Word: sinatras
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ever since squealing, swooning teenage girls at Manhattan's Paramount Theater gave him his first fame in the early '40s, Sinatra, now 70, has swaggered about the world like a quattrocento tyrant, kissing the rings of bigshots and gangsters, throwing tantrums, shoving women around, and bloodying ordinary citizens who failed to grovel sufficiently. His messes have been cleaned up by bodyguards, lawyers and flacks, using money, the borrowed reputations of the influential and Sinatra's own powers of retaliation...
Humphrey Bogart, a Hollywood tough guy who did not need bodyguards, liked Sinatra and thought him "amusing because he's a skinny little bastard and his bones kind of rattle together." But the stories Kelley has assembled are too numerous and grubby to be passed off as the forgivable sins of an amusing scamp, or of a tough-but-decent slum kid who made good. During the 1968 filming of Lady in Cement, according to Producer's Assistant Michael Viner, a prostitute complained that Sinatra had asked her to stay for breakfast after an all-night party, and then used...
Lawford and Jack Kennedy, then a Senator, stayed with Sinatra in Las Vegas at the Sands Hotel, in which the singer had a share. "Show girls from all over the town were running in and out," said a Justice Department report. Lawford confided ruefully, "I was Frank's pimp and Frank was Jack's. It sounds terrible now, but it was really a lot of fun." For his part, Sinatra introduced both J.F.K. and Giancana to a 25-year-old brunet named Judith Campbell (later Judith Exner); for over a year Kennedy, by then President, and the Mafia don shared...
...goes the gossip, some new, some warmed over. Kelley's narrative is as lengthy as a chronicle of the Hundred Years' War, in part because even a selective list of Sinatra's sexual skirmishes seems endless. The author ticks off affairs with, among many others, Marilyn Maxwell, Ava Gardner (his second wife), Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow (his third), Natalie Wood and Lauren Bacall. But the most important woman in the singer's life, and Kelley's most substantial contribution to the inside story, may have been Sinatra's mother Dolly, an abortionist, ward politician...
Assuming that this biography of one of President Reagan's Medal of Freedom winners is accurate, is it also fair? Kelley takes pains to point out that Sinatra's callousness has often been balanced by a swaggering generosity. Ol' Blue Eyes may have charged the gaudy anniversary ring he gave to Ava to her account, being down on his luck at the time. He also played benefits tirelessly for worthy causes, raised millions for charity, and impulsively paid bills for down-and-out show business acquaintances, and sometimes for people whose hard-luck stories he happened to see in newspapers...