The tender crooner and his flip side

He was the best of guys, he was the worst of guys; he was vastly generous, he was frighteningly violent; he loved intensely, he was casual in sex; he was poor, he was rich; he was a Democrat, he was a Republican; he was broke, he was rich again. He championed racial equality, he made crude racial jokes, he courted presidents, he was enamored of the Mob. He sang like a hip angel, and if it weren’t for his voice none of that would matter. Frank Sinatra sang like no one ever has or will.

His elocution and diction, the way he enunciated every word and let it stand on its own, made him Henry Higgins with a cocked hat, a raincoat over his shoulder and a drink in his hand. (An example: the staccato syncopation of “Fly me to the Moon / And let me play a-mong the stars/ Let me see what spring is like/ On Ju-pi-ter and Mars.”) He learned to sing, he said, by studying how Tommy Dorsey played the trombone and Jascha Heifetz played the violin. He saw that Dorsey drew out a musical phrase, prolonging the melodious mood, without seeming to take a breath. He reasoned that a singer who could do that would minimize the interruptions of a song’s lyrics, and in vain watched Dorsey’s back to see when he took in air: “I’d swear the sonofabitch was not breathing. I couldn’t even see his jacket move.... I thought, he’s gotta be breathing someplace -- through the ears?” Watching Heifetz confirmed the importance of breath control. “Every time he came down with the bow, there was hardly any perception at all that it was going back up again.... You never heard a break.... It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or a violin.”

His secret weapon, he discovered early, “wasn’t my voice. It was the microphone.” The stars when Sinatra began, in the early 1930s, were Rudy Vallee and especially Bing Crosby, who was as popular as Elvis, the Beatles and 50 Cent rolled into one. The only way until the late 1920s to boost a voice was to use a megaphone. Sinatra did at first, but it brought only humiliation. (“Guys would throw pennies into it to see if they could get me to swallow them. Lots of fun.”) Following Crosby’s lead, he perfected the use of the microphone, favoring a black one that blended with his dinner jacket, the better to turn amplification into intimacy. “You can sing as if you’re singing in someone’s ear,” he said. “You can talk to a buddy at the bar, you can whisper sweet nothings to a woman.” The women who thought he was whispering to them numbered in the millions and accounted for his initial success. Some people saw microphones as a kind of deception, but not Sinatra (nor E.B. White, who wrote, “To Sinatra, a microphone is as real as a girl waiting to be kissed”).

In “Sinatra,” Anthony Summers (author of “Goddess,” on Marilyn Monroe, and “Official and Confidential,” on J. Edgar Hoover) and his wife, Robbyn Swan, have added FBI surveillance documents and a never-before-published interview with Sinatra’s second wife, Ava Gardner -- their passionate relationship, inflamed by alcohol, was obsessively destructive -- to a mountain of information garnered from some 300 books cited in the endnotes and more than 500 interviews, and have given us perhaps not the definitive “Life,” as suggested in the subtitle but at least a fascinating account of the man who made popular music an art form.

Especially captivating is the story of his Italian immigrant roots and the hardscrabble lives of his tough parents -- Marty, a firefighter, and Dolly, who became a Democratic ward leader in Hoboken, N.J., and quickly learned the ropes of patronage and how to deal with the local pols and gangsters. Frank, born Dec. 12, 1915, was their only child, his name an Americanization in honor of his paternal grandfather, Francesco. The seeds of violence were planted early and deep; as a youth, Frank never lived up to his parents’ high expectations and suffered beatings at the hands of both of them for his failures. Frank’s relationship with the volatile Dolly was in some ways Ava redux: Dolly loathed California, but after Marty’s death in 1969 she moved next door to Frank in Palm Springs, only to continually pick fights with him.

Like his records, Sinatra had two sides. There could be no one more generous. Among many kindnesses, he paid cabaret singer Mabel Mercer’s bills when she was old and penniless, took care of hospital costs for friends such as Peggy Lee, Billie Holiday, boxer Joe Louis and drummer Buddy Rich, and raised or gave millions for children’s hospitals and a wide variety of charities. On the flip side, he delighted in beating up his enemies (or sending others to do it) and, at least in the case of columnist Lee Mortimer, for whom he held a special animus, urinating on their graves. The index has 26 lines listing some 80 pages on “violence of Sinatra,” and more pages for “Mafia, FS’s links with.” Together, the two about equal the space given to “singing of Sinatra,” which one might think deserves more.

What makes Sinatra special is the voice: how he sang so magically and with such conviction. “Somewhere within him, Frank Sinatra aches,” the music critic Gene Lees wrote in a perceptive story on Sinatra in 1967. “Fine. That’s the way it’s always been; the audience’s pleasure derives from the artist’s pain.” We learn too little from Summers and Swan of what went into (to randomly name a few classics) “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “September Song,” “Nancy (With the Laughing Face),” “All or Nothing at All,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” or “I Get a Kick Out of You.” (Of “Strangers in the Night,” we are told that he once announced to an audience, “If you like that song, you must be crazy about pineapple yoghurt.”)

These days, though, artistry doesn’t make for as gripping a read as heavy drinking (the Jack Daniel’s company dedicated an acre of land at its Lynchburg, Tenn., headquarters to him; most of their honorees get a square foot), fistfights, packing a pistol and associating with mobsters. However, it must be admitted that the authors’ account of a 1947 sojourn in Havana during which Frank caroused with Lucky Luciano and held an orgy with “too much booze and twelve naked women” in his own hotel suite, attended by, among others, Al Capone’s brother Ralph and interrupted by a nun-chaperoned delegation of Cuban Girl Scouts (a pilgrimage cut short when “four naked bodies catapulted into the living room”), while gross, is surreally hilarious.

The loyalty of his childhood sweetheart and first wife, Nancy, mother of his children, Nancy, Frank Jr. and Tina, is touching; she clearly was the most hearth-and-home of the women in his life -- but, alas, when people treat you like a god and you believe it (“He acted like he was God,” more than one person said of him), hearth and home are not often what’s wanted. At his funeral in 1998 Barbara Blakely Marx, his fourth wife, sat with the children; immediately behind them -- as, figuratively, she had always been -- was Nancy.

But all this is mere commentary. His mentor Dorsey once remarked that Sinatra “sang a song like he believed every word of the lyrics.” Sinatra would have agreed. “Whatever else has been said about me is unimportant,” he told an interviewer in mid-career. “When I sing, I believe I’m honest.”