The first thing you remember, of course, is the voice - at one time, the most famous voice in the world, the voice that bridged decades from World War II to the waning years of the 20th century, the voice that conjured romance and loneliness, bright dreams and misplaced hopes, the voice that millions danced to, made love to and listened to on jukeboxes and radios and hi-fi sets.
It was a voice, Bruce Springsteen would later say, filled with "bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world."
The second thing you remember is the attitude: the booze and broads and brawls, the hat worn at a rakish angle, the jacket flung over one shoulder, the Camels and Jack Daniel's, the late nights in small saloons and even later nights in Vegas. He was the guy who radiated Bogart's tough-guy cynicism and Fitzgerald's wistful romanticism. He was the hipster and the dreamer, the swinger and the existentialist, the ring-a-ding-ding showman and the melancholy singer of the blues - the first of the great American heartthrobs who made girls swoon and the first big-league avatar of the new celebrity age.
When it snowed, one writer observed, "girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators."
Pete Hamill once declared that it would take "some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler" to capture the complexities of Frank Sinatra's life and work. It's a challenge, the reader might have assumed, that would have been taken up by some enterprising biographer interested in telling this very American story - a story that not only stars an artist of myriad complexities but also embodies immigrant dreams and Gatsbyesque ambitions, the rise of 20th-century American popular culture and the nervous relationship between entertainment and politics and the underworld.
Mr. Hamill, Gay Talese and John Lahr among others have written memorable articles and monographs on Sinatra and his music, but when it comes to full-scale biographies the Chairman of the Board has not had his Balzac or his Chandler.
Instead, he's had a series of lurid gossip and fact compilers: Earl Wilson, Kitty Kelley and now Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, whose tacky new book spends more time talking about the Mafia, the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe than it does discussing Sinatra's music or movies.
The authors of "Sinatra" evince no real appreciation of the singer's work - the very thing that makes a biography of him worth writing or reading in the first place. They shed no light on the autobiographical sources of his artistry, save for making the most obvious connections between the heartbreak he sustained over his doomed romance with Ava Gardner and the heartbreak in the songs he recorded shortly thereafter for Capitol.
They make little effort to locate the emotional roots of the loneliness and solitude that thread their way through his ballads. And they do nothing to illuminate the contradictions of this man, who assumed such a swaggering persona in real life and yet revealed in his songs such an aching tenderness and vulnerability.
As for the actual craft of Sinatra's singing, there are only driblets (in the form of recycled quotes from music critics and former associates) that hint at how he perfected his vocabulary of phrasing, how he learned to tell a story with each song, how he mastered the new technology of the day to create his intimate yet urgent art, how he learned to reinvent himself over the years as both his voice and world around him changed.
Obsessively focused on the headline-making high jinks in the singer's life, "Sinatra" (which is presumptuously subtitled "The Life") is a tawdry symptom of our gossip-centric culture - a culture that thrives on reality television, unverified Internet rumors and supermarket tabloid snarkiness. It is also a quintessential example of pathography - that meanspirited, voyeuristic genre of biography that Joyce Carol Oates once observed dwells on "dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct."
Indeed, "Sinatra" is a leering, bloated and utterly disposable volume. It draws much of its personal material from earlier books like "His Way" by Ms. Kelley and "Mr. S.," a dishy 2003 memoir by George Jacobs, Sinatra's former valet, and William Stadiem. And to make matters worse, it is thickly padded with innuendo, hearsay and speculation. The authors do little to verify many of their sources' allegations, and they seem happy to quote anyone who has anything to say about the singer's womanizing, drinking, violent temper or alleged mob connections.
They quote one of Marilyn Monroe's former maids who says her employer talked of marrying Sinatra, and a tourist who says that Sinatra appeared to treat Judith Campbell Exner (the mistress he reportedly shared with John F. Kennedy and Sam Giancana) in a dismissive fashion during a trip to Hawaii.
Early in the book, Mr. Summers (the author of an earlier gossip-filled book titled "Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe") and Ms. Swan identify "three traits in Frank's character: promiscuity, rage over press coverage of his private life, and a propensity to make violent threats," and these traits quickly become leitmotifs in these pages. The authors also describe the singer as "emotionally unstable" and dwell in melodramatic, vulturelike detail on what they refer to as four suicide "gestures."
The central focus of this book, however, remains Sinatra's alleged mob connections. "Organized crime" is mentioned on page 5 of the book (even before an account of the singer's birth and childhood), and the authors assert that "Frank's involvement with criminals was woven into the fabric of his life and career by 1948" and that "the Mafia had a continuing interest in every aspect of his life and career."
The authors quote sources who say that a Hoboken mafioso named Angelo (Gyp) De Carlo helped the young Sinatra get his start, and they suggest that "Mafia fish bigger than De Carlo" soon "took an interest" in his career. They also quote sources who suggest that Sinatra was able to get out of a costly contract with Tommy Dorsey (which would have given the bandleader a third of the singer's "all future earnings over $100 a week" for "the next 10 years") only after mobsters threatened Dorsey with a gun - a story other biographers have questioned.
In addition, Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan suggest that Sinatra won the role of Maggio in "From Here to Eternity" - a role that helped turn his career around after a precipitous slump in the early 1950's - with more than a little help from mob connected friends, and that Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, was in fact "coerced into giving the part to Frank." They do not quote many of the numerous denials of this "Godfather"-esque scenario cited in, say, Ms. Kelley's book.
In focusing so relentlessly on the possible role that the mob played in Sinatra's career, Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan play down the singularity of his talent, and they elbow the magic of his music to the sidelines. In fact, readers interested in Sinatra's art would do well to turn, instead, to earlier books like "The Frank Sinatra Reader" (a lively compendium of essays by writers like Gay Talese, Gene Lees, Murray Kempton and Mikal Gilmore) edited by Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazza; Will Friedwald's "Sinatra! The Song is You" (a serious examination of his musicianship, that draws upon dozens of interviews with his collaborators); or Mr. Hamill's "Why Sinatra Matters" (a succinct consideration of his life and work).
Even better, readers might crank up the stereo or turn on their iPods, and listen once more to "In the Wee Small Hours," "Songs for Swingin' Lovers" or "Only the Lonely" - albums that remind the listener that whatever the excesses and sometime ugliness of his life, the singer could persuasively say, "When I sing, I believe I'm honest." Or, as Bob Dylan, quoted in the epigraph to this dreadful book, once said of Francis Albert Sinatra, "Right from the beginning, he was there with the truth of things in his voice."