To write a great biography, writers need a diverse set of skills, especially when describing an endlessly documented icon like Frank Sinatra. A good biographer has to be equal parts journalist, detective, psychologist, cultural historian, critic, and prose stylist; it might be possible to get by with a shaky grasp on one of those skills, but it's rare and disheartening when a writer lacks them all. That unfortunately seems to be the case with Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, whose fairly worthless new biography Sinatra adds little to the public's understanding of a preeminent American legend, unless the fact that Sinatra palled around with mobsters and enjoyed Jack Daniels, dames, and even the occasional broad constitute shocking revelations.
Sinatra eventually offers a blandly written, annoyingly judgmental Cliffs Notes version of Sinatra's adult life, but it first offers a revisionist take on his ostensibly hardscrabble upbringing, presenting him not as the tough street kid of popular imagination, but as the pampered son of a domineering mother with major political connections. As Summers and Swan present it, Sinatra's modest early success was attributable largely to the efforts of his mother and the Mafia, which are depicted as equally terrifying. Sinatra duly chronicles Sinatra's rocky romances, his journey from FDR Democrat to Nixon Republican, and his professional highs and lows, with a special emphasis on mob ties and politics, but it has little new to offer on either subject. The book inexplicably wastes a lot of space on the attacks Sinatra's New Deal Liberalism engendered from the radical right. But since his era's conservative attack dogs pretty much thought FDR was a traitorous Bolshevik taking marching orders directly from Uncle Joe, it's no revelation to say they disapproved of Sinatra's outspoken lefty activism.
The Sinatra that emerges here is a crude, hollow caricature of a complicated man who was capable of extraordinary kindness and sensitivity as well as violent fits of explosive rage. Sinatra presents the singer's life as seen from the cheap seats, bloodlessly conveying the larger-than-life themes and episodes of his contradictory existence with none of the magic or mystery that made him so much more than just a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, wannabe hood from Hoboken.