What happened to Frank Sinatra after his career collapsed in 1952

The second act

On March 13, 1953, he signed a seven-year contract with Capitol vice president Alan Livingston. From Here to Eternity opened that August, and the role won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and revived both his acting and his singing. His first Capitol album, Songs for Young Lovers, came out on January 4, 1954. The single “Young at Heart” reached No. 2 that same month. Billboard named Swing Easy! its Album of the Year, and in 1954 Billboard, DownBeat and Metronome all voted him favorite male vocalist. Tom Santopietro describes a man who buried himself in recordings, movies and concerts at a pace he had never kept before. The publisher of James Kaplan’s biography Frank frames the whole book around this arc, from Hoboken to the fall and then to the Oscar-winning return.

The studios now sold him on that Oscar. MGM’s pressbook for Some Came Running in 1958 reminded exhibitors that he had won the Academy Award for his performance in Jones’s From Here to Eternity and called the new film his second big role from a Jones novel. He played Dave Hirsh, a writer whose two published novels had earned him little, opposite Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine. Much of it was filmed in Madison, Indiana, which the studio said was 2,126 miles from Los Angeles, with a location crew of 70. In those years he also starred in The Man with the Golden Arm and won a Golden Globe for Pal Joey, and in 1960 he left Capitol to start his own label, Reprise. In 1962 he starred in The Manchurian Candidate.

By 1965 the studios’ copy had grown with him. Fox’s campaign manual for Von Ryan’s Express cast him as Colonel Joseph Ryan and built its ads around a single question: why did 600 Allied prisoners hate the man they called Von Ryan more than they hated Hitler? That same year Warner Bros.’ pressbook for Marriage on the Rocks called him “the world’s No. 1 show business personality” and pointed to his dramatic performances in Von Ryan’s Express and None But the Brave, which he also directed, as evidence of his versatility. In Marriage on the Rocks he played the president of an advertising agency, contented after 19 years of marriage to Deborah Kerr, and his daughter Nancy played his daughter. Warner added that Trini Lopez, a singer Sinatra had discovered, was making his film debut. The screenwriter, Cy Howard, quoted in the same pressbook, said the comedy showed that “divorce accomplishes nothing.”

His own marriages kept making news. Gardner filed for divorce in 1954, and it became final in 1957. The two stayed good friends for the rest of her life. On July 19, 1966, he married Mia Farrow, who was 21 to his 50, and she left the television series Peyton Place at his urging. Her biography calls that marriage short-lived. On July 11, 1976, he married Barbara Marx. It was his fourth marriage and her third, and it lasted the longest for both of them. She converted to Catholicism and later wrote, in Lady Blue Eyes, that he had never asked her to change faith for him. In 1986 the couple founded the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center in Rancho Mirage, which offers therapy to young victims of abuse.

Professionally, he retired in 1971 after “My Way” and came back two years later. He released “New York, New York” in 1980 and sold an estimated 150 million records worldwide. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. He also painted. In 1991 Random House published A Man and His Art, with 60 of his oils and acrylics. The publisher said he had been a serious painter for more than 20 years. When Gardner had a stroke in 1986, he wanted to pay for her to see a specialist in the United States, and she let him arrange a private plane with medical staff. She died in London in January 1990.

Sinatra died on May 14, 1998. He left Barbara $3.5 million in assets, houses in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Palm Springs, the rights to his Trilogy recordings, and control over his name and likeness. When she died in 2017 she was buried beside him at Desert Memorial Park.

The last song he had recorded for Columbia, in September 1952, was “Why Try To Change Me Now.” The next spring, on Melrose Avenue, he heard the first playbacks of the Riddle session and told the room he was back.

Gardner had pressed Harry Cohn to give him the part that started that comeback, and in 1954 she filed for divorce. Ava Gardner’s side of 1953 follows what she did in the year his career turned.