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He was short, scrawny and balding, with a face like an old boot. But Frank Sinatra wound up owning the world. How? That the immigrants’ son from Hoboken rose to the dizziest heights of showbiz and American society is, frankly, astounding. Did you know that the word “frankly” was derived from him? Okay, not really, but it seems like it should be: Frank was the epitome of frank, i.e., in-your-face, pull-no-punches, take-no-prisoners candid. And I’m talking only about his singing—not the people he actually smacked in the puss or arranged to suffer physical humiliation. For Sinatra was both saint and satan, among the many anagrams you can pull out of the letters of his last name.

In his new book, Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (Harper, 2015), author and poet David Lehman comes up with a bunch more anagrams of Sinatra, among them art, sin, star, rat. They all somehow fit. Rat? Save for the wide-set baby blues, Sinatra truly wasn’t much to look at. Bandleader Harry James, who lifted him from obscurity, saw, if not rodent attributes, “a wet mop.” Art? As Lehman points out, for Sinatra and the world at large there was only one physical attribute that mattered: The Voice, his nickname from the earliest years. With his nuanced use of that vocal instrument Sinatra raised crooning to its highest aesthetic levels. Star? Sinatra swung upon them, swung with them, made love to them, sometimes ate them for breakfast—he was the icon’s icon, the defining celebrity for decades. Sin? He was a living exemplar of all the deadly ones, perhaps excepting gluttony in the earlier years. Saint? He was an early and staunch supporter of civil rights, he financially supported down-and-out friends and acquaintances, he always gave full, audible credit to anyone who helped him, always citing arrangers and songwriters when he performed.



Why Sinatra Matters (Little, Brown, 2015), by renowned journalist and author Pete Hamill, was penned at the time of Sinatra’s death in 1998. Speaking at at recent event at the Brooklyn Library’s Dwek Center around the reissue of his book with a new introduction, Hamill touched on how fiery defiance, relentless drive and lifelong insatiability helped Sinatra overcome the prejudices against his voweled surname and all it implied. Hamill (and Lehman in his book) point out that Harry James wanted him to change his name to “Frankie Satin.” (Yet another anagram.) “No way,” said the man who later made “My Way” an anthem of American hauteur.

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