The Chairman

Sinatra: The Chairman
© 2015 James Kaplan
994 pages

Sinatra: "May I? -- it's your stage, figured I'd ask.."
Dean Martin: "Hey, it's your world! I'm just livin' in it."

(The Rat Pack: Live at the Sands)

In 2010, James Kaplan wrote an eight-hundred page volume about a poor kid from Hoboken, who made it good as a singer, seemed to flame out in the early '40s, and came back with a bang on the silver screen. The kid who was once floored by punches and got back up is now gone, replace by an increasingly wealthy artist-producer who can seemingly get away with anything, and who will remain an icon for the rest of his life, long after  the Beatles and all that follow take over the pop charts.  If The Voice followed 'Frankie' from the gutter to the top, The Chairman  is a chronicle of Sinatra's use and abuse of his cultural and financial power  as the king of entertainment -- for even as his behavior became worse under the influence of constant adulation, his growing wealth and legendary status allowed him to get away with the same behavior that nearly ended young Frankie's career.  This is not a biography for the reader who merely wants to delight in how cool Sinatra was -- there are other books for that --  because the Sinatra here is frequently drunk, ugly, and...well, very un-cool. But Kaplan has produced in these two books a definitive biography,  one that dwells at length on Sinatra's artistry as well as his relationships with others, and the good and bad flow together.  Although its sheer volume nearly exhausted my considerable interest,  at the end I had to count it worth it.

Artistically, Sinatra seems to have peaked in the 1950s:  after that,  both the changing tastes of the music-buying populace,  and Sinatra's growing age and iconic status cut his edge. He never ceased to take music seriously, and after initially dismissing Elvis and the Beatles as so much noise, he would listen to them attentively in hopes of figuring out why kids liked them so much, but movies were a different story.  Sinatra's comeback was based on his outstanding performance in From Here to Eternity, and while there would be a few more stellar roles to come,  after Sinatra gained the wealth and stature to start trying to make his own movies, he would produce films that sold through star power alone.  Sinatra couldn't lose himself in acting the way he did while singing, and as a result a lot of his later movies have characters who are  just Frank Sinatra with a different name; there's no suspension of disbelief.  On the set, Sinatra was increasingly disinclined to heed direction, and produced a lot of films that were panned by critics and lukewarmly attended, but  let him pal around with his buddies.   He remained committed to music, however, and the main reason I kept plugging along was for Kaplan's evaluations of different songs and records; aside from his late Capitol years, when Sinatra was utterly resentful of their refusal to let him go to develop his own label,  Sinatra was a consummate professional about not just singing, but musical performance.  Sinatra didn't just stand in front of a microphone and sing; he played the mic like an instrument, using it to hide his deficiencies and embellish his strengths.  He also experimented with different musical styles, though he was at his happiest giving performances like those of his youth: the singer and a big band behind him, thrilling now grey-haired bobby soxers.

A major part of The Chairman is Sinatra's relationships with others, as Kaplan covers his string of wives, his panel of good and lose friends, and his allies and enemies.  Sinatra liked to have a good time, preferring to stay up all night drinking Jack Daniels with his friends, and he was rarely without female company whether or not he was married at the time. (Sinatra definitely got around,  often seeing several women simultaneously, and apparently without an attempt to be secretive.) Sinatra's serial romances weren't just about having an interesting dinner companion for the evening;  he was ever restless, always looking for someone who could fill a lonely void.  His frequent heartache, particularly the long-burning torch for his second wife Ava, also informed his music, allowing him to sing songs about lost love like no one else.  He was attracted to power and swagger; throughout his life he'd pal around with members of the Mafia, despite being hauled into court several times to be questioned about mob ties.  Sinatra embodied that swagger himself, and without a powerful person to manage him,  he wasn't far from acting out if someone angered him.  (He once drove a golf cart through a casino window after they changed owners and stopped his line of credit.)  The lure of power also brought him to DC,  as he sought the friendship of JFK, and would later schmooze with Governor Ronald Reagan and President Nixon despite being a Democrat. Kennedy, whose own lechery was on par with Sinatra's, was the only person whose fame ever rivaled Sinatra's, but his wife and brother did their best to keep Sinatra away from  Kennedy.  Kaplan also covers the Rat Pack at length, Sinatra's clan of buddies who made films with him and who for a while took over Las Vegas with their shenanigans. While filming Ocean's Eleven, they began disrupting and then taking over each other's shows, to the point that it didn't matter who was booked: Sinatra, Martin,  or Davis. They'd all wind up on stage together, drinking and carrying on. The jokes and act grew old after a while,  but in the early sixties nothing like this had been seen before.

The Chairman covers Sinatra's life at length until the early seventies, when he entered into a "retirement" that was shorter than his marriage to the child-bride Mia Farrow. He came back in less than two years,  and would continue to perform until the 1990s...but this last chapter of  his life is a very small part of the book, and mostly chronicles his friends dying and Sinatra himself growing more tired, until his death in 1998.   Kaplan also includes a touching epilogue about a visit to Sinatra's grave in Cathedral City,  where the larger-than-life singer rests under a very ordinary marker that will probably be completely sun-bleached in another generation. The music, however, will persist.  There many singers who are descended in chaos  after imbibing too much fame and money,  but what they produce overshadows it: that's definitely the case with Sinatra.   He was a complex man who could give to charities lavishly, with complete anonymity, and then cause a public scandal -- but when I listen to something like "Summer Wind",   all of the tabloid  bits are blown away.  The voice takes over, and I can only marvel at the story of this poor kid from the wrong side of the river who became an icon -- and one whose wealth was produced not through dishonest means, like politics and  crime, but through the sheer joy he brought to people who bought his records.  It's a heckuva story, and in Kaplan's version, a heckuva read.

Related:

Frank: The Voice, Jame Kaplan. The first part of this definitive biography, The Voice covers Sinatra's early rise, fall, and rebound, culminating in his award-winning performance in From Here to Eternity. 

1906

1906
© 2004 James Dalessandro
368 pages

Turn of the century San Francisco was a notoriously corrupt city, filled with vice from the brothels of the Barbary Coast to the opium dens and sex slaves of Chinatown. 1906 is a political thriller  that brings together two brother-cops and an intrepid lady reporter together as they attempt to throw a spotlight onto the den of scum and villainy that is city hall, exposing a political-criminal cabal controlling the city.   And then...history happens, in the form of an earthquake and a fire that destroy city hall and a lot of the city, pitting the corrupt mayor against a slightly deranged general whose solutions all involve shooting or exploding things.   The novel and title both indicate that this is a novel set amid the chaos of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, but in reality....the quake hits when the book is nearly over,  and it merely serves as a large-scale plot twist.  Because I was reading this solely for the earthquake and fire angle, I wasn't too much interested in the seaside skulduggery -- especially since one of the cops was this irritating college grad who seemed to have majored in precognition, since he keeps telling people all the mistakes they're making, apparently armed with information from the future.  Perhaps he's a time traveler -- he wouldn't be the only one, since another character pines for cars not taking over the street yet, despite their still being rich man's toys in 1906.  devices that couldn't roll a mile without a flat tire.

If the potential reader is interested in the actual disasters, there are a couple of very storied histories -- Dan Kurzman's Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 was the volume that ignited my interest. It bubbles over with anecdotes that really bring the calamity to life.  Less anecdotal, but written by a San Francisco citizen, is Edward F. Dolan's Disaster 1906.

Opera fans may be interested in Enrico Caruso's steady appearances throughout 1906. He no good a-speaka the English, because he's-a Italiano.

The Indian in the Cupboard (and Return)

The Indian in the Cupboard
© 1980 Lynne Reid Banks

I had to keep watch in the children's department today, and there bumped into an old friend: Omri, the boy with a seemingly magical cupboard that can turn plastic figures into real, albeit tiny, people.  I can't remember how young I was when I encountered the Indian in the Cupboard series, though I do remember being puzzled as to why the "dollar" signs looked funny (£).   The story begins when Omri receives a plastic figure of an Iroquois warrior and a cupboard for his birthday.   There's no key for the cupboard, but oddly one of Omri's mother's heirloom keys fits the lock perfectly.   When Omri locks the figure up for safekeeping, however, he's astonished to hear yelling and muted scraping from within. Somehow, the toy has come alive.  When Omri is able to talk to the figure -- now a very animated and angry warrior -- he learns that the man is not simply a moving toy, but a real man suddenly ripped from history. The book follows Omri and Little Bear's evolving friendship, as well as the near disaster that ensues once Omri trusts his friend Patrick with the secret.  Oddly enough, the arrival of this tiny figure from the French and Indian Wars is a pivotal experience for Omri, giving him his first taste of responsibility, an opportunity for wrestling with the morality of his own actions. Ultimately he decides that he doesn't have the right to play with lives from history like this, and he and Patrick will send back Little Bear and a few others back closing and locking the cupboard door once again.

I loved this series as a child, and I enjoyed it no less today when I decided to revisit the first two books. I remembered much about the story -- I should, considering how many times I read the first few books --  but was amused by some of the things I'd forgotten.  The memory of the weird dollar signs, for instance -- I didn't realize the book was set in another country back in the day, and there were some jokes that went over my head because 'whiskey' wasn't a word that I had encountered at age seven, or whenever it was that I found these.  What a delight this book was to me back then, already in love with history -- even in fourth grade, my history book was the first one I looked for on the first day of school --- and immediately interested in any notion of toys coming to life. One of my favorite childhood books was Elvira Woodruff's Back in Action,  about a magic kit that brings toys to life and shrinks their owner down to have adventures with them.   This book was genuinely educational, however, as Little Bear behaves nothing like what Omri expects a 'savage' to act like. Through Omri and Little Bear, I learned that there were all kinds of different native Americans, that some lived in longhouses and some in tipis, that they fought each other and fought on different sides against  European powers.  Omri becomes fascinated by Iroquois culture, and when in the sequel his friend makes a churlish remark about  the 'savages',, it is Omri who chides his friend for not knowing what he's talking about.

Return of the Indian is more of an adventure than a moral drama -- Omri brings Little Bear to life again to tell him some good news, and then learns that the warrior's village about to be burned and his friend killed, so Omri tries to figure out a way to help out -- but is still enjoyable.  There's so much to appreciate about these two books, but I suppose the days of children playing with little figurines instead of their parents' phones are passing into memory.

This book appeared in a 2011 Top Ten Tuesday list, "Childhood Favorites".

2017's pie

Every year I like to  load up my books-read Excel list, sort it by labels, count everything up, and then make a chart out of it.  Every year's label sets are a little different, aside from old reliables like History and Science.   Historical fiction is safe, too, even though it was waaaaaay down from previous years.  Fiction in general was down, accounting for roughly 25% of what I read. I used Meta-Chart.com instead of Chartgo, and I'm pleased with the result, except for the font size.  Right now to make it readable I've had to expand the chart so that it's clipping into the sidebar.

Just for comparison's sake -- 2017 was my ten-year anniversary, so why not? -- here are some  previous years' pie charts.


2016


2015


2014


2013 (my favorite)


2012



Unfortunately, prior to 2012 I was using photobucket or imageshack to host the graph, so those are kaput.

The Truth about Nature

The Truth About Nature:  A Family's Guide to 144 Myths about the Great Outdoors
©  2014 Stacey Torno and Ken Keller
212 pages

Great news, kids. The tyranny of mom is over: no longer do you have to wait 45 minutes after eating to go swimming. Turns out you can wolf down a hot dog mid-stroke and nary a thing will happen, except for maybe a really soggy hot dog bun. Or...an attack by sea gulls.  That misconception and 143 others are debunked in The Truth about Nature,  which collects misinformation about the natural world passed down from one generation to another, alongside columns like "Strange but True", or facts that seem outrageous but which are really truth -- because that's just how nature rolls. I stumbled upon this book at the library and was immediately attracted by the cover. It's written for juvenile audiences, and is written not just to flush out old information but to sharpen scientific appraisal: the authors often charge the reader with evaluating just how they might find out that a particular information is bunk, prompting them to imagine different possibilities and how they might evaluate them  The collected misconceptions themselves range from folk wisdom ("Moss grows on the north side of trees") to entries that I think were just fudged a bit and thrown in. There's a section on how clouds aren't actually white, as they can also be grey -- and sometimes, oak trees don't have acorns, because it's not the right season.  Well...okay, but that doesn't strike me as a "myth" in the same way that "touching a toad will give you warts" does.  At least one debunked fact -- that rabbits are rodents -- was a surprise to me. Turns out they're lagomorphs. Also, they don't eat carrots, but I kind of figured. They also don't sing opera, or foil the engineering schemes of malevolent coyotes.

While this is intended for younger audiences -- probably late elementary and early middle --  adult readers who are in the mood for some light reading will also find it enjoyable.

Every Man a King

Every Man a King
© 1989 Bill Kauffman
277 pages

Every Man is a King follows the self-destruction and resurrection of one John Huey Long, a rising star in DC’s intellectual establishment who disgraced himself in a heated television interview. Fired and friendless, Ketchum slunk back to the rathole hometown he thought he’d escaped, planning to die – but instead, he found a new life. One part DC satire, one part homage to crappy hometowns, Every Man a King makes for an odd novel. Its mocking of politicians, the media, and pseudo-intellectuals has easy appeal, of course, and one of the characters is winsomely weird. (Imagine Phillip Seymour Hoffman as an obese fop who wears 1940s suits, carries a cane as a transparent affectation, and who is incapable of not sounding like a 19th century dandy.) I liked the general arc of the novel, the tale of a pretentious jerk being taken and realizing there’s more to life than DC power plays, that real people still live in places that don't matter to those in government. And Kauffman should be praised for not making this localist defense sentimental in the least: the town Ketchum returns to has been left behind by everyone else, and most of the people are poor, drunk, and angry instead of poor-but-happy farmers enjoying their simple lives far from the big city blues. Most of the action happens in Ketchum’s heart and mind, though, as he slowly realizes what a empty charade life in DC had been anyway, and what a boob he'd become -- a man corrupting the memory of his populist grandfather, turning the elder into a fount of folksy proverbs just to add a little flavor to his columns.  Life in Batavia is ridiculous, too, but at least it’s real. Even so, a story of largely internal musing doesn’t have a great deal of activity: Ketchum even manages to avoid barfights despite spending most of his time post DC sitting in one. On the whole the novel was too vulgar and too sedentary for my taste.

Snowed in

For the second time in as many months, we've received a hearty dose of snow and ice. This time seems to have been much more disruptive, as roads have been shut down completely. Last month ice wasn't too bad, but this morning even speeds of 10 and 15 MPH were too much for vehicles.  The above shot, borrowed from WVTM's facebook page, is of Interstate 65, south of Alabama's capital city.  This is an eerie sight for me, because this stretch of interstate always has plenty of traffic.  Downtown Selma was deserted as well, with only emergency services and a few reporters gingerly venturing out.   The arrival of the snow and ice coincided magnificently with Martin Luther King day to result in a five-day weekend for many people.  I've been using the time to read, of course, but I also played through Papers Please and have been trying to remember just how I use to beat missions in Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines.   How much of high school did I spend watching German patrols, figuring out the best way to sneak through or neutralize them? Probably too much. 

While I didn't stir today, this was my view shortly before Christmas. My grandmother says she can't remember ever having two snows in one winter -- it's a once every ten years kind of thing this far south.