Let Me Be Frank

The Extraordinary Life and Music of Frank Sinatra, Jr.

Bruce H. Klauber, Andrea Kauffman

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496858771
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

As an American singer, conductor, composer, and actor, Frank Sinatra, Jr. (1944–2016), had a long and successful music career and was recognized for his many contributions to American popular song. Yet, his own star has often been overshadowed by his world-famous father. The first book ever published about Frank Sinatra, Jr., Let Me Be Frank: The Extraordinary Life and Music of Frank Sinatra, Jr., details how this complex and often misunderstood artist dealt with professional struggles, personal demons, and endless comparisons with his father to emerge as a thriving performer who finally made peace with the name "Sinatra."

Let Me Be Frank chronicles Frank Sinatra, Jr.'s life and music career, including the lifetime loyalty of his friends and bandsmen, and his notorious womanizing. It also, of course, details the challenging relationship with his father, including an incident with his father that may have changed Frank Jr. forever. He ran from comparisons to his father and lost work due to his refusal to sing his father's songs. The book also details Frank Jr.'s kidnapping in 1963 when he was nineteen.

Included are over forty interviews with Frank Jr.'s friends, family, and colleagues. It also features a compelling narrative from Andrea Kauffman, Frank Jr.'s personal manager and close friend of thirty-one years, and an in-depth musical analysis of four decades of Frank Jr.'s recordings and stage shows. Let Me Be Frank finally sets the record straight about a brilliant man and a brilliant performer who never truly got the credit he deserved.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Introduction
• My Father
• The Early Years
• His Place in the Sun
• The Start at Disneyland
• Teen Idol in the Making
• Getting Sentimental: The Dorsey Years
• The Kidnapping
• The Aftermath
• The Swinging 1960s
• Meet Me in Las Vegas
• Wild about Harry
• Film and Television Miscellany
• On the Road Again
• I’ll Never Smile Again
• The Start of Something Big
• The Call to Conduct
• Opening Night
• Father and Son Meet Mary Hart
• The Children’s Hour
• They’re Lookin’ for Me, but They’re Gonna Get You
• Still Spreading the News
• As I Remember It
• Gershwin’s America
• The Final Curtain
• At the Nineteenth Hole with Barbara Sinatra
• The Vampire
• The Sopranos
• This Is a Musician Singing
• Radiance
• That Face!
• High Hopes: The Kennedys Revisited
• On Broadway
• The Worst Nightmare
• The Last Dance
• The Victim
• All Things Must Change: A Question of Repertoire
• Sinatra Sings Sinatra
• Cen Cel: The One Hundredth Birthday
• Because I’m Not Done Yet
• Put Your Dreams Away
• Missed
• The Funeral That Wasn’t
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• Index