Frank Sinatra, the talented and temperamental balladeer who dominated popular music longer than any entertainer before him, had clung to his legendary life as tenaciously as he had stuck with the audiences he loved.
Three years after he took his final concert bow, Sinatra died at 10:50 p.m. Thursday in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center's emergency room after a heart attack. His wife, Barbara, was at his side.
The self-styled "saloon singer," 82, had not been seen in public since suffering a heart attack in January 1997. Rumors of his imminent death proliferated throughout that period as he made frequent trips to the hospital only to return home.
Susan Reynolds, Sinatra's publicist who told the world of his death, said his funeral will be private.
Sinatra's masterful interpretation and flawless execution of some of America's most beloved songs earned his reputation as the most influential popular singer of the 20th century. His accomplishments broadened to include film, with such roles as his Academy Award-winning performance in "From Here to Eternity."
A Fiery Personality
For more than three generations, his name was synonymous with talent and taste. In the late 1930s, his fragile frame and painfully shy expressions made swooning, shrieking fools of the normally normal teenage girls standing by the bandstands where he first earned his living at $75 a week. In the 1960s he gathered in millions as both partner and star in the clubs of Las Vegas.
In recent years, the once-irascible boy baritone and multiple Grammy winner had mellowed some, abandoning the omnipresent bottle of Jack Daniels atop the piano and the perennially lighted cigarette. Yet he retained the fiery personality that led him into stormy, sometimes unfulfilled romances and scuffles that often produced more headlines than his performances.
In March 1994, when he collapsed while singing "My Way," his traditional paean to life at a concert in Richmond, Va., attendants rushed to the stage. As a piece of emergency equipment was thrust toward him, he responded by snarling, "Get that damned thing out of my face."
Such was the stuff of his legend.
Toward the end, a life dedicated to the excesses of "his way" had taken a toll on his faculties, and he frequently forgot the lyrics to songs he had been warbling for 50 years, unable to follow even the giant TelePrompTers that became a part of the performance.
He held his last live performance in Palm Desert, on Feb. 25, 1995.
But fans applauded him to the end and remembered him as he was, the pristine vocalist with the keen ear who could hold or emphasize a note at what others would find an inappropriate moment or mischievously shrug a shoulder to suggest the hidden meaning of a phrase.
When he sang "I Get a Kick Out of You," he tossed a playful leg to punctuate the lyric. He wagged a mischievous finger at his audiences, as if to warn them of the unspoken, hidden mysteries of his lyrics. He drastically changed tempo, making ballads of jump tunes or finding the verse of "Stardust" so enchanting that he once recorded it by itself without singing the fabled chorus.
Words held sacred by scores of other vocalists singing old standards would be changed to suit his mood or need. But always he stayed true to the basic intent of the composer and seldom performed a song without telling his audience not only who had written the tune and lyrics but also who were the musicians behind him helping him as he sang it.
In later years, the sound might have ebbed but it still took $500 and a sizable tip to the table captain to get a decent seat at his Vegas shows. People in their 80s who normally went to bed at 9 stayed up until 2 for a glimpse of their old friend, who had lived to become an icon.
Where once he stormed at his fans, he now had begun patiently signing autographs for the multitudes that had pursued him throughout a long and rewarding life in which his bad boy image cast a larger shadow than the countless and various charities he quietly supported.
The last of his four marriages (to Barbara Marx, the former wife of Marx brother and superagent Zeppo) brought a sophistication and gentility to his late years that overshadowed the Rat Pack of Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford and other ribald characters who had formed his earlier social circle.
He had cut back on the bourbon and nicotine, was eating sensibly and seemed to find in his last relationship a tranquillity that had eluded him earlier.
But until illness forced it upon him three years ago, he didn't want to settle for the comforts of home. Instead, he continued adding to his estimated $30-million net worth by continuing to earn up to $250,000 a week back on his saloon circuit.
Why?
Singer Paul Anka (who wrote the lyrics to "My Way") said it was the ultimate high, "the strongest drug in the world, the needle in the arm called show business."
