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In the later years of his life, Frank Sinatra would often reminisce about his loves, his losses and the friends he missed most, including Marilyn Monroe. While the events surrounding what really happened on August 4, 1962 when the star was found dead from a drug overdose remain a mystery, Sinatra's close confidant and former road manager Tony Oppedisano, whose memoir Sinatra and Me: In The Wee Small Hours, is excerpted in this week's PEOPLE, says the singer didn't believe it was an accidental overdose. "Frank believed she was murdered," he writes, "and he never got over it."

If you’ve ever wondered what connects Frank Zappa to Frank Sinatra, Burt Bacharach to The Beach Boys, the answer is Carol Kaye. The session legend tells the story behind her career and legendary bass recordingsIf plucking a ripe plum from a tree had a sound, it would resemble Carol Kaye’s signature tone – a tone that made her a ‘first-call’ bassist in the highly competitive studio session world. It wasn’t just that, though. Kaye is arguably the first bassist to exploit the instrument in a truly melodic fashion, a nod perhaps to her early days as a jazz guitar prodigy....

Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley shared a stage in March 1960, when Ol’ Blue Eyes invited the singer of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ onto his show.When the rock’n’roll phenomenon, spearheaded by the likes of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and Chuck Berry, exploded like the musical equivalent of an atom bomb in the mid-50s, it was greeted with both alarm and suspicion by some of the music business’s established artists, Frank Sinatra among them. The Chairman Of The Board invited The King Of Rock’n’Roll to be a special guest on the last of four hour-long TV shows sponsored by watchmakers Timex and...

One hundred and fifty years ago this month - April 1873 - a song was given its first performance at a house in Harlan, Kansas, which is about six miles from Gaylord, Kansas, via the miniature Statue of Liberty. The song was not written by a professional songwriter, but by a doctor named Brewster Higley VI - a fact that would be of no interest to anyone save Brewster Higley IX, Brewster Higley X or whichever other Brewster Higley is still extant, because almost instantly the song floated free of its creator, first across the American west and then to...

Since 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, here are examples of rappers from Diddy to Lil Wayne embracing Ol' Blue Eyes.Over the years, rappers have proudly embraced Frank Sinatra for his style, smooth catalogue, complicated life and gangsta ties. From his defiant 1938 mug shot, Sinatra embraced his Italian-American heritage as he ran around Hollywood with a pre-Rat Pack group known as the Varsity. Interestingly enough, Sinatra was also an activist during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He gave financial support to Martin Luther King Jr. and refused to play in segregated clubs or...

Question: What's the connection between the Muslim call to prayer and Fred Astaire? Answer: Night and Day You are the one Only you beneath the moon and under the sun... Well, that's the way Cole Porter told it, some of the time: His biggest hit was supposedly inspired by hearing the muezzin summon the faithful in Morocco during one of Cole's Mediterranean wanderings. If so, it must rank as Islam's greatest contribution to American popular music (along with "What Is This Thing Called Love?"). Morocco-wise, it seems more attuned to the country's nocturnal near namesake in Manhattan: "The crowds at...

Bastille Day, France's fête nationale, fell on Thursday, when I was off the air. Thus it went unobserved at SteynOnline, which seems a bit unfair to our many French patrons. So as I chance to find myself on French soil. So, quelques jours de retard, it seemed appropriate to pick something suitably Gallic for our chanson de la semaine. How about..? Je me lève et je te bouscule Tu n'te réveilles pas Comme d'habitude... But no: we did that just the other week. And, if we're going with anglicized franco-pop, we should at least try and pick something that retains...

For much of his life, Frank Sinatra dealt with allegations that he had ties to the mafia. The singer denied these rumors, but they have persisted even after his death. His associations allegedly grew irritated with him because Sinatra failed to get them a direct line to the Kennedy White House. In a conversation in a bugged restaurant, one reportedly offered to get rid of Sinatra and his friends. Sinatra began dealing with whispers about his alleged mob ties early in his career. This, coupled with his left-leaning politics, meant that the FBI began tracking him. The rumors were so...

As a song, “Ebony and Ivory” may not have aged well, but, on the May 22, 1982, episode of Saturday Night Live, the treacly Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder duet gave two of the show’s biggest stars one of their biggest hits. With the cloyingly rosy musical paean to black-white relations having come out just that March, SNL writers Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield knew they had the perfect Stevie Wonder for a parody sketch in Eddie Murphy. Murphy, well on his way to becoming one the biggest stars in the show’s history, did a killer Wonder, but had teased...

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. Scientists have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6,000-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today "Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Professor Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. "But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a "switch," which literally "turned off" the ability to produce brown eyes." The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is...

It’s a well-known fact that outlaw country hero Willie Nelson is a “huge” fan of the iconic crooner Frank Sinatra. Famously, the duo collaborated for a string of shows in Las Vegas. Showing just how far Nelson had risen since his humble Texas beginnings, Sinatra even opened for him in 1984 at the Golden Nugget Casino. However, Nelson has admitted that he holds one regret from his friendship with the ‘My Way’ legend. The friendship of Sinatra and Nelson first blossomed out of mutual love for the other’s craft. “Practically everything he’s recorded, I’ve loved it. I’m a huge Sinatra...

Not everything about “King of Cool” Dean Martin was what it seemed. The dashing playboy and heartthrob was actually a devoted family man to eight children. The legendary drinker — who always had a tumbler in hand —secretly filled his glass with apple cider. And that gleaming grin masked pain. A new documentary explores the complexities of the beloved crooner, comedian and founding member of the Rat Pack. “Dean Martin: King of Cool,” which premieres Friday on TCM, features never-before-seen archival footage and delves into Martin’s strained relationship with Jerry Lewis, his bromance with Frank Sinatra and the personal tragedy...

“There wasn’t a man I met with that didn’t try to sleep with me,” Old Hollywood icon Lainie Kazan tells Page Six. Her strategy for defusing such situations? “Sometimes I tried to play dumb. [As if] I didn’t see it, I didn’t understand it. You know, it was playful. There was no way to be as direct as we are now.” But Kazan points out that when she did end up in an “entanglement” with a suitor it was “not because the guy was saying, ‘You’re not getting the role otherwise.'”

This month we are marking the centenary of Nelson Riddle, perhaps the greatest of all arrangers of popular song. That's what Frank Sinatra thought, and we cite "I've Got the World on a String", "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" as merely the obvious examples. This week's selection is less frequently cited, but is a particular favorite of mine. On March 27th 1929 the Charles B Cochran revue Wake Up And Dream opened at the London Pavilion, with a host of West End talent, including Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale, Tilly Losch...

This month we are marking the centenary of Nelson Riddle, perhaps the greatest of all arrangers of popular song. That's what Frank Sinatra thought, and we cite "I've Got the World on a String" and "I've Got You Under My Skin" as merely the obvious examples. But Sinatra and Riddle rescued a lot of other songs over the years - songs that had once been hits and then been forgotten, songs that had been in hit shows but no one had noticed, songs that had been in the stage version but dropped for the movie adaptation... But they rarely transformed...

Classic flick about the clash between emotional anti-gun war widow and a WW2 veteran (Sterling Hayden) who is sheriff of a small town where the POTUS is set to pass through. A psycho (Frank Sinatra) is planning to beat the odds and take him out. Grand old character actor James Gleason plays the lady's father-in-law, and has the honor to deliver the line: "When the old boys wrote those words 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,' they sounded mighty nice -- but they wouldn't've been worth a plug nickel if somebody hadn't made 'em stick."

Another item on Joe Biden’s to-do list for his first one hundred days in office is the establishment of 100 federal vaccination sites, or “pods,” around the country. That plan understandably had governors and mayors of large cities pretty excited, given how hard it’s been to make significant progress toward herd immunity. It’s a plan that drew bipartisan interest, too. The state Department of Health in Oklahoma, not exactly a blue state by any measure, was ready to sign up for federal pods in three of their largest cities. But as details of the plan emerged, they quickly backed off....

I leave it to readers to decide whether this week's Song of the Week was selected as a plea for healing in a divided land or merely because sixty years ago - January 1960 - it was on the Billboard Number One album. The latter is verifiable, although to be precise one should clarify that it was on the Billboard Number One stereo album; the Number One mono album was the soundtrack to the Elvis film GI Blues. As to the healing balm, you'll have to hang on till our closing paragraph. The stereo album in question was Frank Sinatra's...

Politicians are now afraid of "We The People" and the political elites in their fear are just as drunk and crazy as the few folks who chose mayhem and violence at the US Capitol on Wednesday. I want peace and serenity, sanity and sobriety but the people have been intoxicated with rage. And who did it? A lot did... It looks like the folks on the Left in the Deep State FBI Justice Department the social media magnates are in purge attack mode no holds barred as we enter this Saturday morning... Last week I told you about the phoney...

Monday is not only Labor Day in America and Labour Day in Canada but also Independence Day in Brazil, marking the moment when Prince Pedro was persuaded by the country's leaders to declare himself free of Lisbon. To be honest, it always depresses me to see various charmless presidents preside like mob bosses over Independence Day observances, as nothing makes me pine more for the old Empire of Brazil: South America does not do republics well. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that in global pop music Brazil punches above its weight, its contributions to the repertoire...