Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan
Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan
Book of the week 31st October 2015
Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan review – a 360-degree portrait
Four marriages, countless affairs, links with the mob ... volume two of a
landmark biography finds the singer’s later life at odds with his art. For a reminder of the best and worst of Frank Sinatra,
look no further than the recording of a concert he gave at Carnegie
Hall in the spring of 1974, shortly after emerging, at the age of 58,
from a brief “retirement”. A medley of three ballads – “Last Night When
We Were Young”, “Violets for Your Furs” and “Here’s That Rainy Day” – is
prefaced by a clumsy, cheesy, self-regarding monologue drawing the sort
of sycophantic laughter and applause to which he had long become
accustomed. Then he gets down to the business of bringing a great
seriousness to bear on the trilogy of peerless songs, each
an established part of his repertoire, reaffirming all the qualities of
technique and interpretation that had made him the greatest male
interpreter of Broadway melodies.
This dissonance between the life and the art, a permanent feature of
the singer’s career, is a biographer’s dream and the inevitable
preoccupation of the concluding volume of James Kaplan’s massive
two-part study of Sinatra. The music’s sublime artistry provides
a counterpoint to the lurid details of four marriages, countless affairs
and fist fights and a web of connections with America’s ruling elites,
from the back rooms of mob-run casinos to the White House, all spanning a
period of great cultural upheaval.
Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow cut their wedding cake at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, in 1966
At the end of Frank: The Voice, published five years ago, the author left the skinny crooner from Hoboken clutching an Academy Award statuette for his performance in From Here to Eternity, the role that, in 1953, lifted his career out of the slump which had followed his widespread success in the 1940s and had left him – in Kaplan’s words from the earlier volume – “smelling like a loser”. Sinatra: The Chairman begins with a triumphant restoration of his fortunes on almost all fronts. By 1956 he is earning $250,000 for each film, a guaranteed $200,000 a year from his record company, and a great deal more for his various television appearances.
The year of his album Songs for Swingin’ Lovers was, of course, also the year of “Heartbreak Hotel”, putting Sinatra in the interesting position of becoming the dominant symbol of a set of seemingly modern but strongly conservative values at precisely the time they came under attack from the early exponents of rock’n’roll. He rode out that storm, only to be capsized in the middle of the following decade by the arrival of the Beatles, whose music he could never truly comprehend. From that moment he began to live on past glories, boosted only by the occasional chart success with songs he despised for the very good reason that they lacked the combination of melodic ingenuity and verbal sophistication necessary to bring the best out of his own talent. (“Every time I get up to sing that song,” he said of “My Way”, “I grit my teeth because no matter what the image may be, I hate boastfulness in others. I hate immodesty, and that’s how I feel every time I sing the song.”) Having tried and discarded the beard, turtleneck and medallion look and divorced a much younger third wife, Mia Farrow, he dusted off his tuxedo, selected a more age-appropriate toupee, married his fourth wife, and settled into a long final act which, between 1974 and his death in 1998 at the age of 82, included more than a thousand concerts.
Kaplan’s two volumes, running to total of 1,600 pages, represent an attempt to construct a synoptic biography in large part through the exploitation of earlier attempts, from which he quotes repeatedly and at length as he assembles his detailed 360-degree portrait. Hitherto, if you wanted the gossip, you went to Kitty Kelley, J Randy Taraborrelli or Seymour Hersh. If you wanted to learn about the music, you consulted Will Friedwald or Charles Granata. For a balanced account, you read Arnold Shaw or Donald Clarke. If you wanted an extended fan letter, Pete Hamill. For a snapshot of the singer at the height of his fame, Gay Talese. For a reconstruction of the Rat Pack years, Shawn Levy. For the movies, Tom Santopietro. For the valet’s view, George Jacobs. And so on. Kaplan draws heavily on every one of them, as well as on dozens of memoirs from the supporting cast, including three of Sinatra’s wives and his two daughters, and on the clippings files of many syndicated gossip columnists, including those with whom the singer fell out.
Much of the author’s work, then, is necessarily interpretive, and sometimes he is reduced to presenting two versions of the same incident (such as the conflicting accounts of his near-drowning in Hawaii in 1964) and inviting the reader to decide between them. Coming late to the task, he is able to present original research only in the closing stages of the story, from witnesses including Quincy Jones, Raquel Welch and Larry King. Here, however, he occasionally strikes gold. The actor Tony Bill, Sinatra’s costar in Come Blow Your Horn, describes a trip to the singer’s Palm Springs house as being “like visiting a very, very posh hotel, the owner of which was home but busy”. The comedian Shecky Greene, once Sinatra’s warm-up man, remembers: “The air was volatile and violent around him all the time.” Tiffany Bolling, a 20-year-old good-time girl when they began an affair just as his marriage to Farrow was disintegrating, recalls the pain he endured from his hair transplants: “I know he was conscious of his looks – Mia was very young, I was very young – and he was trying to hold on to his youth.” He treated her perfectly, she says, until he hired a prostitute for a threesome, at which point she walked.
The man who would really do justice to this electrifying story is the Don DeLillo of Libra and Underworld. Kaplan is not in that league, but he is certainly more than a hack. Occasionally, while briskly marshalling such a huge volume of material, he finds a memorable phrase. “He moved on a bubble of agitation, always with a pack, searching for the next amusement,” he writes. In Kennedy, he observes, Sinatra knew he had met “the one other man in America whose connection with the nation’s dream life was as deep and powerful as his own”. The clash between the singer’s first and second wives – Nancy, the mother of his three children, and Ava, the love of his life – “was the birthplace and the essence of his bad conscience”. But a weakness for portentous single-line payoff paragraphs (example: “How could he be so big and feel so small?”), while giving a zing to the narrative, lets him down badly on the last page.
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Boston Globe Review :
Who among us (of a certain age) hasn’t been seduced by — or to — the music of Frank Sinatra?
It is an abiding regret that I never saw the man in concert, even if he was no longer in his prime. After a surfeit of liquor and cigarettes, Sinatra was afflicted by vocal problems. But he kept singing, even tunes (like “Strangers in the Night”) that he hated. He was losing his memory, too, as biographer James Kaplan reports in disturbing detail. But for years that didn’t stop him. Even near the end, he was still a tough ticket.
This year marks Sinatra’s centennial, a celebration replete with musical, film, television, and museum tributes. And, of course, books — of which the crowning glory is surely the second volume of Kaplan’s biography, his follow-up to “Frank: The Voice” (2010).
Do not be deterred by the book’s heft. “Sinatra: The Chairman” is a riveting read — a juicy, painstakingly researched, excitingly written examination of a brilliant musician, an uneven and temperamental actor, and a charming, erratic, deeply flawed man.
The first volume of Kaplan’s biography covered Sinatra’s New Jersey childhood, his big-band and bobby-sox heartthrob days, his first two marriages, his career doldrums, and, finally, his Oscar-winning turn as Maggio in the 1953 film “From Here to Eternity.”
When Kaplan picks up the tale, Sinatra is once again in high demand as both a singer and an actor. He has power, money, and the will to use both. He meets “his musical match,” the arranger Nelson Riddle; pals around with mobsters, presidents, and “Rat Pack’’ buddies; makes more bad films (“Johnny Concho,” “The Pride and the Passion”) than good ones (“The Man With the Golden Arm,” “The Manchurian Candidate”), and conducts his personal life with impulsive, sometimes violent abandon.
Both his long marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Nancy, and his brief tumultuous one with the gorgeous Gardner have ended, though the two stars would dither over divorcing. (Both ex-wives regarded him as their true love and would remain close to him, Kaplan writes.) Meanwhile, the indefatigable singer would pursue sex with hundreds — perhaps thousands — of women, from cigarette girls to film actresses such as Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall.
The sexual compulsiveness, the drinking, the casino gambling — all were markers of an irredeemably lonely and troubled soul. Kaplan depicts Sinatra as emotionally crippled by his mother, Dolly, and incapable of genuine intimacy. “[A] molten cauldron of oversensitivity and insecurity,” Sinatra “had been an adored and abused only child and remained a conflicted Mama’s boy,” Kaplan writes.
Gallant in courtship, he was generous and loyal in relationships — until he wasn’t. He could be cruelly abrupt in his breakups — of friendships (with Riddle, his valet George Jacobs and, for a time, Sammy Davis Jr.), as well as love affairs. His treatment of Bacall, the widow of Sinatra’s friend Humphrey Bogart, is particularly chilling. The romance began, Kaplan writes, during Bogart’s final illness. It was serious enough that an ambivalent Sinatra eventually proposed marriage. But when news of the engagement leaked, he inaccurately blamed Bacall and, after an angry phone call, cut her out of his life.
Kaplan is a critic of Sinatra’s two later marriages. He sees the cultural and generational chasm between Sinatra and “the formidably intelligent” Mia Farrow, nearly 30 years the singer’s junior, as insurmountable. Once their ardor cooled, the two principals eventually agreed. (It didn’t help that Sinatra insisted that Farrow abandon her film career to cater to him — a demand he also had made of Bacall.) As for Barbara Marx, who stayed married to Sinatra until his death in 1998, Kaplan departs from any pretense of even-handedness and virulently dismisses her as a social climber and worse.
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When
it comes to Sinatra’s musical acumen, Kaplan can be as swooning as any
bobby soxer. “Sinatra’s genius was to give you the emotion in the
moment, to make you feel he was feeling it as you were,” Kaplan writes.
He was “an alchemist, one who could turn what other artists might leave
as dross into gold”;
“only Frank was Frank: he was alone at the summit, and he knew it, as
did everyone else.” There is far more in a similarly adoring vein, as
well as a knowledgeable dissection of virtually every album and
arrangement, guaranteed to send fans back, once again, to the v
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