Sinatra: The Life by Anthony Summers & Robyn Swan

The day the wise guys nearly whacked Frank

DOUBLEDAY £20 £18 (P&P FREE) 08700 798 897

DOUBLEDAY £20 £18 (P&P FREE) 08700 798 897

For many music critics, as well as devoted fans, Sinatra is the most accomplished popular singer in history, the "best in the world", as he announced at the outset of his career in 1940 when he was 25. But the velvet-voiced singer also swore like a stevedore, called his audience "finks" or "creeps" and indulged a habit of giving overexcited admirers an ice cube from his drink and advising them to "Go skate on it." He also threatened women, punched out waiters and set his bodyguards on anybody he was too afraid to fight himself. A chilling presence clings to the Sinatra myth that no chronicler can ignore.

It would be more of a surprise if Frank Sinatra and the Mafia had not been involved with each other. Indeed, as this biography uncovers and makes clear for the first time, if Sinatra was blessed with a golden voice, he was also born cursed. The origins of his Mafia connection had been put in place before he had even been born. Sinatra's father, the authors reveal, lived on the same street and was baptised in the same Sicilian church as Charles "Lucky" Luciano, the future capo di tutti capi of organised crime in America. For her part Frank's mother, Dolly, came from a family of freelance loansharks and armed robbers who graduated to bootlegging for a Luciano underling in New Jersey. When their only child wasn't skiving off school with streetgangs in Hoboken, Frank did his homework amid mobsters at the bar of his father's speakeasy.

It is tempting, at this point, to explain Sinatra's subsequent career through mob connections. But that doesn't explain his appeal. Kitty Kelley, for instance, devotes over 500 pages to Sinatra's links to the Mafia in her 1986 biography, with less than half a dozen pages expended on his singing. Summers and Swan try to redress that balance and what distinguishes this biography is their insistence that you can't separate sin from Sinatra, that you can't divorce the heavenly voice from the underworld friends.

At the same time that he bunked off school, Sinatra applied himself to music, both popular and classical. Aged 15, after a Bing Crosby concert, he told a friend: "Most people think he's a crooner. They're wrong. He's a troubadour. He tells a story in every song." The lesson was learned and he introduced "phasing", a clear enunciation and vocal clarity that had never been heard before in song. After watching Jascha Heifetz at Carnegie Hall he noticed that every time the Russian violinist "came down with his bow you hardly realised that it was going back up again". Why couldn't he do the same thing with his breath, he thought. "It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or a violin." Thus the classic tracks of the 1950's achieved a delirious balance between word and tone, what Pavarotti called the "bel canto" of mature Sinatra.

Nonetheless, it's undeniable that while Sinatra brought operatic technique to popular singing his career was initiated and propelled by the Mafia. A mob connection of his mother's got him his first break in a New Jersey nightclub. With the aid of a gun, a Mafia friend from his childhood secured a release from a contract which bound up his future earnings and when his career reached a lull in the early 1950s, Lucky Luciano's troubleshooter in Hollywood persuaded Columbia Pictures' boss, Harry Cohn, to give Sinatra a hotly contested role in the film From Here to Eternity. (This is the incident that would be famously dramatised 20 years later in The Godfather.)

Amazingly, at the height of his fame in the late 1950s, with hit records and overflowing concerts as well as films to perform in, Sinatra endangered it all by reneging on his sworn word to his Mafia overlords and, in particular to the new capo, Sam "Mooney" Giancana. The promise he made to Giancana was that in exchange for Mafia money and coerced votes for the 1960 Presidential campaign, Frank's friend Jack Kennedy would pull back the FBI's attack on organised crime. Giancana delivered the funds and, in Chicago, the votes but far from "laying off the mob", as Sinatra implored, the new administration designated Giancana for "concentrated intensified action".

Why didn't the Mafia put out a contract on Sinatra? Summers and Swan suggest that the singer survived due to pressure on Giancana from his "East Coast associates". Yet, despite their otherwise meticulous research there is one FBI file that the authors have overlooked. Almost every phone conversation that Giancana made was tapped by the FBI and in May 1961 the Bureau recorded an angry underling urging on his Chicago boss: "Let's show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can't get away with it as if nothing's happened. Let's hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys, [Peter] Lawford and that [Dean] Martin, and I could take the nigger [Sammy Davis] and put his other eye out." "No," Giancana replied, "I've got other plans for them."

Giancana's plans meant that Sinatra had to perform at Mafia clubs and casinos whenever he was called upon for the remainder of his career. The authors of this bittersweet accolade never lose track of the Faustian bargain Sinatra made but their biography is also balanced enough to evoke the flawed genius who lived his songs, who wanted to be remembered for his attempt to turn popular music into an art form.

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