Word: sinatras
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...just because he was rock's first superstar, but also because as the pawn of Parker his manager, he was the last pop idol who did not control his own career. In 1956 he released his first million-seller, "Heartbreak Hotel," and became the biggest music idol since Sinatra, and loads weirder. Then, too soon, he was devoured by Hollywood's make-over machinery, steered into a rut that would lead to nearly three dozen low-mediocre films. Parker's determination to slip Elvis into the old showbiz mainstream effectively neutered the emperor of sexual and musical threat...
...White House. In June 1961 Kennedy returned from a U.S.-Soviet summit in Vienna on crutches and was lifted onto Air Force One by a cherrypicker, the most graphic public display of his physical problems. But two nights later, he was in Palm Beach sipping daiquiris while Frank Sinatra records played in the background, telling amusing and frightening stories of his encounter with Nikita Khrushchev. The back spasm of two days earlier never came up. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, which roused the most thunderous audience response I have ever witnessed or felt, came after hours...
...inflections, the remembered gentilities of a Southern belle long since cracked, her light-footed stroll through the huge, moving set in Nunn's sumptuous, pristine production (in the auditorium next to the one holding "The Coast of Utopia" at the National). Nunn is to stage-direction what Sinatra was to lyric-singing: He's a great reader, finding the undertone in every phrase and pause in the text, and translating that understanding into space, time and gesture. Because Essie Davis impresses more as Blanche's sister Stella than Iain Glen does as Stanley (his body and body language...
DIED. BUDDY LESTER, 86, character actor and stand-up comedian who often worked as Frank Sinatra's opening act in Las Vegas and appeared with the Rat Pack in the films Ocean's Eleven (1960) and Sergeants 3 (1962); in Los Angeles. His first acting role was as himself--in the 1959 movie The Gene Krupa Story--and he later made guest appearances in such TV series as Barney Miller and Starsky and Hutch...
DIED. ELLIS LARKINS, 79, classical prodigy turned jazz pianist whose elegant, understated style made him one of the most coveted accompanists in jazz; of pneumonia; in Baltimore. Famous for his collaborations with Ella Fitzgerald, he also played with Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra...