Kaplan's Sinatra bio

[gmonahan]

I've seen a mention or two of this monster (nearly 2,000 pages in two volumes) in one or two threads, but no thread devoted to it.  I just finished reading through the whole thing, and I'm curious if I'm the only one to make that marathon.  It has a breezy "show-biz" style that sometimes put me off, but I do believe that if Sinatra broke wind, Kaplan wrote a paragraph about it.  I liked parts (Johnny Mandel's account of Sinatra in the studio), but I thought Kaplan let Sinatra off the hook a bit too much about his cozying up to the mob.  That said, Sinatra's warts-and-all personality is completely on display.  Oddly, I thought the last chapter seemed rushed and superficial, given the detail in the rest of the book.

What did others think?

[JSngry]

Who is Kaplan?

[Larry Kart]

James Kaplan, author of a recent two-volume (so far) bio of Frank:

http://www.amazon.com/Sinatra-Chairman-James-Kaplan/dp/0385535392

Haven't read it, though I think I did look at the index of the second volume to see if I was mentioned. Wasn't but I could have been, re: the rather mockingly negative review I gave to Sinatra's near non-performance at Chicago Fest in 1982 I think it was, which almost cost me my job at the Chicago Tribune.

Here's the review. As you can see, it rested rather oddly alongside the accompanying new story:

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1982/08/11/page/64/article/lead-tones-tarnish-solid-gold-sinatra

May have told this story before, but I think that Ol' Blue Eyes very cleverly, even quite elaborately, took or tried to take revenge on me a few years later, though I can't prove it.

[ghost of miles]

6 hours ago, gmonahan said:

Oddly, I thought the last chapter seemed rushed and superficial, given the detail in the rest of the book.

No kidding--I bought it shortly after it came out and looked ahead when I was about halfway through, because at that point there were still so many years to cover, and was shocked to see that Kaplan telescopes the last 25 years of Sinatra's life into a mere 50 pages or so... this after devoting 50+ pages to single YEARS, or so it seemed as I read.  Kaplan argues that Sinatra's life changed after his early-70s retirement, that the womanizing and touring lifestyle waned, etc.  It stuck me as a weird copout; I wondered if he was just rushing to get the second volume out in time for the centennial.  (The abbreviation of the  1970s-1998 section might explain why mention of your review didn't make the book, Larry.)  Thought well of the book in general, though. 

[JSngry]

Don't mean to be a smartass, but who is James Kaplan? And I guess, what is he going to tell me that will change the way I listen to my Sinatra records? 

Serious questions, both. I read the Friedwald bio, appreciated what was there, called bullshit where needed (which was often enough), expanded my collection exponentially, and feel as if I've gotten it now, with any growth that happens gonna come from within.

But if I'm wrong, I'd like to know. Just remember, time. is short, and there's still buttloads of new (old and new alike) I feel like I've already shorted myself by not yet getting to.

[gmonahan]

On 5/15/2016 at 4:01 PM, Larry Kart said:

James Kaplan, author of a recent two-volume (so far) bio of Frank:

http://www.amazon.com/Sinatra-Chairman-James-Kaplan/dp/0385535392

Haven't read it, though I think I did look at the index of the second volume to see if I was mentioned. Wasn't but I could have been, re: the rather mockingly negative review I gave to Sinatra's near non-performance at Chicago Fest in 1982 I think it was, which almost cost me my job at the Chicago Tribune.

Here's the review. As you can see, it rested rather oddly alongside the accompanying new story:

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1982/08/11/page/64/article/lead-tones-tarnish-solid-gold-sinatra

May have told this story before, but I think that Ol' Blue Eyes very cleverly, even quite elaborately, took or tried to take revenge on me a few years later, though I can't prove it.

Well, based on the Kaplan bio, I sure wouldn't put it past him, Larry.  If you could say one thing about his personality, it's that he could really hold a grudge.  And that was definitely a very critical review!  Kaplan mostly agrees with you, though, in that very short last chapter.  I think I read somewhere that Kaplan didn't have nearly as much access to Tina and Nancy, Jr. for that final period (Barbara Marx Sinatra, the "last" wife, comes off very badly in the book), so maybe that explains some of it, but I think ghost's argument that he had a deadline makes good sense.  Too bad too, because Sinatra did some interesting film work in the last period, and *some* of his concerts, if not that one in Chicago, were pretty good.

 

 

gregmo

[JSngry]

I saw him in Vegas, January (or very early February) of 1982, and he totally kicked ass. I went in just to "see Sinatra", I came out a goose-bumped convert.

[Larry Kart]

I saw him several times after that '82 Chicago Fest concert, and he was in good form, though not at the level of a remarkable late '70s concert at the Chicago Stadium. Pretty sure that I figured out what happened to him that night at Chicago Fest, though I do so well after the fact. Over the years, as Frank's voice naturally deepened/descended in range, he needed to sing more and more from his butt, so to speak, support lower tones especially from his gluteus maximus region, maybe even clenching those butt muscles some, in order to make things work. Well a short ways into the Chicago Fest concert -- if I recall correctly it was a rather cool August night -- his voice thinned out quite suddenly and notably in the middle of a number, as though the lower tones were no longer being supported. I would guess that he'd tweaked a muscle in his lower back, and the resulting discomfort pretty much screwed up his ability to sing adequately and left him eager to leave the stage ASAP, which he pretty much did, both because his back hurt and because, as a result, he was not singing well at all.

One aspect of the aftermath is that Mike Royko, who was at the concert as a front-row guest of Mayor Jane Byrne, whom he had recently helped to elect, wrote a column for the Sun-Times the day after my review appeared saying that I was dead wrong, that Sinatra had been in great form, and that I was just some kid whose hearing had been ruined by too much rock music. I found this amusing, but then the new editor of my paper, the Tribune, Jim Squires, called a meeting the next day with the entire features staff to discuss "fairness and objectivity in criticism" and pretty much tried to tear me a new asshole. (I found out later on that he had wanted to fire me, but features editor Koky Dishon, a fan of my stuff, more or less interposed her body between me and Squires -- metaphorically, that is -- and I lived to fight another day.)

I no longer recall much of what the steaming mad Squires said to the assembled features staff, other than what he said clearly was aimed right at me and that he said that he had called up Royko and offered him my job, which he actually had (it was a joke of sorts of course, but Squires was trying to lure Royko over from the Sun-Times, which had just been bought by Rupert Murdoch, and soon he would succeed in doing that). But I was so pissed at the phone call to Royko business that I got steaming mad at Squires in turn, telling him that I had gone out there as the representative of the/his paper, and I didn't appreciate getting stabbed in the back by having him tell a writer from another paper (Royko) who had attacked me in print that he was right and I was wrong. I also asked Squires if he had heard any of the concert; there were cutaways to the concert during the  10 p.m. local news, during which, I learned the next day, the anchormen of two different stations registered dismay at what they were hearing from Frank.) At this, which for some reason really infuriated Squires, he more or less screamed (this I do recall), "What does it MATTER how well Sinatra sang?" To which, kind of stunned but also understanding Squires' train of thought, I said, "Well, why did you send  ME [a so-called critic] there then? Why not just send a reporter?" No way I ever could have spoken up like that in any normal joust with authority I can imagine, but the whole thing was so crazy, like a scene in a farce, that I felt utterly free.

Perhaps interesting side notes: 

The only person on the features staff (there must have at least 30 of us there) who said a word in my defense was film critic Gene Siskel -- this perhaps because Gene and I were on fairly friendly terms and because he was or could be a mensch, but also perhaps because he already sensed or knew (this I know nothing of then) that Squires had plans for some reason (perhaps just one dick-swinging ego confronting another) to take the very popular Siskel down a peg or more.

Second side note: Some years later, an acquaintance of mine, Chicago Magazine writer Marcia Froelke Coburn, was doing a big profile on Royko. Marcia was very good at getting subjects to unzip their souls, and at one point she asked Royko if there was anything in particular about writing his column that he regretted. He said, yes, that it was writing things that turned out to injure more or less innocent people, and he named me as one such -- saying that his column mocking my Sinatra review had cost me my job. Marcia explained that this was not true, that I was still employed by the Tribune and that he must have confused me with someone else. Later on we figured out what his confusion almost certainly was. Not too long before the Sinatra review, Al Rudis, a then young rock critic on the Sun-Times had written an ecstatic review of a Rolling Stones concert, and Royko had written a column mocking what Rudis had said, I think even mentioning Sinatra as the only sort of popular music figure who deserved such praise. A short while later Rudis left the Sun-Times for one of the Los Angeles papers -- not because he was fired but because, like any sane rock critic of the time, he thought of LA as more fertile territory for music journalism than Chicago. But Royko thought Rudis left the Sun-Times because he had been fired and thought further that he had been fired because Royko had mocked him in print. Then came my Sinatra review and Royko's column about that, and now in his memory it was my head that had been chopped off because Roko had mocked me in print, when in fact no head had left anyone's shoulders.

Further oddity -- before all this, at some point in the mid-'70s I think, Royko had written a column mocking Sinatra for having Chicago policemen assigned to stand guard outside his room in the Chicago hotel where he was staying. Sinatra wrote a Royko an irate letter about the column, which Royko then printed, draped in further mockery of Frank's engorged ego; then after a while they semi-mysteriously arrived at some sort of reconciliation. (I'm pretty sure the Royko-Frank dustup figures in Kaplan's biography.) 

A Million Stories in the Naked City. And I haven't even told the tale of Frank's possible three-cushion-billiard-shot revenge.

Sinatra's 1976 letter to Royko:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/11/youre-nothing-but-pimp.html

Can't find the Royko column about Sinatra's police bodyguards that set Frank off. IIRC it was Royko at his best.

But here is the column in which Royko responds to Sinatra’s letter:

 

https://books.google.com/books?id=WUMjZaxfpwEC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=royko+on+sinatra's+flunkies&source=bl&ots=_E2miDO2sa&sig=b_i7adT3EuIuvsgXq70Co0D0XIU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKhpv4m-LMAhUo8IMKHXOWDOI4ChDoAQgbMAA#v=onepage&q=royko%20on%20sinatra's%20flunkies&f=false

[Chuck Nessa]

as a former Chicagoan and continuing friend of Larry, it was fun to relive this saga.

[Larry Kart]

56 minutes ago, Chuck Nessa said:

as a former Chicagoan and continuing friend of Larry, it was fun to relive this saga.

Whew -- looking again at what I wrote I thought it might come across as too self-indulgent.

[Chuck Nessa]

Well, there is that. :-)

[JSngry]

Otoh, self - indulgence definitely is on the Sinatra Venner Diagram, so it's cool.

[paul secor]

Isn't it Venn diagram? (My wife used to teach that to her first grade students.)  Or am I missing a pun?  I've been know to do that. (Sinatra did everything in a big way, so his diagram would be Venner?)

[JSngry]

Venn, yes. Damn phone auto-correct and I don't always catch it. Hate this phone-posting, need to get a new PC.

[Larry Kart]

My favorite Sinatra story is the old Shecky Greene joke, which I've been told is based on fact:

 "Frank Sinatra, wonderful man, saved my life. One night I was in the parking lot of the Sands Hotel, three guys were beating the crap put of me, and Frank said, 'That's enough.'"

Perhaps unnecessary background is that Shecky had been wisecracking in his act about Sinatra's mob connections, and Frank decided that he should be taught a lesson. Obviously the lesson was not learned, but that was Shecky.

[fasstrack]

On 15/05/2016 at 0:51 PM, gmonahan said:

I've seen a mention or two of this monster (nearly 2,000 pages in two volumes) in one or two threads, but no thread devoted to it.  I just finished reading through the whole thing, and I'm curious if I'm the only one to make that marathon.  It has a breezy "show-biz" style that sometimes put me off, but I do believe that if Sinatra broke wind, Kaplan wrote a paragraph about it.  I liked parts (Johnny Mandel's account of Sinatra in the studio), but I thought Kaplan let Sinatra off the hook a bit too much about his cozying up to the mob.  That said, Sinatra's warts-and-all personality is completely on display.  Oddly, I thought the last chapter seemed rushed and superficial, given the detail in the rest of the book.

What did others think?

I couldn't get past 5 pages. It was all show-biz gossip about who shtupped who in 1954. Who cares? I like the music myself...

5 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

My favorite Sinatra story is the old Shecky Greene joke, which I've been told is based on fact:

 "Frank Sinatra, wonderful man, saved my life. One night I was in the parking lot of the Sands Hotel, three guys were beating the crap put of me, and Frank said, 'That's enough.'"

 

I heard that one. Shecky is alive and well, and still hilarious: 

 

Edited May 18, 2016 by fasstrack

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, fasstrack said:

I couldn't get past 5 pages. It was all show-biz gossip about who shtupped who in 1954. Who cares? I like the music myself...

I heard that one. Shecky is alive and well, and still hilarious: 

 

Good one. In addition to everything else, I really like Shecky's vibe and soul.

[JSngry]

http://blog.wfmu.org/FREEFORM/2011/06/THE-LEGEND-OF-SHECKY-GREENE.HTML

Good reading.

[fasstrack]

5 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

My favorite Sinatra story is the old Shecky Greene joke, which I've been told is based on fact:

 "Frank Sinatra, wonderful man, saved my life. One night I was in the parking lot of the Sands Hotel, three guys were beating the crap put of me, and Frank said, 'That's enough.'"

 

I heard that one. Shecky is alive and well, and still hilarious...

Shecky does the best accents this side of the late Charlie Callas...

(The quote function is not working properly)...

4 hours ago, JSngry said:

http://blog.wfmu.org/FREEFORM/2011/06/THE-LEGEND-OF-SHECKY-GREENE.HTML

Good reading.

Check this out, too (same guy, Kliph Nesterhoff): http://classicshowbiz.blogspot.com/2011/06/interview-with-shecky-greene-part-one.html

[gmonahan]

Kaplan tells that story about Shecky and also about the whole business of his falling out with Sinatra.  It's interesting to read what jokes about himself Sinatra could take and laugh at and which ones he took offense at.  Don Rickles, for example, regularly ripped him a new one, but he liked Rickles and thought his stuff was funny.  Go figure!

 

gregmo

[fasstrack]

On 5/18/2016 at 3:14 PM, gmonahan said:

  Don Rickles, for example, regularly ripped him a new one, but he liked Rickles and thought his stuff was funny.  Go figure!

 

gregmo

There's a well-known story about Rickles and a date running into Sinatra at an eatery. Rickles pulled Sinatra aside, and begged him to say hello so Rickles's date would be impressed. When Sinatra complied, Rickles yelled 'what's wrong with you? Can't you see I'm with people?' (Sinatra reportedly broke up over that one)...

[JSngry]

I have to admit finding Rickles funny...don't really WANT to, always try to resist, always succeed up to a point, but eventually the guy lands on just right and I can't help myself.

Now if you want to hear something, check out the Joe E. Lewis standup album on Reprise. Talk about something altogether from another time and place.

If you accept Sinatra without this type of thing in the mix, you're a child. If you reject Sinatra because of this type of thing being in the mix...whatever.

Bottom line - Reality Sinatra is not for people who struggle with ambivalence. Greatness and Abomination just as frequently occupy the same space without either questioning the other. This is certainly one type of Quintessential American Human, no doubt.

[paul secor]

Rickles got away with a lot of stuff that no one else could get away with. I saw him take some nasty shots at people in the audience and everyone laughed, including the targets. I always thought that it was because he looked like a sort of ugly looking gnome that people cut him so much slack, but there was more to it than that. Perhaps he said things that other people wanted to say but wouldn't dare say.

[gmonahan]

And still is.  Rickles is still with us at 90 and apparently still performing.  As for Sinatra, Jim has a good point.  He was a man of...contrasts!

 

gregmo

[JSngry]

Rickles on Comedians In Cars Getting coffee is bordeline awesome...maybe fully awesome!