"One of the dumbest things I ever did." Sinatra on his adventures with the Mafia in Cuba, writes Shane Hegarty
"He's the most fascinating man in the world, but don't stick your hand in the cage." Musician Tommy Dorsey
"Italians tend to break down into two kinds of people: Lucky Luciano or Michelangelo. Frank's an exception. He's both."
Pianist Gene DiNovi
"Being a public figure got to me. People were always spiritually peeking in my windows." Sinatra on fame
"Every time I get up to sing that song I grit my teeth, because no matter what the image may seem to be, I hate boastfulness in others." Sinatra on My Way
Frank Sinatra wouldn't have liked this very much. A new biography and some new revelations; most notably that he once carried $3.5 million of Mafia money into New York. He had a way of dealing with critics that on more than one occasion resulted in a very bruised reporter. After the death of one journalist, he went out of his way to urinate on the guy's grave. He wouldn't have liked Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan one bit.
Here they are, though: their bones intact but their reputations getting quite a kicking. Sinatra: The Life has become an instant best-seller. It is, says Summers, an attempt "to see if we could square the circle between the dark and light side". It includes accusations of rape, violence, alcoholism and of being a bagman for the mob. There is the singer's goodness and tenderness, but Sinatra often comes across as a two-bit thug and bully. They were warned of how it might be received. Rock Brynner, son of Yul, told them that they needed to understand America's love for the man, whatever wrong he may have done. "Well he wasn't so much off target," says Summers. "It's as if we've been, in some way, blaspheming, to write about him in the way we did."
They spent almost four years piecing together his life from their home in Cappoquin, Co Waterford. They read everything they could, getting to what he calls the "PhD stage of the project", at which they know everything that is known, before they set off to root out what is not. They interviewed 500 people - none of whom were Sinatra's immediate family .
"Nancy (Sinatra's daughter) had said on the family website that this book was garbage written by clowns. And she said that one knows that a book is garbage when it's written by people who don't bother interviewing the only people who really knew Frank Sinatra, ie his family. This is entirely mendacious."
Summers and Swan insist that they wrote to each of his three children several times. A letter, says Summers, was personally handed to his daughter Nancy Sinatra by their Washington researcher and was opened on the spot.
"We did absolutely everything we could possibly do to ask for interviews, and she says we didn't ask for interviews as an attempt to smear us." Nancy has also insisted that Jerry Lewis, prime source for the Cuban cash story, doesn't know the authors. That particularly irks Swan, given that she spent a week in his company. Both she and the comedian, she says, taped the interviews.
"Jerry Lewis actually rang me at about 10 one night about two weeks ago and said, 'Robbyn, here is a fantastic book, I've been reading what you said I said and I did say that, I stand by it and if anybody asks me I'll tell them so'. Which pleased me because I didn't like to think he was going to back away from it. Sometimes people do back away from things they've said, but I was hopeful that he would stand over it. Unfortunately, nobody has called him and asked him. But it's not nice to see that kind of thing written about you. It goes right to the heart of what you do journalistically. We have it on tape. We supplied it on tape to our publisher when the kerfuffle started." "And we'll gladly supply it to you," adds Summers.
"But when you work as hard as we do to get these interviews and tape everyone and check and double check," continues Swan, "and get rid of things that are wrong, that are myths. We're not trying to make new myths, we're trying to get the truth."
Nancy Sinatra might consider them "clowns" but Summers and Swan see themselves as biographers with a forensic interest in the detail of their subjects. Of the 560 pages in Sinatra, almost 200 of those are made up of notes, bibliography and index, so they get particularly annoyed when accused of not backing up their facts.
Their own story has a certain romanticism to it. Summers was a BBC producer when asked, in 1973, to write a book on the Romanovs. To his surprise, The File on the Tsar became a best-seller. Swan says the book inspired her to study Russian history. Several years later she was working as a "general dogsbody" for the London Independent's Washington bureau when she was employed to do two weeks' research for Summers. "Which turned into two years, which turned into everything else." That "everything else" meaning marriage and three young children.
Connecticut-born Swan moved to Waterford, where Summers has lived since 1973. Here they work, according to Summers, "about eight days a week and our children barely know our names".
"We have no other life," adds Swan. "We think constantly how boring we are to our friends. Because aside from being up on the news and keeping up on our children's school and play-dates, and even those only through the nanny, we only can talk about Frank Sinatra or whoever the subject is at the time."
When commissioned to write about Sinatra, they were given a life that intersected with many of those Summers has written about in other books: Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe and The Kennedy Conspiracy, in which the Mafia features heavily. While Sinatra has attracted some heavyweight biographers already, most obviously Kitty Kelley, it was felt that the timing of this biography was right.
"When Sinatra was alive we wouldn't have got to many of the 500 people we interviewed for this book. Out of respect for him or out of fear of him, they would not have talked. And we wouldn't have been able to get to any of the documents we obtained under freedom of information, " he says. "And in five years time from now it'll be harder. Already some of the people we interviewed for the book are dead and other key people are unwell." Previously working together on biographies of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover, they have been accused of specialising in "pathography", a branch of biography more interested in the dysfunctional aspects of the subject. But Summers says that they simply try to piece a narrative together from the "who, what, why and when" of the lives they examine.
Not all critics approve. "To put it bluntly," wrote one, "the reader wants more cultural context and fewer FBI reports". It is "a tawdry symptom of our gossip-centric culture", said infamous New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani on her way to dismissing it as "this dreadful book". A couple of weeks later "this dreadful book" has reached the New York Times best-sellers list.
Summers and Swan feel that music critics asked to review Sinatra: The Life may search for pages on the musicology when the title very much declares that this is a book on "The Life". Neither were Summers and Swan keen to judge their subject. Rock Brynner told them they should tell the press about their "love" for Sinatra. Summers disagrees. "We don't love Sinatra, we don't hate Sinatra. We don't want to sound too flat, but that seems to us not to be the professional way to approach biography; loving or hating him.
It is a compelling account of a tantalising life. His mob connections have always fascinated the public and fed into his iconography. Swan paraphrases the writer Pete Hamill in wondering, "Would the voice have been the same, the ability to convey the passion of the songs? Would our fascination in him been the same if he had not been this complex personality? And it is sort of the unanswerable question. We've tried to show him in his fullest humanity." Meanwhile, they are enduring this spell during which the spotlight is turned on their lives. VIP magazine is coming to the house to do a shoot. "We're having our children buffed and polished even as we speak," Swan laughs.
Summers says they're just doing what they have to do to sell the book. "It seems to me to be fair enough. Why wouldn't people dig into us? They have every right. Sinatra issued an edict - which the press immediately called Sinatra's Law - about not probing into his private life and would issue threats along the lines of 'I'll have your knees broken'. We don't actually do that. You're safe".
Sinatra: The Life, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, is published by Doubleday, £20
