Word: sinatras
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...UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF FRANK SINATRA, Kelley...
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...
What His Way acknowledges but cannot really convey is the gift that made Sinatra famous and kept him that way: the meticulous phrasing that changed the intonation of popular music, the velvety, plaintive baritone that was the most distinctive male singing voice between Bing Crosby's and Elvis Presley's. Sinatra's character is a thumb in the public eye, but his songs continue to work a lonely magic. And not so lonely. Kelley notes that Frank, like everyone else, used Sinatra LPs as fail-safe aids to seduction...