mordant wit

Frank Sinatra was famously well-endowed and a voracious womaniser. A new biography details his string of lovers.

Nancy Venturi, barely into her teens, was one of those who fell. “He had sex on the brain,” she recalled. “He would make love to anyone who came along . . . There was something unusually intensive about his lovemaking. At least it was with me.” She remembered Frank’s seduction technique, his sexually direct lines. Other guys, she thought, “didn’t talk like that back then”.

Venturi contributed to the legend that Sinatra was hugely well endowed sexually. “There’s only ten pounds of Frank, but there’s 110 pounds of cock,” Ava Gardner once told a British diplomat at a social function.