Frank Sinatra’s Daughter Gifts Piano to UCLA

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tina Sinatra says that wherever her famous father lived, one thing was constant: It was a home full of music. There were the 45-rpm vinyl records she received weekly as a child, and the way her dad sang in the shower every morning. And how Frank and his pals, like Bing Crosby and Judy Garland, would occasionally gather around to harmonize at the family’s Bösendorfer piano — a grand instrument that’s now been donated to the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

“It’s very big and beautiful, like a boat, so we always had to find the right space for it,” Tina says. “It was in Dad’s living room in Palm Springs, pressed up against the door of the Kennedy suite where the president stayed, or in the middle of the room where musicians and writers leaned on it with their drinks.” Yet despite scores of smokers and drinkers, followed by years in storage, the piano is still in fine condition.

Built by the pianomaker to the Austro-Hungarian emperors of the 19th century and given to the Sinatra family by Frank’s composer friend Jimmy Van Heusen, the piano will now be shared by future generations of Bruin musicians.

“We wanted to do something good for UCLA, where Dad set up a scholarship for music students,” Tina says. “Knowing students would be improving their skills on it felt right. Dad was very big on giving people chances they might not otherwise have.”

“Frank Sinatra was a complex man. Depressive and emotionally fragile in person, he cultivated a swaggering masculine persona anchored in a superb sense of swing. This playlist spans the peak years of his singing career, featuring songs of Jimmy Van Heusen accompanied by legendary bandleaders like Tommy Dorsey and Count Basie.”
—Musicology and music industry professor Robert Fink, associate dean for academic affairs in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music