Singer and film actor, born in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. As a teenager, he organized a singing group, the Hoboken Four, which won first prize on the Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour. Following graduation from the Drake Institute, he spent several years singing in New Jersey roadhouses before finding work in the late 1930s as a radio studio singer in New York City. In 1939, while performing at a club in New Jersey, he was heard by Harry James, who signed him to appear with his new swing band. After touring with James (1939), he rose to prominence with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra (19402).
Breaking away from Dorsey, in 1943 he began working solo and serving as emcee on the popular radio programme, Lucky Strike Hit Parade. He quickly emerged as one of the earliest and most adulated teen idols, and the hysteria he engendered in his bobby-soxer fans culminated in rioting at the Paramount Theatre in New York on Columbus Day, 1944. He remained a popular radio star throughout the 1940s and recorded many hits for Columbia Records (194352), but becoming unhappy with conditions there he moved to Capitol Records (195362). His recordings during this period came to epitomize American popular singing at its finest, with a style that maintained fidelity to a song's lyric and mood while imbuing it with subtle elements of jazz beat and phrasing. In 1960 he was a co-founder of Reprise Records, which he recorded for exclusively after 1963.
He also had a successful career as a film actor, beginning as a straight actor in Higher and Higher (1943). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he played dramatic roles that brought him considerable acclaim, including From Here to Eternity (1953), for which he received an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. This work brought him into the Hollywood community, where he became a member of the Rat Pack, a group that included his occasional concert partners, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin. During these years he also had highly publicized marriages to film stars Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow.
His regular appearances at Las Vegas and such locales, the lifestyle that inevitably went with such a celebrity (bodyguards, hangers-on), a temperament that involved him in occasional fights, fabulous wealth, and various business ventures - all this added up in some people's minds to alleged involvement with the underworld, but nothing beyond personal acquaintances was ever proved. In practice he was most generous in his gifts to both individuals and organizations, and his overall status in the entertainment industry earned him the title Chairman of the Board. He announced his retirement in 1971 but he returned for various concerts and tours in the next two decades. Among the many testaments to his special status as a pop superstar was his 1980 recording of New York, New York which made him the first singer in history to have hit records in five consecutive decades.
| Frank Sinatra | ||
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| Background information | ||
| Birth name | Francis Albert Sinatra | |
| Born |
December 12, 1915 Hoboken, New Jersey, USA |
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| Died |
May 14, 1998 Los Angeles, California, USA |
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| Genre(s) |
Pop Big Band Jazz Swing Ballad |
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| Years active | 1935 – 1995 | |
| Label(s) |
Columbia Capitol Reprise |
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| Website | www.franksinatra.com | |
Francis Albert Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer who is widely considered to have been the finest male popular song vocalist of all time.
Sinatra had a larger-than-life presence in the public eye and, over a seven-decade career in show business, became an American icon.
Life
Early life
Francis Albert Sinatra was born in 1915 in a Paterson, New Jersey hospital to a family living at 415 Monroe St., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Following his teen years in New Jersey, Sinatra was interested in serving his country during World War II. (Frank Sinatra was actually not going to get this job but when the first choice Frankie Manion turned down the job the owner chose Frank Sinatra) In 1939 bandleader and trumpet player Harry James heard Sinatra on the radio. James hired Sinatra and the two recorded together for the first time on July 13, 1939. (The complete span of his career with Dorsey was released in the 1994 box set The Song Is You.)
It was as a featured singer with Dorsey that Sinatra made his earliest film appearances, such as the 1942 Eleanor Powell/Red Skelton comedy, Ship Ahoy in which the uncredited singer performed a couple of songs.
However, Sinatra's career began a decline in the late 1940s, as novelty tunes became popular with audiences, and Sinatra moved into his 30s, causing some loss of appeal to new teen-age audiences.
Of this first phase of Sinatra's career, it can be said that it anticipated virtually every phase of what, in the 1960s, would be called "the youth movement."
Post-war revival of career
What might be called Sinatra's second career began as a full-fledged dramatic actor when he played the scrappy Pvt. This role and performance became legendary at the time as the key comeback moment in Sinatra's career.
The following year, Sinatra played a crazed, coldblooded assassin determined to kill the President in the thriller Suddenly (available freely online here).
Musically, Sinatra reinvented himself with a series of complex adult albums featuring darker emotional material starting with In the Wee Small Hours.
The famous Sinatra comeback is the stuff of American legend, and, indeed, there seemed little in either his 1940s film career or his radio and television performances of the early 1950s to predict the dramatic success he would enjoy on screen in the 1950s and 1960s. At the very end of his Columbia recording career, in two performances in 1952 Sinatra had given advance warning of what would become the new sound he achieved in the 1950s at Capitol. In "The Birth of the Blues" it would be the sound of the new and "swinging" Sinatra: a hipper, tougher, more masculine persona than the sometimes boyish Sinatra of the 1940s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, this new Sinatra would become the most popular attraction in Las Vegas, the venue of choice for performers of his era as the rise of rock and roll began to reduce the market for their recordings.
Sinatra played a major role in the desegregation of Nevada hotels and casinos in the 1960s. With the release of the film Ocean's Eleven (1960), the Rat Pack became the subject of great media attention, and this gave the Rat Pack, Sinatra in particular, the leverage he needed to force hotels and casinos to end segregation.
In 2001, Las Vegas named Frank Sinatra Drive, a new street parallel to Interstate 15 and Las Vegas Boulevard, in his honor.
Sinatra was close to the Kennedy family and was a friend and strong supporter of President John F. Years later, Sinatra's youngest daughter Tina would state that Sinatra and mob figure Sam Giancana had helped Kennedy win a crucial primary election in 1960 by helping to deliver the union votes. Sinatra is said to have introduced Kennedy to Judith Campbell, who had been a girlfriend of both Sinatra's and Giancana. This soured Sinatra's relationship with the Kennedy family and the Democratic Party, and by the late 1960s Sinatra had become a Republican and supporter of Richard Nixon, who became President in 1968. Sinatra would lose his Nevada casino license in 1963 when Giancana was seen in the Cal-Neva Lodge casino, of which Sinatra was a part owner.
Sinatra resumed his strong film work with the 1962 paranoid classic The Manchurian Candidate, in which he played the troubled, frequently blinking, but nonetheless resolute protagonist.
In the 1970s Sinatra staged a retirement and several comebacks, recording less frequently but continuing to perform in Las Vegas and around the world. It was a period during which, by taking to the road again, Sinatra sought to bring the great American songbook of the 1920s and 1930s to a much wider audience than the one that frequented the casinos of Las Vegas.
In 1981 Sinatra's Nevada casino license was reinstated after hearings by the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Indeed, journalist Pete Hamill wrote in his book, Why Sinatra Matters, that Sinatra was "the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth."
"Sure, I knew some of those guys," Sinatra himself said.
In 1986, investigative journalist Kitty Kelley published a biography of Sinatra entitled His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra. Another Sinatra nemesis, the Hollywood gossip columnist Rona Barrett, came closer to a depiction of his character in her roman a clef, The Lovo-maniacs, which attempted a fictional insight into his complex personality.
Sinatra's singing career continued into the 1990s, most notably with his commercially-successful Duets albums on which he sang with other stars such as U2's Bono.
Love and marriage
Sinatra was married to his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Barbato, in Jersey City, New Jersey on February 4, 1939. They had three children together: Nancy Sinatra (born June 8, 1940), Frank Sinatra, Jr.
Sinatra married the actress Ava Gardner on November 7, 1951, only ten days after his divorce from his first wife became final.
Sinatra proposed to actress Lauren Bacall, whom he had been seeing since shortly after her husband Humphrey Bogart died in 1957, but reneged when word of their relationship became public.
On December 8, 1963, Frank Sinatra, Jr. Because the kidnappers demanded that Sinatra call them only from payphones, Sinatra carried a roll of dimes with him throughout the ordeal, and this became a lifetime habit.
Sinatra married actress Mia Farrow, 30 years his junior, in 1966.
In 1976, Sinatra married Barbara Blakeley Marx (formerly married to Zeppo Marx), who converted to Catholicism to marry him. She remained his wife until his death, although her relations with Sinatra's children were consistently portrayed as stormy, something Nancy Sinatra (Jr.) confirmed when she publicly claimed that Barbara had not bothered to call Frank's children even when the end was near, although they were close by, and the children missed the opportunity to be at their father's bedside when he died.
Alleged organized crime links
Sinatra has been frequently linked to members of the Mafia and it has long been rumored that his career was aided behind the scenes by organized crime. Sinatra was also allegedly personally linked to Willie Moretti, his first wife Nancy Barbato was a cousin of one of his senior henchmen and Sinatra sang at the daughter's wedding in 1948. After Luciano's deportation to Italy, Sinatra visited him at least twice, singing at a 1946 Christmas Party and gifting the famed mobster with a gold cigarette case engraved "To my dear pal Charlie, from his friend Frank" the next year.
These visits were widely reported by the media and used as further evidence of Sinatra's ties to the mob, haunting him for the rest of his life.
Sinatra had a strong friendship with Sam Giancana who always wore a sapphire friendship ring given to him by Sinatra, and who ordered the killing of about 200 people. Edgar Hoover apparently suspected Sinatra over the years, and Sinatra's file at the FBI ended up at 2,403 pages, detailing allegations of extortion against Ronald Alpert for $100,000.
The character Johnny Fontane in the book and movie The Godfather is widely viewed as having been inspired by Frank Sinatra and his alleged connections.
Death
A frequent visitor, property owner and benefactor in the Palm Springs, California area, Sinatra wished to be buried in the desert he grew to love so much. Sinatra's last words were (according to his daughter Nancy Sinatra, as told to Variety senior columnist, Army Archerd): "I'm losing." Sinatra was buried a short distance east of St. Theresa's next to his parents in section A-8 of Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, a quiet, unassuming cemetery on Ramon Road at the border of Cathedral City and Rancho Mirage and near his famous Rancho Mirage compound, located on tree-lined Frank Sinatra Drive.
Legend has it that Sinatra was buried in a blue suit with a flask of Jack Daniel's and a roll of ten dimes which was a gift from his daughter, Tina, along with a card that said "Sleep warm, Poppa - look for me." The ten dimes were a habit dating back to the kidnapping of his son, Frank Sinatra, Jr.
Recorded legacy
Influences
Sinatra's vocal style represented a significant departure from the 'crooning' style of his idol, Bing Crosby.
However Sinatra, as he himself once noted, sang more, by which he meant that he introduced a bel canto sound to the tradition begun by Crosby.
Two other great performers of the 1930s and 1940s were significant influences on Sinatra: Billie Holiday and Mabel Mercer. Sinatra regularly heard "Lady Day" in New York clubs in the 1940s and learned from her the importance of authenticity of emotion. For Sinatra a song is a three-four minute narrative — sometimes even the story of himself, his own life, his own heartaches, his own feelings of buoyancy — and this is why Ella Fitzgerald could say of him, "With Frank, it's always this little guy, telling this ... The archetypal examples of the Sinatra song as story could later be found in two selections from his 1958 Capitol LP Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely: "Angel Eyes" and "One for My Baby (And One More For The Road)".
Genres
Sinatra would certainly have been considered a 'pop' singer before the Rock and roll era, and the epithets Traditional Pop or more specifically Classic Pop have perhaps been coined to describe Sinatra's style.
There still exists a much wider debate, as with Ella Fitzgerald, as to whether Sinatra is a jazz singer. There are very few occasions when Sinatra was recorded scat singing, but minor nuances and slight deviations from the vocal line are a hallmark of the material he recorded, and he is also known for his impeccable jazz timing and phrasing. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine the Sinatra of the great years after 1953 without the influence of jazz.
Songs and albums
Sinatra left a vast legacy of recordings, from his very first sides with the Harry James orchestra in 1939, the vast catalogs at Columbia in the 1940s, Capitol in the 1950s, and Reprise from the 1960s onwards, up to his 1994 album Duets II.
Of all his many albums, At the Sands with Count Basie, which was recorded live in Las Vegas in 1966, with Sinatra in his prime, backed by Count Basie's big band, remains his most popular and is still a big seller. In addition to the Sands performance with Basie, three performances of Sinatra at the very peak of his career were captured: With Red Norvo Quintet: Live In Australia, 1959, Sinatra '57 In Concert, a performance in Seattle with an orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle and Sinatra and Sextet: Live in Paris, recorded in June of 1962.
Sinatra is also credited with putting out perhaps the first concept album. It is worth noting that each ranking would have shocked the two generations that preceded the generation that founded Rolling Stone, suggesting that the final assessment of Sinatra's achievement in the history of American popular music must await a time no longer marked by the "conflict of generations" that began in the late 1960s.
It was the advent of the long-playing record that opened the door to these famous concept albums of the 1950s, but Sinatra's first efforts in this direction go back to the Columbia years and The Voice, when the 78 rpm disc made "album" less of a metaphor than it would become with the single-disc LPs of the 1950s.
Other Sinatra milestone albums include 1965's September of My Years, which according to critic Stephen Holden, "summed up the punchy sentimentality of a whole generation of American men," 1973's comeback album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back, and 1980's Trilogy: Past Present Future, an ambitious triple album using three arrangers that attempted to portray the past, present, and future of his career. For many Sinatra admirers, 1981's She Shot Me Down is the last great Sinatra album. A collection of what Sinatra called "saloon songs", it includes Alec Wilder's "A Long Night", in a performance that can stand the test of comparison with the work Sinatra did in his Capitol years.
Sinatra also sought a musical legacy beyond singing. He conducted Peggy Lee's 1957 album The Man I Love (arranged by Nelson Riddle), Dean Martin's 1958 album Sleep Warm, Sylvia Syms' 1982 album Syms by Sinatra, and commissioned and conducted the 1956 album Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color.
Awards and legacy
Sinatra won ten Grammy Awards during his career, including Album of the Year for Come Dance With Me in 1959, September of My Years in 1965, and A Man and His Music in 1966, and Record of the Year for "Strangers in the Night" in 1966. (The Grammy Awards only began in 1958, after two peaks of Sinatra's recording career had already happened.)
In addition, Sinatra was named the Down Beat readers' poll Male Singer of the Year sixteen times between 1941 and 1966 and the Personality of the Year six times between 1954 and 1959, and was named the Down Beat critics' poll Male Singer of the Year twice, in 1955 and 1957. Sinatra was also named the Playboy Jazz All-Star Poll Male Vocalist of the Year seven times between 1957 and 1963.
In 2001 BBC Radio 2 named Sinatra as the "Greatest Voice of the Twentieth Century".
Stephen Holden wrote for the 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide:
Frank Sinatra's voice is pop music history.Two decades later, radio personality and musician Jonathan Schwartz's assessment in a 2005 book review for the New York Observer showed that Sinatra's musical reputation had not diminished:
I believe, based on a lifetime of consideration, that Frank Sinatra was the greatest interpretive musician this country has ever produced.Discography
Chronological list of singles and albums recorded by Frank Sinatra Alphabetical list of studio recordings by Frank SinatraFilmography
Major Bowes Amateur Theatre of the Air (1935) (short subject) Las Vegas Nights (1941) Ship Ahoy (1942) Reveille with Beverly (1943) Show Business at War (1943) (short subject) Upbeat in Music (1943) (short subject) (scenes deleted) Higher and Higher (1944) Road to Victory (1944) (short subject) Step Lively (1944) The All-Star Bond Rally (1945) (short subject) Anchors Aweigh (1945) The House I Live In (1945) (short subject) MGM Christmas Trailer (1945) (short subject) Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) It Happened in Brooklyn (1947) Screen Snapshots: Out-of-This-World Series (1947) (short subject) Lucky Strike Salesman's Movie 48-A (1948) (short subject) The Miracle of the Bells (1948) The Kissing Bandit (1948) Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) On the Town (1949) Double Dynamite (1951) Meet Danny Wilson (1952) Screen Snapshots: Hollywood Night Life (1952) (short subject) From Here to Eternity (1953) Suddenly (1954) Young at Heart (1954) Not as a Stranger (1955) Finian's Rainbow (1955) (animated musical, recorded songs with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, film never completed) Guys and Dolls (1955) The Tender Trap (1955) The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) Carousel (1956) (recorded several songs, shot several scenes, walked off set and was replaced by Gordon MacRae) Screen Snapshots: Playtime in Hollywood (1956) (short subject) Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) (Cameo) High Society (1956) Johnny Concho (1956) Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) The Pride and the Passion (1957) The Joker Is Wild (1957) Pal Joey (1957) Kings Go Forth (1958) Some Came Running (1958) Invitation to Monte Carlo (1959) (documentary) A Hole in the Head (1959) Premier Khrushchev in the USA (1959) (documentary) Never So Few (1959) Can-Can (1960) Ocean's Eleven (1960) Pepe (1960) (Cameo) The Devil at Four O'Clock (1961) Sergeants 3 (1962) The Road to Hong Kong (1962) (Cameo) Advise and Consent (1962) (voice) The Manchurian Candidate (1962) The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) (Cameo) Come Blow Your Horn (1963) 4 for Texas (1963) Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) A Tribute to the Will Rogers Memorial Hospital (1965) (short subject) None But the Brave (1965) (also producer and director) Von Ryan's Express (1965) Marriage on the Rocks (1965) The Oscar (1966) (Cameo) Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) Assault on a Queen (1966) Think Twentieth (1967) (short subject) The Naked Runner (1967) Tony Rome (1967) The Detective (1968) Lady in Cement (1968) Dirty Dingus Magee (1970) That's Entertainment! (1974) Rene Simard in Japan (1974) (documentary) The First Deadly Sin (1980) Cannonball Run II (1984) Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones (1990) (documentary) In Person (1993) (voice) (short subject)|
Preceded by: Anthony Quinn for Viva Zapata! |
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor 1953 for From Here to Eternity |
Succeeded by: Edmond O'Brien for The Barefoot Contessa |
Sinatra won his first Academy Award in 1945 for the short film "The house i live in", a racial tolerant movie.
Commercials
In Japan, Frank Sinatra appeared in commercials for All Nippon Airways.
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