Word: sinatras
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...launch a career based on iron self-confidence. In the '40s, married to his doting first wife Nancy, he was the heartthrob balladeer who sang I'll Be Seeing You to World War II G.I.s and their sweethearts. In the '50s, the persona went to war with the man. Sinatra at ballad tempo was the soul-sick, lovelorn, solitary man who closes down a midtown saloon. Up-tempo, and increasingly in his life, he was the unapologetic and (some said) unconscionable swinger, the ring-a-ding ringmaster of a million all-night parties. Which was the real Sinatra, the reveler...
...made everything he sang matter so much. He passed songs along like pieces of a shared life, an intimacy between himself and whoever was listening. You could play a Sinatra album all alone or hear him in a stadium. Either way, it was always the same: a one-on-one experience, the song a shared secret between the singer and you. Only...
...Sinatra's attitude about all this was simple enough. He was responsible to the world for his music, but for his life answerable only to himself, and to hell with the rest of you. There was, all through him, a kind of animating anger, an Italian street-kid swagger that made such good cover for his black-and-blue soulfulness that it was easy, especially when he was living high or mouthing off, to take it at face value. But as much as anything else, that attitude was a dodge, barbed wire for the unwary, protecting his private preserve...
...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...