Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Music, the Legend

His Second Act
A review by Benjamin Schwarz

[Ed. Note. This review discusses the contents and context of twobooks: Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Music, the Legend and Photoby Sammy Davis, Jr..]

Frank Sinatra, the greatest vocalist in the history of Americanmusic, elevated popular song to an art. He was a dominant powerin the entertainment industries -- radio, records, movies, gambling-- and a symbol of the Mafia's reach into American public life.More profoundly than any figure excepting perhaps Elvis Presley,Sinatra changed the style and popular culture of the AmericanCentury. Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Music, the Legend, a long-awaitedcollection of essays gathered from a famed 1998 conference atHofstra University and edited by Jeanne Fuchs and Ruth Prigozy,probes various aspects of Sinatra's influence in his long career(he was a national figure from 1939 until his death, in 1998).But it insists, both explicitly and in its editors' selectionof subjects and themes, that the "proper historical setting" forits subject "is the fifties."Although that point can be debated, the 1950s -- more precisely,the period from 1953 to the mid-1960s -- was clearly the era ofSinatra's supreme artistic achievement and deepest cultural sway.It amounted to the most spectacular second act in American culturalhistory. In the early 1940s, following his break with the TommyDorsey band, Sinatra had emerged, thanks largely to swooning bobby-soxers,as pop music's biggest star and a hugely popular Hollywood actor.By the end of the decade, he was all but washed up, having losthis audience owing to shifting musical tastes and to disenchantmentover his reported ties to the Mob, and over his divorce, whichfollowed a widely publicized affair with Ava Gardner, whom hemarried in 1951. He soon lost his voice (he would never fullyrecover his consistently accurate intonation and precise pitch),his movie contract with MGM, his record contract with Columbia,and Gardner -- their passionate, mutually corrosive entanglementplainly and permanently warped him. But in 1953, his harrowing,Oscar-winning performance as the feisty, doomed Maggio in FromHere to Eternity made him a star again.