by LUDOVIC HUNTER-TILNEY
Frank Sinatra PHOTO/Huffington Post
A century on from his birth, the musical gifts of the singer loom as large as they ever did. But the mythology surrounding his life is starting to wear thin
Sinatra: The Chairman, by James Kaplan, Sphere, RRP£30/Doubleday, RRP$35, 992 pages
Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, by David Lehman, Harper, RRP£16.99/Doubleday, RRP$24.99, 288 pages
Frank & Ava: In Love and War, by John Brady, Thomas Dunne Books, RRP$26.99, 304 pages
Hucksterism fuelled Frank Sinatra’s fame. In 1942, when he stopped being the “boy singer” for a jazz big band, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, and went solo, his New York publicist George Evans pulled every trick in the book to promote him. He devised a catchy nickname, “the Voice”, and fanned the flames of “Swoonatra” mania by coaching girls (“Sinatratics”) to scream at shows. When the singer went to California in 1943 to launch a movie career he was greeted at the railway station by thousands of young “bobby-soxer” fans. They had been corralled by Evans, too.
Success turned Sinatra into a publicist’s nightmare, a womanising, hair-trigger-tempered, Mafia-connected magnet for trouble. Poor Evans died of a heart attack in 1950 at the age of 48, reputedly after quarrelling with a reporter about Sinatra the night before. But the hyperbole continued unabated.
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