Frank: The Voice

ALSO BY JAMES KAPLAN

Dean & Me

(co-written with Jerry Lewis)

You Cannot Be Serious

(co-written with John McEnroe)

Two Guys from Verona

Copyright © 2010 by James Kaplan

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY
and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kaplan, James, 1951–
Frank : the voice/by James Kaplan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Sinatra, Frank, 1915–1998. 2. Singers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
ML420.S565K35 2010
782.42164092—dc22
[B]        2009031046

eISBN: 978-0-385-53364-5

v3.1

FOR MY MOTHER

What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music … And men crowd about the poet and say to him: “Sing for us soon again”; that is as much as to say: “May new sufferings torment your soul.”

—Kierkegaard,
Either/Or

Just because you asked for your contract back, there’s no reason why you should get it. We don’t do business that way. I don’t know who has been putting these ideas into your head or where you’re getting them from. They don’t sound like Sinatra … I had an operation, it took a lot out of me, I’ve had family difficulties of which you’re well aware. But nothing has hurt me as much as the wire I received from you. Don’t friendship and sincerity mean anything to you? Or is it that, when you make up your mind to do something, that’s the way it has to be? I’m telling you, I’ve seen it happen and so have you.
If this is the attitude you want to adopt, it’s got to hit you—you just can’t get away with it; life itself won’t permit it
[italics mine]. Love, Manie.

—August 1945 letter to Sinatra from his close friend Emanuel Sacks, manager of popular repertoire at Columbia Records

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

—Francis Bacon