Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Frank Sinatra on his birthday 🎂
📷 Peter Martin, 1940s
"This is all they really wanted; they wanted to see him. And for a few moments they gazed in silence through the smoke & they stared. Then they turned, fought their way out of the bar, went home."
- Gay Talese

Bob Willoughby
Frank Sinatra & Dean Martin on the set of a Judy Garland TV special, 1962

Tommy Dorsey & Frank Sinatra in Ship Ahoy, 1942
"The sound of Sinatra in his three years with Tommy Dorsey is that of a sage-to-be experiencing the thrills of first romance."
- Will Friedwald

An odd vibe on this set!
Grace Kelly & Frank Sinatra, High Society.
📷 Dennis Stock, 1956

Grace Kelly & Frank Sinatra on the set of High Society.
📷 Dennis Stock, 1956

Laurence Harvey & Frank Sinatra in a @CentralParkNYC scene from 1962's The Manchurian Candidate.
📷 Phil Stanziola, via @librarycongress

Frank Sinatra & Tommy Lasorda, Opening Day, April 10, 1981. The @Dodgers won the Series that year.
📷 Rob Brown
@laplphotos

The first Sinatra-Count Basie albums were arranged by Neal Hefti. Then Quincy Jones took over the arranging duties. Here are the three of them during recording sessions for It Might As Well Be Swing.
Photo: David Sutton, 1964

Another Bob Willoughby shot of Count Basie & Frank Sinatra, from 1965.
Sweets Edison: "He liked to sit there with his arm around Basie."
Earle Warren: "Which Basie didn't mind because Frank was such a big star & always getting bigger."
The Good Life

The Sinatra-Basie LP, released in 1963, features a great photo of the two by Ted Allen. The great arrangements are by Neal Hefti.
Sinatra called the Basie band "the greatest orchestra at any time in the history of the world."

At the beginning of the 1962 recording sessions for Sinatra-Basie: An Historic Musical First, Frank announced "I've waited twenty years for this moment."
Here are Count Basie & Frank Sinatra in 1964, in a photo by John Dominis.

Vincent Canby visits Frank Sinatra on the set of The Detective, 1967
📷 Neal Boenzi
Found this at a wonderful article by @JulieBesonen about Canby's desk
nytimes.com/2020/12/17/nyr…
BTW, Canby panned The Detective

Gjon Mili
Vivian Blaine, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons & Marlon Brando on the set of Guys & Dolls, 1955

Al Hirschfeld includes Frank Sinatra in his 1983 drawing of "Popular Song Performers". The others: Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole & Fred Astaire

Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely, 1958
"Lonely was a high point in the Sinatra-Riddle partnership that the two men would not achieve again. But then again, neither would anyone else."
- Walt Friedwald
open.spotify.com/album/79EPf4gO…

Nelson Riddle on Frank Sinatra:
"The man, himself, somehow draws everything out of you, & he has the same effect on the boys in the band. They know he means business, so they pull everything out."
📷 Sid Avery, 1954

So beautiful! For someone with such a brusque & matter-of-fact image, Weegee could come up with perfect, sensitive, graceful photographs.
Listening to Frank Sinatra, Palace Theater, 1944

Quincy Jones & Frank Sinatra by John Dominis, 1964

Nickolas Muray
Frank Sinatra for Modern Screen Magazine, c. 1940s
Frankie!

Here's Sinatra singing Sammy Cahn & Jule Styne's beautiful "Time After Time" in It Happened in Brooklyn, 1947. It's always a treat to see Jimmy Durante. And the chap playing the piano for Frank off-camera? It was André Previn.

John Dominis
Coffee with Frank Sinatra ☕️
Play that air violin, Frank! 🎻

Shelly Manne tutors Frank Sinatra for his role as jazz drummer Frankie Machine, in Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm
Photo: Bob Willoughby, 1955

Bob Willoughby's shot from the 1955 Man With the Golden Arm soundtrack sessions: Shelly Manne on the right, with Nelson Riddle & Frank Sinatra. This is one of my favourite photographs of Frank.

Peggy Lee's own favourite album was The Man I Love, from 1967. Arranged by Nelson Riddle, with the orchestra conducted by Frank Sinatra. Frank suggested that she put menthol in her eyes for the misty look in the (anonymous) photograph used on the cover.

I love the Gebr illustration of Peggy Lee & Frank Sinatra on the back of the LP. #PeggyLee100
Another song from The Man I Love:

Frank Sinatra, My Way, 1969
Cover photo by Ed Thrasher. Arrangements are by Don Costa
open.spotify.com/album/3IdNQBn7…

"Musically, it has no more content than most rock & roll, yet Sinatra pumps it up with the grandeur of an operatic aria, a five-minute exercise in self-indulgence that starts quietly, even intimately, & ends enormously."
- Will Friedwald

Ed Thrasher's contact sheet from a photoshoot with Frank Sinatra, at a 1968 rehearsal for his Caesars Palace performance. The left shot in the third row was used on the cover of My Way, which was released in 1969.

The Peter Stackpole photos from Sam Spiegel's 1949 New Year's Eve party had no captions. It was fun trying to ID everyone.
I recognized Frank Sinatra's hairline, in the centre of Peter Stackpole's picture, & then I realized that he's with Nancy Barbato Sinatra, his first wife.

Potentially awkward:
This has to be Ava Gardner; the only person this beautiful. One wonders if she & Frank talked at this party, or just looked at each other from across the room...

Terry O'Neill finds a physical grace in Frank Sinatra that you don't often see. On stage at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, 1968

Terry O'Neill's empathy might have worked with many of his subjects, but the early days with Sinatra were different. "It’s a cliché to say that photographers hide behind their camera but that’s absolutely true of me. Sinatra taught me that, to hold back." The menace in this shot!

Mood

Frank Sinatra by Herman Leonard, 1956

Frank Sinatra by Bob Willoughby, 1959.
This is during the filming of Walter Lang's Can-Can, released in 1960.

#Cool
Frank Sinatra by Milton H. Greene
Beverly Hills Hotel, 1954

Frank Sinatra by Philippe Halsman, 1944
"The body of excellent songs that had come into existence in the United States at last found a singer worthy of them... He was one of the best singers in history. And we knew it. He was our poet laureate."
- Gene Lees

Gene Lees' Sinatra essay "The Paradox", is entertaining & insightful. He quotes opera authority Henry Pleasants:
"... he told me once that he had rarely met an opera singer who didn't have a Sinatra collection. 'They know how good he is,' Henry said."
📷 Frank with Luciano, 1982