Frank - NY Times Obituary (Part 2)

[Hit Parade]

NY Times: Obituuary May 15, 1998

Frank Sinatra, Superstar Showman and Quintessential Swinger, Dies at 82

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

(Part 2 of 2 Parts)

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."

Chairman of the Board, Leader of the Rat Pack

Sinatra remained a top box office draw for nearly a decade, and his
success as both singer and actor led the New York radio personality
William B. Williams to nickname him Chairman of the Board of show
business. The name stuck for the rest of his long career.

At a time when restraints on sexual and social behavior had begun to
loosen a bit, the high-living Sinatra, who enjoyed gambling and
womanizing, became in the popular press the embodiment of the swinger, a
concept repeatedly invoked by his album titles.

In the '60s, Sinatra appeared to be America's quintessential middle-aged
playboy. "Ocean's Eleven" (1960) was the first of three Sinatra films to
feature the star surrounded by the hard-drinking, high-living clique --
nicknamed the Rat Pack, which included Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy
Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop.

The group was an outgrowth of a social circle that had centered on
Humphrey Bogart, who died in 1957. The Rat Packers appeared together in
three more lighthearted capers: "Sergeants Three" (1962), "Four for
Texas" (1963) and "Robin and the Seven Hoods" (1964). This was the other
side of Sinatra. As carefully as he plumbed his music, after 1960 he
seemed largely to be wasting his acting talents by walking through his
movies.

One of the Rat Pack's favorite playgrounds was Las Vegas, where Sinatra
was a pioneer entertainer. In 1953, he bought a 2 percent interest in
the Sands Hotel, and eventually became a corporate vice president.

He earned $100,000 a week in his frequent performances at the Sands and
used the hotel for recording albums and making movies.

After supporting Adlai Stevenson's bid for the Presidency in 1956,
Sinatra worked avidly for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and supervised the
newly elected President's inaugural gala in Washington in January 1961.
But his pro-Kennedy sentiments cooled after the President canceled a
weekend visit to

Sinatra's house because the singer had been host to the Chicago mob boss
Sam Giancana and his associates. By the 1970's, Sinatra had turned to
the right. He became a supporter of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Sinatra's recording career entered a major new phase when he formed his
own record company, Reprise, in late 1960. Since the new label
overlapped his Capitol contract, for about a year he recorded for both
labels. In 1963, he sold his record company to Warner Brothers,
retaining a one-third interest. In association with Warner Brothers, he
also set up his own independent film production company, Artanis.

Beginning with "Ring-A-Ding-Ding!" in 1961 and for the next 20 years,
Sinatra recorded more than 30 albums for Reprise. By this time, his
voice had hardened and coarsened. Except for "Francis Albert Sinatra and
Antonio Carlos Jobim," a remarkable 1967 collaboration with the
Brazilian songwriter, guitarist and singer in which he sang very softly,
his ballad singing tended toward the stentorian, often with a noticeable
edge of macho toughness. The coarsening of his voice, however, helped
give his singing an extra rhythmic punch.

Increasingly, his albums had a self-consciously retrospective air. "I
Remember Tommy ..." (1961) looked back to his days with the Dorsey band.

"Sinatra's Sinatra" (1963) consisted entirely of newly recorded Sinatra
favorites.

His 50th birthday in 1965 was celebrated with the release of two
deliberately monumental albums, "September of My Years" and "A Man and
His Music," an anthology of his career that he narrated and sang.
"September of My Years," whose title anthem of middle-aged nostalgia was
custom-written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen and arranged by Gordon
Jenkins, won Grammys for album of the year and best male vocal
performance. Sinatra scored a double triumph in 1966 when "A Man and His
Music" was voted album of the year, and "Strangers in the Night," his
first No. 1 single in 11 years, won record of the year. The string of
hits continued with a Top 5 hit, "That's Life" (1966), and "Something
Stupid" (1967), a duet with his daughter Nancy.

In 1969 he had a substantial hit with "My Way," an adaptation of a
French ballad, "Mon Habitude," by Claude Francois, Jacques Revaux and
Giles Thibaut, with English lyrics by Paul Anka. Along with "New York,
New York," which he recorded for a three-disk set, "Trilogy: Past,
Present, Future" (1980), it became one of the signature songs of his
later years.

The moment when Sinatra and his style of music seemed the least
fashionable was in the late 1960s, when the youthful rock counterculture
dominated popular music. Sinatra was no fan of rock-and-roll, having
once dismissed it as music "sung, played and written for the most part
by cretinous goons."

He did make tentative efforts to adapt to changing styles, trying his
hand at songs by Jim Croce, Jimmy Webb, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, John
Denver, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Peter Allen, Billy
Joel and the Beatles, among others. But even singing soft rock, he never
sounded entirely comfortable.

His surprise marriage in 1966 to the actress Mia Farrow, then 20 (and 30
years his junior), seemed in part to be a search for a youthful
connection. They were divorced in 1968.

Retirement? For Good? Doing That His Way

As a film actor, Sinatra continued to work steadily through the 1960s.
Besides his Rat Pack jaunts, his films included "Come Blow Your Horn"
(1963), "Von Ryan's Express" (1965), "Tony Rome" (1967), "The Detective"
(1968) and "Dirty Dingus Magee" (1970).

In June 1971, Sinatra announced his retirement during a gala concert at
the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, but it lasted only two
years. He returned with the album "Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back," the title of
which gave him his last show business nickname.

In 1976 he married for the fourth time, to Barbara Blakely Marx, who had
been married to Zeppo Marx. She survives him, as do his daughters, his
son and two grandchildren.

His recordings and films became less frequent. In 1980, after a six-year
hiatus, he released "Trilogy: Past, Present, Future," a concept album in
which a Gordon Jenkins oratorio imagined the singer as an intergalactic
traveler. It was followed by the moody "She Shot Me Down" (1981) and the
jazzy "L.A. Is My Lady" (1984).

Sinatra returned to film in 1977 with a television movie, "Contract on
Cherry Street," which was poorly received, as was his last major
Hollywood role, as an aging detective in "The First Deadly Sin" (1980).
In 1984, he briefly appeared as himself in "Cannonball Run 2." For his
75th birthday in 1990, Capitol and Reprise each released extensive,
elaborately packaged Sinatra retrospectives. Columbia had released a
six-disk anthology four years earlier.

Sinatra worked vigorously for the 1980 Presidential campaign of his
close friend Ronald Reagan, and produced and directed a three-hour
inaugural gala that was shown in an edited form on television in 1981.
In 1985 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's
highest civilian award.

Even after he stopped making records and movies, Sinatra continued to
give concerts. In the early 1980's, he was paid $2 million for four
concerts in Argentina and $2 million for nine concerts in Sun City,
South Africa. Sun City appearances by Sinatra, who had always supported
civil rights causes, drew sharp criticism from anti-apartheid groups.

In 1982, he signed a $16 million three-year contract with the Golden
Nugget Hotel in Atlantic City. In 1988 and 1989, Sinatra was still
listed in Forbes magazine as among the 40 richest entertainers, with an
annual income estimated at $14 million in 1989 and $12 million in 1988.
But when he was required to submit a financial statement to the Nevada
Gaming Commission for a renewal of his gambling license in 1981, he
claimed a surprisingly modest net worth of just over $14 million.

Sinatra's life was rocked in 1986 by the publication of "His Way," Kitty
Kelley's best-selling unauthorized biography, which focused on his
volatile personality, his personal feuds, his streak of violence and his
relbest-selling unauthorized biography, which focused on his volatile
personality, his personal feuds, his streak of violence and his
relationships

The Concert Giver and Singer of Solo Duets

He toured the world in 1989 with Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli in a
concert package billed as "the ultimate event." It was one of the
grander events in a rigorous touring schedule that he maintained into
his late 70s. He toured with Shirley MacLaine in 1992. Increasingly,
during his performances in later years, he resorted to using electronic
prompters at the front of the stage to read lyrics.

In 1993, at the age of 77, Sinatra had an astounding recording-career
comeback with "Frank Sinatra Duets," a collection of 13 Sinatra
standards rerecorded with such pop stars as Barbra Streisand, Tony
Bennett, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross and Bono of the Irish rock
group U2. The record was widely criticized for being an engineering
stunt, since none of the guest singers were actually in the recording
studio with Sinatra, who recorded his parts separately. The record
nevertheless sold over two million copies in the United States. A year
later, there was a weaker follow-up using a different roster of guests.

Sinatra's last concert was on Feb. 25, 1995, at the Palm Desert Marriott
Ballroom in Palm Desert, Calif.

Assessing his own abilities in 1963, Sinatra sounded a note that was
quintessentially characteristic: forlorn and tough. "Being an 18-karat
manic-depressive, and having lived a life of violent emotional
contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as
elation," he said.

"Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I
sing, I believe, I'm honest."