by Kitty Kelley
“My guess is that probably as long as this nation lasts, your descendants will speak with pride of the day you attended a White House ceremony and received this, the Medal of Freedom,” he said. “Each of you has achieved the hardest of all things to achieve in life, something that will last and endure and take on a life of its own. And fifty years from now, a century from now, historians will know your names and your achievements. You have left humanity a legacy.”
Placing the beribboned medal around Frank’s neck, the President said: “His love of country, his generosity for those less fortunate, his distinctive art, and his winning and compassionate persona make him one of our most remarkable and distinguished Americans and one who truly did it his way.”
There was to be still another award for Frank that day, this one back in Hoboken. Having ridiculed his hometown as a “sewer” for so many years, he was now returning in triumph to receive an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology, the school his parents had prayed he would attend.
When the trustees had announced that they would confer this award on him, more than one hundred graduating seniors, one-third of the student body, signed a protest, citing his lack of educational credentials.
“The fact that Sinatra was born in Hoboken is a poor excuse for bestowing this honor,” said the petitioners. “An honorary degree is awarded to someone who has distinguished himself in a particular field. Frank Sinatra is recognized in the area of entertainment, not engineering, not science, and not education. The stories say that Sinatra always wanted to go to Stevens when he was growing up in Hoboken. If he wanted it that badly, why didn’t he bother to graduate from high school?”
The institute, though, stood behind its choice, saying that Frank was being honored as a humanitarian.
So on May 23, 1985, Sinatra went to Hoboken to receive an honor personally important to him. With the honorary doctorate he was finally making his parents’ dreams of a college degree come true. He could stand up with pride to the memory of his mother and father.
Standing proudly in the black robes of a baccalaureate, he touched his tasseled graduation cap and beamed as the chairman of the Stevens board of trustees handed him the diploma and draped the red and gray engineer’s hood over his shoulders. Walking to the center of the stage, he looked out on the stately campus that had always seemed like a king’s paradise to him as a Depression child. The Italians who once knew his parents now gazed at him in awe. They were proud that one of their own had achieved such stunning success in the new world, and for a moment, Frank, too, seemed to recognize the wonder of his life.
“Today is quite a day for me … along with Jimmy Stewart, Jacques Cousteau, and others, I received a Medal of Freedom from the President of the United States,” he said. “And now, here I am with you, at this institute of higher learning—the school I dreamed of attending when I was a kid.” His face was flushed and his words, some garbled, came haltingly as he referred to the college as “the Stevens Institute of Humanities.” He talked about his father who could not read or write. “My father was a great believer in education.… This is the school he had chosen for me to attend. My dad was—like all other dads I suppose—a wonderful man. … I must say I have that little bit of regret at all times at not having continued my education. … I am so honored … to be a small part of your day. This is more enjoyable than being at the White House. There nobody raised a fuss.”
The crowd broke into cheers, as if their applause could wipe away the embarrassment of the student protest, but Sinatra was without rancor on that sunny afternoon at Castle Point. At peace with himself and his past, he told them how Stevens had helped him as a singer when he sprinted across the campus track trying to improve his lung capacity. Again the crowd cheered, happy to have been a part of this American dream. And Frank was grateful to them.
“I … I … hope you live to be four hundred years old,” he said, “and may the last voice you hear be mine.”
Then, just weeks after he had received his nation’s highest accolade and the most coveted honor his hometown had to offer on one and the same day, his awards fell victim to the satirical pen of Garry B. Trudeau, the creator of “Doonesbury,” one of America’s most popular comic strips.
In a series of six strips, the artist depicted Frank’s ties to the Mafia and mocked the values of a society that would honor such a man with a Medal of Freedom and a doctorate from the Stevens Institute of Technology. With scathing humor, Trudeau showed the President of the United States paying homage to a man who literally embraced the worst criminal elements of America, as Frank did when he posed for a picture with his arms around Carlo Gambino.
The prestige of the Medal of Freedom was tarnished by Trudeau’s caricature of Frank shouting obscenities, bullying young women, and chasing after gangsters like a lovestruck teenager. Even sillier was the honorary degree, awarded to him for applying “his talents to the benefit of mankind,” which in Trudeau’s comic strip included trying to get a casino employee fired for refusing to break the law.
Sinatra responded to the stinging satire by issuing a statement: “Garry Trudeau makes his living by his attempts at humor without regard to fairness or decency. I don’t know if he has made any effort on behalf of others or done anything to help the less fortunate in the country or elsewhere. I am happy to have the President and the people of the United States judge us by our respective track records.”
Some newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, refused to publish the strip because of a possible lawsuit from Sinatra. The letters to the editor of the Times about their refusal totaled 221. Two hundred and six letters criticized the decision and praised Trudeau; only fifteen letters praised Sinatra or criticized the cartoonist. That tally gave Frank a harsh barometer of public sentiment.
Still, bedecked in his ribbons, his awards, and his citations, he continued to present himself to the world as a great humanitarian, an inheritor of the American dream who had all that society could offer in terms of wealth and power and fame. Yet the honors of polite society and grateful politicians could never wipe out the stain of his Mafia associations or his ties to organized crime.
To those who had been touched by the magic of Frank Sinatra’s music, his Mafia ties would never matter. For they had witnessed a peerless talent and that was enough. They had been moved by a performer who even at the age of seventy could still stir irrevocable longings. For fifty years, he had been interpreting the mood of his generation, taking people back to a time when love was young and life full of promise. With a catch in his voice betraying his own pain and loneliness, he reached into their souls, stoking their vulnerabilities. He soothed them and made them feel that their lost dreams were understood, their heartbreaks shared. His ballads became their anthems of romance—seductive, memorable, unique. More than any other popular singer, Frank Sinatra became the touchstone of his time.
* In 1970 Carol Sue Edmondston had filed suit charging Frank, Jr., with fathering her child, Victor Randolph. In 1980 Mary Wallner took him to court declaring him the father of her daughter, Franane. After an eight-month romance with Jr. in 1977, Mary-Fleming gave birth to Francis Wayne Sinatra, Jr., and named Jr. as the father.
DISGOGRAPHY
1940
SINGLES (VICTOR, with Tommy Dorsey)
“I’ll Never Smile Again”
“Imagination”
“Trade Winds”
“Our Love Affair”
“We Three”
“Stardust”
NOTE: Only singles listed are those that made Billboard magazine’s Top Ten.
1941
SINGLES (VICTOR, with Tommy Dorsey)
“Oh, Look at Me Now”
“Do I Worry?”
“Dolores”
“Everything Happens to Me”
“Let’s Get Away from It All”
“This Love of Mine”
“Two in Love”
1942
SINGLES (VICTOR, with Tommy Dorsey)
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“Just As Though You Were Here”
“Take Me”
“Daybreak”
“There Are Such Things”
1943
SINGLES (VICTOR, with Tommy Dorsey)
“It Started All Over Again”
“In the Blue of the Evening”
“It’s Always You”
“All or Nothing at AH” (COLUMBIA, with Harry James, recorded and first released in 1939)
COLUMBIA
“You’ll Never Know”
“Close to You”
“Sunday, Monday or Always”
“People Will Say We’re in Love”
1944
SINGLES (COLUMBIA)
“I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night”
“White Christmas” (released in 1946)
1945
SINGLES (COLUMBIA)
“I Dream of You”
“Saturday Night”
“Dream”
“Nancy”
1946
SINGLES (COLUMBIA)
“Oh! What It Seemed to Be”
“Day by Day”
“They Say It’s Wonderful”
“Five Minutes More”
“The Coffee Song”
1947
SINGLE (COLUMBIA)
“Mam’selle”
1949
SINGLE (COLUMBIA)
“The Huckle Buck”
1954
SINGLES (CAPITOL)
“Young at Heart”
“Three Coins in the Fountain”
LPs (CAPITOL)
Songs for Young Lovers
Swing Easy
1955
SINGLES (CAPITOL)
“Learnin’ the Blues”
“Love and Marriage”
LP (CAPITOL)
In the Wee Small Hours
1956
SINGLE (CAPITOL)
“Hey, Jealous Lover”
LP (CAPITOL)
Songs for Swingin’ Lovers
1957
LPs (CAPITOL)
Close to You
A Swingin’ Affair
Where Are You?
A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra
1958
LPs (CAPITOL)
Come Fly with Me
Only the Lonely
1959
LPs (CAPITOL)
Come Dance with Me
Look to Your Heart
No One Cares
1960
LP (CAPITOL)
Nice ’n’ Easy
1961
LPs (CAPITOL)
Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session
All the Way
Come Swing with Me
(REPRISE)
Ring-A-Ding-Ding
Sinatra Swings
I Remember Tommy
1962
LPs (CAPITOL)
Point of No Return
Sinatra Sings of Love and Things
(REPRISE)
Sinatra and Strings
Sinatra and Swingin’ Brass
All Alone
1963
LPs (REPRISE)
Sinatra-Basie
The Concert Sinatra
Sinatra’s Sinatra
1964
LPs (REPRISE)
Frank Sinatra Sings Days of Wine and Roses, Moon River
and other Academy Award Winners
Sinatra-Basie: It Might as Well Be Swing
Softly, As I Leave You
1965
LPs (REPRISE)
Sinatra 65
September of My Years
A Man and His Music
My Kind of Broadway
1966
SINGLES (REPRISE)
“Strangers in the Night”
“That’s Life”
LPs (REPRISE)
Moonlight Sinatra
Strangers in the Night
Sinatra-Basie: Sinatra at the Sands
That’s Life
1967
SINGLE (REPRISE)
“Somethin’ Stupid” (with Nancy Sinatra)
LPs (REPRISE)
Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim
Frank Sinatra and Frank & Nancy
1968
LPs (REPRISE)
Francis A. & Edward K.
Cycles
1969
LPs (REPRISE)
My Way
A Man Alone
1970
LP (REPRISE)
Watertown
1971
LP (REPRISE)
Sinatra & Company
1973
LP (SINATRA)
Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back
1974
LPs (REPRISE)
Some Nice Things I’ve Missed
The Main Event/Live from Madison Square Garden
1980
LPs (REPRISE)
Trilogy (three-record album)
1981
LP (REPRISE)
She Shot Me Down
1984
LP (QWEST)
L.A. Is My Lady
FILMOGRAPHY
Las Vegas Nights (Paramount, 1941)
PRODUCER: William LeBaron. DIRECTOR: Ralph Murphy. SCREENPLAY: Ernest Pagano and Harry Clork. CAST: Constance Moore, Bert Wheeler. Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra as the male vocalist singing “I’ll Never Smile Again.”
Ship Ahoy (MGM, 1942)
PRODUCER: Jack Cummings. DIRECTOR: Edward Buzzell. SCREENPLAY: Harry Clork. CAST: Eleanor Powell, Red Skelton, Bert Lahr, Virginia O’Brien. Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with Frank Sinatra singing “The Last Call for Love” and “Poor You.”
Reveille with Beverly (Columbia, 1943)
PRODUCER: Sam White. DIRECTOR: Charles Barton. SCREENPLAY: Howard J. Green, Jack Henley, and Albert Duffy. CAST: Ann Miller, William Wright, Dick Purcell, Franklin Pangborn, Tim Ryan, Larry Parks, with Frank Sinatra singing “Night and Day.”
Higher and Higher (RKO, 1943)
PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR: Tim Whelan. SCREENPLAY: Jay Dratler and Ralph Spence. CAST: Michèle Morgan, Jack Haley, Frank Sinatra.
Step Lively (RKO, 1944)
PRODUCER: Robert Fellows. DIRECTOR: Tim Whelan. SCREENPLAY: Warren Duff and Peter Milne. CAST: Frank Sinatra, George Murphy, Adolph Menjou, Gloria DeHaven, Walter Slezak.
Anchors Aweigh (MGM, 1945)
PRODUCER: Joe Pasternak. DIRECTOR: George Sidney. SCREENPLAY: Isobel Lennart. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Gene Kelly, Jose Iturbi.
The House I Live In (RKO, 1945)
PRODUCER: Frank Ross. DIRECTOR: Mervyn LeRoy. SCREENPLAY: Albert Maitz. CAST: Frank Sinatra
Note: The House I Live In, a ten-minute short, won a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Till the Clouds Roll By (MGM, 1946)
PRODUCER: Arthur Freed. DIRECTOR: Richard Whorf. SCREENPLAY: Myles Connolly and Jean Holloway. Based on the life and music of Jerome Kern. CAST: June Allyson, Lucille Bremer, Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, Van Heflin, Lena Home, Van Johnson, Angela Lansbury, Tony Martin, Virginia O’Brien, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Robert Walker.
With guest star Sinatra singing “OF Man River.”
It Happened in Brooklyn (MGM, 1947)
PRODUCER: Jack Cummings. DIRECTOR: Richard Whorf. SCREENPLAY: Isobel Lennart. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Peter Lawford, Jimmy Durante.
The Miracle of the Bells (RKO, 1948)
PRODUCERS: Jesse L. Lasky and Walter MacEwen. DIRECTOR: Irving Pichel. SCREENPLAY: Ben Hecht and Quentin Reynolds. CAST: Fred MacMurray, Alida Valli, Frank Sinatra, Lee J. Cobb.
The Kissing Bandit (MGM, 1948)
PRODUCER: Joe Pasternak. DIRECTOR: Laslo Benedek. SCREENPLAY: Isobel Lennart and John Briard Harding. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game (MGM, 1949)
PRODUCER: Arthur Freed. DIRECTOR: Busby Berkeley. SCREENPLAY: Harry Tugend and George Wells. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Esther Will
iams, Gene Kelly, Betty Garrett, Edward Arnold, Jules Munshin.
On the Town (MGM, 1949)
PRODUCER: Arthur Freed. DIRECTORS: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. SCREENPLAY: Adolph Green and Betty Comden from their musical play based on an idea by Jerome Robbins. CAST: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller.
Double Dynamite (RKO, 1951)
PRODUCER: Irving Cummings, Jr. DIRECTOR: Irving Cummings. SCREENPLAY: Melville Shavelson. CAST: Jane Russell, Groucho Marx, Frank Sinatra.
Meet Danny Wilson (Universal-International, 1952) PRODUCER: Leonard Goldstein. DIRECTOR: Joseph Pevney. SCREENPLAY: Don McGuire. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Shelley Winters, Alex Nicol.
From Here to Eternity (Columbia, 1953)
PRODUCER: Buddy Adler. DIRECTOR: Fred Zinnemann. SCREENPLAY: Daniel Taradash. CAST: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine.
Note: From Here to Eternity won eight Oscars in 1953: Best picture, direction, screenplay, photography, film editing, sound, supporting actress (Donna Reed), and supporting actor (Frank Sinatra).
Suddenly (A Libra Production, released by United Artists, 1954) PRODUCER: Robert Bassler. DIRECTOR: Lewis Allen. SCREENPLAY: Richard Sale. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates.
Young at Heart (An Arwin Production, released by Warner Bros., 1955)
PRODUCER: Henry Blanke. DIRECTOR: Gordon Douglas. SCREENPLAY: Adaptation by Liam O’Brien from the screenplay Four Daughters by Julius J. Epstein and Lenore Coffee. CAST: Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Gig Young, Ethel Barrymore, Dorothy Malone.
Not as a Stranger (A Stanley Kramer Production, released by United Artists, 1955)
PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR: Stanley Kramer. SCREENPLAY: Edna and Edward Anhalt. CAST: Olivia de Havilland, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Charles Bickford.
The Tender Trap (MGM, 1955)
PRODUCER: Lawrence Weingarten. DIRECTOR: Charles Walters. SCREENPLAY: Julius J. Epstein. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, David Wayne, Celeste Holm, Jarma Lewis, Lola Albright, Carolyn Jones.
Guys and Dolls (A Samuel Goldwyn Production, released by MGM, 1955)
PRODUCER: Samuel Goldwyn. DIRECTOR AND SCREENPLAY: Jo seph L. Mankiewicz. CAST: Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, Vivian Blaine.
The Man with the Golden Arm (A Carlyle Production, released by United Artists, 1955)
PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR: Otto Preminger. SCREENPLAY: Walter Newman and Lewis Meitzer. CAST: Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak.