James Kaplan - "The Voice"
The Voice begins with a birth, a not at all unusual start for a biography. But this scene grabs the reader as different. The language is vivid, like something out of Dickens, with “horse-s**t-flecked cobblestones” and air that “smells of coal smoke and imminent snow.” We soon arrive in a kitchen full of women gathered around a table on which lies a “copper-haired girl, hugely pregnant,” “moaning hoarsely.” This is a difficult delivery. Blunt methods are used to extract the baby, who is then thrown aside for dead, bleeding from its injuries, to save the mother. But both mother and son survive. The son, Francis Albert Sinatra, would later say of the event, “They just kind of ripped me out and tossed me aside.” This birth scarred him, physically and emotionally. It was the first painful event to drive him to the heights he attained.
But the birth is important to this book for another reason: it gives form to author James Kaplan’s unique plan.
Virtually everything that can be written about Sinatra has. So why another bio? Kaplan’s twist is to focus on Sinatra’s first 39 years: a sort of portrait of an artist as a young man, timed to close after his rise from the ashes of the first phase of his career. The Voice is a redemption story with Frank Sinatra in the lead.
Most of what people seem to remember about Sinatra is what happened long after his comeback, the Rat Pack era of the 60’s and the Chairman of the Board of the 70’s. But what Kaplan understands and was smart enough to put into written form is that the most interesting part of Sinatra’s life was really that time from the early 40’s to mid-50’s: his rise as “The Voice,” mobs of girls wetting their pants for him; his downfall in the late 40’s and early 50’s when his shady relationship with the mob, serial cheating on his wife, and a combustible second marriage to Ava Gardner - who was essentially a female version of Frank Sinatra - soured him to the public; then the comeback: the dissolution of his marriage to Gardner, his Oscar-winning role in From Here To Eternity, and, most importantly, his renaissance at Capitol Records, where he did his most beloved and artistically vibrant work.
Kaplan gets special credit for showing us so much about Sinatra’s volatile relationship with Gardner, and the often touching pain Sinatra experienced because of it, as well as the man’s respect and hard work on his music. These are two important touchstones in Sinatra’s life (the other being his mother), Ava and the music, and Kaplan lays everything out for us, more than I’ve ever read before. When Ava and Frank are on the stage, or when Frank is at work in the studio, the book is nearly impossible to put down.
Kaplan’s approach is also interesting in that he provides layer upon layer of witnesses to Sinatra’s life, offering sometimes inconsistent and conflicting testimony, so that the reader is often left to divine the truth, something that frequently seems as elusive as the man under study. Yet this doesn’t disappoint as one might expect, in fact it feels almost like a pleasant dissonance. I think this is because Kaplan still manages to nail Sinatra’s essence, the contradictions: the man who could buy a friend a new house and also leave a pregnant wife at home while he cheated; the man who thought life’s rules didn’t apply to him, but could be also be paralyzed with self-doubt. Kaplan’s Sinatra is the man most of us forget about - the human one - so used to the caricature that came later. And this is the beauty of The Voice: by focusing on Sinatra’s difficult fall and ultimate redemption, Kaplan turns the legend into a universal story; he shows us how Sinatra is just like us, while also showing us how he isn’t anything like us at all. He presents a character that at times we’ll like, and at other times we’ll hate, but we’ll always have empathy for.
The Voice ends on the night he won his Oscar. He has dropped his children off at his ex-wife’s house. Friends wait for him at his apartment to celebrate. But he wants to be alone, a rarity for a man who sometimes kept his friends up all night drinking so he wouldn’t have to be. Coming off his lows, he doesn’t trust anyone who wishes him well over his victory; he sees ulterior motives everywhere. The only person whose happiness has been true is his ex-wife’s, the woman he misses but left for the frenetic lifestyle he had no choice but to live. So he walks the streets of Beverly Hills with his Oscar, enjoying his moment, alone, as alone as the day he was born.
