Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra is a remembered husband, a singer judged through divided voices, and a presence that reaches the novel’s scenes through recorded music. He never needs to appear in person for his image to take shape: the Blonde Actress recalls their stormy marriage and his suicide attempt, while the sound of his version of “All the Way” accompanies Marilyn Monroe beneath the gaze of the President.

Identity and Place in the Story

Sinatra enters the novel as a figure in the Blonde Actress’s account of the men she and the brunette have both known. The account identifies him as her husband for a couple of turbulent years, placing him among a succession of intimate and professional connections associated with Hollywood’s defeated and precarious world. He is referred to as Frankie as well as Sinatra, a familiar name that suits the intimacy and sharpness of the recollection.

The book offers no sustained biography or independent account of his life. Instead, Sinatra is constructed through memory and performance: the marriage is recalled after its end, his character is assessed in intimate terms, and his singing is heard again in a later scene through a recording. The reader encounters not a rounded portrait outside these fragments, but the contradictory celebrity image assembled by the women who speak about him.

Marriage and Suicide Attempt

The Blonde Actress recalls that Sinatra tried to kill himself with sleeping pills, apparently for love of her. Someone called an ambulance, and he survived. Her response, as she recounts it, was angry and deliberately cutting: she scolded him for choosing what she called a woman’s way of attempting suicide, and said that he would never forgive her. She added that there were other women he would forgive even less readily. The episode makes their marriage’s turbulence concrete, while leaving the precise causes and circumstances of his crisis within her partial, retrospective account.

Her memory does not settle into simple tenderness or condemnation. The suicide attempt is described as an act undertaken for her, but she remembers answering it with contempt rather than reassurance. That contrast gives the marriage its jagged shape in the novel: intimacy is present, but it is recalled through provocation, injury, and the knowledge that the relationship did not last.

Voice, Persona, and Musical Afterlife

The two voices in the later recollection assess Sinatra differently. The Blonde Actress expresses admiration for him as a singer. The brunette is less impressed, describing his musical style as white and syrupy and preferring Black jazz and rock. She also offers a bluntly sexual assessment of him, while qualifying it with memories of his drunkenness, drug use, and nervousness. These remarks remain character judgments rather than an authoritative account of Sinatra; their disagreement makes him a screen onto which contrasting tastes and attitudes are projected.

Sinatra’s voice returns indirectly in the scene on the moonlit terrace, where his version of “All the Way” plays through speakers around the pool as Marilyn Monroe approaches. The President watches her, while the song supplies a soundscape for her vulnerable, dreamlike appearance. Sinatra is not shown there as a participant in the encounter: his role is mediated by the recording. That distance is significant. The living singer of the earlier recollection becomes an audible trace, attached to a scene in which Marilyn is watched and interpreted by others.