Opinions on Frank Sinatra?

quote:

---

here's a few facts you may not have known about the one and only Mr. Frank Sinatra.

A forced delivery at birth left permanent scars on his neck and cheek and ruptured an eardrum. This eardrum injury is what kept Frank from enlisting and serving in World War II.

When Frank was born, his parents had wanted a girl. They had already picked out the feminine name "Frances," so when Frank was born, they changed the chosen name to "Francis" for a boy.

According to Mia Farrrow (who Frank had been married to briefly), Frank offered to have Woody Allen's legs broken for her after he found out Woody was having an affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn.

Frank loved the color orange. It was his favorite color.

He permanently injured one of his fingers in a fight scene in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He threw a karate chop and his hand went through a solid wooden table, breaking several bones in his little finger. The footage was left in the film.

In 1950, Frank attempted suicide by sticking his head in the kitchen stove and turning on the gas. The failed attempt occurred after a fight with Ava Gardner, who he was madly in love with. The two married the next year.

Frank was flat broke in 1951, so wife Ava Gardner had to pay for his plane ticket to Africa so he could accompany her while she was filming Mogambo (1953).

Although the song "My Way" is often thought of as his signature or theme song, at first he didn't want to record it. He thought the song was "self-serving and indulgent."

Frank suffered from severe insomnia. He enjoyed talking to people on the CB radio in the middle of the night. Late in his life came the computer era, and yes, Frank, like so many of us, enjoying using the internet and writing email messages in the middle of the night.

He loved playing with his beloved electric train set. He had a track set up that traced his entire career, starting at a replica of the Hoboken, New Jersey, train station.Many know that Frank won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in From Here To Eternity in 1954. But Frank had already won a special Oscar for a short film about intolerance called The House I Live In in 1946.

When actor Bela Lugosi died virtually penniless in 1956, Frank quietly paid for his funeral.

It was during the filming of a kidnapping scene for the movie Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964) that Frank found out that his son, Frank Sinatra Jr. had been kidnapped.

It was during the filming of a funeral scene for Robin and the Seven Hoods that he found out that his close friend, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated. For obvious reasons, the scene was never used in the movie.

Frank was the first choice to play Harry Callahan in the 1971 film Dirty Harry, but he had to bow out when he broke his finger.

Frank was offered the lead in the movie Death Wish (1974) but he turned it down and the role went to Charles Bronson instead.

Sinatra's epitaph: "The Best is Yet to Come."

---

quote:

---

"Frank Sinatra saved my life. Some thugs were savagely beating me when Frank walked up and said, 'That's enough'." -- Shecky Greene

---