Topics: Ambition; Anxiety; Career; Contentment; Fatherhood; Fear; Greed; Idolatry; Money; Motives; Retirement; Stress; Success; Work
References: Ecclesiastes 4:8; 5:10; Matthew 6:19–34; Luke 12:22–34; Philippians 4:10–19
His health was in tatters and his life mired in financial wrangles, but Frank Sinatra refused to stop giving concerts. “I’ve got to earn more money,” he said.
His performances, sad to say, were becoming more and more uneven. Uncertain of his memory, he became dependent on teleprompters. When his daughter, Tina, saw her father at Desert Inn in Las Vegas, he struggled through the show and felt so sick at the end that he needed oxygen from a tank that he kept on hand. At another show he forgot the lyrics to “Second Time Around,” a ballad he had sung a thousand times. His adoring audience finished it for him.
“I couldn’t bear to see Dad struggle,” Tina said. “I remembered all the times he had repeated the old boxing maxim ‘You gotta get out before you hit the mat.’ He wanted to retire at the top of his game, and I always thought he would know when his time came, but in pushing eighty he lost track of when to quit. After seeing one too many of these fiascoes, I told him, ‘Pop, you can stop now; you don’t have to stay on the road.’ ”
With a stricken expression he said, “No, I’ve got to earn more money. I have to make sure everyone is taken care of.”
Since Sinatra’s death, there has been constant family wrangling over his fortune.
—Tina Sinatra with Jeff Coplon, My Father’s Daughter (Simon & Schuster, 2000)