Sinatra: The Life - Hardcover

Anthony; Swan Summers

3.8

558 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385609248 ISBN 13: 9780385609241

Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

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The first and last definitive, fully-documented, massively researched birth-to-death biography of Frank Sinatra by the bestselling author of File on the Tsar and Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Frank Sinatra said that, as a child, he heard 'symphonies from the universe' in his head. At twenty-five, he told a friend he planned to become 'the best singer in the world'. Soon teenagers worldwide were behaving as though he were just that. He was 'the Big Bang of popular music', as U2's Bono has put it, and he remained a towering figure for more than fifty astonishing years. 'The day Frank Sinatra dies,' an aficionado declared in the early nineties, 'the 20th Century is over.' It ended in 1998 by that reckoning, and six years after his death here is the landmark life story the legend deserves. Sinatra was much more than his music. He was a political maverick, lover of a multitude of women, prone to violence and - most controversially - linked to the Mafia. Renowned biographer Anthony Summers and co-author Robbyn Swan have worked for four years to track down the truth and unravel the mysteries. They deliver stark new facts on Sinatra's tangled relationships with U.S. presidents, interview the women in his life, and get to the heartbreaking core of the tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner. In a sensational breakthrough, they uncover the origins of the Mafia connection, and trace the course of a life lived dangerously. SINATRA penetrates the private world the singer famously kept closed. It is packed with shocking revelations yet always remains compassionate and fair. This is the definitive book on a complex, flawed genius, from masters of the craft of biography.

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From the Inside Flap:

From the best-selling author of Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, the first fully documented, comprehensively researched, birth-to-death biography—the definitive life—of Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra is the story of an American icon who held the imagination of millions for more than fifty years and whose influence in popular music was unsurpassed in the twentieth century. As a child, he said, he had heard "symphonies from the universe" in his head. No one could have imagined where those sounds would lead him. Tracing the arc of this incredible life, from the humble beginnings in Hoboken to the twilight years as a living legend in Malibu, Sinatra follows a career built on raw talent, sheer willpower—and criminal connections.

Drawing on a treasure trove of documents and interviews, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan reveal stunning new information about Sinatra’s links to such Mafia figures as Sam Giancana and Lucky Luciano. And we see for the first time where the Mafia connection began, how and why it lasted, and how it impinged on others, not least President John F. Kennedy.

Here, too, is the core of the private Sinatra—alternately caustic and sympathetic—that the singer so long concealed. The heartbreaking truth about his passion for Ava Gardner emerges from never-before-published conversations with Gardner herself. In exclusive, intimate interviews, the women who loved Sinatra—some of them unknown to the public until now—share memories of the joy and pain of their relationships with him. And we learn what it was like to be the friend of a man who was generous and loyal to a fault, yet—as some of his fellow Rat Packers discovered—who could turn abruptly into a vindictive brute.

Dramatic, eye-opening, and unfailingly fair-minded, Sinatra is masterful biography: the revelatory story of a brilliant artist and an infinitely complex man.

About the Author:

Anthony Summers worked for many years as a senior producer on Granada's World in Action and on the BBC's Panorama, and produced many landmark TV documentaries. His bestselling books include THE FILE ON THE TSAR, CONSPIRACY (about the JFK assasination which won the CWA Gold Dagger), GODDESS (about Marilyn Monroe) HONEYTRAP and THE ARROGANCE OF POWER (on Nixon). Robbyn Swan is a writer for VANITY FAIR, LIFE MAGAZINE and others.

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