Here is an excerpt from Edward Kosner‘s review in The Wall Street Journal of James Kaplan’s recently published Sinatra: The Chairman, a biography of a “mother-ridden boyhood in Jersey, bobby-sox mania, career eclipse, Ava Gardner, super-stardom, Rat Pack shenanigans, the Mob, the Kennedys, master of sex.” To read the complete review, check out other articles, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Frank Sinatra is the Mount Everest of show business. For decades, journalists, biographers, jazz and movie critics, and gossips have launched themselves at the summit, striving to capture the tantalizing blend of “Lucky Luciano and Michelangelo,” to quote one musician, that made Sinatra such an electric figure in American popular culture.

The New Yorker’s E.J. Kahn was the first, in 1947, just a few years after the famished-looking boy idol convulsed all those bobby-soxers at the Paramount. Then there’s Gay Talese’s classic 1966 Esquire profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Pete Hamill’s 1998 pocket gem Why Sinatra Matters, Kitty Kelley’s 1986 not-quite-tell-all His Way, and many others, worthy and unworthy of their elusive subject.

Sinatra would be 100 years old this Dec. 12 had he not, in his own pet locution, “gone to the mountains” at 82 on May 14, 1998. Timed to the centenary, two volumes have just been added to the buckling library shelves. One is Sinatra’s Century, poet David Lehman’s slim meditation on the singer in 100 epigrammatic pensées. The other is Sinatra: The Chairman, the second volume of James Kaplan’s gargantuan biography (following Frank: The Voice, from 2010), lumbering in at 883 pages of text, not counting endnotes and index. That any popular entertainer could inspire such different biographical treatments — much less nearly 1,700 pages of a two-part study published over five years — confirms Sinatra’s death grip on the American imagination.

Mr. Lehman appears to have listened to cuts from each of Sinatra’s nearly 600 recording sessions, watched most of his 50-odd movies and his countless TV shows and specials, and read deeply in the bibliography. A fan, Mr. Lehman pronounces Sinatra “the greatest of all popular American singers,” his work “an aesthetic experience of intense pleasure,” and the star no less than “the most interesting man in the world.” He compares Sinatra’s 1958 recording of the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer lament “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” to Hemingway’s pitch-perfect story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” about a forlorn, tipsy old man reluctant to leave a Madrid cafe. Sinatra’s ballad, Hemingway’s nihilistic tale, and the sight of Humphrey Bogart stood up in the rain by Ingrid Bergman at the Gare de Lyon in “Casablanca,” he writes, are “what American existentialism, as a mood or an aesthetic condition, is all about.”

Happily, most of Mr. Lehman’s Sinatra appreciation is on a less cerebral plane. He ticks all the familiar biographical boxes: mother-ridden boyhood in Hoboken, N.J., bobby-sox mania, career eclipse, Ava Gardner, movie stardom, Rat Pack shenanigans, mob and Kennedy connections, master of sex, sad decline. But, like a good rewrite man, Mr. Lehman holds the reader by ferreting out of the voluminous files lots of choice quotes and anecdotes that reanimate Sinatra’s gamy lost world.

Here is Ava Gardner proclaiming, “He weighs 120, but 110 of those pounds are pure c—k.” Here is movie mogul Louis B. Mayer sobbing as he watches young Sinatra belt out “Ol’ Man River” in 1943 at the Hollywood Bowl. And there’s Sinatra’s first glimpse of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s smash comedy act: “The Dago’s lousy, but the little Jew is great!” Or screaming in a Hollywood restaurant at Mario Puzo,the author of “The Godfather,” with its portrayal of a mobbed-up crooner many thought was based on Sinatra: “Choke. Go ahead and choke, you pimp.” In his final days, Sinatra watches the 1955 movie version of Guys and Dolls, in which Marlon Brando got the role he coveted of the suave gambler Sky Masterson, and complains to his daughter, “He still can’t sing.” Like a pharaoh, he is buried with provisions for the next world: a flask of Jack Daniel’s.

One anecdote is worth rendering at length as a hallmark of the Sinatra “machismo” that Mr. Lehman can’t help admiring. The lyricist Sammy Cahn relates the story of Sinatra once bragging to his skeptical entourage, “ ‘Who do you think is going to walk into this room?’ and he named a lady who will be one of the great luminaries of the screen as long as movies are made.” She “walked in, smiled demurely, allowed Sinatra to take her hand and lead her into the bedroom.” The author continues: “The lady . . . has been identified as Marlene Dietrich, who is also supposed to have called Frank ‘the Mercedes-Benz of men.’ ”

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Here is a direct link to the complete review.