![]() His book is thus a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-following Sinatra at close range up to the moment when he retrieves a faltering career by winning the supporting actor Oscar for From Here to Eternity-except that the subject refuses to sit still long enough to provide a stabilized image. Kaplan limits himself to the first third of Sinatra’s trajectory, the rise and fall and resurrection preceding the long run of now-classic albums for Capitol, the raucous heyday of the Rat Pack, and the final enthronement as Chairman of the Board. But they hardly converge into a unified portrait: confronted with the multitude of Sinatras that one must attempt to resolve into a single plausible person, there is a gathering sense of unsettling dissonance quite at odds with the perfected harmonies of his greatest recordings. There is certainly enough testimony to choose from pieces of Sinatra, variously skewed and distorted, are scattered all over the latter part of the twentieth century. James Kaplan’s Frank: The Voice is authentically a page-turner, a strident tabloid epic constructed out of facts-or more precisely out of the disparate and sometimes contradictory testimony of scores of participants in Frank Sinatra’s early life. ![]() ![]() Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Tony Curtis, and Janet Leigh attending a dinner at the Empress Club, London, December 1951 ![]()
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