THIS AMERICAN LIFE PRESENTS....Stories, tributes, and attempts to understand the Chairman of the Board....
Stallworth
Stories, tributes, and attempts to understand the Chairman of the Board.
Prologue.
Host Ira Glass, with a recording of a 1962 Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and
Sammy Davis Jr., appearance at the Villa Venice, a club outside Chicago.
What's fascinating about Sinatra is how he is so many different people at
once, and they're all on display in this recording: sentimental crooner,
cruel woman-baiter, bully, goofball. The part of the act with Sammy Davis,
Jr. is the oddest. Martin and Sinatra are constantly telling him to get off
the stage, and make joke after joke whose main point is simply that he's a
black man, onstage with two white men. Chicago writer Rennie Sparks makes
the case that Sinatra is mesmerizing because he's every man, every possible
man, all rolled into one. (7-1/2 minutes)
Act One. The Death of Frank Sinatra.
Michael Ventura, who grew up Sicilian in New York, says that as a kid he
thought Sinatra was in his family. His book The Death of Frank Sinatra is
not really about Sinatra. It's about men like Ventura, who drew part of
their style and sense of self from Frank. He reads from the only section in
the book where Sinatra actually appears: an account of a Sinatra concert,
circa 1994. He says he wanted to write about the older Sinatra because the
older Sinatra contains all the ages of Sinatra. All of them come forward
when he sings. (12 minutes)
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=54
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