath control that shaped his phrasing. Sinatra called him one of only two people he ever feared and made him godfather to his daughter Nancy. Their parting in 1942 was bitter, over a contract that gave Dorsey forty three percent of his lifetime earnings, and dogged by rumours of a mobster's gun. They never fully reconciled before Dorsey's death in 1956.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. Riddle, a former Dorsey trombonist, arranged the Capitol records that revived his career, beginning in April 1953. Sinatra called him the greatest arranger in the world, and Riddle called Sinatra a perfectionist whose taste was impeccable. Their partnership ran for more than twenty years, but after their last session in 1977 they fell out badly. They made peace in 1985 and planned a new album, but Riddle died that October.[1] [2] [3]

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Dean Martin was his closest partner in the Rat Pack, sharing films like Some Came Running, Ocean's 11 and Robin and the 7 Hoods, and stages all over Las Vegas. Their act joked about Frank's womanising and Dean's drinking. In 1976 Frank surprised Jerry Lewis by reuniting him with Dean on live television. But the 1988 reunion tour broke them. Dean, grieving his son, quit after five shows, and the two never spoke again.[1] [2] [3]

Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.. They met in 1941, when fifteen year old Sammy's family act opened for Dorsey. Frank later booked the trio to open for him, helped Sammy get into the Copacabana after he was turned away for being black, and took him in to recover after the 1954 crash that cost him an eye. They were estranged for a time over Sammy's cocaine use, but toured together in 1988. Sammy was buried in 1990 with a gold watch from Frank.[1] [2]

Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy. Sinatra campaigned for Kennedy in 1960 and staged his inaugural gala with Peter Lawford, the president's brother in law. The two men partied together in Hollywood and Las Vegas. But Robert Kennedy's war on organised crime made Frank's mob friendships a liability, and in 1962 the president stayed at Bing Crosby's house instead of Frank's. Frank blamed Lawford and cut him out of the Rat Pack. When Kennedy was killed, Frank reportedly wept for three days.[1] [2] [3]

Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana. The Chicago mob boss was, by several accounts, a friend and golf partner, and Sinatra introduced him to his longtime lover Phyllis McGuire. Giancana was said to be a hidden partner in the Cal Neva Lodge, and his 1963 stay there cost Frank his Nevada licence and his casino stakes. FBI wiretaps showed Giancana stopped trusting Frank as he grew close to the Kennedys. In June 1975 Giancana was shot dead in his own basement.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Frank Sinatra and Frank Sinatra Jr.. Frank Jr. said that as a small boy he saw his father more often on a movie screen than in person, yet called him as good a father as his career allowed. After the 1963 kidnapping his father paid the ransom and carried dimes for pay phones ever after. From 1988 Frank Jr. set his own career aside to be his father's musical director and conductor, which brought the two much closer. He died in 2016.[1] [2] [3]

Frank Sinatra and Nancy Sinatra. His eldest daughter made her debut on his television show in 1957 and signed to his label, Reprise. When her career stalled, Frank asked the songwriter Lee Hazlewood to help, and These Boots Are Made for Walkin' followed. In 1967 father and daughter topped the Hot 100 together with Somethin' Stupid. She defended his memory fiercely, dismissing Mia Farrow's paternity hint as nonsense.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Frank Sinatra

• Harry James wanted to rename his new singer Frankie Satin in 1939, and Sinatra refused. When the trumpet star Harry James signed Sinatra in 1939 for seventy five dollars a week, he suggested the stage name Frankie Satin. Sinatra flatly refused to change his name, and left the band within months for Tommy Dorsey.[1]
• In Tommy Dorsey's band, Sinatra's nickname was Lady Macbeth. His bandmates gave him the name because he showered and changed his outfits so often. He was famously obsessed with cleanliness and with dressing immaculately all his life.[1] [2]
• Sinatra built his breath control partly by swimming underwater while running song lyrics in his head. He copied Tommy Dorsey's trombone breathing, which let a phrase run for many bars. To stretch his own lungs, he regularly swam and held his breath underwater, thinking through lyrics as he went.[1]
• Sinatra never learned to read music properly. In 1945 he admitted he wished he could read music. He learned by ear, followed lead sheets by the shape of the notes, and could still spot a wrong note in a full orchestra.[1]
• He was thrown out of high school after just forty seven days. Sinatra attended A. J. Demarest High School in Hoboken in 1931 but was expelled for general rowdiness after forty seven days. He never graduated.[1]
• After his son's kidnapping, Sinatra carried dimes for pay phones for the rest of his life. The kidnappers insisted on talking only through pay phones, and Sinatra worried about running out of coins. He kept ten dimes on him from then on and, by family accounts, was buried with them.[1] [2]
• The kidnappers turned down Sinatra's offer of one million dollars and asked for less. Frank offered a million dollars for his son's release in 1963, but the ringleader Barry Keenan demanded two hundred and forty thousand instead. Keenan believed, bizarrely, that he was helping bring the family closer together.[1] [2]
• Sinatra broke his little finger filming the karate fight in The Manchurian Candidate. He refused to have the hand properly bandaged or cast for the rest of the shoot, and the injury caused him chronic discomfort for the rest of his life.[1]
• Sinatra, then in his seventies, was contractually offered the lead in Die Hard, and declined. Die Hard was based on the sequel to the novel behind his 1968 film The Detective, so Fox was obliged to offer him the role of John McClane first.[1]
• Sinatra was meant to play Dirty Harry but had to pull out because of a hand condition. He was set to play Detective Harry Callahan in the 1971 film, but developing Dupuytren's contracture in his hand forced him to turn it down.[1]
• Sinatra abandoned recording Lush Life in 1958 because he found it too hard. In a single session on the twenty ninth of May 1958 he recorded seven songs, more than double the usual output, but gave up on Lush Life as too technically demanding.[1]
• Asked for his favourite of his own albums, Sinatra picked Only the Lonely without hesitating. The 1958 album's cover, a painting of Sinatra as a sad clown by Nicholas Volpe, also won a Grammy for its artwork.[1]
• I've Got You Under My Skin reportedly took twenty two takes to perfect. The Cole Porter song, arranged by Nelson Riddle, appeared on Songs for Swingin' Lovers! in 1956 and became one of his defining recordings.[1]
• His Fly Me to the Moon was played on a cassette during the Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 missions. A copy of Sinatra's 1964 recording with Count Basie was played on a portable Sony cassette player aboard Apollo 10, which orbited the Moon, and on Apollo 11.[1]
• Glen Campbell played guitar on Strangers in the Night and got yelled at by Sinatra. Campbell, who could not read music, spent the first take listening instead of playing, which prompted Sinatra to shout at him asking whether he was asleep.[1]
• The Soviet policy that let Eastern Europe go its own way was nicknamed the Sinatra Doctrine. In October 1989 Soviet spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov told American television that Moscow now had a Frank Sinatra doctrine, a joking nod to My Way, meaning each Warsaw Pact country would choose its own road.[1] [2]
• My Way spent seventy five weeks in the UK top forty, a record at the time. Although it only reached number five in Britain and twenty seven in America, it stayed on the UK chart from April 1969 to September 1971.[1] [2]
• In the Philippines, fights over karaoke performances of My Way have been linked to killings. Media there call them the My Way killings, and the song has reportedly been dropped from many karaoke bars as a result.[1]
• A 2005 survey found My Way was the most popular pop song at British funerals. The Co-operative Funeralcare survey put it at the top of the pop songs chosen for funerals, ahead of Wind Beneath My Wings and Angels.[1] [2]
• Somethin' Stupid is the only father and daughter duet ever to reach number one on the Hot 100. Frank and Nancy topped the chart in April 1967 for four weeks. Nancy said DJs teasingly nicknamed it the incest song because it is sung as a love duet.[1]
• Gay Talese reported that Sinatra owned about sixty hairpieces, cared for by a travelling attendant. In Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, Talese described a quiet grey haired woman who followed him to performances carrying his hair in a small satchel, for four hundred dollars a week.[1] [2]
• The famous Esquire profile of Sinatra was written without Sinatra ever giving an interview. Gay Talese spent three months in 1965 and 1966 trying and failing to interview him, so he wrote about the people around him instead. Esquire later called it the best story it ever published.[1]
• Ernest Borgnine and Sinatra traded Christmas cards signed with their From Here to Eternity character names. Despite playing bitter enemies, they became lifelong friends, signing their cards Maggio and Fatso.[1]
• Sinatra was buried in a red and blue tie because he supported Genoa's football club. His mother's family came from Genoa, and the tie honoured Genoa CFC. He was laid to rest beside his parents in Cathedral City, California.[1]
• A vandal tried to chisel the word husband off Sinatra's grave marker in 2021. The damaged stone, which had read The Best Is Yet to Come, was replaced with one reading Sleep Warm, Poppa, the words his daughter Tina had buried with him.[1] [2]
• Sinatra received an honorary doctorate in engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1985. It was a fitting honour. His illiterate father Marty had always hoped his son would study civil engineering at Stevens, the college in their home town of Hoboken.[1]
• Sinatra lent the drummer Buddy Rich money to start his own band in 1946. Despite fistfights when they were roommates in Dorsey's band, Frank helped Rich form his band and supported him through illness. He gave the eulogy at Rich's funeral in 1987.[1] [2]
• The only known TV performance of Sinatra, Martin and Davis together was found in a closet at a halfway house. The 1965 closed circuit special had been a benefit for Dismas House in St. Louis. A producer tracked the kinescope down there in the 1990s.[1]
• Sinatra's nickname for Peter Lawford, the president's brother in law, was Brother in Lawford. The joke dated from the 1960 campaign, when the Rat Pack stumped for John F. Kennedy. Their friendship collapsed after Kennedy cancelled his 1962 stay at Sinatra's home.[1] [2]
• Sinatra once served as master of ceremonies at a Hollywood lunch for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. 20th Century Fox asked him to host the luncheon on the nineteenth of September 1959, during Khrushchev's visit to America.[1]
• Pope Pius XII once asked Sinatra whether he was an opera tenor. They met in Rome near the end of the Second World War, when Sinatra was touring to entertain the troops with the comedian Phil Silvers.[1]
• Ava Gardner reportedly threw her six carat engagement ring out of a window. The BBC reported that in 1951 she flung the diamond ring Sinatra gave her into the street during a tantrum, and it was never found.[1]
• Watertown is the only major Sinatra album that failed to reach the Billboard top hundred. The 1970 concept album, written by Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes, peaked at one hundred and one, yet many now count it among his finest records.[1] [2]
• Frank Sinatra Jr. was not technically a junior, because his name was Francis Wayne. His father was Francis Albert Sinatra, but the son was known as Frank Jr. his whole life anyway.[1] [2]
• Theme from New York, New York was Sinatra's final top forty hit, peaking at thirty two in 1980. The song had been written for Liza Minnelli, who liked to remind her Uncle Frank of that. A publishing associate, Frank Military, persuaded him to sing it.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.