Frank Sinatra: The Life by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swann

Having finished "Sinatra: The Life" by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swann,  I was fascinated and somewhat horrified by it all.  



Frank Sinatra  (1915-1998)

 It is an exhaustive recounting of a life of excess by someone who was to my mind, clearly alcoholic and bipolar. Like most drunks he could turn mean and violent and the only reason he didn't go to jail for battery several times was that he used his considerable financial resources, his allies in the underworld, and his friendships with the prominent and powerful, like John F. Kennedy and later, Ronald Reagan.   He was married four times, and in between marriages and during them too, according to the Summers book, hired women.


Perhaps his most intense relationship was with Ava Gardner in the 1950s

 I expect the manic phase of his illness certainly contributed to his amazing achievements in show business.  He was a relentless and driven individual.  Unfortunately for such supreme gifts of energy and inspiration one has the devil to pay.  According to the book he attempted suicide at least once, and reportedly consumed a bottle of Jack Daniels every day.   
 

 He did have a wonderful voice and at his best was a brilliant singer, so you have to hand him that, but you have to wonder what might have happened if he had gone into rehab and maybe gotten some treatment for his bipolar disorder.  I kept expecting that at one point or another he would gain some insight into his substance abuse, and try to mend his ways.  Maybe he did somewhat, towards the end of his life.   

In the end alcoholic dementia caught up with him, and he could not even remember the words to songs he had been singing for years unless he had a teleprompter. Then his sight began to fail and he couldn't read the teleprompter. He told jokes at concerts and then, a few minutes later told the same jokes. He would get in his Lear Jet and fly places and then forget where he was going and could not even remember the faces of people who had worked with him literally his whole career.

Isn't death always like that, however, where one's world shrinks to the width of a sickroom?   Something breaks and can't be fixed, finally, and there you have it, the grand biological machine grinds to a halt, in an irreversible process.

Celebrities of course subsist in the imagination of the living, and in the consumers of their arts.   Movies are a carefully constructed illusion so that we, in our humdrum lives, can go somewhere else, and be someone else.  We are trapped in time and space but we reward handsomely anyone who can feed our hunger for experience. 

 Sinatra was the archetype of the age when men wore hats, and women were playthings, where Jazz age heroes were hard-drinking (smoking) hep cats with no reverence for law or sobriety.