Frank Sinatra was a bundle of contradictions: a scrawny artist with a tough-guy image, an outspoken liberal turned stalwart Republican, a casual actor who won an Oscar, a notorious womanizer who lost the woman he loved most, and an American icon accused of dodging the draft in World War II.
He led such an eventful, fascinating life that author James Kaplan needs almost 800 pages to cover less than half of it in Frank: The Voice, his lively, anecdote-crammed biography of the world’s greatest saloon singer.
The book follows Sinatra from his 1915 birth in Hoboken, New Jersey, to 1954, when his sagging career was revived by a supporting-actor Oscar for From Here to Eternity. During those first 39 years, Francis Albert Sinatra embodied the lyrics of That’s Life, his 1966 hit about resilience.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king/I’ve been up and down and over and out and I know one thing/Each time I find myself flat on my face,/I pick myself up and get back in the race.
The only child of Italian immigrants — his mother, Dolly, was a midwife who moonlighted as an abortionist, his father, Marty, a fireman and former boxer — Sinatra dropped out of high school to become a singer. He had numerous setbacks — a jilted girlfriend had him arrested on trumped-up morals charges — before joining Tommy Dorsey’s popular band in 1940.
GANGSTERS
Sinatra, who died in 1998 at the age of 82, recorded his first hits with Dorsey before they had a falling out and he left the band in 1942.
Rumors that the Mafia helped Sinatra get out of his contract inspired the famous horse’s head scene in The Godfather. Kaplan doesn’t find a smoking gun on Sinatra’s reputed organized-crime connections, though he makes it clear that the singer often enjoyed the company of mobsters. He also recounts an infamous 1947 trip to Havana, where a newspaper columnist reported that Sinatra was hanging out with Lucky Luciano and other gangsters.
PAID TO Scream
In the 1940s Sinatra became the idol of screaming teenage girls known as bobby-soxers, a precursor to the wild crowds that later mobbed Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Kaplan reveals that Sinatra’s publicist would select girls who could scream the loudest and then pay them US$5 to stay for multiple shows.
Sinatra hit the skids in the late 1940s and by 1950, when he damaged his vocal cords during a performance at New York’s Copacabana nightclub, many thought his career was over. The career slump, combined with depression over his rocky love affair with Ava Gardner, led to several suicide attempts, according to the book. (Pinpointing dates is difficult because Kaplan goes long stretches without mentioning the year he’s writing about.)
Then came Sinatra’s phoenix-like comeback, fueled by his gritty performance as the rebellious soldier Maggio in From Here to Eternity. About the same time Sinatra started a collaboration with arranger/conductor Nelson Riddle that produced some of his finest albums, including In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely and Songs for Young Lovers.
MUSIC AND MORE
Kaplan, who is working on a second volume about Sinatra, writes with insight and grace about the crooner’s music. He explains how Sinatra worked to improve his voice, how he made the transition from lightweight tunes to adult fare and how his personal experience infused his songs with emotional depth.
He chronicles Sinatra’s troubled first marriage, which produced three children, and his tumultuous relationship with Gardner, whose appetite for liquor and sex was just as strong as Sinatra’s.
Kaplan also writes about Big Frankie, Sinatra’s nickname for his oversized penis. It was so big, Kaplan writes, that he had to wear special underwear to contain it.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and