And instead of resenting it, people loved it.
And there was never anything like it before or since.
Between 1957, when his hero Humphrey Bogart died, and 1963, when his friend Jack Kennedy died, Frank Sinatra was the biggest star in all of showbiz.
There was Elvis, of course, and John Wayne and Danny Thomas and Ray Charles and Marlon Brando and Bob Hope and Pat Boone and Tony Curtis and Frankie Avalon and Jerry Lewis and a whole lot of other people who were Kings of Pop, or certain quadrants of it, at the time.
But nobody was so sheerly supreme as Frank as an icon, artist, or draw, none held his mighty sway over the mass imagination, and none was so ascendant for so long.
With his stunning LPs for Capitol Records—Songs for Siwingin’ Lovers, In the Wee Small Hours, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely, a good dozen more—he was releasing classics at the rate of several a year and moving big numbers in the record stores.
With a string of commercial hit movies—and good ones, frequently, like The Man with the Golden Arm, The Joker is Wild, High Society, and the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity—he ranked among the era’s top-grossing movie stars.
He had regular specials on television (though rarely very good, they always drew well); he was the top act in nightclubs from Miami to Chicago to Las Vegas; he performed with ceremonious duty at charity events, Academy Award telecasts—all the orthodox showbiz sacraments.
Arguably no single entertainer had ever held the top spot in so many media for so long—Bing Crosby, maybe, back in radio days.
No, Frank was It.
And It in ways that nobody ever had been.
Because as big a deal to the popular American mind as Frank’s considerable musical and cinematic lives was his private life.
Flitting from gorgeous bedmate to gorgeous bedmate, rubbing elbows with tough guys, throwing punches, pounding back whiskey, romancing in a cigarette’s glow, he was the envy of every American male who had left off worshiping Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams for more grown-up pursuits: the rakish kid brother-in-law they’d all secretly give their left arms to trade places with.
There was nothing, it seemed to the average working stiff, that Frank didn’t have.
But Frankie—and who could have guessed it?—didn’t like to be by himself: He got antsy. He liked to have entourages of like-minded he-men around him, guys to drink and schmooze and play cards and go to the fights and hit the bars with: chums.
He wanted an accumulation of bosom fellows around him, and he thought it would be wonderful if they could work together. He began to play with his buddies in nightclubs, to make films with them, to pop in on their TV shows and invite them onto his.
He started smallish—a picture with one or two here, a spontaneous walk-on there—but then his horizons expanded. Various threads in his personal and professional lives began to merge in ways that no one would ever have predicted: his affectations toward politics and the Mafia, for instance, his ownership of film and record companies and shares in casinos, his friends and debtors and vassals.
At the end of 1959, he concocted an intoxicating brew of money, power, talent, romance, gall, a nexus of showbiz and muscle, politics and glamour, a brilliant netherworld spinning at 33⅓ with himself stock-still at the center, conducting it all with his mind.
They alit in Las Vegas for a month to make a movie and play a historic nightclub gig that they called the Summit; they hit Miami, the Utah desert, Palm Springs, Chicago, Atlantic City, Beverly Hills, Hollywood back lots, illegal gambling dens, saloons, yachts, private jets, the White House itself.
It was what a good portion of America was about for a few remarkable years.
It was sauce and vinegar and eau de cologne and sour mash whiskey and gin and smoke and perfume and silk and neon and skinny lapels and tail fins and rockets to the sky.
It was swinging and sighing and being a sharpie, it was cutting a figure and digging a scene.
It was Frank and Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin and Peter Lawford for a while and Joey Bishop when they asked him and Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana and tables full of cronies and who knew how many broads.
It was the ultimate spasm of traditional showbiz—both the last and the most of its kind.
It was the high point of their lives and a midlife crisis.
It was the acme of the American Century and a venal, rancid, ugly sham.
It was the Rat Pack.
It was beautiful.
Grow up with immigrant parents and a last name that no one can pronounce right, with an ear mangled by a midwife’s forceps and no meat on your slight bones, with no brothers or sisters, and a mother always on the go, and a queer little dream that you can win the whole world over with a song; grow up with all this, and then win wealth and fame and acclaim and power—the whole world and more—and you’ll likely find no embarrassment in living as if your every action was the stuff of legend.
Throughout his life, Frank would be boosted in his perception that his progress through the world was of great import, and if he ever lapsed into doubt, there would always be someone around to reassure him: a wife, a dame, a publicist, a thumbbreaker, a daughter, a fan, even, though not quite so reliably, the press. Frank could count on being spiffed-up, spoiled, spirited out of jams; he expected it of life. And it was an expectation born not in the flush of his success but in the earliest days of his youth: Of all the hangers-on, sycophants, yes-men, and boosters, his mother was first and foremost.
There was undeniable steel in Natalie Garavante, the little pug-faced Genoese firebrand known to everyone in Guinea Town, Hoboken, as Dolly. She prodded the men around her to let her through doors that she herself would’ve battered down in a world that cut women an even break. She had a stunningly foul mouth: “Her favorite expression was ‘son of a bitch bastard,’” recalled a mayor of Hoboken who knew her in his youth; a mob lawyer who met her in the 1960s compared her way with profanity favorably to Jimmy Hoffa’s. She made the slow-moving Italian men around her jump at her command, and she carried enough clout to get political bosses and city officials to do the same. She was a shit-stirrer and a hollerer; she worked hard and she took no prisoners; she spoke simpatico with the people in the streets and defied the men of power. If she’d’ve been born a boy, she might’ve been an Italo-American Huey Long.
But she was a woman and it was the 1910s—and an Italian neighborhood at that—and so she had to find a husband, and she settled on a handsome, illiterate kid from the neighborhood, a guy who couldn’t hold a steady job but cut a dashing figure in the boxing ring. Dolly’s brothers were boxers, which was probably how she came to meet Marty O’Brien, a stout, quiet little guy with tattoos on his arms. Maybe she first took him for Irish, which would’ve appealed to her social-climbing instincts; soon enough, she learned he wasn’t an O’Brien but a Sinatra, but that didn’t make him any less attractive. He might’ve been an unfinished project, but Dolly was sure she could make something of him. Despite her parents’ fears of a layabout Sicilian for a son-in-law, they eloped and married in a civil ceremony. A year and a half later, she bore their first and only child.
Later on, he would try to depict himself as some kind of Dead End Kid turned good, but the truth was that Frank was always plushly seen to. In a neighborhood where the men worked menial jobs and the women raised broods of five, eight, ten brats, only-child Frank had two working parents and a surfeit of candy,