# Not Acceptable Material
*Frank Sinatra and the File That Made Him a Suspect and a Monument* — Legendary Biographies No. 260

- **Subject:** Francis Albert Sinatra
- **Written by:** Keisha Morgan
- **Shelf:** Music / Pop
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 244 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-540-4)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr (ISBN 979-8-90623-649-4)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/260-not-acceptable-material.html

## About this book

A flat in Hoboken, a bad delivery, forceps that perforated the newborn's left eardrum. In 1943 an Army physician examining Frank Sinatra for induction found that ear and classified him 4-F. That is the public reason he did not go to the war, and this book says it is true. The same examination made a second finding, kept out of his classification on the stated grounds that telling him would cause him emotional upset: that he was not acceptable material from a psychiatric viewpoint. He lived fifty-five more years without knowing the sentence existed. It surfaced seven months after he died, when the FBI released its Sinatra dossier and the New York Times filed it under a headline calling the contents tidbits, old and new.

The Bureau watched him from the war until the nineteen-eighties and never brought a charge. The argument here is that the two things everybody knows about Sinatra, that the mob made him and that America eventually made him a monument, are one fact seen from opposite ends, and that both were assembled out of proximity rather than evidence. Nevada took his gaming license in 1963 without charging him with anything, on the evidence of a guest sleeping in a chalet at his lodge, and handed it back in February 1981 on a letter from a President, with nothing underneath it changed. The suspicion and the sainthood came off one machine.

It is neither a prosecution nor a defense. The pistol in Tommy Dorsey's mouth is Mario Puzo's invention and the book says so, and the absence of a charge is not treated as a character reference either. He sought these men out, and he held nine percent of the Sands and better than half of the Cal Neva. No interviews were conducted. The finding the author likes least is not in the file at all. In January 1960 Sinatra hired Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, jailed for refusing to testify, to write a screenplay. He defended the hire in public. On April 8, 1960 he fired him.

## Contents

1. Monroe Street
2. The Rustic Cabin
3. All Or Nothing At All
4. Breathing
5. The Paramount
6. Not Acceptable Material
7. The House I Live In
8. Havana
9. Ava. 1949 to 1952, the years everything went
10. Maggio
11. April Thirtieth
12. Three In The Morning
13. Under My Skin
14. The Summit
15. High Hopes
16. Reprise
17. The Helipad
18. December
19. A Very Good Year. 1965-1966, the late peak
20. My Way
21. Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back
22. The File

## Questions

**Who is Not Acceptable Material about?**

Francis Albert Sinatra. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Not Acceptable Material — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,559 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 76,000 words, 22 chapters, 244 pages in the paperback.

## The writer

Keisha Morgan writes about the people who held a mirror to America and forced it to look. A culture critic whose work spans food, comedy, television, and the politics of fame, she contributed for fifteen years to The New Yorker and The Cut before her first book on Whitney Houston was named one of NPR's best books of 2024.