Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert Sinatra (; December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer, conductor, and actor. Nicknamed the "Chairman of the Board" and "Ol' Blue Eyes", he is regarded as one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century.

Born to Italian immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra began his musical career in the swing era. He joined the Harry James band as the vocalist in 1939 before signing with Columbia Records four years later and becoming the idol of the "bobby soxers". In 1946, Sinatra released his debut album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra. He then signed with Capitol Records and released several albums with arrangements by Nelson Riddle, notably In the Wee Small Hours (1955) and Songs for Swingin' Lovers! (1956). In 1960, Sinatra left Capitol Records to start his own record label, Reprise Records, releasing a string of successful albums. He collaborated with Count Basie on Sinatra-Basie: An Historic Musical First (1962) and It Might as Well Be Swing (1964). In 1965, he recorded September of My Years and starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music.

After releasing Sinatra at the Sands in 1966, Sinatra recorded one of his most famous collaborations with Tom Jobim, Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim. It was followed by 1968's Francis A. & Edward K. with Duke Ellington. Sinatra retired in 1971 following the release of "My Way" but came out of retirement two years later. He recorded several albums and released "New York, New York" in 1980. Sinatra is among the world's best-selling music artists, with an estimated 150 million record sales globally.

Sinatra also forged a highly successful acting career. After winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity (1953), he starred in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Sinatra also appeared in musicals such as On the Town (1949); Guys and Dolls (1955); High Society (1956); and Pal Joey (1957), the last of which won him a Golden Globe Award. Toward the end of his career, Sinatra frequently played detectives, including the title character in Tony Rome (1967) and the titular The Detective (1968). He received the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1971. Sinatra also directed the anti-war drama None but the Brave (1965). On television, The Frank Sinatra Show began on CBS in 1950, and Sinatra continued to make appearances on television throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Francis Albert Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants Natalina "Dolly" Garaventa and Antonino Martino "Marty" Sinatra. His mother was from Genoa, Liguria, while his father was from Lercara Friddi, Sicily. Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds (6.1 kg) at birth and had to be delivered with the aid of forceps, which caused severe scarring to his left cheek, neck, and lifelong damage to his left eardrum, delaying his baptism to April 2, 1916. A childhood operation left major scarring on his neck, and during adolescence, Sinatra was further scarred by cystic acne. His excessively skinny frame as a child and young man later became the subject of jokes during stage shows. He was raised in the Catholic Church.

Sinatra's mother, Dolly, was energetic and driven; biographers believe that she was the dominant factor in the development of her son's personality and self-confidence. Sinatra's fourth wife, Barbara, would later claim that Dolly "knocked him around a lot" when he was a child. Dolly became influential in Hoboken and in local Democratic Party circles. During the Great Depression, Dolly provided money to her son for outings with friends and to buy expensive clothes, resulting in neighbors describing him as the "best-dressed kid in the neighborhood".

Sinatra's illiterate father, Marty, was a bantamweight boxer who later worked at the Hoboken Fire Department, working his way up to captain. Due to his illiteracy, Marty stressed the importance of a "complete and full" education and had instilled in his son the desire to become a civil engineer and enroll at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Sinatra spent much time at his parents' tavern in Hoboken, working on his homework and occasionally singing for spare change.

At a young age, Sinatra developed an interest in music, particularly big band jazz and listened to Gene Austin, Rudy Vallée, Russ Colombo, and Bob Eberly while idolizing Bing Crosby. For his 15th birthday, Sinatra received a ukulele from his uncle Domenico, with which he performed at family gatherings. Sinatra attended David E. Rue Jr. High School from 1928, and A. J. Demarest High School (since renamed Hoboken High School) in 1931, where he arranged bands for school dances, but left without graduating after having attended only 47 days before being expelled for "general rowdiness".

To please his mother, Sinatra enrolled at Drake Business School, but departed after 11 months. Dolly found him working as a delivery boy at the Jersey Observer newspaper (since merged into The Jersey Journal), where his godfather Frank Garrick worked; Sinatra later worked as a riveter at the Tietjen and Lang shipyard. He began performing in local Hoboken social clubs and sang for free on radio stations such as WAAT in Jersey City.

Sinatra began singing professionally as a teenager. He never learned to read music but learned by ear. Sinatra got his first break in 1935 when his mother persuaded a local singing group called the 3 Flashes, who were auditioning for the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show, to let him join. Baritone Fred Tamburro stated, "Frank hung around us like we were gods or something", admitting that they took him on board only because he owned a car and could chauffeur the group.

The group became the "Hoboken Four" and passed an audition from Major Bowes to appear on the show. They each earned $12.50, and attracted 40,000 votes to win first prize—a six-month contract to perform on stage and radio across the U.S. Sinatra quickly became the group's lead singer, and, much to the jealousy of his fellow group members, garnered most of the attention from the girls. Due to the success of the group, Bowes kept asking for them to return, disguised under different names, varying from "The Secaucus Cockamamies" to "The Bayonne Bacalas," although this may be apocryphal, sourced from Sinatra's humorous stage patter during his appearance with the Count Basie orchestra at the Sands (1966).

In March 1939, saxophone player Frank Mane, who knew Sinatra from Jersey City radio station WAAT, arranged for him to audition and record "Our Love", his first solo studio recording. In June, bandleader Harry James, who had heard Sinatra sing on "Dance Parade", signed him to a two-year contract of $75 a week after a show at the Paramount Theatre in New York. It was with the James band that Sinatra released his first commercial record "From the Bottom of My Heart" in July. No more than 8,000 copies were sold, and further records released with James through 1939, such as "All or Nothing at All", also had weak sales on their initial release. Thanks to his vocal training, Sinatra could now sing two tones higher, and developed a repertoire that included songs such as "My Buddy", "Willow Weep for Me", "It's Funny to Everyone but Me", "Here Comes the Night", "On a Little Street in Singapore", "Ciribiribin", and "Every Day of My Life".

Sinatra became increasingly frustrated with the Harry James band, feeling that he was not achieving the major success and acclaim he was looking for. Sinatra's pianist and close friend Hank Sanicola persuaded him to stay with the group, but Sinatra left James in November 1939 to replace Jack Leonard as the lead singer of the Tommy Dorsey band. Sinatra earned $125 a week, appearing at the Palmer House in Chicago, and James released Sinatra from his contract.

On January 26, 1940, Sinatra made his first public appearance with the band at the Coronado Theatre in Rockford, Illinois, opening the show with "Stardust". Dorsey recalled: "You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when the kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinée idol. He was just a skinny kid with big ears. I used to stand there so amazed I'd almost forget to take my own solos".

Sinatra reported in 1945, "I wish I knew how to read music." He never learned to read music well, but had a natural understanding of it, and worked very hard from a young age to improve his abilities in all aspects of music. Sinatra could follow a lead sheet (simplified sheet music showing a song's basic structure) during a performance by "carefully following the patterns and groupings of notes arranged on the page" and made his own notations to the music, using his ear to detect semitonal differences.

Granata states that some of the most accomplished classically trained musicians soon noticed his musical understanding and remarked that Sinatra had a "sixth sense", which "demonstrated unusual proficiency when it came to detecting incorrect notes and sounds within the orchestra."

Sinatra was an aficionado of classical music, and would often request classical strains in his music, inspired by composers such as Puccini and Impressionist masters. His personal favorite was Ralph Vaughan Williams. Sinatra would insist on always recording live with the band because it gave him a "certain feeling" to perform live surrounded by musicians. By the mid-1940s, such was Sinatra's understanding of music that after hearing an air check of some compositions by Alec Wilder, which were for strings and woodwinds, he became the conductor at Columbia Records for six of Wilder's compositions. The works were considered by Wilder to have been among the finest renditions and recordings of his compositions, past or present. Critic Gene Lees, a lyricist and the author of the words to the Jobim melody "This Happy Madness", expressed amazement when he heard Sinatra's recording of it on Sinatra & Company (1971), considering him to have delivered the lyrics to perfection.

Voice coach John Quinlan was impressed by Sinatra's vocal range, remarking, "He has far more voice than people think he has. He can vocalize to a B-flat on top in full voice, and he doesn't need a mic either". As a singer, early on, he was primarily influenced by Bing Crosby, but later believed that Tony Bennett was "the best singer in the business." Bennett himself claimed that as a performer, Sinatra had "perfected the art of intimacy." According to Nelson Riddle, Sinatra had a "fairly rangy voice", remarking: "His voice has a very strident, insistent sound in the top register, a smooth lyrical sound in the middle register, and a very tender sound in the low. His voice is built on infinite taste, with an overall inflection of sex. He points everything he does from a sexual standpoint".

Despite his heavy New Jersey accent, when Sinatra sang, his accent was barely detectable; according to Richard Schuller, Sinatra's diction became "precise" while singing and his articulation "meticulous". Sinatra's timing was impeccable, allowing him, according to Granata, to "toy with the rhythm of a melody, bringing tremendous excitement to his reading of a lyric." Tommy Dorsey observed that Sinatra would "take a musical phrase and play it all the way through seemingly without breathing for eight, ten, maybe sixteen bars." Dorsey was a considerable influence on Sinatra's techniques for his vocal phrasing with his own exceptional breath control on the trombone, and Sinatra regularly swam and held his breath underwater, thinking of song lyrics to increase his breathing power.

Sinatra attempted to pursue an acting career in Hollywood in the early 1940s. While films appealed to him, being exceptionally self-confident, Sinatra was rarely enthusiastic about his own acting, once remarking that "pictures stink". Sinatra made his film debut performing in an uncredited sequence in Las Vegas Nights (1941), singing "I'll Never Smile Again" with Tommy Dorsey's Pied Pipers. Sinatra had a cameo role along with Duke Ellington and Count Basie in Charles Barton's Reveille with Beverly (1943), making a brief appearance singing "Night and Day". Next, he was given leading roles in Higher and Higher and Step Lively (both 1944) for RKO.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cast Sinatra opposite Gene Kelly and Kathryn Grayson in the Technicolor musical Anchors Aweigh (1945), in which he played a sailor on leave in Hollywood. A major success, it garnered several Academy Award wins and nominations, and the song "I Fall in Love Too Easily", sung by Sinatra in the film, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. He briefly appeared at the end of Richard Whorf's commercially successful Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), a Technicolor musical biopic of Jerome Kern, in which Sinatra sang "Ol' Man River".

Sinatra co-starred again with Gene Kelly in the Technicolor musical Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), in which they play baseball players who are part-time vaudevillians. He teamed up with Kelly for a third time in On the Town (1949), playing a sailor on leave in New York City. The film remains rated very highly by critics, and in 2006, it ranked No. 19 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals. Both Double Dynamite (1951), an RKO Irving Cummings comedy produced by Howard Hughes, and Joseph Pevney's Meet Danny Wilson (1952) failed to make an impression.

Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953) deals with the tribulations of three soldiers, played by Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Sinatra, stationed on Hawaii in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sinatra had long been desperate to find a film role that would bring him back into the spotlight, and Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn had been inundated by appeals to give Sinatra a chance to star as "Maggio" in the film. During production, Montgomery Clift became a close friend, and Sinatra later professed that he "learned more about acting from him than anybody I ever knew before". After several years of critical and commercial decline, his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor win helped Sinatra regain his position as the top recording artist in the world. Sinatra's performance also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. The Los Angeles Examiner wrote that Sinatra is "simply superb, comical, pitiful, childishly brave, pathetically defiant", commenting that his death scene is "one of the best ever photographed".

Sinatra starred opposite Doris Day in the musical film Young at Heart (1954), and earned critical praise for his performance as a psychopathic killer posing as an FBI agent opposite Sterling Hayden in the film noir Suddenly (1954).

After beginning on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio show with the Hoboken Four in 1935, and later WNEW and WAAT in Jersey City, Sinatra starred in his own radio shows on NBC and CBS from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s. In 1942, he hired arranger Axel Stordahl away from Tommy Dorsey before beginning his first radio program that year, keeping Stordahl with him for all of his radio work. By the end of 1942, Sinatra was named the "Most Popular Male Vocalist on Radio" in a DownBeat poll. Early on, he frequently worked with The Andrews Sisters on radio. They would appear as guests on each other's shows, as well as on many USO shows broadcast to troops via the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). Sinatra appeared as a special guest in the sisters' ABC Eight-to-the-Bar Ranch series, while the trio in turn guested on his Songs by Sinatra series on CBS. Sinatra had two stints as a regular member of the cast of Your Hit Parade; his first was from 1943 to 1945, and second was from 1946 to May 28, 1949, during which Sinatra was paired with the then-new girl singer, Doris Day. Starting in September 1949, the BBD&O advertising agency produced a radio series starring Sinatra for Lucky Strike called Light Up Time – some 176 15-minute shows that featured him and Dorothy Kirsten singing – which lasted through to May 1950.

In October 1951, the second season of The Frank Sinatra Show began on CBS Television. Ultimately, Sinatra did not find the success on television for which he had hoped. Santopietro writes that Sinatra "never appeared fully at ease on his own television series." In 1953 and 1954, Sinatra starred in the NBC radio program Rocky Fortune, portraying Rocco Fortunato (a.k.a. Rocky Fortune).

In 1957, Sinatra formed a three-year, $3 million contract with ABC to launch The Frank Sinatra Show, featuring himself and guests in 36 half-hour shows. ABC agreed to allow Sinatra's Hobart Productions to keep 60% of the residuals and bought stock in Sinatra's film production unit, Kent Productions, guaranteeing him $7 million. Though an initial critical success upon its debut on October 18, 1957, it soon attracted negative reviews from Variety and The New Republic, and The Chicago Sun-Times thought that Sinatra and frequent guest Dean Martin "performed like a pair of adult delinquents", "sharing the same cigarette and leering at girls." Sinatra later made numerous appearances on The Dean Martin Show and Martin's TV specials.

Sinatra's fourth and final Timex TV special, Welcome Home Elvis, was broadcast in March 1960, earning massive viewing figures. During the show, he performed a duet with Presley, who sang Sinatra's 1957 hit "Witchcraft" with the host performing the 1956 Presley classic "Love Me Tender". Sinatra had previously been highly critical of Elvis Presley and rock and roll in the 1950s, describing it as a "deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac" that "fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people." A CBS News special about Sinatra's 50th birthday, Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music, was broadcast on November 16, 1965, and received an Emmy award and a Peabody Award.

Continuing his musical collaboration with Jobim and Ella Fitzgerald in 1967, Sinatra appeared in the TV special, A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim, which was broadcast on CBS on November 13. When Sinatra came out of retirement in 1973, he appeared in a TV special that shared its title with his contemporaneously released album, Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back. In the late 1970s, John Denver appeared as a guest in the Sinatra and Friends ABC-TV Special, singing "September Song" as a duet.

Sinatra was married to Nancy (née Barbato) from 1939 to 1951. They had three children: Nancy (born 1940), Frank Jr. (1944–2016) and Tina (born 1948).

Sinatra met Barbato in Long Branch, New Jersey, in the summer of 1934 while working as a lifeguard. He agreed to marry her after an incident at "The Rustic Cabin" that led to his arrest. Sinatra had numerous extramarital affairs, and gossip magazines published details of affairs with women including Marilyn Maxwell, Lana Turner and Joi Lansing.

Sinatra held varied political views throughout his life. His mother, Dolly, was a Democratic Party ward leader. After meeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, Sinatra subsequently heavily campaigned for the Democrats in the 1944 presidential election. According to Jo Carroll Silvers, in his younger years, Sinatra had "ardent liberal" sympathies and was "so concerned about poor people that he was always quoting Henry Wallace." Sinatra was outspoken against racism, particularly toward black people and Italians, from a young age. In the early 1950s, he was among those who campaigned to combine the racially segregated musicians' unions in Los Angeles. In November 1945, Sinatra was invited by the mayor of Gary, Indiana, to try to settle a strike by white students of Froebel High School against the "Pro-Negro" policies of the new principal. His comments, while praised by liberal publications, led to accusations by some that he was a communist, which Sinatra denied. In the 1948 presidential election, he actively campaigned for President Harry S. Truman. In 1952 and 1956, Sinatra campaigned for Adlai Stevenson.

Of all the U.S. presidents Sinatra associated with during his career, he was closest to John F. Kennedy. Sinatra often invited Kennedy to Hollywood and Las Vegas, and the two would womanize and enjoy parties together. In January 1961, Sinatra and Peter Lawford organized the Inaugural Gala in Washington, D.C., held on the evening before President Kennedy was sworn into office. After taking office, Kennedy distanced himself from Sinatra due partly to Sinatra's ties with the Mafia. In 1962, Sinatra was snubbed by the President as, during his visit to Palm Springs, Kennedy stayed with the Republican Bing Crosby instead of Sinatra, citing FBI concerns about the latter's alleged connections to organized crime. Sinatra had spared no expense upgrading the facilities at his home in anticipation of the President's visit, fitting it with a heliport, which he smashed with a sledgehammer after the rejection. Despite the snub, when Sinatra learned of Kennedy's assassination, he reportedly sobbed in his bedroom for three days. Sinatra worked with Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968, and remained a supporter of the Democratic Party until the early 1970s. Although still a registered Democrat, Sinatra endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan for a second term as governor of California in 1970. Sinatra officially changed allegiance in July 1972 when he supported Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.

In the 1980 presidential election, Sinatra donated $4 million to Ronald Reagan's campaign. Sinatra arranged Reagan's Presidential gala, as he had done for Kennedy. In 1985, Reagan presented Sinatra with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, remarking, "His love of country, his generosity for those less fortunate ... make him one of our most remarkable and distinguished Americans."

On June 18, 1984, Sinatra performed at the state dinner in the White House honoring Sri Lankan president J. R. Jayewardene at the invitation of Reagan, singing "Strangers in the Night" and "Fly Me to the Moon".

Santopietro notes that Sinatra was a "lifelong sympathizer with Jewish causes." He was awarded the Hollzer Memorial Award by the Los Angeles Jewish Community in 1949. Sinatra gave a series of concerts in Israel in 1962 and donated his entire $50,000 fee for appearing in a cameo role in Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) to the Youth Center in Jerusalem. On November 1, 1972, Sinatra raised $6.5 million in bond pledges for Israel, and was given the Medallion of Valor. The Frank Sinatra Student Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was dedicated in 1978.