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Another underrated session, with Duke Ellington, produced a wonderfully world-weary “Indian Summer”. An album with bossa-nova king Antonio Carlos Jobim demonstrated Sinatra’s ability to encounter a song – or in this case a whole genre – and make it his own, while also making it more fully itself. His all-passion-spent rendition of a Jobim song called “Dindi” may be the finest thing he has ever done. The Sinatra of this era, and of some others, reminds me of something Kenneth Tynan once said about Laurence Olivier: that his finest effects seemed to have been dredged up from a huge pit of exhaustion. There are obvious parallels between Sinatra and Olivier: each the acknowledged world-master of his game, each a compulsive performer, each an obsessive technician. The difference is that with Sinatra the technique disappears, the mannerisms are subsumed in the material I often found it hard to believe Olivier. I have nearly always believed Sinatra.I am aware that I have left out the worst things that have been said about him as a man I have also left out some of the best.

It was once said that nobody who played trumpet could ever believe that Louis Armstrong was an Uncle Tom. I doubt if anyone who has tried to sing a classic American song could think ill of Frank Sinatra !. “I AM fascinated by the corruption of power,” Joe Eszterhas said in 1985, promoting his first movie, F.I.S.T., a study of US labour relations. Ten years on, Eszterhas’s own powerful position, as the highest-paid and highest-profile writer in Hollywood, is starting to look corrupt. Every year throws up its Joe Eszterhas controversy, as regular an event in the movie calendar as the Oscars.

Rows with directors, tiffs with agents, spats with censors, filthy scripts, fat paychecks – he is rarely out of the headlines. But up to now he has always ended up looking like the good guy (“When he gets into a brawl, he turns it into a morality play,” a friend once said). Now, as he shelters from two separate storms around his work, it may be different His cloak of righteousness begins to look frayed

The issue, as so often with Eszterhas, is sleaze. Over the last month he has socked America with a dubious double whammy: two films that, in the fashionable Hollywood phrase, “push the envelope” of what is acceptable in mainstream movies.