Frank Sinatra, legendary entertainer and one of the great stylists of American popular song, died Thursday night of a heart attack. He was 82.
Sinatra, who had not been seen in public since a heart attack in January 1997, was pronounced dead at 10:50 p.m. in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his publicist, Susan Reynolds. Sinatra's family, including his wife, was with him when he died. A private funeral was planned, Reynolds said.
President Clinton said he was deeply moved by the entertainer's death. "I think every American would have to smile and say he really did do it his way," he said. Martin Scorsese, in Cannes for the film festival, was quoted as saying that Sinatra was "an idol of mine and millions A great Italian American, a great American, and a great actor." U2's Bono, who sang "I've Got You Under My Skin" with Sinatra on the 1993 release Duets, said in a statement that "Frank Sinatra was the 20th Century, he was modern, he was complex, he had swing and he had attitude. He was the boss but he was always Frank Sinatra. We won't see his like again." Fellow crooner Tony Bennett reminisced about Frank, saying "One of Sinatra's favorite toasts to make with a glass in hand was, 'May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.' The master is gone but his voice will live forever."
Sinatra excelled at a string of careers, achieving a level of fame known to few people in the history of popular entertainment: He was this country's original teen idol, a pop-music legend, an Oscar-decorated actor and, ultimately, a show-business institution. For more than half a century, he thrilled fans with his smooth baritone and subtle phrasing, his often controversial comportment and his commanding presence.
Born Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, N. J., Francis Albert Sinatra was thought to be stillborn until his grandmother doused him with cold water. Though he weighed in at a whopping 13 pounds, Sinatra grew up to be decidedly scrawny as a young adult, he stood 5 foot 10 inches tall and weighed less than 140 pounds. But if he was a featherweight physically, Sinatra's charismatic, larger-than-life persona would eventually make him a giant in the pop pantheon.
The son of Italian immigrants, Sinatra inherited his uncompromising, prideful personality from his firebrand mother, Natalie Della "Dolly" Sinatra, a midwife and saloon keeper and a prominent figure in the local community; his father, Anthony Martin Sinatra, was a professional boxer and fireman. A poor student, young Frank dropped out of high school at 15, taking a series of odd jobs, the most notable of which were copy boy and sports reporter for The Jersey Observer.
But Sinatra cherished grand dreams of becoming a singer he claimed he would one day be even more successful than Bing Crosby and in 1935, he entered a radio talent show called Major Bowes Amateur Hour. Also set to perform was a singing, dancing trio called the Three Flashes, and Sinatra soon found himself paired with the group by a promoter. The impromptu teaming took the stage as the Hoboken Four, and walked away with first prize. Their win yielded a succession of dates playing with Major Bowes' traveling show, and occasional club and radio gigs.
By 1938, Sinatra was singing regularly on radio. A combination of vocal lessons and the determined efforts of his mother helped him land a $15-a-week job as a singing emcee and headwaiter at an Englewood, N.J., eatery called the Rustic Cabin. That same year, 1939, Sinatra married his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Barbato. Trumpeter Harry James, a former member of Benny Goodman's orchestra, was in the market for a vocalist to front a new band he was forming when he heard Sinatra on the radio. James attended one of Sinatra's gigs at the Rustic Cabin and subsequently hired him to front his Music Makers for a whopping $75 a month.
After fulfilling just seven marginally successful months of the two-year contract he had signed with James, Sinatra quit the Music Makers to join Tommy Dorsey's swing orchestra. Singing for Dorsey was a significantly sweeter experience, one that allowed Sinatra to polish a signature suave phrasing that never failed to make the girls in the audience swoon.
The wiry, vulnerable-seeming vocalist was suddenly all the rage, and it wasn't long before the orchestra's record "I'll Never Smile Again" rocketed to the top of the charts. By 1941, Sinatra made good on his ambition to eclipse Bing Crosby in popularity, when he overtook the veteran performer in a top band vocalist poll. The following year, Sinatra recorded his first four solo songs and bought his way out of his Dorsey contract to launch a solo career. The young crooner continued to create a sensation, driving starry-eyed bobby-soxers to a frenzy with his inimitable vocal interpretations and his ability to make each of his self-reflective, intimate lyrics ring with emotion.
Sinatra had become the master of love ballads, and it didn't hurt that he had sex appeal in spades. His appearances were all sell-outs, and his records vied with one another to command the charts. In December of 1942, he was pulling down $1,250 a week fronting Benny Goodman's band then the hottest ticket in town and from 1943-1945, he was the star of the popular radio program, Lucky Strike Hit Parade.
In 1943, "The Voice," as Sinatra had come to be known, made an inauspicious feature film debut in Higher and Higher in a role written expressly for him. (He had already appeared in cameo roles with the Tommy Dorsey Band in a handful of early '40s films, among them Las Vegas Nights). During the war years, Sinatra began courting the kind of controversy that would seldom abate over the course of his high-profile career: Although he had a legitimate excusethe draft board had rated him 4-F due to a punctured eardrumcritics lambasted him for not joining the armed forces.
In 1946, the prodigiously talented singer signed a five-year film contract with MGM that effectively put his music career on hold. An untrained yet surprisingly instinctive actor, Sinatra achieved inevitable stardom in a string of breezy, mainly music-oriented films. Apart from the fine musicals he made with Gene KellyAnchors Aweigh, in 1945, and On the Town, in 1949 there were few genuine high points in Sinatra's early movie career. However, he did win a special Academy Award in 1945 for the film The House I Live In, a short subject that advocated racial, ethnic and religious tolerance.
Meanwhile, Sinatra's popularity in the music polls suffered from negligence, more than anything else, and by the late '40s, he had sunk to 49th position in a ranking of top-selling recording artists. Sinatra's music career wasn't the only thing that was foundering: In 1951, he incited national outrage by obtaining a quickie Nevada divorce from his long-suffering wife Nancy to marry sultry screen goddess Ava Gardner. His vilification was compounded by the fact that the couple had three children Nancy, Frank Jr. and Christine.
The following year brought another stroke of bad luck when Sinatra's vocal cords suddenly hemorrhaged, and he was dropped by his talent agency, M.C.A. It looked like the 37-year-old was all washed up, as his film career had also stalled. Sinatra and Gardner's tempestuous, headline-dominating five-year union yielded as much heartache as passion, but it was Gardner who helped Sinatra stage his comeback. She was instrumental in helping him land his career-revitalizing role in the 1953 film From Here to Eternity. Sinatra lobbied hard to get the role and agreed to work for a paltry $8,000 instead of his normal fee of $150,000.
It's widely believed that Sinatra also used mob connections to secure the part, a rumor that was played out in Francis Ford Coppola's film The Godfather. (Sinatra's affiliation with Mafia figures dogged him throughout his life.) But regardless of how he won the role, Sinatra proved incredibly potent as the doomed Angelo Maggio. His dramatic resurgence was complete when he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.
Sinatra left the Columbia recording label that same year to sign with Capitol Records, where he began a very successful collaboration with music arranger Nelson Riddle. Said to be motivated by his utter infatuation for Gardner, Sinatra recorded such hits as "My One and Only Love," "My Funny Valentine" and the 1954 million-copy seller, "Young at Heart." Experimenting with new styles, Sinatra generated some of the first best-selling LPs in history, among them Songs for Young Lovers, This Is Sinatra, A Swingin' Affair, Come Fly with Me, Swing Easy, In the Wee Small Hours and the phenomenal Songs for Swingin' Lovers.
His Oscar-nominated performance as a heroin addict in the Otto Preminger film The Man with the Golden Arm led to several choice roles: He co-starred in the compelling 1962 Cold War psychodrama The Manchurian Candidate and displayed wry insouciance in musical features like Guys and Dolls (1955), High Society (1956) and Pal Joey (1957). In the late '50s, Sinatra's winning streak continued unabated. He churned out an endless stream of hit songs: "Love and Marriage," "Learnin' the Blues," "The Tender Trap," "All the Way" and "Hey, Jealous Lover" were only some of his chart-toppers. His vocal cords had fully recovered, and with his successful films, sold-out singing engagements, television shows and hit records, no other performer could touch him.
"The Chairman of the Board," as Sinatra was dubbed, had not only made a comeback, he was all the way back on top. He funnelled his profits into savvy business deals, including co-founding Reprise, his own recording label, in 1961. Vincente Minnelli's 1958 film Some Came Running teamed Sinatra for the first time with fellow singer-turned-actor Dean Martin. The two subsequently became the leaders of an exclusive "fraternity" of roguish Hollywood figures, dubbed the "Rat Pack," that also included Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. Together, these Vegas-haunting entertainers starred in a series of filmsOcean's Eleven (1960), Sergeants 3 (1962), 4 for Texas (1963) and Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), among others that reflected the spirit of their caper-prone brotherhood. Following his 1957 divorce from Gardner, Sinatra dated a bevy of beautiful young stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland and Lauren Bacall. To the shock of his fans, however, he married actress Mia Farrow, 30 years his junior, in 1966. The union lasted two years.
Sinatra won a Grammy in 1966 for the album September of My Years. Although he announced his retirement from both recording and acting in 1971, he was back with a TV special and album, Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back, in 1973. Three years later, Sinatra married dancer Barbara Jane Blakely Marx, Zeppo Marx's widow. He broke his film retirement in 1980, with the urban crime drama The First Deadly Sin. Sinatra continued to appear sporadically on TV and in films throughout the '80s. In the latter part of the decade, he launched an enormously successful tour with Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli. In 1992, his daughter Tina brought to the small screenwith his blessinga no-holds-barred, five-hour miniseries about his life and career, titled simply Sinatra. Duets (1993) and Duets II (1994), collections of collaborative recordings with artists as diverse as Bono and Barbara Streisand, propelled the 80-year-old crooner up the charts once again. Sinatra's late-life triumphs prompted music critic Pete Welding to comment, "There can be little doubt that Sinatra is the single greatest interpreter of American popular song we have had the pleasure of hearing The one performer who has raised what he deprecatingly refers to as 'saloon singing' to a high art, he has enriched American music with countless superior recordings of many of the idiom's finest songs."
Indeed, Sinatra's appeal was never limited by generational barriers or changing musical trends. At an age when most entertainers are too hopelessly outdated to warrant recycling on oldies stations, he was still being hailed by new crops of adoring fans. Bruce Springsteen acknowledged Sinatra's enduring appeal on the occasion of his 1995 star-studded 80th birthday celebration. "Hail brother," said Springsteen. "You sang out your soul." A man of contradictions and controversy, Sinatra nevertheless maintained a reputation as a consummate professional and a generous contributor to philanthropic organizations. At the 1971 Academy Awards ceremony, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charitable deeds. Among the more notable of his numerous honors were the Kennedy Center Life Achievement Award, presented in 1983; the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed two years later; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in 1987; and the Congressional Gold Medal for his accomplishments as a singer, actor and humanitarian, in 1997.
"I am truly quite moved and deeply honored by this marvelous recognition and happily share the Congressional Gold Medal with the talented people with whom I've worked," said the 81-year-old Sinatra when he received the latter award. "Today, as a proud American, Congress may have brought a tear to my eyes, but that lofty institution has also made me very, very happy."
The skinny kid from New Jersey had more than achieved his childhood dreams: Not only had he overreached the fame of Bing Crosby, he had become a pop icon, a legendary figure who defied attempts to separate the myths surrounding his character from the true, if extraordinary, events of his larger-than-life career.Sinatra is survived by his wife, Barbara, daughters Nancy and Christine ("Tina"), and son, Frank Jr.