Doubleday £20 pp576

It has been almost 20 years since Kitty Kelley’s Sinatra: The Unauthorised Biography set the ball rolling with revelations about Frank Sinatra’s abortionist mother, his mob ties and hero worship of gangsters, his numerous affairs, his violence and his control freakery. Sinatra tried to suppress it through the courts, but to no avail. Kelley returned to the fray in her biography of Nancy Reagan (1991) in which she accused Sinatra of canoodling with the First Lady behind closed doors at the White House. Over the years, we have been treated to memoirs by Sinatra’s daughters, Nancy and Tina, his valet, George Jacobs, and several books about the Rat-packers and other associates. Suzanne Finstad’s 2001 biography of Natalie Wood used several sources to argue that Sinatra almost certainly seduced the young actress, with the connivance of her pushy mother, when she was below the age of consent. (Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan refer to Finstad’s book, but fail to address the charge.)

While this book underlines what an immense pioneering achievement Kelley’s biography was, Summers and Swan nonetheless tell us much that is new, and with panache. Summers is the author of books about Marilyn Monroe, J Edgar Hoover and (with Swan) Richard Nixon, so it is perhaps no surprise that they are adept at explaining the nexus between showbusiness, organised crime, and politics that so dominated Sinatra’s life. Yet they are also compelling in their account of their subject ’s emergence as a singing phenomenon. From band crooner to bobbysoxer idol to mature recording star, Sinatra honed his interpretative skills until, as one singer puts it, he could “turn a 32-bar song into a three-act play”.

The bandleader Tommy Dorsey thought him “the most fascinating man in the world, but don’t stick your hand in the cage”, while the film director Stanley Kramer observed that “tension walks in beside him”. Time and time again, the authors describe incidents in which he would fly into a hideous rage or withdraw into a monumental sulk. He was a chronic alcoholic: several attest to his drinking a bottle of whisky or bourbon a day. “It became the pattern of his life,” reflected one friend. He couldn’t handle rejection, whether by the record-buying public (in the early 1950s), by Ava Gardner (his second wife), or by JFK (in whom, according to Shirley MacLaine, he “met his match in terms of theatrical manipulation”). He was prone to violence and surrounded himself with the human equivalent of attack dogs that were ready to administer a beating at the drop of his pork-pie hat. When it came to bearing a grudge, few could equal Sinatra.

As a lover, he veered from tender and cuddly to downright brutal. Gardner recalled him being almost too gentle, “as though I’m a piece of Dresden china and he’s gonna hurt me”. Susan Murphy, a fresh voice that the authors have discovered, who claims that in effect he raped her in his Palm Springs home in 1969, says: “He was forceful, and it was over very quickly. I do remember — I found out without caring to — that he was quite large in that department.”

The best new witness the authors have found, however, is Peggy Connelly, a singer who had a three-year affair with Sinatra in the mid-1950s. His charm, she says, was “wrapped up in the mythology of what the French call the caïd. It’s an old Arab word, used in France to describe a man who is powerfully attractive but outside the law. Such a man is flamboyant, commanding, cocky, swaggering, big with the ladies — like a mafia figure. He dominates people . . . Frank lived the part.”

Summers and Swan have done sterling work in tracing Sinatra’s roots in Sicily to the same street as the forebears of Lucky Luciano, and in tracking the sinuous nature of his long-standing relationship with the capo di tutti capi. The excuse for Sinatra’s mob associations has always been that he grew up among “those guys” and had to curry favour with them to boost his career. But Dean Martin, who came from a similar background, showed sufficient respect to guarantee a steady flow of work yet managed to keep his distance. The difference is that Sinatra sold himself to the mob out of admiration. “I’ve always felt Sinatra was frustrated,” says Broadway press agent Eddie Jaffe. “He would rather have been a made member of the mafia than the great singer he was.”

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