Review by New York Times Review
The first volume of a new Frank Sinatra biography charts his rise, fall and comeback. ELVIS PRESLEY, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, Judy Garland, Jack Kerouac: these and other giants of popular culture were long ago explored to death, yet biographers keep struggling to give the old stories a new spin. With most of the eyewitnesses gone, however, and the tattered clippings picked dry, writers are left to "reinterpret" the facts, leaning heavily on imagination. Many of their books enter a gray zone of shady credibility. In 1947, when Frank Sinatra was only 32, the New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn Jr. wrote the first book about him, "The Voice: The Story of an American Phenomenon." Kahn quotes a journalist who said foreknowingly, "Perhaps Frankie is more important a symbol than most of us are aware." Since then, dozens more authors have tried to crack the mystique of a star who barely made a move that wouldn't be deemed historic. Aside from revolutionizing the art of popular singing - which he took from strident and bravura to the most nuanced form of storytelling - Sinatra redefined prevailing notions of masculinity. His balance of tough, tender and cool made him the heterosexual male's ultimate role model. For women, he was the ideal: a sensitive man's man. His life is a biographer's field day. Among its details are a Hoboken upbringing with an abortionist mother; the hard-scrabble but exciting swing era, which ignited his career; his ascent to superstardom in the war years, when he awakened the lust in countless screaming girls; the youthful marriage (to the long-suffering homebody Nancy Barbato) that was torn asunder by Ava Gardner, over whom he attempted suicide. Mafia ties, arrests and other scandals kept his hands dirty for years. For an author to tackle this epic again would require, at the very least, a lot of nerve. And nerve is everywhere in the newest effort by James Kaplan, co-author of memoirs by John McEnroe ("You Cannot Be Serious") and Jerry Lewis ("Dean and Me"). "Frank: The Voice" takes more than 700 pages to tell half the story: that of Sinatra's rise, his late-1940s career crash and his phoenix-like rebirth in 1954, when he claimed an Oscar for best supporting actor in "From Here to Eternity." (Kaplan is now at work on Volume 2.) There's scarcely a fresh tidbit here; the source notes list fewer than 20 original interviews, while the bibliography contains about 125 books. But "Frank: The Voice" is more about the voice of its author, who sets out to view the familiar tale through a lens like none other. His goal, the publisher says, is to "make . . . the reader feel what it was really like to be Frank Sinatra." The tools he uses are questionable. They include relentless psychoanalyzing and mind reading, even to the point of putting words in his subjects' brains. (From the onetime Sinatra rival Eddie Fisher, who apparently wasn't interviewed for the book, Kaplan clairvoyantly draws the following: "Remember me. I used to be huge.") The author becomes a fly on the wall of ages-old bedrooms, boardrooms and verandas, observing and overhearing things no one ever reported. The good news is that Kaplan can tell a story. His passion for Sinatra keeps the narrative flowing; he's equally fascinated by his subject's seamy and artistic sides; and he evokes period atmosphere well. While adding nothing new to our understanding of Sinatra's singing, he offers a fair synthesis of whai's already been said. But the biographical content has grown hoary through overtelling, and Kaplan strains to pump new life into it. He tarts up his lines with profanities and Sinatra-like snarling: "He made good and goddamn sure that he understood the words to every song he sang." Kaplan grasps for pulp-novel intrigue: Los Angeles in 1947, he says, is "a city rife with decadence, moral ambiguity, drug use, racial tension and police corruption." Clichés pile into the hundreds; hyperbole flies. Of Sinatra's first big break, as Harry James's vocalist, Kaplan writes: "The singer was a genius, the trumpeter-leader a kind of genius. The band was terrific." Sometimes an eloquent passage pops out of nowhere, like his assessment of Bing Crosby's vocal breakthroughs, which laid the foundation ior Sinatra's style. "Under the old show-business conventions," Kaplan writes, "a certain remove from the audience, in the form of 'classiness,' as exemplified by heightened diction, was a quality to be cultivated. Bing Crosby caplured America's heart as no entertainer had ever done before by removing the remove, by seeming the most common of men." But such insights seem inspired by a book he calls "superb," Gary Giddins's mammoth biography, "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903-1940." And Kaplan's reliability is no match for Giddins's. Kaplan notes that Sinatra rumors would keep gurgling up "like malodorous bubbles in a swamp," yet the whiff of the apocryphal rises often from these pages. Telling of Sinatra's trip to Havana in 1947, he drops this uncredited teaser: "There was even allegedly an orgy in his suite - 12 naked women, a number of gangsters, plenty of alcohol." Three pages later, rumor becomes truth: "On Feb. 14, the day an orgy unfortunately detained him in Havana. . . ." Semifictionalizing is a standard device in celebrity bios, and it happens here in every chapter. Kaplan recalls Sinatra's youthful stint as a singing waiter in a New Jersey nightspot, the Rustic Cabin: "The place oozed sex, and Frankie, showing the giggly couples to their booths in his waiter's outfit, felt horny just being there. It showed in his voice." He takes us into bed with Frank and Ava for a love scene worthy of a Harlequin romance: "They lay together quietly. . . . With the wind swishing through the pines, it seemed they could hear the earth turning. . . . She got up on one elbow and looked down at him, her hair falling over one eye." The author's own enrapturement with his subject can take amusing forms. Sinatra's "extraordinary endowment," as he puts it, moves Kaplan - a husband and father of three - to rhapsodize for over a page. Elsewhere, he marvels at Sinatra's "voluptuously beautiful" mouth and "extravagantly sensual lower lip." If nothing else, "Frank: The Voice" helps prove that a dozen years after his death, Sinatra is still setting both sexes aflame. No book has done eqtial justice to the personal, historical and musical depth of his story, but several deliver in their own ways. For sheer dish, nothing can top Kitty Kelley's "His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra." If some of her sources were dubious, Kelley's intentions never were: she bulldozed her way through his messy life, without feigning a shred of interest in his art. George Jacobs, his longtime valet, offered a true insider's view in the frequently hilarious "Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra." Will Friedwald's "Sinatra! The Song fs You: A Singer's Art" boasts interviews with numerous musicians who recorded with the star. For the recent "Sinatra in Hollywood," Tom Santopietro pored over his subject's film work and found subtleties that no other author had. Those who know little of Sinatra's history probably won't care where Kaplan got his material; they may not even mind his shameless flights of fancy. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," he writes. His book made me wonder: should fantasy figures like Sinatra be fair game for this biopic approach to the truth? Any responsible biographer, I think, would have to answer no. James Gavin's most recent book is "Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne." Sinatra was the heterosexual male's ultimate role model; for women, he was the ideal: a sensitive man's man.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 7, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Like Gary Giddins' masterful Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams (2001), Kaplan's fascinating account of Frank Sinatra from his birth in 1915 through 1954, when he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity, encompasses far more than the early life of a singing star. Giddins told the story of how Crosby invented popular singing, and Kaplan shows how Sinatra built on what Bing created a vocal style based on intimacy and naturalness by adding a unique blend of vulnerability and swagger ( Nobody got his personality into a song like Sinatra ) that produced our first teen idol, a precursor to both Elvis and the Beatles. But where Crosby was cool, Sinatra was volcanic ( the overaggressive, loud-talking bantamweight who snarls to hide his terror ), and that tempestuousness made his personal life a gossip columnist's dream. Kaplan tracks it all, separating truth from hyperbole and supplying astute psychological analysis: Sinatra's relationship with bandleader Tommy Dorsey (not quite as portrayed in The Godfather); his horrendous career slump in the late 1940s and early 1950s, only reversed by landing the role in Eternity; the crazed womanizing; and, of course, the passionate but doomed love affair with Ava Gardner, a star who burned as bright, drank as hard, and fought her perceived inadequacy every bit as violently as Sinatra. Kaplan vividly transforms the Sinatra-Gardner romance into something between a heavyweight championship bout and a tragedy of operatic proportions, something so much grander than the comparatively mundane couplings of the Brads and Angelinas who pass as stars today. For anyone who wants to know what popular culture and celebrity felt like around the middle of the twentieth century, this book is the new bible.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this riveting and fast-paced biography, Kaplan, coauthor with Jerry Lewis of Dean and Me, chronicles Sinatra's somewhat unlikely meteoric ascent to success, his failures, and his rebirth as a star of song and screen. With exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, detail, Kaplan engagingly re-creates the young Sinatra's childhood in Hoboken, N.J., where young Frank was born, in 1915. By the time he was 12, Sinatra was singing for quarters on top of the piano in the bar in his father's tavern. At 21, Frankie joined a group that became known as the Hoboken Four, and everyone soon recognized Sinatra's great vocal gift. Kaplan expertly conducts us on a journey through Sinatra's early years with Tommy Dorsey and his long solo career; Sinatra's first marriage to Nancy Barbato and his more famous marriage to Ava Gardner; and through Sinatra's movie career and his rebirth in the early 1950s. Although Sinatra's career often faltered in the late 1940s, his partnership with Nelson Riddle and the release of the song "Young at Heart" in 1953 began Sinatra's comeback. Kaplan's enthralling tale of an American icon serves as an introduction of "old blue eyes" to a new generation of listeners while winning the hearts of Sinatra's diehard fans. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Singer and pop icon Frank Sinatra is hardly a neglected personage. While novelist and celebrity coauthor Kaplan (Dean & Me, with Jerry Lewis; You Cannot Be Serious, with John McEnroe) clearly respects Sinatra's enormous talent, the hagiographic tone common in Sinatra books is absent here, though he is not as negative as Anthony Summers and Robyn Swan (Sinatra: The Life). Kaplan covers Sinatra's life from his birth in 1915 until the resurrection of his career in 1954 (when he won an Oscar for his role as Maggio in From Here to Eternity). His youth, persistence in pursuing a singing career, relationships with women, work with bandleader Tommy Dorsey, the controversial reversal of his draft status during World War II, and relationships with musicians and mafiosi are all presented with panache and clarity. VERDICT While this book may be the fullest account of Sinatra's first 40 years, libraries will want to have other books-perhaps Richard Havers's Sinatra-for covering his career and more in-depth analysis of his music and films.-Bruce R. Schueneman, Texas A&M Univ. Lib., Kingsville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
For better and worse, this ambitiously epic biography of Frank Sinatra (19151998) reads like a movie biopic.Over the course of nearly 700 pages, biographer Kaplan (co-author, with Jerry Lewis: Dean and Me, 2005, etc.) brings his subject up to 1954, when his Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity revived a career that had been on the skids (with the likes of Eddie Fisher and Perry Como far exceeding his popularity). So, is there anything new to say about 'Ol Blue Eyes? Not really, as the author draws heavily fromand frequently provides commentary onmany previous Sinatra biographies, as well as those of other crucial figures in his life, including Ava Gardner, Lana Turner et al. The distinguishing features of Kaplan's narrative are its psychological focus on the domineering mother who shaped the singer's psyche and its attempt to craft a literary style that echoes Sinatra's. Thus the author describes Gardner in her first encounter with Sinatra as "curvy, fleshy in just the right places" and later as "a sexual volcano [who] ruled him in bed." The inscrutable smile of Nancy Sinatra, the singer's first wife, "reminded him of that chick in the painting by da Vinci." His response to the passing of FDR: "death was such a strange thing: it gave him the creeps." And his reaction to the playback of "I've Got the World on a String," his revitalizing triumph with arranger Nelson Riddle: "'Jesus Christ,' he breathed, almost prayerfully, his eyes wide and blazing. "I'm back! I'm back, baby, I'm back!' " Whether readers find that such stylistic flair enhances the narrative or compromises its credibility, Kaplan humanizes his subject, illuminating both the insecure man and the artistic genius.Ring-a-ding-ding!]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.