SINATRA AND ME in the wee small hours

 Old blue eyes life told in a refreshing way by his manager, producer, drinking buddy (Jack Daniels and water), and best friend. This is not Frank’s life story, although the blanks get filled in along the way. It’s a composite of thousands of conversations with Frank, his friends, and his family as told by Tony Oppedisano, his Sicilian confidant, manager, fellow singer, and writer of this book. Being Sicilian is one of the reasons Frank was always assumed to be mafioso by the press, who had a vendetta for most of old blue eye's career. The other reason was Frank’s presumed ties with all the big NYC clubs and later Las Vegas. The fact that all those clubs and early Las Vegas were mobbed-owned didn’t seem to mean anything to the American press. Sinatra’s trouble with the press started when Frank decked New York Mirror’s Lee Mortimer after Mortimer linked Frank to Lucky Luciano with no evidence. Frank's verbal attacks on columnist Dorothy Kilgallen were started when he called her “the chinless wonder.” Frank also had a long press battle with Maxine Cheshire, who also linked him to the mafioso. Anyway, the slightly built Sinatra was always able to stand up to anybody. If he liked you, you were his friend for life. If he disliked you, it’s not true that he didn’t apologize. “ Hey, I’m sorry. Sometimes I’m a schmuck. Help me get my foot out of my mouth. Frank could be extraordinarily generous with his fans. If people were polite one good turn deserves another. And one bad turn deserves another.” 

Frank’s taste for women was always in the spotlight. “When Frank married actress Mia Farrow in 1966, he became the butt of a lot of jokes. Jackie Mason was one of the most vocal. He used to talk about Frank’s buying Mia a box of crayons for her birthday, or Frank’s being asked to leave the bar because Mia’s rattle was making too much noise. As everyone knows, Frank was still married to Nancy Sr. when he met Ava Gardner. Ava was the total opposite of Nancy, Sr., which was part of the attraction. If Nancy was the angel on one of Frank’s shoulders, Ava was the devil on the other. Nancy was the devoted Italian wife and mother, every inch a ‘good girl.’ Ava was a two-fisted drinker, and like his mother, Dolly, Ava had a mouth as bad as Frank’s. Frank told me, she could have a mouth like a truck driver. She drank as well as I did or better. Ava was also stunningly beautiful, the Angelina Jolie of her day.” Frank and Marilyn (Monroe) were very close and he idolized her. “She was beautiful and funny and charismatic and radiated sexuality. She was also as fragile as a troubled child, always looking for a man to take care of her and make her feel safe. Frank knew her for years, and they had a romance of sorts. Contrary to widespread belief, however, Frank never slept with her. He told me he badly wanted to, that he was terribly attracted to her, but always stopped short. He just couldn’t get rid of the feeling that sex with her would be taking advantage of a woman who’d already had been used by so many men.”

Sinatra’s mom, Dolly, was a five-foot ninety-pound leader, who was a domineering and sometimes aggressive mother. She was a political force in Hoboken, NJ, getting a letter of commendation from Calvin Coolidge, congratulating her on her great work for the Democratic Party. “Dolly had a mouth like a sailor. Her profanity was legendary.” She was known for grabbing Frank by the ear and dragging him home when caught playing hooky. “Dolly wanted him to enroll in the Stevens Institute and become an architect.” Even though Frank had a pretty high IQ and was fascinated with geometric designs, his heart was set on being a singer. “The whole thing came to a head one night over dinner with his parents. They were eating when his father said, “So, did you enroll in the Stevens Institute?” Frank said no and that he could be a better singer than Bing Crosby. His angry father said, “Well, fine, If that’s your final answer, that’s your choice, but you are not going to do it on my dime. So pack your stuff and get out of here.” Young Frank packed his bag and left to continue his singing career on his own. He was going to have to do it, “My Way.” Haha. 

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: Frank Sinatra died of a  heart attack on 5/14/1998 at the age of 82. Reportedly, his wife, Barbara was encouraging Frank to fight for his life when he said his final words,” I’m losing.”

In the Source Notes, his friend Tony Oppedisano, explains how he wrote this book: “Unlike most Sinatra biographers, I lived this book. It is almost entirely on direct personal experience and on thousands of conversations that occurred over decades with Frank, Jilly Rizzo, Nancy Sinatra Sr., and others close to Frank. I expect that I have been consulted on so many other Sinatra books because, in some cases, I have the only living memory of what occurred. I have become something of a keeper of the flame.

DEAD SILENCE

S. A. Barnes’ space novel, Dead Silence, somehow never lives up to the blurb on the inside jacket…” picks up a strange distress signal,” a line that always hooks me into reading a sci/fi novel. That line opens the door to a cornucopia of possibilities but sadly doesn’t add to the suspense of this novel. The signal is picked up by a space repair ship, LINA, a ship on its 26th month of updating “a network of beacons throughout the solar system designed to boost ship and colony transmissions.” The upgrade will put this crew out of work since the upgrade they are installing will be handled by a Verux SmarTech machine on earth in the future. The five-member team is led by our protagonist, Claire Kovalik, who was the only survivor of a past failed mission on the Ferris Outpost twenty-three years ago. Everyone died except Claire. Since then, Claire seems to flip-flop between reality and hallucinations bordering on insanity for the entire 343 pages of this fake novel, I’m calling it fake because it never lives up to its potential. The author’s prose is very easy to understand for a sci/fi novel yet still caused me the dreaded sleepy eyes syndrome. After listening to Claire’s constant whining about her previous failed outpost disaster and continuous complaining about her bosses back on earth, I lost all empathy for our lead character, who lives in a perpetual state of *Einstein Insanity (*Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.)

The distress signal comes from the luxury liner ship, Aurora, designed for the rich and famous and that disappeared on its maiden voyage. Can the crew bring it home and claim it as theirs and all the riches inside? “Twenty years ago, five hundred passengers and a hundred and fifty crew left on a maiden voyage for a tour of the solar system. It was supposed to take a year. But the Aurora disappeared six months in. All souls are presumed lost. The luxury space cruiser had every possible amenity you can imagine. Gold faucets, real wood floors, coffee from actual beans, meat that was once alive.” The crew on the Lina consisted of team captain, Claire Kovalik, and teammates Voller, Kane, Lourdes, and Nysus. They debated whether they should return home and report the incident or try to bring it back to earth and collect the salvage fee. They decided to see if they could return the ship to earth and earn enough to quit their jobs, “We’re going to be rich!” The crew navigates Lina next to the Aurora. “The Aurora is discomfortingly large, once we’re right upon it. In the Lina, it feels like we’re a tick crawling on a sleek silver beast that hasn’t yet noticed our presence or been annoyed by it to shake us loose.” 

“Theoretically, the Aurora could receive shipments from resupply vessels while cruising. State of the art for the time, “ Nysus says, his voice high and reedy with excitement. “So the outer doors could be independently operated if the setting was engaged and you had the override code.” And clearly, he does.

“Then the working lights kick on outside, giving us our first look inside the Aurora. It is shockingly normal, other than the fields of debris. A coffee mug, absurdly upright, floats by, and a four-legged object, glossy with black paint drifts aimlessly in the far left corner.  “Shit”...it’s a baby grand piano, floating upside down. The lights continue to sweep the area as Voller edges us toward the center of Aurora’s bay.” Suddenly they were in, Lina’s landing gear attaching their ship to the deck. That’s your 59-page taste of a 339-page novel. Are any of the 650 souls still alive after 20 years? What went wrong with this massive luxury liner? Can the five-person crew of the Lina navigate the massive ship back to earth? Why did so many people have to die? Was it corporate’s fault? This book was enjoyable but nothing special. The jacket blurb gave me a reason to believe this novel was going to be exciting but failed to rouse me. One of my favorite first contact novels was Harry Bates’ Farewell to the Master published in 1940 (see Rick’s review in Rambling Comments #5 on 2/3/2018.) You probably never heard of the novel because the theme was the major difference between the short story and the movie. The atomic bomb had not been invented yet when Harry Bates wrote the short story in 1940. The 1951 movie was a big hit and is considered a sci/fi classic. The movie? The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, and Sam Jaffe as the professor.

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

Comment: So Rick, what are some of your favorite first contact novels? Well, how about the following in no particular order:

Contact by Carl Sagan published in 1986: Amazon writes, “The future is here…in an adventure of cosmic dimension. When a signal is discovered that seems to come from far beyond our solar system, a multinational team of scientists decides to find the source. Why are they watching us? And what do they want with us?”

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky published in 1972: This is one of my favorites, it was banned in Russia for 8 years due to government censorship. “Roadside Picnic takes place in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event, which simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around the earth for a two-day period.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke published in 1973: This is my all-time favorite! “A huge, mysterious, cylindrical object appears in space, swooping in toward the sun. The citizens of the solar system send a ship to investigate before the enigmatic craft, called Rama, disappears.”

 

CHILDREN OF TIME

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award with this exciting science fiction classic space opera. All the action takes place on a planet thousands of years from a dying Earth that was destroyed by human's hate for each other. Doctor Avrana Kern attempts to send thousands of monkeys down to a green planet along with a  nano-virus to speed up the evolution of the monkeys in hope of producing a better human being. Her ship is one of several ships launched in different directions looking to terraform an unoccupied planet capable of supporting human life. It takes almost 15 years to find a suitable planet. But before she can unload the monkeys, a political group against the project blows up the ship, Doctor Kern escapes in an observation satellite and releases the nano-virus on the planet not knowing that all her monkeys are dead. She maintains an orbit around the planet. Now thousands of years pass and the real story of Children of Time begins. I didn’t issue a spoiler alert because all that I have told you is just a preface of the main story that follows on this 600-page tome. This is the story of the spaceship, Gilgamesh, and it's several thousand years voyage. As vast as this novel is, it’s amazing that the main characters on the spaceship are only six, and the main insects on the planet are held to four. What is interesting is that when Doctor Kern dropped the nano-virus to speed up evolution she was unaware the planet already had an insect population.

Since the spaceship took thousands of years to arrive at the target planet, generations of people were born on the ship. Most of the population was put to sleep in coffin-like containers only to be awakened if they were needed to help maintain the ship or to be sent down to a planet to start human life. Holsten Mason, the man in charge of remembering Earth’s past history, is over 2,000 years old since he was an original crew member on Gilgamesh and has been put to sleep and awakened so many times that he technically was that old. The author’s story was initially confusing until I realized he was talking about two different spaceships in two different eras. That’s why Mason was important to Gilgamesh, he could tell the current humans about the past (the old world and their technology) when things would pop up that affected a present-day situation. His knowledge was part of a dying skill. What I loved about these spaceships was that the author didn’t get technical, he does not explain how the engines run or how the sleeping coffins work. If some new technical feature on the spaceship comes up…so be it. I don’t care how it works, just get on with the story. On the other hand, he is great at describing the creatures that already live on the terraformed planet. My kind of sci/fi storytelling, good character descriptions, and less technical talk. An example of what I dislike in sci/fi literature is a novel written by author Vernor Vinge (a computer science professor and writer), who drove me crazy with his constant boring technical talk in his sci/fi novel, Rainbows End. 

If I told you about the insects that were evolving on the terraformed planet it would spoil the story for you. I will just tell you that Kern’s observation satellite continued to orbit the terraformed planet for 2,000 years holding off any ship that tried to land on the planet. When Gilgamesh first tried to land on the terraformed planet, they were warned by Kern’s satellite to stay away. “It’s a warning, it saying that we’re transmitting from incorrect coordinates or something like that, It says we’re forbidden here,” I think that Author Tchaikovsky’s story was unique and written in a manner that every reader can understand. There are 600 pages of eccentric enjoyment ahead of you. I highly recommend this novel to any genre of the reader.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: Bugs and insects have always interested Mr. Tchaikovsky, a British fantasy/ science fiction writer.

Wikipedia says, “Whilst studying at the University of Reading he ran a role-playing game called Bugworld. The game told the story of the insect-people of the lowlands, under threat from the encroaching Wasp Empire. From this original scenario, the entire series of books grew.” (talking about Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt 10 book series. 

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

 It took me over a month to read this novel or should I say study this novel. Charles Dickens is either the greatest writer of all time or the greatest magazine editor that ever lived. I slowly read (and studied) 20 pages or so a day with some breaks spending time with my acrylic painting hobby. It’s not that I eschewed my daily chore, but one has to understand with Dickens you must go at a snail’s pace or chance missing his meaning. I’ll let you read the first paragraph of page 183, chapter 18, “There are many lives of much pain, hardship, and suffering, which, having no stirring interest for any but those who lead them, are disregarded by persons who do not want thought or feeling, but who pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it.” Now, if you read that at a normal pace, you will not understand what he just wrote. You must reread much of his novel before reading on or risk discerning his thoughts. Coupled with seemingly hundreds of characters (it was actually 40+) knowing that one of these early minor or major characters (some were comically abhorrent) will surely appear near the end of the story to completely vex you because you didn’t pay proper attention to him/her. Most of Dickens’s novels were originally monthly or weekly serial publications before being published into book form. The adventures of Nicholas Nickleby was Dickens’s third novel, written while still writing Oliver Twist. Poverty was always the main theme in his novels, Dickens himself witnessed his father being sent to Debtor’s Prison causing the twelve-year-old Charles to bounce from place to place which led Dickens to believe “the rigors of life were unfairly borne by the poor.” (Wikipedia). “Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of reader.” (Wikipedia). Alright, enough about Dickens, what’s the story about? I’m glad you asked.

BTW, before I give you a brief rundown of the story, I want to apprise you of how Dickens tells a story (at least in my 1944 illustrated copy). He writes a little blurb about what’s going to happen in italics before the chapter starts, such as, in chapter XII, he previews it with, “Whereby the reader will be enabled to trace the further course of Miss Fanny Squeer’s love and to ascertain whether it ran smoothly or otherwise.” Anyway, I thought those little interpolations before each chapter were refreshing. Before I tell you about the story, I need to give you an example of the author’s amazing descriptive ability (I promise my synopsis is coming shortly). On page 383, chapter XXXV, our protagonist, Nicholas Nickleby meets Mr. Charles Cheeryble, twin brother of Ned, “He was a sturdy old fellow in a broad-skirted blue coat, made pretty large, to fit easily, and with no particular waist; his bulky legs clothed in drab breeches and high gaiters, and his head protected by a low-crowned broad-brimmed white hat, such as a wealthy grazier might wear. He wore his coat buttoned, and his dimpled double-chin rested in the folds of a white neckerchief-not one of your stiff-starched apoplectic cravats, but a good, easy, old-fashioned white neckcloth that a man might go to bed in and be none the worse for. But what principally attracted the attention of Nicholas, was the old gentleman’s eye,-never was such a clear, twinkling, honest, merry, happy eye, as that. And there he stood, looking a little upward, with one hand thrust into the breast of his coat, and the other playing with his old-fashioned gold watch-chain: his head thrown a little on one side, and his hat a little more on one side of his head (but that was evidently accidental; not his ordinary way of wearing it), with such a pleasant smile playing about his mouth, and such a comical expression of mingled slyness, simplicity, kind-heartedness, and good-humor, lighting up his jolly old face, that Nicholas would have been content to have stood there, and looked at him until evening, and to have forgotten, meanwhile, that there was a thing as a soured mind or a crabbed countenance to be met within the whole wide world.” Wow, now you know why many people think Dickens was paid by the word (not true). Notice the heavy use of adjectives and long sentences. 

Nicholas Nickleby’s father lost everything in the stock market and dies thereafter. Mrs. Nickleby, Nicholas, and his sister, Kate, go to London to seek rescue from the wealthy and devious, Uncle Ralph Nickleby, their only relative. Ralph grudgingly puts them up in an abandoned house he owns after the Nicklebys had a short stay at kindly miniature painting artist, Mrs. LaCreevy’s home. Nineteen-year-old Nicholas asks for help in finding employment. Ralph hates Nicholas and gets him a low-paying job as a teaching assistant to the repulsive Wackford Squeers, who runs the school Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire. Squeers and his wife are mean to the boys who live there. Squeers keeps most of the money the parents give him and he beats and starves the boys regularly. He especially picks on a boy named Smike. (are Dickens character names special or what?). One day while Squeers is beating up Smike for nothing, Nicholas loses his composure and pummels Mr. Squeers. Nicholas flees with Smike to London not knowing what Squeers is going to tell his uncle. Mrs. Squeers says, “I hate him worse than poison.” Meanwhile, Ralph gets Kate a low-paying job at Madame Mantalini’s fashionable milliner shop. She is initially liked by her boss, Miss Knag until the customers want to deal with Kate only because of her good looks. Now Miss Knag hates Kate and schemes to get rid of her. Newman Noggs, who clerks for Ralph Nickleby, takes Young Nicholas under his wing and provides shelter for Nicholas at the Kenwigs’ home while he’s on the run from Squeers. He also finds Nicholas a new job teaching the four young Kenwigs children French. (Nicholas changes his last name to Johnson).  Noggs, once successful himself, is now a drunk who despises his boss, Ralph. In the meantime, Ralph asks Kate to host a dinner party at his house for clients of nobility and wealth. He just wants a pretty face around to enhance his business prospects and it works as everybody there tries to get close to Kate. This rattles a country girl like Kate and she bursts into tears and runs out of the room pursued by the dominating Sir Mulberry Hawk and his friend, Lord Fredrick Verisopht. Uncle finally gets a coach for Kate and she leaves in tears.

I’m going to end my review of the story now because it’s about ready to take off like a runaway train and I want you to enjoy all the ensuing happenings. There are many adventures and miss adventures for the Nicklebys and their conglomeration of good and bad characters yet to be touched on, you have had only a taste of this marvelous novel. It’s a tough read not just only because of the 711 pages, but because of Dickens’s grandiose writing style which was prevalent during his times. Also, occasional bouts of Mr. John Browdie speaking with an accent, such as, “And she wur coaxin’, and coaxin’, and wheedlin’ a’ the blessed wa’. Wa’at didst thou let yon chap mak’ oop tiv’ee for? Says I. ‘I deedn’t John, says she, a squeedgin my arm. ‘You deedn’t ?’ says I. ‘Noa,’ says she, a squeedgin of me agean.” Boy, Hemingway sure simplified things in the 1920s. All kidding aside, Nicholas Nickleby is an important read and should be savored like a fine wine.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: On June 8th, 1870, Charles Dickens suffered a stroke and died at his home. He was only 58 years old. He was working on an unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dan Simmons (a great writer) wrote a wonderful novel, Drood, in 2009. It is hypnotizing story about Dickens narrated by his real-life friend and author, Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White).

Amazon writes, “Drood explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author’s last years and may provide the key to Dickens’s final unfinished work.”

If you have time (you should make room), Drood and The Woman in White are two of my all-time favorite novels (surely in the top ten). Both novels are over 700 pages each but worth reading.