His Daughter's Way

My Father's Daughter
A Memoir
by Tina Sinatra with Jeff Coplon
Simon & Schuster, 313 pp., $ 26

Frank Sinatra is too much with us, judging from the latest spate of books about him and his music. In Bill Zehme's The Way You Wear Your Hat, we learn that by the time Frank Sinatra was thirty, the singer owned three private jets, drank a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, and had given away hundreds of pinkie rings, watches, cuff links, and fifty thousand dollars' in gold cigarette lighters. J. Randy Taraborrelli's Sinatra: A Complete Life counts the number of Frank's facelifts and toupees.

Shawn Levy's Rat Pack Confidential is smart and lively, in spite of its obsessiveness. At one point Levy relates every aspect of the Vegas nightclub act with eerie, claustrophobic accuracy. John Lahr's Sinatra: The Artist and the Man is an eloquent and insightful distillation of the man's life. But the facts, so familiar from so many other books, weigh down the discussion. Yet Lahr does fresh things with them. Writing of Sinatra's self-consciousness about his New Jersey accent, Lahr notes that when he sang,

He didn't just sing a song; he made it his own. He brought a special urgency to his proprietorship. . . . Once he was inside the lyric, he had command of the language that he found paralyzing elsewhere. When he opened his mouth in song, he was calm; he was smooth; he was sensitive; he had no hint of the Hoboken streets in his pronunciation; what he called his 'Sicilian temper' was filtered through the charm of lyrics and music into poetic passion.

His first wife, Nancy Sinatra Sr., told Lahr that "the facade of being macho and strong grew as his career grew. He became part of that image. He was never quite that at all, believe me." And daughter Tina Sinatra said to Lahr, "Underneath there is something quite -- I don't want to say 'sensitive,' because that's an understatement -- underneath there is a delicate, fragile boy." This is the part that Tina tries to capture in her new memoir -- not to apologize for her father or to feminize him, but to explain him.

Tina's My Father's Daughter is certainly the work of a grieving daughter. It has scores to settle, mainly with a detested stepmother, but the book is more of an outcry than a diatribe. And it has the unsettling ring of truth to it. This is not simply the Sinatra of swagger and danger, but neither is it the devotional portrait that daughter Nancy presented in her two books. Tina gets under her father's skin, writing about the years when he was old and debilitated as well as the years when he was young and terrifyingly successful.

The result is a humanizing picture of someone who was the king of show business -- almost, it sometimes seemed, king of the world. There was the sheer breadth and scope of his career. William B. Williams, disc jockey at WNEW, the flagship Sinatra station in New York, called him "the most imitated, most listened to, most recognized voice of the second half of the twentieth century." Kings and queens, presidents, dozens of beautiful movie stars from Ava Gardner to Marilyn Monroe to Lauren Bacall to Lana Turner, and countless artists and writers adored him. He appeared in 60 films, was omnipresent on records (between 1958 and 1966 he had twenty Top Ten albums), in film and television, in night clubs, concert halls, and sports arenas. For fifty years he was at the top of the heap. And it was all deserved. Hearing his voice could be a revelation as powerful as any experience of high art. It was like spring water to the spirit.

By 1941 he was Billboard's best male vocalist of the year, and in 1943 his singing created pandemonium among the teenagers at Manhattan's Paramount. His weekly salary went from seven hundred and fifty dollars to twenty-five thousand. Arnold Shaw, an early biographer, wrote that "Girls hid in his dressing rooms, in his hotel rooms, in the trunk of his car." But only a few years later, Sinatra was a has-been. He had alienated his fans by his extramarital affairs, leaving his wife Nancy and marrying Ava Gardner in 1951 and allowing himself to be seen and photographed with wise guys. Suddenly he was down and out. He lost his agent, his Columbia recording contract, and his MGM movie contract. No one would hire him. "People scattered like a bomb had hit," singer Jimmy Roselli said in an interview.

But then the resilient Sinatra made his comeback. In 1953 he had his first acting triumph in From Here to Eternity, for which he received an Academy Award. He had also found a brilliant arranger in Nelson Riddle at Capitol, who brought out the cosmopolitan swagger and virility, the ability to swing up-tempo or express the most vulnerable romantic longing in ballads. He had elevated popular song into an art, and himself into the most haunting singer of all time.

Such was the span of his career that he campaigned for FDR, produced JFK's inaugural gala in 1961, and sang at the inaugural gala of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. "May you live to be one hundred and may the last voice you hear be mine," he would toast to his audiences. Although he stayed on the very top through the mid-1990s, the voice began to give way long before. When, in the 1970s, he made another one of his comebacks for "The Main Event" at Madison Square Garden, his voice sounded thin and coarse. (Some of the songs on the recording of the event were actually re-recorded for the album, technically enhanced.) How did he keep his hold on his audience? Sometimes it was pure ego and chutzpah, and sometimes it was his singular talent for intonation, phrasing, acting, and artistry.

Though the drinking, smoking, screwing around, and insomnia took their toll, even in his later years Sinatra appeared to have something in reserve. In concert his voice grew strong in the later songs, slowly building to do wondrous things. On the last video about his life, The Best Is Yet To Come, Sinatra's voice was a croak in many of the concert snippets. But in a 1984 recording session with Quincy Jones, Sinatra gave one of the greatest performances ever in his rendition of "Mack the Knife," which he reinvented by paying tribute to other singers who gave it life: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bobby Darin. In the video, a seemingly reborn Sinatra gives it a whole new swing as the camera swings to arranger Quincy Jones jumping up and down with excitement.

He was always a creature of extremes. He was sometimes a thug, for example, trying to protect his image by pulverizing his critics. It was unnecessary. What mattered was the talent. But he had other qualities. He was an unceasing battler against racial injustice and anti-Semitism from early on; he was endlessly, extravagantly, and often anonymously generous toward those in great need. In everything, he went the extra mile.

And then he turned mortal. In the final years Sinatra was often walked or carried around the stage by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. There was almost no voice left. He forgot lyrics; he couldn't see the teleprompter; he had two hearing aids. In 1994 he collapsed during a concert in Richmond, Virginia, hitting the stage with a thud. Frank Jr., who was conducting the orchestra, ran to his father, crying out, "He's alive." Sinatra gave his final performance in 1995, and soon after that, he began a final physical decline. He was haunted by the deaths of so many of his peers: Dean, Sammy, Ella, Duke Ellington, Count Basie -- the list went on and on. When told in 1992 that his longtime pal and bodyguard Jilly Rizzo had been killed in a car accident, he sank to his knees.

A photograph in Nancy Sinatra's Frank Sinatra, My Father shows Frank at twenty-four with his bride Nancy, standing on a Hoboken street in 1939. They look like kids barely out of high school. Nancy is pregnant, and politely covers her stomach by holding a large white hat with a ribbon over it. She is wearing a simple flowered dress; Frank wears a casually untucked open shirt that might have come from Klein's or J. C. Penney and a scruffy pair of white chinos. Behind them is a Hoboken street: the S&W Gold Exchange, a sign shop, a parking lot for fifteen cents an hour, the Wonder Bar, and "The New Hippodrome: Hats Cleaned and Blocked Like New; Suits Sponged While You Wait." The couple looks very happy; it is a picture of innocence. In 1951, after twelve years of marriage, Frank left her. For his daughter Tina, and perhaps for Sinatra himself, it was the mistake of his life.

Sinatra never resolved his tangled, impossible relationships with women. His mother Dolly looms large as a reason. John Lahr writes that "The public took Sinatra in with an affectionate avidity that he could never call forth from his mother." For Dolly "[He] could do no wrong and do no right," even though Frank provided her with a five-bedroom house in Rancho Mirage with a gardener, cook, three maids, and security guards. Frank married his mother, according to Tina, when he married Barbara Marx. Like Dolly, Barbara was never satisfied, no matter how many jewels and millions Frank tossed at her.

Meanwhile, Nancy Sr. waited for him, keeping jars of her spaghetti sauce in the refrigerator for whenever he came over, and delivering her egg-plant parmigian to him by a limousine service. Apparently, she did not always wait in vain. Tina suggests there were interludes of intimacy between Frank and Nancy for perhaps twenty years after their divorce. In Tina's telling, Nancy continued to love Frank, despite everything -- infidelity, divorce, and his other marriages. There was one thing she couldn't forgive. In 1978 Frank sought and received an annulment of his and Nancy's marriage before he went on to remarry Barbara in a Catholic ceremony.

But it is clear from Tina's book that even then, Nancy never stopped loving Frank. In 1983, Tina writes, Sinatra called his former wife, crying, and said "I never should have left you. I never should have left home." The most moving scene, however, came in 1994, when an elderly Sinatra was driven to Nancy's home, resolved to leave Barbara and begin anew with Nancy. But he remained in the car, unable to move. Tina records the many times her father expresses guilt about his life. "At bottom, my father didn't think he deserved to be happy."

Tina's account of the second decade of Sinatra's last marriage is a brief against her stepmother. She accuses Barbara of benign neglect, over-medicating her father, exacerbating his mental deterioration and confusion, isolating him from family and friends, manipulating him to gain more and more financial control, and ridiculing him as a "has-been." (Frank's mother also took a dim view of Barbara; when she first met her, writes Tina, she told Frank, "I don't want no whoo-er coming into this family.")

It is difficult to unravel all this, but certain scenes haunt the memory. Near the end, Tina succeeded in improving her father's medication regimen, and he was well enough to make his last appearance in a film she was producing in Toronto. She awaits his arrival there. "As the bus pulled up," she writes, "and Dad saw the sea of lights and people at our location, he started slapping on the window with both hands, shouting my name."

Then a heart attack further enfeebled Sinatra, now in a wheelchair, when he was eighty-one:

I joined him in his room. He looked so small and vulnerable lying there. I crept to his bedside and laid my head on his mattress. I just wanted to be close to him. I hadn't cried in front of Dad, and I didn't want to frighten him, but now I could not stop myself. I softly wept. Then I felt a hand on my head, stroking my hair. I looked up -- his eyes were open.

In the last year of his life, Sinatra could turn on the TV and watch the ceremony awarding him a Congressional Gold Medal. On his last birthday, he saw on TV the Empire State Building bathed in blue lights in his honor. And through his window, he looked up at the sky and saw a sky-written heart with the name, "Francis," in the middle of it -- an anonymous gift from a fan. The honors kept coming. But, although Barbara was around, he spent most of his time alone.

As Tina's memoir makes clear, Frank Sinatra was sometimes an absent father, but always a loving one. His was certainly not a gentle life, but in the words of Shakespeare's Antony, "the elements so mixed in him, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, 'This was a man.'"

David Evanier, novelist and screenwriter, is the author of Making the Wise Guys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli story.