Sinatra: An Unauthorized Biography – Earl Wilson, 1976 ★★

Life in King Frankie's Court

A courtier’s life is never easy. Flatter too much, and you risk being taken for granted. Offer candor, and it may be resented.

You may benefit from great kindness in certain moments, but the higher one’s master rises in life, the more callous and cruel they are inclined to become.

Earl Wilson experienced this, and wrote a book about it.

A nightlife columnist for a New York City newspaper, he found himself in 1940 covering one of his era’s brightest stars, Frank Sinatra, just as Sinatra was breaking out. Wilson became one of Sinatra’s biggest champions in the press, and for a time, enjoyed Sinatra’s favor. Then one day in 1967, it all came crashing down when Wilson’s byline appeared in an article Sinatra didn’t like. Sinatra then shut him out. Nearly a decade later, Wilson was still hurting.

“I have striven to write an honest book, without being influenced by the seven-year silence between us,” Wilson explains in a preface. “From the standpoint of a biographer, perhaps I am lucky to have been both out of Sinatra’s favor and in his favor, for I have known both Sinatras. The book is eminently fair to him, I hope, but in painting the portrait, I have not left out the warts.”

Sinatra indeed gives you plenty of warts, albeit couched in so many caveats and excuses as to make clear Wilson hasn’t stopped serving as Sinatra’s courtier whether or not Frank returns his calls. There’s a kind of perverse damnation of the singer in the way Wilson writes about him so positively. If Sinatra could cut off one of his heartiest media supporters so coldly, he must have been a nasty piece of work!

Wilson himself doesn’t present it that way. His Sinatra is written as a memoir of basking in the presence of the world’s most interesting man. Occasionally he gets carried away by this: “The love that millions of people feel for Frank Sinatra is one of the marvels of the cynical, hate-filled twentieth century,” Wilson writes in the first chapter, egregiously entitled “All Hail The King!”

Yet Wilson’s unctuousness has its limits, which is where Sinatra’s interest value lies. As a portrait of Sinatra’s darker side, Sinatra connects in a way more lurid tell-alls written by assassination-minded scribes do not:

Everyday Sinatra propels himself into the battle, cool, calm, and confident. He overcame a rough boyhood that had almost no prospect of success. He went on to become a millionaire and a power. He lacks the education of his critics and of those who attack him. But he looks with disdain on their opinions because by his standards he’s more important than they can ever be… That’s what powers Sinatra; that’s what makes him tick.

Wilson's relationship with Sinatra began one night in early 1940 when Wilson and his wife went to see Tommy Dorsey’s band perform at Manhattan’s Paramount Theater. Dorsey had just brought on a young male singer from Hoboken, New Jersey who was at the moment his own biggest fan. Yet when Sinatra sang, Wilson recalls how the couples on the dance floor stopped dancing to gather around and bask in his voice. Intrigued, Wilson asked to meet the skinny young troubadour with sucked-in cheeks and tousled hair:

There was a sharp light in Frank’s blue eyes as he sat down and talked. He spoke of his dreams and ambitions, and he said he was going to write a book about counterpoint. He was going to be the biggest singer in the country. “You’ll see,” he said.

He returned to our table several times between sets, and his self-confidence impressed us. He was convinced that he was going to be the greatest. In fact, he was already the greatest, he said.

Capturing the certainty of Sinatra is one of this book’s key takeaways. “Seldom has he apologized for a remark,” Wilson writes. When it came to women, Sinatra was unusually successful even for a celebrity, his confidence apparently proving a potent aphrodisiac. Some of Sinatra’s conquests spoke to Wilson quite willingly, describing Sinatra as a virile lover, if hard to take in other areas.

“It was always great in bed; the troubles were all out of bed,” is how Sinatra’s famous second wife, Ava Gardner, explained it to Wilson.

Wilson covered the Sinatra-Gardner romance for his newspaper, and had both parties talking freely to him. At times, he gives you a feeling for the atmosphere around the couple as they blew so hot and cold.

Wilson isn’t as sharp in other parts of his book. One key failing is the way he shortchanges Sinatra’s musical career in favor of celebrating his celebrity. Much attention is given to bobby-soxers and “Sinatra swooners” causing near-riots outside venues where the singer performed. Little attention is given to what made his singing unique, and even less to how he made himself one of the first recording stars with his run of gold-selling 78-rpm discs for Columbia Records. If you are interested in songs like “Strangers In The Night” or “I’m A Fool To Want You;” or albums like In The Wee Small Hours, there’s nothing for you here. His movies get more attention, if only for the actors and actresses with whom he co-starred.

Namedropping was part of Wilson’s repertoire covering celebrities for the newspaper; his desire to mention as many beautiful people as he can becomes laborious. Bob Hope must have been a friend of Wilson’s; his quips about Sinatra get regular and prominent mention. Wilson even applies the convention of referring to recently deceased celebrities with the honorific “the late,” as in “the late Jack Benny.”

Frank Sinatra cuts the cake with his third wife, Mia Farrow, in 1966. A year later, he was cutting ties with his old friend Earl Wilson as the marriage hit the rocks. [Image from http://pinuppickspenup.com/tag/mia-farrow/]

Wilson’s book doesn’t eliminate the negative, but it keeps it in check. If you want to read about how Frank’s mother Dolly was an abortionist or how he was arrested on a morals charge as a young man, Wilson’s book is not for you. He brings up Sinatra’s controversial 4-F designation during World War II, which helped him to avoid military service, but the cause here is said to be a punctured eardrum, not mental instability as other biographers claim.

When it comes to those reputed Mob ties, Wilson takes Sinatra’s side that anti-Italian bias fueled much of the gossip. If Sinatra seemed at times a little too eager to make the acquaintance of someone like Lucky Luciano, Wilson suggests it was a bit of understandable hero worship from a guy who didn’t play by the rules. Sinatra, Wilson writes, is “fascinated” by hoods.

That Wilson was a stooge in Sinatra’s service is something the author doesn’t try to conceal. Wilson describes how he kept flattering Sinatra even after Frank’s star had waned in the early 1950s: “As one of his surviving and loyal friends in the press, I tried to create excitement for him. The Paramount gave me a couple of rows of seats for VIPs whom I got out for the opening on March 26, 1952. Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Ted Lewis, Jimmy Durante and the columnists stood up in the audience and sang out greetings to Frankie, and I reported in the papers: ‘Jule Styne reached for his handkerchief when Frank sang ‘The Birth Of The Blues.’”

For his service, Wilson once got a gold money clip from Sinatra, inscribed “Oil, Youse is a Poil.” He carried it with pride, only to discover later that other friends of Sinatra received more expensive presents.

Along with his reporting on Sinatra’s romance with Ava, Wilson’s fallout with Sinatra provides this book’s most fascinating material. As Wilson describes it, it was September, 1967, a time of great tumult for Frankie. He was drinking heavily and on the outs with Wife #3, Mia Farrow. While gambling at the Sands casino in Las Vegas, where he often headlined, Sinatra got into an argument with the casino manager about his line of credit, and vowed never to appear there again. Then he went back and got into a fistfight with the manager which Sinatra lost, along with two capped teeth.

Wilson wrote up the episode, but nothing he says Sinatra would have found objectionable. It was an editor that inserted information Sinatra found “damaging.” Months later, when Sinatra reportedly got into a fight with singer Eddie Fisher, Wilson got a denial from the Fisher camp and shot the story down. He still thought himself on Sinatra’s team.

So when he went to see a Sinatra show in Miami in February, 1968, it came as a shock when he was told: “Frank says he won’t go on if you’re in the room.”

Sinatra kept Wilson at bay for the next few years, then out of the blue dropped him a line. This happened to coincide with Sinatra’s latest bid for a showbiz comeback, in 1975. No doubt Sinatra saw the value of getting back in his camp a longtime press ally. He was ready to try anything; at that moment he was performing a series of doubleheader concerts with pop superstar John Denver.

Sinatra never apologized or explained why he snubbed Wilson. It was not his style. Wilson was just happy to be back. He admits readily to being unable to hold a grudge where Frank is concerned:

He has more likability than anybody I ever met. If there such a word as unlikability, he has that, too, but when he turns on his likability, you think you must have been wrong about him ever being unpleasant.

It’s funny to report that the overall impression you get from reading Sinatra is unpleasant anyway, despite the ample attention Wilson gives to Sinatra the gracious entertainer or generous philanthropist. Mentioning a prostitute being hustled away by police for loitering outside a hotel, Wilson describes Sinatra walking up, explaining to the cop she’s his date, buying her a drink, and giving her a hundred-dollar bill with the condition she stop working for the rest of that evening.

Such moments add to the ample Sinatra legend. But they don’t quite make one as apparently ready as Wilson to forgive the cruelties and slights inflicted by the title subject. Somehow, underneath all his fulsome words, one senses Wilson was not that ready, either. He takes too many subtle digs at the legend, however insulated with flattery. It’s weak beer as revenge goes, but what else can a courtier do?