His Way, by Kitty Kelley
Teachout, Terry
"T do not believe," W. Somerset 1 Maugham wrote in 1935, "that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity." Maugham was talking about...
...Maugham was talking about Cervantes, but he might just as well have been referring to Kitty Kelley's His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, the most scabrous biography of a living person to be published in recent memory...
...No stone is left unturned, no suppurating detail passed over in silence...
...his other uncle, Babe, had been charged with participating in a murder and had been sent to prison...
...Sinatra's "Mafia ties" are disgusting...
...For Miss Kelley's account of the life of Frank Sinatra, revealing as it is, is completely divorced from the only possible reason why such a book should have been written in the first place: Sinatra's artistry...
...For they had witnessed a peerless talent and that was enough...
...He cannot be compared to, say, Richard Wagner, whose work contains a clear and relevant political aspect...
...Miss Kelley brings His Way to a close with a coolly hypocritical nod to the artistic side of Frank Sinatra...
...mazingly, Kitty Kelley has nothing whatsoever of interest to say about Frank Sinatra's singing...
...Yet both belonged more to the aggressive world of Ernest Hemingway than to the sensitive realm of F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...With raw material like this, a more intelligent author might, have produced an extraordinary social document, a quintessentially American story of fear and power and distrust...
...Though Miss Kelley is deaf to Sinatra's achievement as a musician, His Way does manage to suggest some of the infinitely fascinating paradoxes with which his life abounds...
...Though Sinatra's charitable activities and personal kindnesses are cursorily described from time to time, the charitable activities are dismissed as smart press agentry and the personal kindnesses are carefully balanced with appalling tales of savage brutality impartially wreaked on friends, acquaintances, and perfect strangers who inadvertently managed to get in the way of Sinatra's bodyguards...
...But Yardley's inane comments are useful to the extent that they point up a deeper imbalance in His Way...
...They have nothing to do with his singing...
...Kitty Kelley, by contrast, is only interested in sifting through garbage pails...
...How could a man capable of eating breakfast off the bosom of a prostitute have made albums like Only the Lonely or September of My Years or Close to You...
...If Frank Sinatra ever did anything good, you won't find out much about it by reading His Way...
...He is the ultimate artist in his field, one of a bare handful of singers HIS WAY: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF FRANK SINATRA Kitty Kelley/Bantam/$21.95 Terry Teachout THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 49 who bring to popular music something of the expressivity and emotional depth of their classical counterparts...
...This passage accurately conveys the overall tone of the book...
...Riddle bestowed on Frank a swinging ballad style coupled with a jazz-influenced, finger-snapping spontaneity that characterized his music and came to be known to Sinatra fans as the Capitol Years (1953-1961...
...One should hardly be surprised that her efforts have turned up a pile of garbage...
...To those who had been touched by the magic of Frank Sinatra's music," she says, "his Mafia ties would never matter...
...Witness the very first page of His Way, which opens with a description of Sinatra's 1938 arrest on a morals charge and immediately proceeds to supply the following information about the Sinatra family tree: Frank's uncle Dominick, a boxer known as Champ Siege...
...His father, Marty, was once charged with receiving stolen goods, and his mother, Dolly, was regularly in and out of courthouses for performing illegal aborTerry Teachout is a senior editor of Harper's Magazine and a contributing editor of High Fidelity...
...This is a simple-minded reduction of a very profound truth: Frank Sinatra's life is in the long run irrelevant to his work...
...his uncle Gus had been arrested several times for running numbers...
...And her lack of balance is quite shameless...
...Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post, goes so far as to argue that the publication of His Way completely negates Frank Sinatra's value as an artist...
...Even the sincerity of Sinatra's current friendship with Ronald Reagan is called into question by a lengthy account of his liberal youth which is clearly designed to suggest that Sinatra would have remained a Democrat had John Kennedy not been forced to shun him because of his Mafia connections...
...But mere implication is not enough...
...And Frank himself had been arrested just a month before on a seduction charge...
...And while some reviewers have been put off by the obvious imbalances in Miss Kelley's recital of the facts, others have accepted her account as essentially complete...
...How could a man capable of exchanging friendship rings with Sam Giancana have been able to perform on equal musical terms with the Hollywood String Quartet...
...Sinatra's work inside the recording studio stands on its own...
...On those rare occasions when she is forced to write about the specifics of Sinatra's musical career, her prose disintegrates into utter incoherence: The driving basses [sic] and swinging reeds of Nelson Riddle supplanted the fluffy lush strings and slow tempi of Axel Stordahl, creating some of the best popular music of the era...
...His Way is a long and sordid catalogue of gangland friendships, suicide attempts, hulking bodyguards, and casual encounters with prostitutes...
...The biographer's task is to try to explain these fantastic juxtapositions, to find form and coherence in the details of a life...
...His Way, then, is a profoundly one-sided portrait of Frank Sinatra, a caricature of the grossest sort...
...tions...
...had been charged with malicious mischief...
...The best of Sinatra's music," he says, "may indeed be beautiful, but if listening to it is to pay honor to the man whom Kelley describes, then I have no need or desire to do so...
...But Kitty Kelley is a dreadful and insensitive hack, the very worst kind of "Entertainment Tonight"-type trivializer...
...But the one side portrayed by Kitty Kelley is shown in such proliferating detail that it is difficult to keep from taking it at something like face value...
...One puts down His Way convinced that biography affords no greater humiliations than the ones Miss Kelley has inflicted on, Frank Sinatra...
...Her book does not address musical questions at any length...
...It is one thing when, say, the Israel Philharmonic bans the music of Richard Strauss because of his association with Adolf Hitler, another thing altogether when a petulant Jonathan Yardley puts his Sinatra albums to the torch because Kitty Kelley has written a book proving that 01' Blue Eyes pals around with mobsters and likes to have people beaten up...
...Frank was as much illusion and fantasy as the Great Gatsby, and Ava was as infantile and intoxicating as Daisy...
...These self-serving remarks are, of course, absurdly disproportionate...
...We even learn that Sinatra's Playboy interview was ghosted...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
