All or nothing at all
He planned to become the best singer in the world and he succeeded. But Frank Sinatra was a man with a lot of demons. Tom Galvin looks at a new book which focuses on the darker side of Ol' Blue Eyes
Frank Sinatra: The Life by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, Doubleday €24.99
"A star is a special thing," writes Summers, quoting social scientist Leo Rosten on the Walter Cronkite programme, marking the occasion of Frank Sinatra's fiftieth birthday. "A Picasso. Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Sinatra. We shower them with special license, like the royalty of an earlier time. We say, 'Gratify your desires. Satisfy every whim. Don't resist temptation. Live for us. Live as we would live if we were beautiful or brilliant or lucky and very, very rich.'"
Sinatra was one of the greatest stars of them all. He was indeed, as Rosten said, a special thing. He was also a man of many contradictions and author Anthony Summers (with Robbyn Swan), in Sinatra: The Life, show that at times great stars entertain us at great expense to themselves.
Sinatra was beautiful, but never handsome, "torn from the birth canal, bleeding from the head and neck" he became scarred for life. His talents took him so far but others took him further. He was a serial adulterer and womaniser, had a vicious temper and a violent streak, and while his generosity showed no bounds he would exact revenge twofold on those who crossed him. In a nutshell, he was a padrone, a man with the 'mafia' code in his blood, the code that gave those who possessed it power and respect in the community. But he was also a man corrupted by the code, a man of the Mafia with a capital 'M' and quite a great deal of Summers' book is given over to Sinatra and his dealings with the Mob, often – one feels – with some contempt.
"Did I know those guys?" Sinatra had said late in life, "sure I knew some …I spent a lot of time working in saloons. And saloons are not run by the Christian Brothers." Summers however, goes on to write that the power of the Mafia in the entertainment field was indisputable. Bing Crosby supposedly succumbed to their pressure. As did Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and actor George Raft. Comedian Joe E Lewis might have been remembered as a tenor if he hadn't defied the owners of the Green Mill Club in Chicago by defecting to another venue. He was beaten senseless and had his throat cut. He would laugh again but never sing. It was the Mob who helped get Sinatra his first real gig with Tommy Dorsey and it was the Mob who helped get him out of the contract when he wanted to break away on his own.
The mafia plot thickens later in Sinatra's life when he is suspected of being a courier, and in 1950 and again in 1960 the FBI were informed that Sinatra carried money to mob leaders in Italy and in Cuba. Then there is the intriguing trio of the Mafia, the Kennedys and Sinatra, with money for the presidential campaign donated on the understanding that the Mob would be left lone once JFK was in power. They weren't, so Kennedy was shot. At least, that's what's between the lines and Summers could get a whole book out of that brilliant chapter alone.
When Sinatra's career hit rock bottom in 1950 and 1951 – with audience figures as low as 150 in a 1500-seater club and Colombia Records ditching him after nine years – it was the casting (with a little help from his friends and a bit of leaning on studio head Harry Cohn) of Sinatra in From Here to Eternity that resurrected him and won him an Oscar. Summers alludes, with some hilarity, to The Godfather and the character, Johnny Fontane, who goes to Don Corleone to be liberated from a contract. A career break and an Oscar following the apperance of the stallion's head in the studio exec's bedfollow and Fontane is destined for greater things.
"What phony stuff!" said Sinatra of The Godfather. "Somebody going to the mob to get a role in a movie!"
If all the alleged Mafia connections are disturbing, then the tales of Sinatra's exploits with women are at times incredible. His appetite for the opposite sex seemed insatiable, with rumours that he was endowed as well as a stallion conflicting with those that he was as hopeless at using it. Others report that he was a lonely soul who only ever wanted women with a 'mothering instinct' but the book is peppered with tales of orgies, hookers and casual adultery. The making of Ocean's 11, the story of a group of war veterans who plot to rob five Las Vegas casinos, in particular illustrates the extent of the promiscuity engaged in by Sinatra and those in his company.
"There were poker games in the massage room," said one of the casino dealers. "A big table with five, six guys with towels around them, and women under the table giving oral sex." He goes on to say that Sinatra was probably "the first real star to have groupies".
Summers offers no reason for Sinatra's callous treatment of his first wife Nancy, except to quote Sinatra whose credo at the time was that there was more to it than Nancy and he was going to get it. And get it he did. He met his match in actress Ava Gardner, a woman he obsessed over and who drove him into fits of rage when he suspected her of infidelity, but who would quickly come to marry him when he was a falling star at 34 and she a rising one at 27. The marriage was a shambles, mostly due to alcohol, the other demon in Sinatra's life which was exemplified by the philosophy of the Rat Pack, the original Rat Pack born in a restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1955 with Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Their aim was "the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don't care for anyone else." Bogart said that their activities were simply "staying up late and drinking lots of booze".
The other Rat Pack, the Sinatra Rat pack of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jnr, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford were formed in Madison, Indiana, an old boomtown that had seen better days and was where Sinatra was filming Some Came Running in 1958, a story of a boozy army veteran who returns to his home town. Sinatra, (with Dean Martin in tow), played the part well even off set, mocking the locals with remarks such as "Hello there, hillbilly…Drop dead, ya fink". He also imported 'pleasure girls', drank like a fish, ripped a phone out of the wall because he thought the operator was listening in on his calls and assaulted a 67-year-old hotel clerk. The shows that the Rat Pack would go on to stage at the Sands Hotel, with people offering $100 for three dollar tickets, were more of the same. Drunk, jokes about being drunk, and as the civil rights movement gathered momentum in tandem with their sell-out shows, racist jokes about Jews and Blacks, despite the rainbow make-up of the group.
Sinatra, the padrone who was torn between the moral code of old Sicily, a code that ran in his blood, and the street code of Hoboken, New Jersey, where his leg up from the Mafia of the twentieth century resulted in a lifelong pledge of allegiance. This is what Sinatra: The Life gives us in a pacey and engrossing read. Not that Summers ignores the music. But as with any great star, the author is keenly aware that readers, for the most part, want to know about stars when they're falling, not rising. Live for us, instead of us, so we keep the envy and the demons at bay. And we get a Sinatra who loved life but, as if punished by the gods, falls on his knees when those closest to him begin dying while he is spared to watch.
Summers does however scatter his book quite liberally with Sinatra's feats of remarkable generosity and genuine compassion. He got Billie Holiday out of the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital where she was dying and into private care; he also arranged medical care for the husband of a maid in a hotel he stayed in; he gave $1,000 to a shoeshiner at another hotel when he discovered he had been a boxer who was down on his luck; while seeing a report on TV where a family's home had been destroyed by fire at Christmas time, he dispatched $5,000 dollars to them; and he donated a bus to a school in Ohio on the condition he remained anonymous.
Sinatra also made 30 appearances at rallys for racial intolerance in 1945 alone. And though he was a champion of Israel, balanced his leanings by establishing the Frank Sinatra International Youth Center in Nazareth to help Arab children, hoping, possibly, to fulfil his ambition of simply reaching all people through his music. Arab league countries banned his records for years. But Saddam Hussein, according to a former mistress, secretly liked to dance to 'Strangers in the Night' in the privacy of his Baghdad Palace.