What about Ol' Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra?
Sinatra also did a radio series in 1953-54, casting him as a cynical temp worker who got himself entangled in solving crimes.
Critics then and now dismiss it as a lame exercise (one radio historian, in his entry on the show in his
On the Air: The
Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, said, "Even Sinatra sounded bored with it"), but there's a certain wiseass charm to the
show, especially when you realise where Sinatra was when he signed on to do the show: he was finishing the making of
From Here to Eternity with no clue as to just
how successful it would really be and how it, too, would help revive
his career; and, he'd just signed on with Capitol Records after his Columbia contract expired---and he almost blew the Capitol
deal when he was assigned the producer Dave Dexter and remembered rather nastily that Dexter had once ripped him in
a review of a live performance some years earlier. Dexter was so furious he was ready to tear up the contract then and there,
until other Capitol executives convinced him to cool his jets, is how I think the story went.
Anyway, this radio show was most assuredly Frank Sinatra at the crossroads . . . the entire single-season's run of the show
has survived.
Rocky Fortune
