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"MY WAY"...how could Frank Sinatra hate a song that had done so much for him? (This is a follow up to the "My Way" article.) He had spent the first 35 years or so of his career singing, essentially, one kind of song, the kind in which one human being expresses romantic love for another. It simply never would have occurred to Sinatra to sing a pretentious anthem in celebration of himself. If anything, that shtick was the territory of his sidekick, Sammy Davis Jr., who had raised his own career to a whole new level with a series of iconic hits that were inevitably about singing his own praises -- most famously "Once in a Lifetime" and "I Gotta Be Me." That's why Sinatra hated "My Way": Although it was anticipated, to a degree, in his 1966 hit "That's Life," before Paul Anka's lyrics entered his world, it would have seemed like the tackiest thing imaginable to stand in the middle of Madison Square Garden and shout out to the world how great he was.
Shirley MacLaine and others who knew him intimately have insisted that Sinatra was a genuinely humble man who never took his own success for granted. Even though the outline of Mr. Anka's text seemed to be based on The Sinatra Story -- a superstar who stumbled, fell, and against unbelievable odds scaled the mountaintop of fame a second time -- the attitude of the song was something he just couldn't relate to.
(After brief retirement) " he gradually fashioned himself into more of a "My Way" kind of singer. The song, he grudgingly learned, ideally suited those stadiums and amphitheaters where he was now frequently working, just as "One for My Baby" and "Angel Eyes" belonged to the nightclubs and saloons of his earlier career.
Strange fact: Ten years after Sinatra recorded "My Way," its composer Claude François was electrocuted when he tried to take a bath and change a light bulb at the same time." Edited excerpt from the WSJ.
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