Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, a small New Jersey port standing across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. Both his parents had been brought to America from Italy as children. His Sicilian father, Martin Sinatra, worked as a boilermaker and then as a fireman. But it was Martin's wife, Dolly, who exerted the stronger influence on their only child. She had been born Natalie Garavente, the daughter of a Neapolitan lithographer.
Francis Albert Sinatra left school at 16. Under the spell of Bing Crosby, he was singing in local clubs at the age of 17. In 1935 he became one of a vocal quartet which went on national tour. Then for two years he hustled, singing in neighbourhood social clubs and pestering music publishers, until in 1938 he auditioned for a job at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse in Alpine, New Jersey. For $15 a week he sang and waited on tables between performances, the bonus being a nightly radio broadcast to New York.
The trumpeter Harry James heard the show and "discovered" the singer for himself. "He'd sung only eight bars when I felt the hairs on my neck rising," James recollected. That night he offered Sinatra $75 a week to join his new band.
In the same month that he joined the James orchestra Sinatra married Nancy Barbato, whom he had met as a teenager on holiday with their families on the Jersey shore. Early in 1940, Tommy Dorsey made a bid for the singer's services. Dorsey's trombone-playing had been one of the principal influences on Sinatra's vocal style.
He was with Dorsey from 1940 to 1942, earning $150 a week. There are many colourful accounts of the circumstances surrounding Sinatra's escape from his contract with Dorsey, which gave the bandleader 43 per cent of the singer's earnings for life. One of them formed the basis of an episode in Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather, but according to the singer's own testimony it was not his Sicilian friends but his civilian lawyers who persuaded Dorsey to accept a settlement of $75,000.
An audience of delirious bobbysoxers greeted the launch of his solo career on December 30th, 1942 at the Paramount Theatre, New York. He was soon being called the Lean Lark and the Sultan of Swoon; eventually these were distilled to an irreducible sobriquet: "the Voice".
Within the space of a month, according to his daughter Nancy, his income rocketed from $750 to $25,000 a week; not long afterwards he moved from New Jersey to a house on Lake Toluca in southern California, with a 10-foot fence to keep his fans at bay, while Nancy brought up the first of their three children, Nancy Jr.
His movie career advanced in 1945 when he co-starred with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh and appeared in The House I Live In, which carried a civil rights message. The California state senate committee on un-American activities accused him of having "followed or appeased some of the Communist Party line over a long period of time".
His personal life, too, had slipped its moorings. There were affairs with actresses and singers, including Lana Turner. He was dancing with her one night in 1947 at a club in Palm Springs, California when he met Ava Gardner, who was in the arms of the tycoon Howard Hughes.
Two years later Sinatra and Gardner began an affair which culminated in their marriage in Philadelphia in November 1951, a week after his divorce from Nancy had been finalised. By the time they married, Gardner was already the bigger star of the two. This led to rows. The arranger Nelson Riddle said years later: "She was the greatest love of his life, and he lost her."
When they separated in 1953, his fortunes were at a nadir. He wanted to play the lead in On The Waterfront, but was beaten by Brando. So he pleaded with Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, to give him the part of Angelo Maggio in Fred Zinneman's From Here To Eternity. The result was a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1954, and a relaunched career.
Between 1953 and 1960, he created a sequence of albums which remain definitive statements of 20th century American song. Songs For Swingin' Lovers and In The Wee Small Hours were followed in 1958 by Only The Lonely, an astonishingly complex and assured meditation on emotional loss.
In Hollywood, Sinatra broadened his range by playing a heroin addict in The Man With The Golden Arm in 1955, followed by the successful musicals Guys And Dolls (also 1955), High Society (1956) and Pal Joey (1957), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), John Frankenheimer's atmospheric Cold War drama. Divorced from Ava in 1954, he romanced Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, Shirley Maclaine, Dorothy Provine, Jill St John, the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, the dancer Juliet Prowse and many others. He was also gathering around him a group of male friends who became known as the Rat Pack: they were the singer Dean Martin, the entertainer Sammy Davis Jnr, the actor Peter Lawford, and the comedian Joey Bishop.
At the dawn of the 1960s he left Capitol to form his own label, Reprise Records, in partnership with Warner Brothers. By this time he was rich, earning around $4 million a year, and powerful, with links to a variety of worlds, notably John F. Kennedy's Camelot.
But his relationship with the White House cooled under the influence of Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General, who was conducting a war on organised crime and felt that Sinatra's links with the gambling world could damage the administration.
In 1963 Sinatra's licence to operate the Cal-Neva Lodge, his $4 million casino hotel at Lake Tahoe, was taken away after the Nevada Gaming Commission uncovered his relationship with Sam Giancana, a Chicago Mafia boss. The singer, the mobster and the president were said to have shared a mistress, Judith Campbell Exner. That was as close as anyone ever got to putting the finger on Sinatra's rumoured Mob connections.
The advent of the Beatles aged a lot of singers overnight. Sinatra responded with a bout of introspection, the 1965 album, September Of My Years. Yet only a few months later he married a 19-yearold actress, Mia Farrow, and demonstrated his continuing artistic virility by winning Grammy awards. And at the end of the 1960s he had an even greater success with My Way.
His later recordings were generally uninspired. The stage shows, scheduled with an impressively reckless disregard for his age, were eventually marked by a reliance not just on Frank Jnr, who conducted the orchestra, but on large teleprompter screens at all corners of the stage, feeding him lyrics and patter.
Politically he had long since transferred his allegiance to the Republican presidencies of Nixon, Bush and his old friend Reagan. He remained on good terms with his former wives, particularly Nancy, the mother of his children, and was married for a fourth and last time in 1976 to Barbara Marx, the former wife of Zeppo Marx.
The celebration of his 80th birthday had as its highlight an internationally televised party at which he was serenaded by the surviving giants of American popular music. The guest of honour chose not to sing. His work was done.
