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Let Me Be Frank - The Extraordinary Life and Music of Frank Sinatra, Jr.

Let Me Be Frank

The Extraordinary Life and Music of Frank Sinatra, Jr.

By Bruce H. Klauber & Andrea Kauffman
Series: American Made Music Series

Hardcover : 9781496858658, 264 pages, 32 b&w illustrations, October 2025

Table of contents

Contents
Preface
Introduction by Bruce H. Klauber
Introduction by Andrea Kauffman
My Father by Michael Francis Sinatra
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

How the son of one of the most famous performers in history fought for his own star as a musician

Description

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.

Reviews

"Let Me Be Frank is the first biography of the enigmatic Frank Sinatra, Jr., a singer who lived most of his life in the immense shadow of his legendary father. The authors, Bruce Klauber and Andrea Kauffman, created this work as a labor of love for a man they knew well. Their research is extensive, drawn from over forty in-depth interviews, including one with Michael Sinatra, the singer’s son. Kauffman was Frank Jr.’s manager for over thirty years, and she chronicles his evolution from someone who insisted on going his own way to someone who embraced his father’s legacy after his death in 1998."

- Anthony DiFlorio, entertainment archivist and WRDV-FM host

"Let Me Be Frank is the first book ever published about Sinatra, Jr., and there are no two better people to tackle the subject than Kauffman and Klauber, who don’t hold back and share intimate, never-before-known stories about the musical legend and how he 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.’"

- Scott Cronick, www.shorelocalnews.com