Verwandte Artikel zu Sinatra: The Chairman

Sinatra: The Chairman - Softcover

Kaplan, James

 
9780307946935: Sinatra: The Chairman
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307946932 ISBN 13: 9780307946935
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

One of the Best Books of the Year
The Washington Post - Los Angeles Times - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The story of Frank Sinatra's second act, Sinatra finds the Chairman on top of the world, riding high after an Oscar victory--and firmly reestablished as the top recording artist of his day. Following Sinatra from the mid-1950s to his death in 1998, Kaplan uncovers the man behind the myth, revealing by turns the peerless singer, the (sometimes) powerful actor, the business mogul, the tireless lover, and--of course--the close associate of the powerful and infamous. It was in these decades that the enduring legacy of Frank Sinatra was forged, and Kaplan vividly captures "Ol' Blue Eyes" in his later years. The sequel to the New York Times best-selling Frank, here is the concluding volume of the definitive biography of "The Entertainer of the Century."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Kaplan has been writing about people and ideas in business and popular culture, as well as notable fiction (The Best American Short Stories), for more than three decades. His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and New York. His novels include Pearl's Progress and Two Guys from Verona, a New York Times Notable Book for 1998. His nonfiction works include The Airport, You Cannot Be Serious (coauthored with John McEnroe), Dean & Me: A Love Story (with Jerry Lewis), and the first volume of his definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, Frank: The Voice. He lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and three sons.

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Act One
The Whirlwind

1
Eleven days after winning the Oscar for From Here to Eternity, Frank Sinatra sat down and typed a note to a friend, clearly in response to a congratulatory letter or telegram. The note, on Paramount Pictures stationery and in Frank’s customary, too-impatient-to-press-the-shift-key style, began,
 
april 5, 1954
dear lew—
my paisan mr sinatra is still on cloud nine and the bum refuses to come down…
 
That bum—“mr sinatra”—was so thrilled, the note continued (still all lowercase, still in the third person), that he was “ridiculous.” And then, after a final thanks to the recipient, came the signature: “maggio.”
 
It’s a charming letter and a fascinating one. Throughout his life, Sinatra employed secretaries who answered his voluminous mail, often signing his name themselves. From time to time, though, when the spirit moved him, he penned or typed his own missives, and the letters are him, revealing his restless intellect, his sense of humor (always more spontaneous in personal circumstances than onstage), even a literary sensibility. And why not? As a great singer, he was a great storyteller; why should that faculty switch off when he was away from a microphone? In this note, he is writing in character, as PFC Angelo Maggio, the role that won him that Academy Award, and the voice is perfect: “the bum refuses”; “he’s so thrilled he is ridiculous.” From the moment he’d first picked up James Jones’s blockbuster novel, Sinatra had completely identified with Maggio, the feisty little private from Brooklyn who speaks in a kind of Damon Runyon–ese. He had campaigned, hard, for the movie role by barraging the filmmakers—Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn; producer Buddy Adler; director Fred Zinnemann; screenwriter Daniel Taradash—with telegrams touting his perfect suitability for the part, and he had signed every wire just as he’d signed this note: “Maggio.”
 
Frank Sinatra had identified so powerfully with the character not only because Angelo Maggio was a skinny, streetwise Italian-American from Brooklyn—like Sinatra’s native Hoboken, close geographically to Manhattan but oh so far away—but also because Maggio was one of the world’s downtrodden, a little man who drank to ease his sorrows and spoke truth to power with wisecracks. When Sinatra first read From Here to Eternity in late 1951, he was feeling considerably downtrodden himself. His records were no longer selling; he was having vocal and financial problems; the IRS was after him. He had become infamous, pilloried in newspapers across the United States, after leaving his wife and three children for Ava Gardner. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recently terminated his movie contract, and he would soon also be dumped by Columbia Records, as well as by his talent agency, the Music Corporation of America.
 
“He’s a dead man,” the talent agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar declared in 1952. “Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.” Maybe not, but Frank Sinatra could. Literally overnight—after the Academy Awards ceremony on March 25, 1954—Sinatra brought off the greatest comeback in show-business history. And he had done it all in Hollywood, a ruthlessly Darwinian company town that reviles losers but has the sappiest of soft spots for a happy ending. His Oscar underlined the fact that he was also a freshly viable recording artist with a new contract at Capitol Records, where he and a brilliant young arranger named Nelson Riddle had begun creating the string of groundbreaking recordings that would revolutionize popular music in the 1950s.
 
And quite suddenly that spring, without a shred of embarrassment about its fickleness, the entire entertainment industry began throwing itself at his feet. “The whole world is changing for Frank Sinatra,” Louella Parsons wrote in her syndicated column of April 19. “Today he has so many jobs offered him he can pick and choose.”
 
Parsons was talking about movies, although television, radio, and nightclubs were also calling. Among the film possibilities offered to Sinatra: a supporting part alongside the hot-as-a-pistol young Robert Mitchum in the medical melodrama Not as a Stranger; the second lead in a Warner Bros. remake of Four Daughters, the picture that had catapulted John Garfield to fame; a co-starring role alongside Marilyn Monroe in the 20th Century Fox musical Pink Tights, even though Monroe soon dropped out when she heard how much more the studio was offering Sinatra than her. And, lo and behold, MGM—where Louis B. Mayer had personally fired Sinatra in 1950 after he made an impolitic joke about Mayer’s mistress (and where Mayer himself was now history)—wanted him back, for the long-discussed St. Louis Woman, alongside Ava Gardner.
 
This was distinctly problematic for several reasons. For one thing, Gardner, who’d been outraged that Metro had dubbed a professional singer’s voice over hers in Show Boat, was determined never to make another musical. For another, she had come to hate Hollywood with a passion. She was living as an expatriate, cohabiting in Spain with the charismatic and brilliant bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, the darkly handsome torero whose rivalry with his brother-in-law Antonio Ordóñez would later inspire Ernest Hemingway’s long Life magazine piece The Dangerous Summer. Most important of all, however, she was about to file for divorce from Frank.
—
While the Hollywood of 1954 bore some similarities to today’s entertainment capital, it was altogether a sleepier, more rustic town. Not a more virtuous one by any means, but more tightly bounded. The studios still held sway; their publicity departments controlled access to stars and information about them, even when it came to police matters. There was a certain code of conduct for the press and other prying outsiders when it came to celebrities.
 
It is, for example, impossible to imagine any major star today living, as Sinatra did in the spring of that year, in a garden apartment, albeit such a glamorous one as Frank’s five-room bachelor pad in a redbrick complex at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Glen. A decade before, when he had first come to Hollywood, he had resided in a pink-walled stucco mansion in Toluca Lake. It was a mark of both his change of fortunes and his maturity (not to mention the change of times) that Sinatra no longer had to ward off hordes of bobby-soxers, or hordes of any kind. In the spring of 1954, he was approaching thirty-nine—lean and balding, not settled by any means (his defiant hedonism and overweening ego would guard against such a fate for a very long time), but grown up, in his own particular way. His oaken baritone on the Capitol recordings, rich with sad knowledge—or, on up-tempo numbers, with swaggering authority—was a sea change from the tender Voice that had soothed America through the war.
 
But the secret was that he was still yearning. (He would always yearn, even after he had gained all the world had to offer.) He had spent the previous Christmas and New Year’s in Rome, where Gardner was shooting Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa, desperately trying to hold on to...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307946932
ISBN 13 
9780307946935
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
992
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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