Frank: The Making of a Legend by James Kaplan, Sphere, $35
James Kaplan’s 700-page biography of the first 39-years-old of Frank “The Voice” Sinatra (1915 until 1954), packs a colourful, sometimes crude and blue, but entertaining punch, littered with fascinating and dogged detail.
Dubbed “scarface” by fellow New Jersey street kids because of facial disfigurements from a brutal forceps birth, the only child was both spoiled and neglected by his ambitious mum, midwife and sometime abortionist “Hatpin Dolly”.
At a time when immigrant families huddled in one room, Sinatra listened to crooners like Bing Crosby on his radio alone in his bedroom. Dolly plied the skinny, acne-plagued boy with wheels and threads – a convertible Chrysler and a charge account at a department store – and later a sound system which amped up a then thin voice. Vocal coach Australian John Quinlan, a tenor with the Metropolitan Opera, stopped Sinatra sounding like a stevedore and he was soon spinning his own way to the top.
First wife Nancy’s father bemoaned his lack of a day job, but the night his son-in-law sang Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, capella, to the cream of New York society was the night Frank Sinatra “happened”.
Hollywood star Ava Gardner, his second wife, possessed him. “Francis” as she called him fell fast and their screaming squabbles and intoxicated infidelities were lived out publicly. An obsessive hand-washer, who Kaplan speculates attempted suicide on several occasions, hard drinker and pill popper Sinatra was nearly eclipsed by new crooners Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, but Fifties recordings of I’ve Got The World on a String and A Foggy Day magnified his new maturity and rhythmic ease, and a 1954 Oscar for From Here to Eternity had them standing in the aisles again. Captivating!
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