Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants Natalina Garaventa, known as Dolly, and Antonino Martino Sinatra, a boxer and later a fireman ^[1]. The delivery was difficult. Forceps damaged the infant's cheek, ear, and neck, leaving scars he carried for life, and the doctor at first believed the baby was stillborn ^[2].

Hoboken in the 1920s was a crowded port city across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and the Sinatra household sat near the center of its Italian American community. Dolly Sinatra worked as a midwife and became a ward level power in local Democratic politics, connections that gave the family more stability than many of their neighbors ^[2]. Frank attended David E. Rugg Junior High and later A. J. Demarest High School, but he left without graduating, more interested in singing than in classrooms ^[1].

He took his cues from the radio. Bing Crosby's relaxed baritone convinced the teenager that a singer could sound conversational rather than operatic, and Sinatra began performing at local dances and social clubs with a small sound system his mother helped him buy ^[2]. In 1935 he joined three other Hoboken performers as the Hoboken Four, and the group won first prize on the radio program Major Bowes Amateur Hour, which sent them on a national tour ^[1].

Sinatra's professional break came at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where he sang and waited tables in the late 1930s. Radio broadcasts from the club reached the trumpeter Harry James, who was forming his own band and hired Sinatra as his male vocalist in 1939 ^[3]. With James he made his first commercial recordings, including an early version of All or Nothing at All.

Within months a bigger offer arrived. Tommy Dorsey, leader of one of the most polished orchestras in the country, signed Sinatra away from James at the end of 1939, and the young singer spent nearly three years refining his craft in front of Dorsey's trombone ^[3]. Sinatra later said he studied the bandleader's seamless breathing on the horn and worked to reproduce that legato line with his voice, swimming underwater to extend his lung capacity ^[2]. Hits with Dorsey, among them I'll Never Smile Again in 1940, made him a national name.

He went solo in 1942, a risky move when band singers rarely succeeded alone. The gamble paid off spectacularly. His engagements at the Paramount Theatre in New York, beginning in December 1942, drew screaming crowds of teenage admirers, the bobby soxers, and an October 1944 return engagement produced a crush of thousands of fans in Times Square that newspapers called the Columbus Day Riot ^[4]. Signed to Columbia Records, Sinatra became the dominant male vocalist of the war years, a phenomenon of mass adolescent devotion that anticipated the receptions later given to Elvis Presley and the Beatles ^[1].

The late 1940s treated Sinatra harshly. His record sales declined, his radio work dried up, his marriage was collapsing amid a public affair with the actress Ava Gardner, and in 1950 he suffered a vocal cord hemorrhage that silenced him for weeks ^[2]. Columbia and his talent agency both dropped him. By 1952 many in the industry considered his career finished ^[1].

He fought his way back through acting. Sinatra campaigned hard for the role of Private Angelo Maggio in the 1953 film From Here to Eternity, accepting a modest fee for the part, and his performance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1954 ^[5]. The Oscar restored his standing almost overnight and any Frank Sinatra biography treats it as the hinge of his professional life.

A new contract with Capitol Records in 1953 completed the revival. Paired with arrangers such as Nelson Riddle, Billy May, and Gordon Jenkins, Sinatra recorded a string of albums that treated the long playing record as a unified statement rather than a bundle of singles. In the Wee Small Hours in 1955 sustained a mood of late night desolation across sixteen songs, while Songs for Swingin' Lovers! in 1956 did the opposite with buoyant, driving swing ^[3]. Critics and historians credit these Capitol releases with establishing the concept album years before rock musicians adopted the idea ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Frank Sinatra confronts a career of unusual breadth. As a recording artist he cut well over a thousand songs, and his interpretations of standards by composers such as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen became reference versions that later singers measured themselves against ^[3]. He won multiple Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year honors in the 1960s for September of My Years and A Man and His Music, and the Recording Academy gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1965 ^[6].

In 1960 he founded his own label, Reprise Records, an assertion of artistic and financial independence that was rare for a performer of his generation ^[1]. The following decade brought some of his most recognized recordings, including Strangers in the Night in 1966, which topped the American pop chart, the duet Somethin' Stupid with his daughter Nancy in 1967, and My Way in 1969, a song that became permanently attached to his persona ^[3]. Theme From New York, New York, recorded in 1979, gave him one last signature anthem.

His film work extended far beyond the Oscar. He earned a Best Actor nomination for playing a heroin addict in The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955, starred in musicals such as Guys and Dolls and High Society, and delivered a chilling dramatic turn in the 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate ^[5]. Among the most cited Frank Sinatra achievements off screen are the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the Congressional Gold Medal, voted by Congress in 1997 ^[7]. Kennedy Center Honors came in 1983 ^[6].

Sinatra married four times. His first wife, Nancy Barbato, whom he wed in 1939, was the mother of his three children: Nancy, born in 1940, Frank Jr., born in 1944, and Tina, born in 1948 ^[2]. The marriage ended in 1951, and he married Ava Gardner days later; their stormy union dissolved within a few years. A brief 1966 marriage to the actress Mia Farrow, thirty years his junior, ended in 1968. In 1976 he married Barbara Marx, who remained his wife until his death ^[1].

His friendships were as public as his romances. In the early 1960s Sinatra headlined a circle of Las Vegas performers, including Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop, popularly called the Rat Pack, whose Sands Hotel shows and films such as Ocean's Eleven fixed an image of tuxedoed nightlife in the American imagination ^[4]. He was also close to political power, campaigning for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and staging the president's inaugural gala, before shifting his support toward Republican candidates in later decades ^[1].

Questions about his associations with organized crime figures followed him for most of his adult life. He was called before investigators on several occasions and testified in 1972 before a House committee examining crime, where he denied any business ties to the Mafia; his FBI file, released after his death, ran to more than a thousand pages without producing criminal charges ^[4]. Less discussed among common Frank Sinatra facts is his record on civil rights: he refused to perform for segregated audiences, insisted on equal treatment for Sammy Davis Jr. in Las Vegas, and won a special Academy Award in 1946 for The House I Live In, a short film pleading for religious and ethnic tolerance ^[5].

Sinatra announced his retirement in June 1971 with a farewell concert in Los Angeles, but the withdrawal lasted barely two years. He returned in 1973 with the television special and album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back and resumed a punishing touring schedule that continued for another two decades ^[1].

The later concerts traded youthful tone for authority. He performed at stadiums and arenas around the world, including a 1980 concert in Rio de Janeiro before one of the largest audiences of his career, and continued playing Las Vegas and Atlantic City into his seventies ^[3]. In 1993 Capitol released Duets, an album pairing his voice with contemporary stars from Bono to Aretha Franklin; it became the best selling studio album of his career despite mixed reviews, and a sequel followed in 1994 ^[6].

His final public performance came in February 1995 at a golf tournament gala in Palm Desert, California ^[1]. Health problems accumulated in his last years, including heart trouble. Frank Sinatra died of a heart attack at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on May 14, 1998, at the age of 82, and was buried at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California ^[7]. The lights of the Las Vegas Strip and the Empire State Building were dimmed in tribute.

Sinatra changed what popular singing could be. He treated lyrics as speech, bending tempo and dynamics to the meaning of a line, and his microphone technique turned amplification into an expressive instrument rather than a crutch ^[3]. Singers across genres, from Tony Bennett to Bob Dylan, who recorded albums of Sinatra associated standards in the 2010s, have acknowledged the debt ^[6].

The institutions of American culture have kept his memory in circulation. His recordings remain staples of the Grammy Hall of Fame, his hometown of Hoboken maintains a park and a waterfront drive bearing his name, and the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative Sinatra stamp in 2008, timed to the tenth anniversary of his death ^[7]. Congress marked his centennial in 2015, a year that also brought major exhibitions and an HBO documentary, Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, directed by Alex Gibney ^[6].

His estate, his catalog, and his image continue to generate scholarship as well as commerce. Full length studies by writers including James Kaplan, whose two volume biography appeared in 2010 and 2015, treat him as a central figure in the history of American entertainment, a performer whose recorded legacy spans the swing era, the golden age of the LP, and the arena concert ^[8]. Few careers in any art form have covered so much ground for so long.