Sinatra Frank - Sinatra: the life

Table of Contents

For Theresa Santore Swan
with love

Right from the beginning, he was there with the truth of things in his voice.

Bob Dylan

Praise for Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swans

SINATRA: THE LIFE

Anthony Summers never writes a book that fails to offer accurate material you will find nowhere else. No surprise then that Sinatra:The Life is one of the very few bona fide, three-dimensional portraits of an amazingly complex, interesting and sometimes god-awful guy.

Norman Mailer

Compelling.... Its the depth and thoroughness of the authors research that make the biography noteworthy.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Fascinating.... And you can say that in spades. Mr. Summers is an author I believe in.

Liz Smith, New York Post

Newsmaking revelations.... Meticulous research.

Las Vegas Review-Journal

Riveting.... No one has exposed Sinatras majestyand his dark side, as Anthony Summers does.

Book-of-the-Month Club

Well-researched, detailed analysis.... Extensive documentation of the legendary crooners involvement with the Mafia.

USA Today

Ava Gardner, the Rat Pack, JFK, Lucky Lucianoits all there. What a ride!

Washington Examiner

Eye-opening disclosures.

St. Petersburg Times

Balanced, candid and highly readable.

Tucson Citizen

Provocative.

Life

Sinatra: The Life is worthy of the talented and complex man who is its subject.... Sheds light on every aspect of the entertainers life with such clarity and detail that even his family and closest friends are in for some surprises.

Nicholas Gage, author of Eleni

Exhaustive research.... Solid.... Moving.

The Toronto Star

Summers and Swan tell us much that is new, and with panache.... Sterling work.

The Times (London)

A fascinating, very fair and balanced account of a modern Jekyll and Hyde.

Charles Higham, author of Howard Hughes: The Secret Life

The definitive must-read bio of the Chairman of the Board.... A page-turner that reads like a fast-paced mystery novel.

Edge (Boston)

No stone unturned.... An astonishing job.

Irish Examiner

The finest Sinatra biography yet.... Unflinchingly honest, impeccably written and researched.... A pungent portrait of a sad, mad and dangerous figure.

Herald Sun (Melbourne)

AUTHORS NOTE

We were commissioned to write this book with a brief to deliver a truthful account of the life of Frank Sinatra. Here was an artist of shimmering talent and unparalleled generosity, shadowed always by rumors of personal shortcomings and persistent stories linking him to the some of the most evil criminals in the world. In the blur of fifty years of gossip, what were the facts? We believe we have delivered themwithout neglecting the magic of Sinatras music or his virtues. Some prominent critics suggested, when the hardcover edition of our book appeared, that we had been unfair to the man and his artistry. We say they are wrong, and we stand by every line.

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
April 2006

Debut

MARCH 18, 1939.

In a studio on West 46th Street in New York City, a band was playing Rimsky-Korsakovs Flight of the Bumblebee. It was a simple place, a room with couches and lamps, hung with drapes to muffle the echo from the walls. This was a big day for the musicians, who were recording for the first time.

A skinny young man listened as they played. The previous night, at the Sicilian Club near his home in New Jersey, he had asked if he could tag along. Now, as the band finished playing, he stepped forward and spoke to the bandleader. May I sing? he asked.

The bandleader glanced at the studio clock to see if they had time left, then told the young man to go ahead. He chose Our Love, a stock arrangement based on a melody from Tchaikovskys Romeo and Juliet. Standing at the rudimentary microphone, he launched into a saccharine lyric:

Our love, I feel it everywhere
Our love is like an evening prayer...
I see your face in stars above,
As I dream on, in all the magic of
Our love.

Unseasoned, a little reedy, the voice was transmitted through an amplifier to a recording device known as a lathe. The lathe drove the sound to a needle, and the needle carved a groove on a twelve-inch aluminum-based lacquer disc. The result was a record, to be played on a turntable at seventy-eight revolutions per minute.

The bandleader kept the record in a drawer for nearly sixty years. He would take it out from time to time, with delight and increasing nostalgia, to play for friends. The music on it sounds tinny, a relic of the infancy of recording technology. Yet the disc is kept in a locked safe. The attorney for the bandleaders widow, an octogenarian on Social Security, says the singers heirs have demanded all rights and the lions share of any potential income derived from it, thus obstructing its release.

The disc is a valuable piece of musical history. Its tattered adhesive label, typed with an old manual machine, shows the recording was made at Harry Smith Studios, electrically recorded for bandleader Frank Mane. Marked #1 Orig., it is the very first known studio recording of the thousand and more that were to make that skinny young man the most celebrated popular singer in history. For, under Vocal chor. by, it bears the immaculately handwritten legend:

Frank Sinatra

A year after making that first record, at twenty-five, Sinatra told a new acquaintance how he saw his future. Im going to be the best singer in the world, he said, the best singer that ever was.

A Family from Sicily

IO SONO SICILIANO ... I am Sicilian.

At the age of seventy-one, in the broiling heat of summer in 1987, Frank Sinatra was singing, not so well by that time, in the land of his fathers. I want to say, he told a rapt audience at Palermos Favorita Stadium, that I love you dearly for coming tonight. I havent been in Italy for a long timeIm so thrilled. Im very happy.

The crowd roared approval, especially when he said he was Sicilian, that his father was born in Sicily. Sinatras voice cracked a little as he spoke, and he looked more reflective than happy. At another concert, in the northern Italian city of Genoa, he had a joke for his audience. Two very important and wonderful people came from Genoa, he quipped. One ... Uno: Christopher Columbus. Due: mia Mamma...

This second crowd cheered, too, though a little less enthusiastically when he mentioned that his father was Sicilian. I dont think, he said wryly, that theyre too thrilled about Sicilia. It was a nod to northern Italians feelings about the island off the southernmost tip of the country. They look down on its people as backward and slothful, and because, as all the world knows, it is synonymous with organized crime. It is the island of fire and paradox, the dismembered foot of the leg of Italy. Sicily: at ten thousand square miles the largest island in the Mediterranean, a cornucopia of history that remains more remote and mysterious than anywhere in Europe.

The islands story has been a saga of violence. Its ground heaved to earthquakes, and its volcanoes spat fire and lava, long before Christ. Its population carries the genes of Greeks and Romans, of Germanic Vandals and Arabs, of Normans and Spaniards, all of them invaders who wrote Sicilys history in blood.