Read: Frank Sinatra, the lonely lothario

Best not to crease his shirt

Consiglio saw Sinatra close up and angry many times. When a TV at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas wasn't working, Sinatra threw it out of the window and into the swimming pool. Sinatra threatened to do that to Consiglio in Miami when he brought him a creased shirt.

No man is a hero to his valet

Well that's true of George Jacobs, Frank Sinatra's valet of 15 years, whose picture of Ol' Blue Eyes in his tell-all memoir Mr S was far from pretty one. When Jacobs was spotted dancing with Sinatra's soon-to-be-ex wife Mia Farrow, Jacobs was instantly out on his ear. The same fate had met Hank Sanicola, his original manager, over an imagined snub.

Best let him be a sports reporter

Sinatra's overbearing mother Dolly had pressurised her son's godfather Frank Garrick, who was the circulation manager of the Jersey Observer, to get young Frank a job. He got Sinatra work on the paper’s delivery truck. When the Observer’s sportswriter died, Dolly told Sinatra to ask for the reporter's job. Without checking, Sinatra sat at the dead writer’s empty desk and when the editor asked Sinatra who he was, he told him he'd been appointed as the sportswriter. Garrick had to fire him and recalled to biographer Kitty Kelly: "Oh, the temper and the words and the filthy names he called me... like he was going to kill me. He stormed out. He never said another word to me until fifty years later, after his mother died. She wrote me off, too, and even though we lived in the same town, she never said another word to me for the rest of her life.”

He terrified Lauren Bacall...

Sinatra dated and then ditched Humphrey Bogart's former wife. She later bumped into him in Palm Springs, and recalled: "He looked at me as if I were the wall. It was so terrifying. I have never had that experience before or since."

...and his wife Barbra

In her memoir, Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank Sinatra she recalled that during a late-night game of charades, the singer’s team lost a round and Sinatra turned on the time-keeper, Barbara, who held a large brass clock on her lap. “He came over and he had been drinking quite a lot. It must have been about 4 o’clock in the morning. He picked up the clock and I think he wanted to hit me with it. He threw it against the front door and it broke into a thousand pieces."

He took revenge on a wardrobe...

Angered by his agent Irving 'Swifty' Lazae, he ordered a minion to have Lazar's prize new built in wardrobe bricked in.

...And all manner of bathroom fittings

During his turbulent marriage to Ava Gardner, his wife said that their Hollywood home Twin Palms saw "some pretty amazing occurrences". One of the expensive bathroom sinks had a large crack in the basin from a champagne bottle that Sinatra hurled at Gardner.