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Frank Sinatra
1915–1998 · 83 years Tier II
Delivered with forceps at 13 pounds, and marked for life
He weighed 13 and a half pounds at birth and came out with forceps, which tore his left cheek and neck and permanently damaged his left eardrum. Cystic acne finished the face off in adolescence. His mother Dolly ran a tavern through Prohibition and a Democratic ward besides, dressed him better than any child in Hoboken, and, by his fourth wife's account, knocked him around. His father, an illiterate former bantamweight who made captain in the fire department, wanted him to become a civil engineer. Instead he was expelled from high school after 47 days for general rowdiness, lasted 11 months at business school, delivered newspapers, drove rivets in a shipyard, and sang in social clubs and on Jersey radio for nothing.
He came up through the band circuit with Harry James and then Tommy Dorsey, and by 1946 was earning as much as 93,000 dollars in a week and selling 10 million records a year. Then it stopped. By 1952 he was drawing 150 people into a 1,200-seat room in Chicago, had borrowed 200,000 dollars from his own label to pay back taxes, and had been dropped by both his record company and his agency. From Here to Eternity, released in August 1953, put him back, and the Academy Award confirmed it. What he did next is why he lasted. At Capitol, with Nelson Riddle arranging, he built albums that held a single mood from end to end rather than collecting singles, and in 1960 he started a label of his own to keep control of them.
His godfather was Willie Moretti, an underboss of the Genovese family, who helped him and took kickbacks for it. He was in Havana in 1946 when the mob met there, and the photographs of him beside Lucky Luciano followed him for life. In 1951 a Senate investigator interviewed him at four in the morning at the top of Rockefeller Center holding eight of them. Asked what was in the attaché case he carried off a plane in one, Sinatra said razors and crayons. The FBI kept 2,403 pages on him across five decades. The same man refused hotels that would not admit Black guests, pushed Nevada casinos to desegregate, and played a Carnegie Hall benefit for Martin Luther King in January 1961, then endorsed Reagan in 1970, Nixon in 1972, and gave four million dollars to the 1980 campaign.
The Empire State Building went blue the night after he died and the Las Vegas casinos stopped their wheels for a minute. He had died on May 14, 1998, at Cedars-Sinai, of a heart attack at 82, with his fourth wife at the bedside. His daughter Tina later wrote that she and her siblings were never told he had been hospitalized, and believed the omission deliberate. They buried him at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City beside his parents, in a blue suit and a red and blue tie for Genoa, his football club, under a stone reading The Best Is Yet to Come. The stone was damaged and replaced in 2021. It now says Sleep Warm, Poppa.
Lifespan
Frank Sinatra's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
The Voice of Frank Sinatra
album
His first album, and a number one on the Billboard chart 1946 -
From Here to Eternity
film
The comeback, and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor 1953 -
In the Wee Small Hours
album
His first 12-inch LP, arranged by Nelson Riddle 1955 -
Songs for Swingin' Lovers!
album
Often named the best record he made 1956 -
Reprise Records
company
Founded to keep control of his own recordings 1960 -
My Way
song
Not an instant hit, and now among the most requested songs at funerals 1969
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1931 aged ~16 Expelled from high school after 47 days for general rowdiness He then lasted 11 months at a business school to please his mother.
- 1935 aged ~20 Appears on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour with the Hoboken Four
- February 4, 1939 aged 23 Marries Nancy Barbato They had three children and divorced in 1951.
- 1946 aged ~31 Releases The Voice of Frank Sinatra and tops the chart He was earning up to 93,000 dollars a week and singing as many as 100 songs a day.
- March 1, 1951 aged 35 Questioned about the Mafia at four in the morning above Rockefeller Center The investigator had eight photographs. He learned nothing worth a subpoena.
- 1952 aged ~37 Columbia and MCA both drop him He had borrowed 200,000 dollars from Columbia to pay his back taxes.
- March 13, 1953 aged 37 Signs a seven-year contract with Capitol Records From Here to Eternity opened five months later.
- January 1977 aged 61 His mother dies in a plane crash on her way to see him perform He was playing Caesars Palace. He turned back to the Catholic Church afterward.
- May 14, 1998 aged 82 Dies of a heart attack at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles
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