Today would have been Frank Sinatra's 96th birthday.
"Widely held to be the greatest singer in American pop history, Frank Sinatra was also the first modern pop superstar. He defined that role in the early 1940s when his first solo appearances provoked the kind of mass pandemonium that later greeted Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
During a show business career that spanned more than 50 years and comprised recordings, film and television as well as countless performances in nightclubs, concert halls and sports arenas, Sinatra stood as a singular mirror of the American psyche.
His evolution from the idealistic crooner of the early 1940s to the sophisticated swinger of the '50s and '60s seemed to personify the country's loss of innocence. During World War II, Sinatra's tender romanticism served as the dreamy emotional link between millions of women and their husbands and boyfriends fighting overseas. Reinventing himself in the '50s, the starry-eyed boy next door turned into the cosmopolitan man of the world, a bruised romantic with a tough-guy streak and a song for every emotional season.
In a series of brilliant conceptual albums, he codified a musical vocabulary of adult relationships with which millions identified. The haunted voice heard on a jukebox in the wee small hours of the morning lamenting the end of a love affair was the same voice that jubilantly invited the world to "come fly with me" to exotic realms in a never-ending party.
Sinatra appeared in more than 50 films, and won an Academy Award as best supporting actor for his portrayal of the feisty misfit soldier Maggio in "From Here to Eternity" (1953). As an actor, he could communicate the same complex mixture of emotional honesty, vulnerability and cockiness that he projected as a singer, but he often chose his roles indifferently or unwisely.
It was as a singer that he exerted the strongest cultural influence. Following his idol Bing Crosby, who had pioneered the use of the microphone, Sinatra transformed popular singing by infusing lyrics with a personal, intimate point of view that conveyed a steady current of eroticism.
A Smooth Baritone Inspired Copycats
The skinny blue-eyed crooner, quickly nicknamed the Voice, made hordes of bobby-soxers swoon in the 1940s with an extraordinarily smooth and flexible baritone that he wielded with matchless skill. His mastery of long-lined phrasing inspired imitations by many other male crooners, notably Dick Haymes, Vic Damone and Tony Bennett in the 1940s and '50s and most recently the pop-jazz star Harry Connick Jr.
After the voice lost its velvety youthfulness, Sinatra's interpretations grew more personal and idiosyncratic, so that each performance became a direct expression of his personality and his mood of the moment. In expressing anger, petulance and bravado -- attitudes that had largely been excluded from the acceptable vocabulary of pop feeling -- Sinatra paved the way for the unfettered vocal aggression of rock singers.
The changes in Sinatra's vocal timbre coincided with a precipitous career descent in the late 1940s and early '50s. But in 1953, Sinatra made one of the most spectacular career comebacks in show business history, re-emerging as a coarser-voiced, jazzier interpreter of popular standards who put a more aggressive personal stamp on his songs.
Almost singlehandedly, he helped lead a revival of vocalized swing music that took American pop to a new level of musical sophistication.
Coinciding with the rise of the long-playing record album, his 1950s recordings ---- along with Ella Fitzgerald's "songbook" albums saluting individual composers -- were instrumental in establishing a canon of American pop song literature.
With Nelson Riddle, his most talented arranger, Sinatra defined the criteria for sound, style and song selection in pop recording during the pre-Beatles era. The aggressive uptempo style of Sinatra's mature years spawned a genre of punchy, rhythmic belting associated with Las Vegas, which he was instrumental in establishing and popularizing as an entertainment capital.
The Archetypal Swinger, Drinking and Hedonistic
By the late 1950s, Sinatra had become so much the personification of American show business success that his life and his art became emblematic of the temper of the times. Except perhaps for Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, nobody did more to create a male ideal in the 1950s. For years, Sinatra seemed the embodiment of the hard-drinking, hedonistic swinger who could have his pick of women and who was the leader of a party-loving entourage.
That personality and wardrobe, borrowed in part from his friend Jimmy Van Heusen, the talented songwriter and man about town who liked to insouciantly sling his raincoat over his shoulder, was, in turn, imitated by many other show business figures. It was a style Sinatra never entirely abandoned. Even in his later years, he would often stroll onto the stage with a drink in his hand.
On a deeper level, Sinatra's career and public image touched many aspects of American cultural life.
For millions, his ascent from humble Italian-American roots in Hoboken, N.J., was a symbol of ethnic achievement. And more than most entertainers, he used his influence to support political candidates. His change of allegiance from pro-Roosevelt Democrat in the 1940s to pro-Reagan Republican in the 1980s paralleled a seismic shift in American politics.
By the end of his career, Sinatra's annual income was estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, from concerts, record albums, real estate ventures and holdings in several companies, including a missile-parts concern, a private airline, Reprise Records (which he founded), Artanis (Sinatra spelled backward) Productions and Sinatra Enterprises.
Sinatra left his imprint on scores of popular songs and was the background voice, it seemed, for the romances of most Americans, from the earliest to the second time around.
Among the standards he recorded at least three times were "All or Nothing at All," "Angel Eyes," "Autumn in New York," "I Concentrate on You," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "I'll Be Seeing You," "I'll Never Smile Again," "I've Got a Crush on You," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Nancy (With the Laughing Face)," "Night and Day," "One for My Baby," "September Song" and "Stormy
Weather."
His personal signature songs included "Put Your Dreams Away" (his 1945 theme) and later "Young at Heart" (1954), "All the Way" (1957), "It Was a Very Good Year" (1965), "Strangers in the Night" (1966), "My Way" (1969) and "New York, New York" (1980).
For decades, his private life, with its many romances, feuds, brawls and associations with gangsters, was grist for the gossip columns. But he also had a reputation for spontaneous generosity, for helping singers who were starting out and for supporting friends who were in need. And over the years he gave millions of dollars to various philanthropies.
Francis Albert Sinatra, Thanks to Bing Crosby
Sinatra was born in Hoboken on Dec. 12, 1915, the only child of Martin Sinatra, a boilermaker and sometime boxer from Catania, Sicily, and his wife, Natalie Garavante, who was nicknamed Dolly. The young Francis Albert Sinatra, who attended Dave E. Rue Junior High School and Demarest High in Hoboken, decided to become a singer either after attending a Bing Crosby concert or seeing a Crosby film sometime in 1931 or 1932.
His mother encouraged his ambition, allowing him to drop out of high school.
In 1935, after two years of local club dates, he joined three other young men from Hoboken who called themselves the Three Flashes. The quartet renamed itself the Hoboken Four and won firstprize on "Major Bowes's Original Amateur Hour."
After several months with the group, Sinatra decided to go it alone, and in the late 1930s he had his first important nightclub engagement, at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
Local radio exposure brought him to the attention of Harry James, the trumpet player who had recently left Benny Goodman to form his own band. James signed Sinatra for $75 a week, and the singer made his first concert appearance with the James band in June 1939 and his first recording the next month.
Early that year, he married his longtime sweetheart, Nancy Barbato. They would have three children: Nancy, who was born in 1940; Franklin Wayne (later shortened to Frank Jr.), born in 1944, and Christina (Tina), born in 1948.
Six months after Sinatra signed with Harry James, Tommy Dorsey invited him to join his band, which was far more popular. Released without protest from his contract by James, Sinatra remained with Dorsey from January 1940 until September 1942. His first successful record with the band was "Polka Dots and Moonbeams." Six months after joining Dorsey, he scored his first No. 1 hit, "I'll Never Smile Again," a dreamy ballad he sang with the Pied Pipers, the vocal group then led by Jo Stafford.
Determined to be the first singer since Bing Crosby to have a successful solo career, he split from Dorsey, who held him to a contract that gave the band leader 43 percent of the singer's income for the next decade. Eventually Sinatra, with his record label, Columbia, and his booking agency, MCA, bought out the contract.
In addition to "I'll Never Smile Again," Sinatra left behind several classic early recordings with Dorsey. They included "Star Dust" (1940, with the Pied Pipers), "This Love of Mine" (1941) and "There Are Such Things" (1942, with the Pied Pipers).
Sinatra's last concert with Dorsey was in September 1942. Three months later, he made history at the age of 27 with his first solo appearance at the Paramount Theater in New York City. Billed as an "extra added attraction" on a program headlined by Benny Goodman, Sinatra appeared on Dec. 30 and evoked a public hysteria that made headlines. Within weeks he had signed lucrative contracts with Columbia Records, R.K.O. Pictures and the radio program "Your Hit Parade."
Beloved by Hordes of Bobby-Soxers
The adulation reached a high point on Oct. 12, 1944, the opening day of a three-week return engagement at the Paramount, when 30,000 fans -- most of them bobby-soxers -- formed a frenzied mob in Times Square.
"It was the war years, and there was a great loneliness," Sinatra, who was kept from the draft by a punctured eardrum, recounted later. "I was the boy in every corner drugstore who'd gone off, drafted to the war. That was all."
From 1943 to 1945, he was the lead singer on "Your Hit Parade" and at the same time began recording for Columbia. Because of a musicians' strike, the accompaniment on his first several recording sessions for the label was a vocal chorus called the Bobby Tucker Singers, instead of an orchestra. In June 1943, however, Columbia rereleased a recording he had made in September 1939 with Harry James. The recording, "All or Nothing at All," which had sold 8,000 copies in its first release, sold over a million.
Once the musicians' strike was settled in November 1944, Sinatra began recording with Axel Stordahl, who had been a trombonist and lead arranger with Tommy Dorsey. Stordahl's sweet string-laced settings for Sinatra's recordings silhouetted a yearning voice that one writer compared to "worn velveteen."
Until Sinatra left Columbia for Capitol Records in 1953, Stordahl remained his principal arranger. He also brilliantly exploited the songs of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, who tailored many of their ballads to Sinatra's voice and style.
The Movie Star, Playing an Innocent
Sinatra's first movie appearance was in 1940, singing with the Dorsey band in "Las Vegas Nights." He made his movie acting debut in 1943, in "Higher and Higher," an innocuous bit of froth that was
described by Bosley Crowther, a New York Times movie critic, as "a slapdash setting for the incredibly unctuous readings of the Voice." The film was followed by "Step Lively" (1944) and "Anchors Aweigh" (1945), the first of three movies in which Sinatra played Gene Kelly's sidekick. In these early films, Sinatra, often wearing a sailor suit and projecting a skinny soulfulness, played a wide-eyed innocent who was shy with women.
In 1945, he also made "The House I Live In," a 10-minute patriotic plea for racial and religious tolerance that won him a special Academy Award. Like his mother, Sinatra was an ardent Democrat and supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. He visited the White House in 1944 and campaigned for Roosevelt in his bid for a fourth term as President.
Sinatra's popularity remained at a peak through 1946, when he had 15 hit singles.
Then it began a gradual slide that steepened after 1948 and hit bottom in 1952. As early as November 1947, an appearance at the Capitol Theater in New York drew disappointing attendance. Only 4 Sinatra singles made the Top 10 in 1947, and the number dropped to one in 1948.
Although he had shown himself to have an engaging screen presence, his film career had not made him a top box-office star. From 1946 to 1949, he appeared in five MGM musicals -- "Till the Clouds Roll By" (1946) (in which he sang "Ol' Man River" in a white suit), "It Happened in Brooklyn" (1947), "The Kissing Bandit" (1948), "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" (1949) and "On the Town" (1949) -- and one R.K.O. film, "The Miracle of the Bells" (1948), in which he was
miscast as a priest.
After two more unsuccessful pictures, "Double Dynamite" (1951) and "Meet Danny Wilson" (1952), his movie career all but evaporated.
Part of the public disenchantment came after the columnist Robert Ruark denounced him in 1947 for having socialized with the deported gangster Lucky Luciano in Cuba. The suggestion that the singer consorted with criminals made him a target of the conservative press, which resented his pro-Roosevelt political stance. For the rest of Sinatra's career, stories of his relations with the
underworld dogged him, and he reacted angrily to the charges.
Divorce and Remarriage; Career Troubles
While his career was in decline in the late 1940's, his marriage to Nancy Barbato also unraveled. In 1949, he had begun an affair with the movie star Ava Gardner. The relationship became public the next year, and on November 7, 1951, one week after his divorce was final, he married her in Philadelphia.
Passionate but stormy, the marriage lasted just less than two years. MGM announced their separation in October 1953, and they were divorced in 1957.
Those personal upheavals, including a suicide attempt, coincided with increasing tension between Sinatra and Columbia Records after Mitch Miller took the company's creative reins in 1950.
In an ever more desperate search for a hit single, Sinatra let himself be coerced into recording inferior material, the most notorious example being "Mama Will Bark," a 1951 novelty duet with the television personality Dagmar that included dog imitations by Donald Baine.
Although his voice had begun to reflect the strain he was under, he still made some powerful recordings, including "April in Paris," the anguished "I'm a Fool to Want You" and renditions of "Castle Rock" and "The Birth of the Blues" that anticipated the swinging Sinatra of the mid-50s.
A Doomed Maggio, Leading to a Rebirth
Sinatra's phenomenal resurgence began in 1953 with the release of "From Here to Eternity," Fred Zinnemann's film version of James Jones's best-selling novel about American G.I.'s in Hawaii on the eve of World War II. His portrayal of Maggio, the combative Italian-American soldier who is beaten to death in a stockade, his spirit unbroken, won him rave reviews, an Oscar and renewed public
sympathy.
In April 1953, Sinatra, then 37, had signed with Capitol Records. A cautious deal, the contract was for only one year, with no advance. Sinatra arrived at Capitol just when his voice had lost most of its youthful sheen, but the move proved fortunate. Only five years earlier, the long-playing record had been introduced, and the longer form encouraged Sinatra, who brought remarkable introspective
depth to the interpretation of lyrics, to make cohesive album-length emotional statements.
In his second recording session for Capitol, in late April 1953, Sinatra was teamed with Nelson Riddle, who became the most important of the several arrangers with whom he worked during his decade with the label. A trombonist who had also worked with Tommy Dorsey, Riddle pioneered in augmenting a big-band lineup with strings, and he was the master of an elegant pop impressionism
that enhanced Sinatra's vocal image of urbane sophistication. On a series of classic pop albums for Capitol, the singer and arranger virtually reinvented swing music for a more opulent era.
That process began with their first single release, "I've Got the World on a String," which hit the pop charts in the summer of 1953. It continued with the albums "Songs for Young Lovers," released in early 1954, and "Swing Easy," which came out six months later.
The collaboration hit its artistic peak with three albums. "In the Wee Small Hours," a 16-cut collection of classic torch songs sung in a quietly anguished baritone, was released in the spring of 1955. "Songs for Swingin' Lovers," released a year later, defined Sinatra in his adult "swinging" mode. It included what many regard as his greatest recorded performance: Cole Porter's "I've Got
You Under My Skin."
"Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely," released in the summer of 1958, expanded on the mournful, introspective tone of "Wee Small Hours" by adding shadings that were at once jazzier and more operatic. The album, which included his classic recording of "What's New," inspired Linda Ronstadt's hit 1983 album "What's New," which in turn spurred a revival of interest in elegant '50s
pop styles.
Sinatra's Capitol albums were among the first so-called concept albums in the way they explored different adult approaches to love and invoked varied aspects of the singer's personality. These were the fun-loving hedonist ("Songs for Swingin' Lovers" and its equally brilliant 1957 follow-up, "A Swingin' Affair"), the romantic confidant ("Close to You," recorded with the Hollywood String
Quartet), the jet-set playboy ("Come Fly With Me"), the romantic loner ("Where Are You?," "No One Cares") and the hardened sensation-seeker ("Come Swing With Me").
In 1959, "Come Dance With Me!," a hard-swinging album arranged by Billy May, won Sinatra his first Grammy Awards, for album of the year and best male vocal performance, and stayed on the sales chart for 140 weeks, longer than any other Sinatra album.
The Hit Maker and Prolific Actor
Sinatra's career as a maker of hit singles was also rejuvenated. "Young at Heart," which hit the pop charts in February 1954, reached No. 2 on Billboard's pop singles chart, and "Learnin' the Blues" reached No. 1 the following year. His other significant hits from the late 1950s included "Love and Marriage," (which was written for a television production of "Our Town," in which Sinatra played the
Stage Manager), "The Tender Trap" (1955), "Hey! Jealous Lover" (1956), "All the Way" (1957) and "Witchcraft" (1958).
During this period, the versatile team of Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, who had become partners in 1954, functioned almost as Sinatra's house songwriters, supplying both movie song hits and the title songs for albums.
After "From Here to Eternity," Sinatra's movie career boomed, with the roles many and varied. He played the perennial gambler Nathan Detroit in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical "Guys and Dolls" (1955), a heroin addict in "The Man With the Golden Arm" the same year and an Army investigator tracking a would-be assassin in the political thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962).
His performance in "The Man With the Golden Arm" won him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
In his better movie roles -- playing a would-be Presidential assassin in "Suddenly" (1954), the comedian Joe E. Lewis in "The Joker Is Wild" (1957) and a vulnerable intellectual in "Some Came Running" (1958) -- Sinatra conveyed an outsider's edgy volatility that matched the film-noirish mood of his more introspective albums.
His roles in the film musicals "High Society" (1956) and "Pal Joey" (1957) as well as "Guys and Dolls" effectively played off his scrappy, streetwise image.
Assessing Sinatra's film career, the critic David Thomson said he had a "pervasive influence on American acting: he glamorized the fatalistic outsider; he made his own anger intriguing, and in the late '50s especially he was one of our darkest male icons."
"Sinatra is a noir sound," he said, "like saxophones, foghorns, gunfire and the quiet weeping of women in the background."
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