Video Age International November-December 2015

8 Book Review December 2015 V I D E O A G E I knew very little about Frank Sinatra when I picked up J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Sinatra: Behind the Legend (Grand Central Publishing, 2015, 588 pgs., $17.99). I knew that he was a member of the Rat Pack — a group of actors and singers with a reputation for womanizing and binge-drinking — along with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., that he may or may not have fathered Mia Farrow’s son, Ronan, and that he had a daughter, Nancy Jr., whose boots were made for walking (as it said in the chorus to her only hit single). But after completing this nearly 600-page doorstop of a biography, I learned one other very important thing about the New Jersey crooner they called Ol’ Blue Eyes: He was a horrible person. An egomaniac who drove not just one, but two women (ex-wives Nancy Sinatra and Ava Gardner) to abort his children, fearing for his further involvement in their lives, Sinatra was also a hotel room-trashing, telephone-throwing, mafia- idolizing serial adulterer who once accidentally shot a man while out joyriding and gun-shooting with onetime-paramour Gardner. (How that particular incident wasn’t bigger news is nearly incomprehensible in today’s Twitter-happy era). Strangely, the book doesn’t mention the confrontation Sinatra had with Mario Puzo in 1970 about the Johnny Fontane character in Puzo’s The Godfather , who Sinatra suspected was based on his relationship with the Mafia. Similarly, the author doesn’t report that Sinatra introduced one of his lovers, Judith Campbell Exner, to both John F. Kennedy and mobster Sam Giancana. Taraborrelli initially released Sinatra in 1997— just six months before the singer’s death in May 1998 — after six years of research and more than 425 interviews with friends, family members, former lovers and associates of the man who rose from Hoboken, New Jersey obscurity to Rat Pack fame. But following the book’s release, many more people in Sinatra’s life came out of the woodwork wanting to fill in gaps in the storytelling — including Sinatra’s longtime valet, George Jacobs, who Taraborrelli would go on to interview three times. It therefore seemed wise to update and eventually reissue the text. And it’s a good thing he did. Taraborrelli’s newly revised edition seems to somehow cover every single second of Sinatra’s existence, from the moment he was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Italian immigrant parents Marty and Dolly Sinatra in 1915 to his death in 1998 following a heart attack. Taraborrelli even manages to stick with his subject beyond death, by doing what most authors (heck, most people) would never do — crashing Sinatra’s funeral, and managing to make it read less sleazy than it sounds. The book is long, but it’s a page-turner, documenting Sinatra’s relationships with his many ladyloves; including four wives: Nancy Sinatra, Sr. (the mother of his three kids, Nancy Jr., Frank Jr. and Tina), Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow and Barbara Marx, as well as stormy unions with starlets Lana Turner, MarilynMonroe and Lauren “Betty” Bacall. According to Taraborrelli, Sinatra was happy to sleep with anything female that moved, but was too chicken to break up with his ladies in person. He sometimes used an intermediary. Other times, he simply stopped talking to them, as was the case with former fiancée Bacall. “One moment he was there, making love to Betty, confiding in her, sharing his life with her and being essential to her support system in grief [following the death of her husband and Sinatra pal Humphrey Bogart],” writes Taraborrelli. “Then the next he was gone, as if he’d never existed in her life, as if they’d never even met… Apparently he could turn off his feelings, just like that.” This sort of badbehaviorwas—unfortunately for the people in his life— fairly typical for him. When refused credit at the Sands casino in Las Vegas in 1967, he found the hotel’s telephone department, “and much to the horror of operators there, walked in and started pulling out all of the wires from the switchboard, thereby rendering service in the entire hotel inoperable,” writes Taraborrelli. Then he got behind the wheel of a golf cart and smashed into a plate-glass window. On another occasion, after Gardner told Sinatra she was leaving him for a Spanish bullfighter, “he proceeded to completely trash the room in which she was staying… First he threw the television set out the window. Then he shattered all of the crystal. He threw lamps against the walls, turned over tables, and hurled expensively framed photographs all about, sending shards of glass into the air like little missiles.” Taraborrelli quotes Phyllis McGuire of the singing trio The McGuire Sisters, “He got away with a lot because he was Frank Sinatra and people wanted to be in his world. But really, if you looked at it realistically, why would you ever want this man for a friend?’” You probably wouldn’t. But, in his defense, Sinatra might have actually had a real reason for his behavior, writes Taraborrelli. “In today’s world, Sinatra would likely be diagnosed as bipolar. However, the only diagnosis he ever actually received from a psychiatrist would be in the 1950s when Dr. Ralph Greenson — also Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist —would diagnose him as being manic-depressive. Beyond his sessions with Sinatra, Greenson did nothing else to treat him. He most certainly did not administer the kinds of strong medications he would later prescribe to Marilyn, drugs that many people in her life would feel led to her demise.” While Sinatra may have acted like an entitled, petulant child a lot of the time, he was unquestionably a great talent. Taraborrelli goes into painstaking detail to describe how hardworking and serious the singer/actor was about his career, constantly looking to become better at his craft. When he was still new to performing, he studied other, more established singers to learn how to properly breathe during a song. When he filmed Anchors Aweigh with Gene Kelly in 1944, he had to learn choreography. At first he felt it was beyond him, but he buckled down and learned all that Kelly was willing to teach him. Sinatra released more than 60 albums in his lifetime—recording such classic songs as “My Way,” “Strangers in the Night” and “The Lady is a Tramp”— and starred in more than 50 films, going on to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as a soldier on the eve of Pearl Harbor in 1953’s From Here to Eternity . (He was also nominated for Best Actor for 1955’s The Man with the Golden Arm .) But being a gifted performer doesn’t excuse his deplorable behavior. Sinatra may have been a hit- making superstar, but he was also a self-absorbed jerk whose volatile temper and crazy tantrums threatened to make the lives of everyone around him a living hell. To write this book, Taraborrelli set out to look Behind the Legend . What he found was a narcissist. LHR Sinatra Did Many Things His Way And Not All Were Nice, Legal or Moral