The Voice' goes past scandals to get to the essence of Sinatra
HOBOKEN, N.J. — At Piccolos, in Frank Sinatra's hometown, the specialty is cheese steak and the soundtrack is all-Sinatra, all the time. The shrine-like back room is filled with photos and posters of the singer and movie star, young and thin, old and beefy.
But Sinatra himself, who died in 1998 at 82, is not in the framed newspaper page that draws a visitor's attention.
It shows the front of Piccolos in 1986, draped with a banner: "It's All Right Frank Sinatra. We Love You! That Book Lies."
That book was Kitty Kelley's sensational best seller His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra.
The visitor at Piccolos is James Kaplan, author of yet another Sinatra book, Frank: The Voice (Doubleday, $35), to be released Tuesday.
At first, Kaplan quips, "Maybe they should dust off that sign."
Then he adds, "I shouldn't say that. I wonder if I've written anything that will make people mad."
It's not as if Kaplan has ignored the Sinatra scandals: the incessant adultery and affairs, his palling around with gangsters, the fistfights or the fact that Dolly Sinatra, his mother, was not only a midwife but was arrested for performing abortions.
But after more than a dozen major biographies and scores of other Sinatra books and articles, Kaplan says he has something different to say about an uncomfortable, hyper-sensitive genius who turned his voice into The Voice.
Over lunch at Piccolos, first stop on a Hoboken visit, Kaplan says that in the five years he worked on the book (reading the "overwhelming" material already written and conducting 150 interviews), he was often asked, "What dirt did you dig up?"
"That's all been done," he says. "But it didn't feel like enough."
Where it all began
His 786-page book ends in 1954, when Sinatra was dismissed as a has-been, dropped by his music label and scandalized for leaving his wife, Nancy, and three kids for Ava Gardner. ("The great love of his life, but a relationship whose DNA was filled with pain.")
Then Sinatra stages what Kaplan calls "the greatest comeback in American show business," winning an Oscar for his role in From Here to Eternity.
Kaplan, 59, a magazine writer, novelist (Two Guys From Verona, which is set in suburban New Jersey) and biographer (co-author of books with Jerry Lewis and former tennis star John McEnroe), says Sinatra was "the most uncomfortable man in history."
In reading about him, Kaplan says, "you see the results of the discomfort — the fistfights and temper tantrums and egomania — but you didn't see where it came from. How it was not just all of a piece with the bad behavior, but what made him as great as he was."
Kaplan concluded that Sinatra, after four marriages and countless affairs, "was truly happy only when he was doing right by his music, when he was in good voice. Everything else, the sex and the playing around, was in between."
The seeds of Frank were sown at a "boozy, slightly rowdy" dinner at a Santa Monica, Calif., restaurant in 2004. Kaplan was finishing Dean & Me, co-authored with Lewis, which grew out of a profile of Lewis that Kaplan wrote for The New Yorker in 2000.
The dinner was thrown by Lewis' manager, Claudia Stabile, in the midst of preparations for Lewis' annual Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon. Present were Lewis, singer Jack Jones, bandleader Jack Eglash, guitarist Joe Lano, pianist/arranger Vincent Falcone and Kaplan.
"We were just sitting around," Kaplan recalls. "They didn't care who I was. I wasn't there as a journalist. I wasn't there on the record. I was just a guy. Their hair was down. And musicians are blunt. They say whatever the hell they feel like saying — and all the more so when they're drunk."
Several had worked with Sinatra, or "the Old Man," as they called him. Most had known him well.
So when they began to gossip about Sinatra, Kaplan expected "the sex stories or the fistfight stories, all the bad behavior. But no. Every story to a man was told in tones of awe about what an absolute genius he was. They talked about his pitch, his way with a lyric, his professionalism, collegiality, and even his vulnerability. And that, to me, was something brand new."
Kaplan's next stop in Hoboken is 415 Monroe St., Sinatra's birthplace (he was born Dec. 12, 1915), marked by a bronze star in the sidewalk. (The opening scene in Kaplan's book takes place there, a brutal birth. The doctor thought the baby had died. Kaplan writes that Sinatra bore scars of his birth, "both physical and psychological, to the end of his years. ... He had learned from earliest childhood to trust no one.")
The house, now the site of an empty lot, burned down 30 years ago. Next door is a one-room Sinatra museum that closed in 2006.
Family contradiction
To understand Sinatra, Kaplan says, you have to understand his love-hate relationship with his hometown and mother. His father, Marty, a failed prizefighter, was barely a presence.
In Sinatra's youth, Hoboken was a tough, working-class town, filled with Italian and Irish longshoremen and factory workers. (Now it has been largely, but not totally, gentrified by artists and young professionals who like the 10-minute ferry ride to Manhattan.) But, Kaplan says, "Frank was never as tough as he wanted everyone to believe."
His mother, however, was "tough and smart. She was a political ward boss when that meant something. She was always in his face." She gave him a charge account at Hoboken's best clothing store. She bought him a sound system and whatever he needed when he started singing (at first, for nickels and quarters, at a bar his father ran).
Dolly Sinatra also "was interested in upward mobility, and she moved the family to a better part of Hoboken, out of what was called Guinea Town. ... But she also hit Frank (with a billy club and once pushed him down a flight of stairs). That was part of the contradiction."
Late in life, Sinatra grew sentimental about Hoboken, returning to campaign with Ronald Reagan in 1984, after Sinatra, a onetime liberal Democrat, turned conservative.
"When he was young, he couldn't wait to get out," Kaplan says. He did when he was 20, after he and a music group dubbed The Hoboken Four hit it big on the radio, winning Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour, the American Idol of its day.
But "he was Italian-American to his core, back when Italians literally were not considered to be white," Kaplan says. "To the end of his days, he felt he had come from the wrong side of the tracks and had to prove what he was worth."
"I went tongue-in-cheek. He was tubby then, palling around with Spiro Agnew. His image was what Joe Piscopo and Phil Hartman made fun of.
"But he was fantastic. He was inspired by Carnegie Hall. He
raised his game. In Vegas, he'd play the tough guy like all the tough guys who ran Vegas. But at Carnegie Hall, he was in communion with his better angels. My tongue fell right out of my cheek."
Thirty years later, Kaplan says, "Frank was hip-hop before there was hip-hop. I'd love to figure out how many rap songs mention him. He was the essence of cool, the essence of people who make their own rules."
'So much more' to write about
There's no Sinatra plaque outside the grim-looking, century-old school, formerly Hoboken High School, now a middle school, that Sinatra attended for about 50 days before dropping out. He was 15.
"Look at how severe it looks," Kaplan says. "Can you imagine Frank being confined in a place that like? He used to say he was expelled for rowdiness. But in fact, he just quit. His mother was furious. But he would have been dreaming of girls and of New York and of getting out of Hoboken."
Kaplan decided that Sinatra's 1954 comeback was "a dynamic pausing point" to end on. But he plans a second volume: "There's the Rat Pack years, and his involvement with the Mob and the Kennedys, and so much more."
Near Sinatra's birthplace is Lepore's Home Made Chocolates, locally famous for supplying Sinatra with his favorite: chocolate-covered apricots.
Mario Lepore, who helped run the Sinatra museum "until we ran out of money," apologizes that his Sinatra artifacts, including thank-you notes, are in storage. The store is moving elsewhere in Hoboken because the building "is going condo."
Lepore is excited to see Kaplan's book and asks, "What does the family think?" referring to Sinatra's kids, Tina, Frank Jr. and Nancy. (All declined Kaplan's interview requests.)
"They haven't seen it yet," Kaplan says. "But it's not a scandal book."
Lepore recalls Sinatra sitting in a limo while a driver came inside for the chocolates and how he once met him in Atlantic City: "I felt like I was meeting a prophet. I was mesmerized. When he spoke, no one would interrupt."
Lepore is discouraged by what he sees as waning local interest in Hoboken's most famous native son and rising interest in its newest local celebrity, baker Buddy Valastro, star of the reality TV show Cake Boss.
Kaplan assures him, "The Cake Boss will come and go. Sinatra will always be with us."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-10-28-Sinatra28_CV_N.htm?csp=Books
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