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Frank Sinatra Jr. dies of cardiac arrest while on tour Frank Sinatra Jr., faithful keeper of his father’s flame, dead at 72
(about 5 hours later)
LOS ANGELES — Frank Sinatra Jr., who carried on his famous father’s legacy with his own music career and whose kidnapping as a young man added a bizarre chapter to his father’s legendary life, died Wednesday. He was 72. Some sons run from their fathers. Others ride their fathers’ coattails. Frank Sinatra Jr., who died Wednesday of a heart attack at 72, charted an even rockier middle course.
The younger Sinatra died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest while on tour in Daytona Beach, Florida, the Sinatra family said in a statement to The Associated Press. “I was never a success,” he told The Washington Post’s Wil Haygood in 2006. “Never had a hit movie or hit TV show or hit record. I just had visions of doing the best quality of music. Now there is a place for me because Frank Sinatra is dead. They want me to play the music. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be noticed. The only satisfaction is that I do what I do well. That’s the only lawful satisfaction.”
The statement said the family mourns the untimely passing of their son, brother, father and uncle. No other details were provided. [Frank Jr., the Unsung Sinatra]
His real name was Francis Wayne Sinatra — his father’s full name was Francis Albert Sinatra — but he went professionally by Frank Sinatra Jr. Sinatra Jr., a gifted singer who, fortunately and unfortunately, was the only son of one of American popular music’s giantest giants, died while on tour in Florida, as the Associated Press reported. He is survived by a son, Michael. Nancy Sinatra, Sinatra Jr.’s sister, also posted news of his death on Facebook. “Sleep warm, Frankie,” she wrote.
Sinatra Jr. was the middle child of Sinatra and Nancy Barbato Sinatra, who was the elder Sinatra’s first wife and the mother of all three of his children. Sinatra Jr.’s older sister was Nancy Sinatra, who had a successful musical career of her own, and his younger sister was TV producer Tina Sinatra. The Sinatra family mourn the untimely passing of their son, brother, father, uncle, Frank Sinatra, Jr. of cardiac arrest… Posted by Nancy Sinatra on Wednesday, March 16, 2016
He was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1944, just as his father’s career was getting started, and he would watch his dad become one of the most famous singers of all time. But he usually watched from a distance, as Sinatra was constantly away on tours and making movies. The Sinatra family mourn the untimely passing of their son, brother, father, uncle, Frank Sinatra, Jr. of cardiac arrest…
He did, however, sometimes get to see him from the wings of the stage, especially when his father performed for long stints in Las Vegas. Sinatra Jr. got to see many other storied performers too, like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Count Basie. Posted by Nancy Sinatra on Wednesday, March 16, 2016
“I saw all the top stars perform,” Sinatra Jr. told the AP in 2002. He said one of his favorite memories of his father was a show in the late 1960s at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Sinatra Jr.’s recent string of concerts, like many, many before, focused on his father’s catalogue. Frank Sinatra, who died in 1998, was born in 1915, and the centenary of his birth has brought many a tribute.
“He was sitting on a little stool, and he sang the Beatles song ‘Yesterday’ and ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ and ‘Didn’t We,’” Sinatra Jr. said. “We were all crying and singing.” “The show that we’re doing is one of probably at least a half dozen big Sinatra tributes out there but I like to believe ours is different for one reason,” Sinatra Jr. told the Sarasota Herald Tribune just last week. “People know if they go they’re going to hear ‘Strangers in the Night,’ ‘My Way,’ and so on, but our show goes deeper than that. We assume you’re here because you love and know the music, heard all the legends, and now it’s time to know something about the man.”
Sinatra Jr. followed his father into music as a teenager, eventually working for the senior Sinatra as his musical director and conductor. If someone was going to do Sinatra, it seemed Sinatra Jr. was the best candidate. And he wasn’t phoning in “Fly Me to the Moon” for a paycheck.
The elder Sinatra died of a heart attack May 14, 1998, at 82. “He can sound exactly like his dad if he wants to,” Jim Fox, Sinatra Jr.’s guitarist, told The Post in 2006. “He can turn on the classic Sinatra sound anytime. It just depends on what kind of mood he’s in. He has such high standards. He doesn’t want to work unless he has his 38 band pieces. He knows every third trombone part, every cello part. You know, he conducted for his dad. So he knows the way Sinatra music is supposed to sound.”
Sinatra Jr. was able to provide a link to his father’s music after his death, performing his songs and arrangements on tours and especially in Las Vegas. Sinatra Jr.’s familiarity with his father’s music may have been his birthright, but that didn’t mean the birthright came easy. Born in 1944, he was not close with his dad — one of the most famous performers of the 20th century. Much of his childhood was spent in boarding schools.
“Since my father’s death, a lot of people have made it clear that they’re not ready to give up the music,” Sinatra Jr. said in the 2002 AP interview. “For me, it’s a big, fat gift. I get to sing with a big orchestra and get to sing orchestrations that will never be old.” “When I started as a kid, I wanted to be a piano player and songwriter. I only became a singer by accident,” Sinatra Jr. said. “I was in college, playing in a little band. The lead singer got tanked one night. A guy in the band pointed at me and said, ‘You sing.’ I said, ‘Me? Why me?’ He said, ‘You’re a Sinatra, aren’t you? Sing!'”
When Sinatra Jr. was 19 in 1963, three men kidnapped him at gunpoint from a Lake Tahoe hotel. He was returned safely after two days when his family paid $240,000 for his release. Sinatra Jr. could sing — very well. His father certainly could have meddled — in the early 1960s, an endorsement from his dad certainly would have been a great career boost — but didn’t. The Chairman of the Board’s reported reaction to his son’s chosen career path: “If that’s what he wants.”
Barry Keenan, a high school friend of Nancy Sinatra, was arrested with the other two suspects, Johnny Irwin and Joe Amsler, and convicted of conspiracy and kidnapping. “His reaction went to his people, not me,” Sinatra Jr. said. “When he learned when I was a teenager and wanted to sing he had one question, ‘Can he sing?’ To me, nothing. He wanted me to have the right of my own determination, something I was also grateful for.”
Keenan masterminded the kidnapping, prosecutors said. He was sentenced to life plus 75 years in prison, but was declared legally insane at the time of the crime, had his sentence reduced and was paroled in 1968 after serving 4 ½ years. But the young man’s career was nearly derailed by one of the strangest — and, perhaps, most forgotten — celebrity episodes of the 1960s: In 1963, like Charles Lindbergh Jr. before him and Patty Hearst after, Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped and held for ransom.
Sinatra Jr. had nearly two dozen TV and movie credits as an actor, including appearances on “The Love Boat” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” most recently providing his own voice for two episodes of “Family Guy.” “Three men kidnapped 19-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr. from a motel in Lake Tahoe, Nev.,” The Post recounted in 1998. “He was held in a Los Angeles hideout for four days; the price of his release was $240,000. During that time, the family was distraught, and because of who the father was, the headlines were big and black and screaming across front pages around the country. Attorney General Robert Kennedy offered the government’s support, J. Edgar Hoover activated the FBI, and mob boss Sam Giancana volunteered his own special brand of crime solving (which the elder Sinatra refused).”
Last year he performed the national anthem at Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees games in celebration of the centennial of his father’s birth. The bizarre twist in an already bizarre story: One of the kidnappers was a friend of Sinatra Jr.’s sister Nancy: Barry Keenan, a 23-year-old businessman in the grip of drug and alcohol addiction.
He was scheduled to perform Thursday night in St. Petersburg, Florida, in a show featuring his father’s songbook. The venue’s website mentioned Sinatra Jr.’s death in canceling the show. He had other tour dates booked for May, September and October in the Midwest and East Coast. “One day I decided to do something radical,” Keenan told Ira Glass in 2002. “… Kidnapping seemed like a good idea, so I put a business plan together.”
Sinatra Jr. was married in 1998, but divorced in 2000. He is survived by a son, Michael. More than 25 years later, Keenan — who served four-and-a-half years in prison after his capture and later became a successful real-estate developer — reported that Sinatra Jr. refused to give up his father’s phone number.
___ “I told him we could get this thing over with quickly and asked for the phone number of his dad,” Keenan told The Post in 1998. “He says, ‘I’m not going to give you anything … you’re going to have to shoot me now.'”
AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen contributed to this report. Though the episode ended without violence — and, perhaps, proved the mettle of its intended victim — it spawned an unfortunate rumor: that the kidnapping was a mere cry for attention.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. “Look, back in those days kidnapping was a capital offense,” Sinatra Jr. told The Post in 1973. “And the publicity stunt bit was the only defense those kidnappers had. And the newspapers used that stuff because they gotta sell papers.”
Sinatra Jr., who dropped out of a music program at the University of Southern California in his third year, was back on the road soon enough.
“I guess my parents were curious to find out how long I’d stick with show business,” he said. “And I — I was curious too.”
He stuck with it for the rest of his life. But unlike some of his peers, he didn’t ditch the big band and string arrangements for a distorted guitar and a bad attitude.
“I was never an admirer of what used to be called rock and roll and never have been an admirer of rock and roll,” he said last week. “It was terribly simplistic compared to the melodies and harmonies of what I consider better music.”
Sinatra Jr. was not without admirers among his own rebellious generation, however. In his autobiography “Chronicles,” no less a personage than Bob Dylan reported being quite impressed with the singer after seeing him in New York.
“Why him and not somebody on the hip circuit?” Dylan wrote, perhaps intuiting his readers would be confused that he had gone to see Sinatra Jr. at all. “No hassles and nobody chasing me, that’s why … that and maybe because I felt a connection — I reckoned that we were about near the same age and that he was a contemporary of mine. Anyway Frank was a fine singer. I didn’t care if he was as good as his old man or not — he sounded fine, and I liked his big blasting band.” Dylan added: “Frank Jr. seemed pretty smart, nothing faked or put-on or ritzy about him. There was a legitimacy about what he did, and he knew who he was.”
This self-assurance — that Sinatra Jr. was a living legacy, but also his own person — was on full display more than a decade into his career, when it was perhaps clear he was never going to make a splash.
“What makes you think I can’t do anything on my own?” Sinatra Jr. said. “What makes you think I always have to prove myself?” (A reporter who saw him perform wrote: “He even sang one of his own songs.”)
Never able to escape his father’s shadow, Sinatra Jr. slid into it. Though an established, if not widely celebrated, musician and actor in his own right, he became his dad’s conductor in 1988.
“I had heard indirectly, because I was not close to it, that he had gone through a series of orchestral conductors,” Sinatra Jr. said last year. “There was something missing, obviously, otherwise he wouldn’t have made all the changes. And one afternoon in the middle of 1988 he called me. ‘Why don’t you come out and conduct for me?’ Well, when my friends who were in the room revived me with the smelling salts, I said, ‘You can’t be serious.’ He said, ‘I’m dead serious. I can’t get these guys to give me what I want to get. Maybe another singer can understand what a singer is trying to do.’ I took that as a terrific compliment.”
The Chairman of the Board often made light of his son’s presence from the stage.
“Frank wasn’t one for a lot of sentimentality,” comedian Tom Dreesen, who often opened for Sinatra, said last year. “He wasn’t going to say to the audience, ‘That’s my son, and I love him!’ He used to joke about it. He would introduce Frankie Junior and then say, ‘This is my son — his mom told me to give him a job.’ But the truth is, it meant a lot.”
It wasn’t necessarily a heartfelt reunion — but it was more than a gig.
“I was in his life the last seven years that he was giving concerts and as his music director that was when I spent the most time with him,” Sinatra Jr. said last year. “In a certain degree, we became closer, but by that point in time, to be perfectly honest, there were so many issues and so many people vying for his time that we never became as close as I would have liked. But it was better than having no time at all.”
After his father’s death, Sinatra fils carried the banner for Sinatra pater — and not just onstage. He appeared as himself in an episode of “The Sopranos” — a cameo that made anyone familiar with his father’s alleged mafia ties smile — during which he was called “Chairboy of the Board.” (“There’s a resemblance,” Tony allowed.) He appeared as himself on “The Family Guy.” He sang the national anthem at a Yankees game last year — the team plays “New York, New York” after every home game.
 
He was the keeper of his father’s flame  — but kept it his way.
“Sinatra had this magnificent talent of picking the right stuff for him,” Sinatra Jr. said in 2006 of his father. “In those days, of course, there were a lot of songwriters to pick from. Today, who’s left? … Most of it has long since passed. But it’s okay. You can always reach into the past.”
David Malitz contributed to this report.