Sinatriana The Market Will Be Flooded With Sinatra Products As Ol’ Blue E Nears His 80th Year

On Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, N.J., Francis Albert Sinatra first peered out on the world from his soon-to-be-famous baby blue eyes.

That 13-pound, 3-ounce tyke went on to a huge career - the most monumental in American popular song - unrivaled in length, scope, and continued artistic and commercial success. And Sinatra’s fourscore years will be celebrated with an avalanche of Sinatriana.

From the ephemeral to the obligatory to the essential, there will be no end to the products by Sinatra, for Sinatra, and about Sinatra. Records, books, neckties, TV shows, you name it. And this countdown to age 80 (which coincides, ever so neatly with the Christmas shopping season) has already begun.

All this comes when Sinatra’s performing career is in limbo if not outright, unannounced retirement - he hasn’t sung in public since February. But that’s not stopping the onslaught.

Speculation is rampant about the possibility of a Sinatra minitour or a farewell concert. “It would be so un-Franklike to go out with a whimper rather than a bang,” says musical biographer Will Friedwald. But there’s no “official” word on whether the Chairman of the Board has gone out of business.

“He’s accumulated a lot of well-deserved vacation time, and he’s taking it now,” says Sinatra’s publicist, Susan Reynolds. “He continues to get proposals from promoters all over the world, but he has not decided what he wants to do.”

There may be no Sinatra live, but there’s no shortage of Sinatra repackaged. There are new boxed sets of classic Sinatra music from every era of his career, including a 20-CD, 454-song, limited-edition box of every studio recording he made for Reprise Records between 1960 and 1988. Yours for $499.98.

A two-hour ABC-TV tribute special called “Sinatra: 80 Years My Way” is being taped Nov. 19 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to be aired in December. In addition to such appropriate guests as Walter Cronkite, Robert De Niro and Natalie Cole, it will feature Paula Abdul essaying “Luck Be a Lady” and Hootie & the Blowfish doing “The Lady Is a Tramp.” (We’re not making this up.) Sinatra himself is not scheduled to perform.

And while there’s no “Duets III” ‘album in the works, each of Capitol Records’ two new projects will be sweetened with a technologically arranged pairing. “Sinatra 80th - Live in Concert,” a creaky but still swinging effort due Tuesday, is largely drawn from a 1987 radio concert in Dallas. It’s topped off by a Phil Ramone-engineered collaboration between Sinatra and Luciano Pavarotti on “My Way.”

And Capitol’s “Sinatra 80th: All the Best,” also due Tuesday, is a 40-song, two-CD set from the singer’s ‘50s heyday; it’s capped by “The Christmas Song” with a Nat King Cole vocal from 1946 electronically mingled with Sinatra’s voice from 1957.

(And there’s a third oddball duet out there, in the form of Sinatra and country swinger George Strait doubling up on “Fly Me to the Moon” that’s available only on Strait’s new four-CD box on MCA Records.)

The “All the Best” set is a compelling collection, but it’s no substitute for either the three-CD set “The Capitol Years” (1990), or, better still, albums such as 1956’s finger-snapping “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers,” or 1958’s harrowing “Only the Lonely.” Those two Sinatra collaborations on Capitol, with arranger Nelson Riddle, represent the height of his achievement.

But there’s no end to the Sinatriana. On Dec. 1, Christie’s in Manhattan will auction off property from the Palm Springs, Calif., home of Sinatra and his wife, Barbara Marx, who moved to Malibu this year. Up for grabs: an electric golf cart, a 1976 Jaguar and a Bosendorfer piano, among other castoffs.

Due next month is the second edition of the Frank Sinatra Neckwear Collection. Same as Jerry Garcia or Miles Davis ties, each is based on a painting by the musician himself.

There’s a Sinatra designer credit card on the way and Sinatra tomato and pesto sauce and pasta.

Sinatra’s baby blues sparkle out of an otherwise black-and-white photo taken during his bobby-soxer slaying days (they called it “Sinatrauma”) on the cover of this month’s Life magazine. And on Dec. 12, buses in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago will bear signs proclaiming “Happy Birthday Frank!”

Daughter Nancy Sinatra reveals in her second and latest book about her dad, “Frank Sinatra: An American Legend” (GPG), that “Everything Happens to Me” is also the title of a single CD Reprise will issue in January. It will be made up of Sinatra’s personal favorites from the Reprise years.

Not surprisingly, “An American Legend” treats Sinatra as if he were a god and sweeps any Sinatra mob involvement allegations or creeping senility rumors under the rug. But as a family picture album, it’s got considerable substance. The $45 version includes a Sinatra sound-bite CD; its snippets range from Sinatra with Harry James in 1939 to the 1993 Grammy Awards tribute by U2’s Bono. And the $100 deluxe version includes four more CDs, drawn from Sinatra’s days on the RCA, Columbia, Capitol and Reprise labels.

Len Irwin’s “Sinatra: The Pictorial Biography” (Courage, $19.98) is a thinner, more affordable coffeetable book with a less awestruck approach.

The “Frank Sinatra Reader” (Oxford University Press, $25) is a winning collection of articles edited by Penn State professors Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazza. It includes Sinatra-inspired musings by the likes of New York newspapermen Pete Hamill and Murray Kempton, as well as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” written on the occasion of Sinatra’s 50th birthday, when he was hanging out with Rat Pack buddies Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

But aside from the music, the top-of-the-list, king-of-the-hill item of new Sinatriana is Will Friedwald’s “Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer’s Art” (Scribner’s, $30). It’s a snappily written, unfailingly smart book that looks hard for the center of the Sinatra myth precisely where no one else bothers.

The intensity of the explosion of Sinatra product on this anniversary can be traced to one word: “Duets.”

Sinatra’s 1993 album with Bono, Luther Vandross, and Barbra Streisand, among others, was, at 7 million copies sold, the biggest album of his 60-year career. Its follow-up, last year’s “Duets II,” sold close to 3 million.

And the “Duets” albums built upon a groundswell in interest in Sinatra as he has become more accepted among a new generation of cocktail-swilling rock fans.