Word: sinatras
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...long time, an out-front liberal, and--surely swayed by charm and power--eventually added some deep shadows to J.F.K.'s definition of executive privilege. He passed along a mistress to the President, Judith Exner, who was also a favorite of Giancana's. Kennedy used her, but eventually froze Sinatra out of Camelot. Sinatra responded bitterly and swung right. He golfed with Spiro Agnew, sang (wonderfully) at the Nixon White House and partied with the Reagans...
...manage the trade-off, although he insisted on certain terms and boundaries. He dismissed purveyors of some of the seamier press gossip about him as "pimps and whores. Because they can't write their own name to earn a living properly. They got to lean on somebody else." But Sinatra in those years was natural tabloid fodder, doing the clubs with Ava Gardner (wife No. 2) and Juliet Prowse, and courting Mia Farrow, who became, fleetingly, wife No. 3. And scandal, spurious as it may have been, exerted its own fascination, deepened the dark edge of danger that Sinatra could...
Notes were for singing, and on the subject of music, Sinatra could write a book. He was generous to his singing contemporaries, maybe because he knew he had no serious rival, but probably too out of a genuine respect for musicianship. He would speak fondly and knowledgeably of Billie Holiday, Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett. And if he heard you had an ear and were ready to lend one, and if the mood was right and there was a bottle of Scotch in the neighborhood, he could talk about music far into the night. "A Johnny Mercer lyric," he said once...
...would be best, of course, if you were a player, a singer, a fellow musician. But with luck and fine timing, you could also be a casual guest, a dinner companion, a colleague's spouse--even, if the furies were snoozing, a journalist. In 1988 Sinatra, the paragon of show-biz sangfroid, told Larry King, "I swear on my mother's soul, the first four or five seconds, I tremble every time I take the step and I walk out of the wing onto the stage, because I wonder if it will be there when I go for the first...
...with the Dorsey band in the early '40s, he kept on tap a voice teacher who was a former opera singer. Later on he would turn to Metropolitan Opera soprano Dorothy Kirsten and baritone Robert Merrill for pointers on technique. "He knew they knew...how to maintain the equipment," Sinatra's longtime conductor, Vincent Falcone, told writer Will Friedwald. That stuff in the whiskey tumbler he used onstage was often tea. Booze, he knew, could batter the throat...