What could be more ’80s than a special edition of one of the era’s most maligned personal luxury cars named after one of its most fascinating and endlessly controversial public figures? The rare 1981–1982 Imperial Frank Sinatra Edition offered a special color combination along with an “Imperial Collection” of Sinatra’s music on cassette — a strange assortment of albums almost as haphazard as the 1981–1983 Imperial itself.
Is there anything left to be said about the 1981–1983 Imperial that hasn’t been said before? It was a fancified version of the second-generation Chrysler Cordoba (or, if you want to put a really fine point on it, the world’s fanciest Plymouth Volaré), full of luxury features and whizzy electronics …
… including a new throttle-body electronic fuel injection system that Car and Driver‘s David E. Davis Jr. warned, with ominous prescience, “seems almost too complicated and too ambitious for Chrysler, with its current dearth of people and money.”
Although Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca trumpeted its advanced technology, declaring it “an electronic marvel,” the Imperial shared a lot of its underpinnings with the unloved Volaré, upgraded with heavy-grade sheet metal, extra sound insulation, and supposedly painstaking quality control.
Iacocca also sought to enhance the Imperial’s appeal to the over-50 target audience by getting his pal Frank Sinatra to help promote the new model, including recording a TV commercial and lending his name to a special “FS” limited edition.
This was all for naught: The Imperial arrived after the market for this class of domestic luxury car had abruptly cooled, hampered by “stagflation,” a second oil crisis, and very high interest rates on new car loans. Younger buyers (and many critics) mostly dismissed the Imperial as an oversize dinosaur with lackluster performance, and even if you liked this sort of car, its design and execution didn’t always hold up to close scrutiny. Worse, the Imperial’s unusually comprehensive two-year warranty got a real workout thanks to the unreliability of its various “electronic marvels,” including the fuel injection system, which was often replaced with a two-barrel carburetor (a costly swap also involving a new fuel tank!). Even Sinatra got burned by Imperial reliability problems, souring his relationship with Iacocca — Sinatra had a very low tolerance for disappointment.
Chrysler eventually built only 12,385 Imperials in three years, about half what they’d anticipated selling annually, while the Frank Sinatra Edition sold only around 500 copies in its year-and-a-half run. (Including Canadian sales, the final total was either 496 or 516, depending on which tally you believe.)
I don’t have a lot to add to that part of the story except to note that my feelings about the Imperial’s styling have mellowed since I first wrote about it years ago. I used to disdain its styling, but compared to rival early ’80s domestic luxury coupes like the Lincoln Continental Mark VI and 1980–1982 Ford Thunderbird, it’s really not so bad, with decent proportions and an okay basic shape beneath its abundant mall-store bling. I abhor the bustleback look, but it’s muted enough here to be more palatable than the 1982 Lincoln Continental and infinitely preferable to the ghastly second-generation Cadillac Seville. The Imperial also looks good in Glacier Blue, the only exterior color specified with the FS package. (This color was also available on non-FS cars in 1982–1983, so not every Glacier Blue Imperial is an FS edition.)
However, I was recently pondering how the Imperial FS fit into the vast and complex lexicon of Frank Sinatra, one of the 20th century’s most intriguing and divisive public figures. Despite his considerable achievements as a singer and actor, the mercurial Sinatra was tabloid fodder for much of his life: He had a terrible temper, especially when drinking (which he often was), and he was known to take a swing at people who annoyed him, or to have them beaten up by underlings. He would be extraordinarily generous in one moment and a vicious bully the next, and even in a good mood, he could be offensively boorish — it’s probably for the best that he didn’t survive to the age of Twitter. Gay Talese’s April 1966 Esquire profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” offers an incisive portrait of the outsize impression Sinatra made, which was often far from positive. There was also the endless controversy surrounding his connections to Mob figures like Sam Giancana and Carlo Gambino, which seemed to resurface every few years.
However, whatever else he may have been, Sinatra was a moneymaker with a vast following, and that was what Chrysler hoped to tap with this special edition. The Frank Sinatra package (option code A51) was announced in mid-January 1981 and became available around June, returning that fall for the 1982 model year (though not for 1983). Priced at $1,000 in 1981, it gave you Glacier Blue Crystal Coat paint with blue accent stripes — allegedly selected by Sinatra himself, to match his eyes; “FS” medallions on the fenders and rear deck; a Glacier Blue interior with your choice of Corinthian leather or Kimberly velvet upholstery; a special locking mini-console; and a Mark Cross leather case containing 16 cassette tapes of Sinatra’s music to play in the car’s standard AM/FM stereo cassette player.
This “Imperial Collection” included the following, listed here in the order the cassettes are listed in the 1981 brochure:
- It Might As Well Be Swing (1964)
- Academy Award Winners (1964)
- Sinatra’s Sinatra (1963)
- Softly As I Leave You (1964)
- September of My Years (1965)
- My Kind of Broadway (1965)
- Strangers in the Night (1966)
- That’s Life (1966)
- The World We Knew (1967)
- Cycles (1968)
- My Way (1969)
- A Man Alone (1969)
- Trilogy: The Past (1980)
- Trilogy: The Present (1980)
- Trilogy: The Future (1980)
- Sinatra’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 (1969)
(You also got a 17th tape, the Sound of Stereo sampler, but there was no Sinatra on that.)
Although there was a lot of PR flack nonsense to the effect that this was a personally curated collection of Sinatra’s finest albums, anyone familiar with Sinatra’s music will quickly recognize that this was a rather odd assortment, drawn entirely from material he recorded for Reprise Records in the ’60s and ’70s.
If your knowledge of Sinatra’s discography is limited to occasionally hearing “Fly Me to the Moon” or “Come Fly With Me” in movie soundtracks or TV commercials, I should explain that most of Sinatra’s solo recording career fell into three phases: He was under contract to Columbia Records from 1942 to 1952; moved to Capitol Records from 1953 to 1961; and started his own Reprise label in 1960, with his early Reprise recordings overlapping the last of his Capitol obligations.
The Capitol years are almost universally held to be Sinatra’s best. If you’ll allow me a slightly torturous automotive analogy, Sinatra’s Capitol albums were akin to the Chrysler Forward Look, a sleek combination of power (Sinatra’s voice at its peak), design (fine material and excellent arrangements by the likes of Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Billy May), and modern technology (the newly popular 33-1/3 rpm LP format). Their impact was something like what the 1957 Chryslers might have had if they hadn’t been beset by quality control problems (Capitol production quality was superb), and they transformed a singer who’d been considered a washed-up has-been just a few years earlier into one of the world’s biggest stars. Unfortunately, none of those albums were included in the Imperial Collection.
Although Sinatra had far more creative control at Reprise (even after he sold the label to Warner Bros. in 1963), his Reprise output is generally considered a step down from the Capitol era. A lot of his Reprise albums were frustratingly scattershot, and, like ’60s Chryslers, their production quality often left something to be desired. There were some standouts and a number of intriguing experiments, like his 1967 collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim or his unusual 1970 concept album Watertown, written by Bob Gaudio of the Four Seasons, but on the whole, his Reprise records lacked the meticulous craftsmanship of his best Capitol work.
The albums included in the Imperial Collection mostly fell into that category. September of My Years was the exception, a magnificent record that easily stands comparison with Sinatra’s Capitol output. It Might As Well Be Swing (his second collaboration with Count Basie, produced and arranged by Quincy Jones) is also fun, but too many of the others fall into the typical Reprise pattern: a couple of good songs surrounded by a lot of decidedly lackluster filler, carelessly assembled.
Part of Sinatra’s problem in the Reprise years was that he never really came to grips with this era’s dramatic shifts in popular musical tastes. Just as Chrysler stubbornly rejected small cars until CAFE forced the issue, so too did Sinatra disdain rock and R&B (he dismissed Motown as bubblegum, and his few forays into disco were embarrassing for everyone concerned). He didn’t have a high regard for the newer generation of songwriters, and his interpretations of their work were sometimes uncomfortable. In later years, after his short-lived early ’70s retirement, Sinatra increasingly preferred performing live for adoring fans who would eat up the material he wanted to sing, and who would more readily excuse the occasional creaks and cracks in a voice seasoned by decades of heavy smoking and drinking. Again, it’s tempting to draw parallels with Chrysler (and Lee Iacocca), which had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the post-Brougham era, and which couldn’t resist periodic retreats into Golden Oldies territory even into the ’90s:
It’s not surprising that the Imperial Collection included My Way and Strangers in the Night, as the title tracks of both albums had been some of Sinatra’s biggest latter-day hits. (Ironically, he hated “Strangers in the Night” and was uneasy with “My Way,” although the latter became one of his signature songs, often included in concert set lists.)
The newer Trilogy, a real curate’s egg of a triple album, had been a solid commercial success in 1980, and for better or worse, its very peculiar third volume (Reflections of the Future in Three Tenses, composed and conducted by Gordon Jenkins) was the perfect soundtrack for the 1981–1983 Imperial: It’s 40 minutes of Sinatra rambling about interplanetary travel and world peace, with syrupy orchestral arrangements and occasionally hilarious choral accompaniment. What better to complement the Imperial’s odd mixture of neoclassical cues and Battlestar Galactica futurism? (“Little buttons you can push and push / Let your imagination burst into flames.”)
However, what can one make of the inclusion of A Man Alone, Sinatra’s 1969 album of songs by that once-inescapable American poet vacuate Rod McKuen, whose work Robert W. Hill once declared fit for “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetry section”? Why throw in a 1969 greatest hits collection of songs already included on the other cassettes rather than, say, Sinatra at the Sands, a superb live album which would have let Imperial owners pretend they were seeing Frank in Vegas? Or the sweeping 1963 show tunes album The Concert Sinatra, with Nelson Riddle conducting a 76-piece orchestra behind some of Sinatra’s finest vocal performances? (THAT would be an album worth playing on a high-end sound system in a quiet luxury car.)
I’m not suggesting that the selection of albums had anything to do with why the Imperial FS was a commercial flop. The economy was terrible, the Imperial had already made a resoundingly terrible first impression, and Sinatra’s public image was not exactly at its peak in 1981 — he was stumbling through his latest series of controversies (including yet another public airing of his ties to organized crime, occasioned by his application for a Nevada gaming license) with all his accustomed grace and charm.
Also, even if you had your heart set on a Glacier Blue Imperial, by 1982, you could order that color without the Frank Sinatra package and save yourself the extra grand. A thousand bucks bought a lot of cassettes in those days, and at your local record store, you didn’t have to be bound by the odd selection the Warner Bros. Records flacks came up with for the Imperial FS. (Amusingly, Warner Bros. was still so concerned about Chrysler’s financial situation that they demanded full payment in advance before shipping the tapes.)
I am to some extent a Sinatra casual: I have a sizable chunk of his musical output, but I have to be in the right mood for it. His oeuvre is sort of a sideline to what I’d consider my principal musical tastes, since I didn’t pay much attention to Sinatra until later in life. I’m reminded of this 1998 observation by the jazz critic Gary Giddins:
As his original audience pushed sixty, [Sinatra] was at long last discovered by its children, who, no longer acne-scarred or bell-bottomed, finally understood what those songs were about. Lost love, one for the road?—hey, let me get this round. … His movie days were finished, and for a while nobody wanted to record him, and Gary Trudeau [creator of Doonesbury] reminded everyone who needed reminding what a scumbag he could be. But the album Trilogy was a huge success, and so were his concerts, which drew bigenerational crowds. He embodied a major life lesson: Never dismiss an artist just because he plays golf with Spiro Agnew. And, yes, an artist he was, not a craftsman. He loomed over the cultural life of a tumultuous half century, defying analysis, because every generation had to figure him out from scratch.
If I’m honest, it’s also easier to come to grips with Sinatra as an Historical Personage than as a live public figure constantly in the news for his latest questionable choices, worrying associations, and loutish outbursts. The challenge of figuring him out from scratch remains a monumental task (it took biographer James Kaplan 1,800 pages), but it became more feasible and somewhat more palatable once The Compleat Exploits of Francis Albert Sinatra had become a finite set rather than an ongoing spiral.
Coincidentally, that’s also how I’ve come to feel about these older domestic luxury cars I’ve been writing about on CC of late. I hated most of these cars when I was younger — like Sinatra, I thought they were, to borrow another phrase from Giddins, “edgy kitsch that verged on self-parody and promoted skepticism.” It’s only now that they’re firmly in the historical artifact class that I’ve felt inclined or able to reassess them.
I still don’t love these cars, just as I don’t know that I could honestly say I love Sinatra, a man of endless, frequently irreconcilable contradictions. However, like Frank, they remain a source of fascination, and they’re sometimes worthy of both affection and respect — though not always at the same time.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1981 Imperial by Chrysler – It’s Time For You. Or Not. (by J P Cavanaugh)
I find these really interesting to look at, they somehow still look futuristic and the upright grill works. The bustle back, not so much. Also interesting to contrast with the Mark VII, which has also attempts to modernize classic American luxury car styling, maybe more successfully so. Looking forward to a possible article on that car.
That might make a good comparison, yeah.
Same here, the profile really isn’t that far off from the 83 Thunderbird either, maybe even in more ways than the Mark VII. The thing most notably missing from those much better received aero Ford PLCs are the rounded edges.
I know Iacocca was in some ways brilliant. However I wonder if this was a case where the people working under him were too scared to tell him the whole idea of a cheesy Tony Soprano-like special edition of a car was not the best idea. It’s not anything like being associated with a designer, like the Coach Lexus LS or Lincoln Marks. One tabloid headline could lose most of your sales.
I like the regular Imperial though, I see a futuristic baroqueness. It had presence and didn’t look too obvious being based on a cheaper car like the Versailles. I figured many more were made as they seemed popular in my area, but South Florida isn’t known for having good taste.
Yeah. The designer editions were also a marketing fiction — Bill Blass and Mark Cross, et al, really didn’t have any more hands-on involvement with their special editions than Sinatra did with his — but it was a more marketable marketing fiction, since it was trying to position those cars as akin to a designer wallet or handbag.
Looking at the last photo, I wonder if the front end was inspired by the 75 Cutlass. The waterfall grille leads me to that possibility.
The Imperial drew its suspension from the Volare? Maybe foisted upon is a better choice of words.
Excellent piece.
The ’76-77 Cutlass “waterfall” grille looked very much like that on the ’74-75 Imperial.
The starting point for the front end was the 1977 Chrysler LeBaron Turbine Car concept, by Bob Marcks (who had nothing to do with the production Imperial and wasn’t thrilled with how it turned out).
While he may have appealed to an older crowd, Frank Sinatra wasn’t a washed-up star from the distant past when the Imperial FS debuted. Just a half year earlier he had a top-40 hit with “New York, New York”, which quickly became a fixture at Yankees games. I miss the days when top-40 pop radio would bounce between Frank Sinatra and, say, the B-52’s.
Speculation elsewhere online regarding the selection of tapes included is that several of his Reprise albums had gone out of print by 1981, at least on cassettes, so couldn’t be included. Today, Watertown has a cult following, but it flopped badly upon initial release. There was actually a follow-up to the 1967 Jobim album, called simply Sinatra/Jobim, that was only released on 8-track cartridges and was quickly recalled after Sinatra went ballistic because “Wave” had been divided into two tracks so you got a loud “kerchunk” in the middle of the song. The few cartridges that were sold have traded for thousands of dollars. Most of the songs were later released as side 1 of the 1970 album Sinatra and Company, which also wasn’t a big seller.
It’s too bad nobody surrounding Sinatra looked beyond the top of the pop charts for worthy songwriters and arrangers in the late-’60s and ’70s, as their were many that were much better suited to his style than those he recorded. For arrangers, someone like George Tipton (who did the elegant chamber-music arrangements for Harry Nilsson’s early albums) or Robert Kirby (Nick Drake, Elton John) would have suited Sinatra perfectly.
I think the poor sales of the Imperial FS weren’t Sinatra’s fault but rather that the FS package was a terrible deal. $1,000 got you about $150 worth of standard-issue cassettes you could buy at the record store, a small center console under the dash, and a leather case or two. The car itself could have been worse; I commend Chrysler for eschewing the opera windows and vinyl roofs that were ubiquitous on personal-luxury coupes of the era. It was a fairly clean design, with only the overdone grille and bustle-back trunk detracting from it.
I don’t fault them for not including Watertown, which I think might have been the least successful LP of Sinatra’s career. (I see what he was thinking with it, and I understand why he did it, but I don’t think it works, and it’s regular-type depressing rather than theatrically morose like Only the Lonely or No One Cares.) On the other hand, I kind of resent A Man Alone.
I’ve never heard the whole album, but I do like the title song. I must say though that I haven’t given Rod McKuen any thought for the last 20 years or so though, amazing that someone who once that massively popular could have so thoroughly fallen off the pop-culture radar screen.
McKuen was an intriguing character — a closeted gay man who had a very difficult and frequently traumatic early life that he managed to keep almost completely under wraps until well after he had disappeared from the radar, who for a while became a cottage industry in vacuous middlebrow poetry. It mostly didn’t translate into interesting work, probably by design (and there’s a lot of question about how much of McKuen’s output he actually wrote; much of his music, at least, was ghost-written), but it’ll make a fascinating biopic one day.
Sinatra was not the only artist to try to cash in on the McKuen gravy train (Petula Clark and Glenn Yarborough did too), but it comes across as rather cynical. Sinatra wasn’t a songwriter (he had a couple of co-writing credits), but he put more of himself into standards than McKuen did songs he (allegedly) wrote.
I believe that Rod McKuen translated Jacques Brel songs from French to English for Scott Walker; my favorite is “Funeral Tango,” which is a funny take on a morbid subject.
Most of Scott Walker’s Brel covers (including “Funeral Tango”) were translated by songwriter Mort Shuman. McKuen did write the English lyrics for “If You Go Away” though.
Good to know! Is it possible I found some misinformation on the internet? 🙂
Regardless of any luxury appointments or high-tech features the Imperial had, that K-car-ish steering wheel just kills the vibe.
And the cover of “September of my years” looks less like Sinatra and more like Bob Eubanks. ;^)
I actually prefer the old-school, hard, shiny, Bakelite plastic steering wheel to the follow-up, soft-touch A-frame version, especially for Chrysler’s up-market cars like the Lebaron and Imperial (although those were typically leather-covered). The old one just seemed way more appropriate for those applications.
“if you want to put a really fine point on it, the world’s fanciest Plymouth Volaré”
I see your Imperial and raise you the Monteverdi Sierra:
You have a point there …
Too many Fiat parts-bin lights (foreshadowing?) I’d like to see that convertible prototype done up as an otherwise-stock Volare complete with Road Runner package.
Just another one of Aaron’s great CC write-ups. Personally, while Sinatra’s contributions to music can’t be denied, I’m way more of a Dean Martin fan, not only of his music, but simply his personality. Yeah, there was the acrimonious relationship with Jerry Lewis but, unlike Sinatra, Dino didn’t take himself too seriously throughout his long and successful career. He realized how fleeting fame can be early on and, despite how he cultivated a carefully crafted public persona as a carefree swinger, was a devoted family man who shunned unneccsary publicity. There was never going to be a Dean Martin edition car, but that was okay by me.
As to the Imperial, that thing had Iacocca written all over it, and the Sinatra edition even more so. Ironically, when it soon turned out to be a massive flop, Iacocca quickly disavowed any kinship with it, saying, “it was too far along for me to stop it when I got there” which is patent BS.
With the usual Chrysler flair for bad timing and screwing things up, the Imperial should have been a success, easily achieving its modest sales goals. But it was far too ambitious with all the half-baked technology, the worst of which was the damn poorly engineered EFI. There were other design issues, too, but not only was the EFI riddled with bugs to the extent that nearly every one was replaced with a carburetor under warranty, simply using Chrysler’s smallest V8 was an issue. They could have at least used the 360; anyone buying an Imperial could care less about fuel mileage.
And, then, as someone else mentioned, at an option price of $1k, the Frank Sinatra edition was just an extremely poor value, especially when the Glacier Blue color could be had on any other Imperial. Maybe if Iacocca hadn’t been so greedy, he’d have sold more of them. Of course, maybe part of the big price tag was due to Sinatra, himself, wanting a hefty paycheck just to use his name.
And then there’s the styling. Yeah, the Imperial’s bustle-back was about the best application of that dubious styling gimmick, but imagine how much better the car would have looked with a lower rear deck and moved the license plate frame into the rear bumper. That huge rear end with the license plate schmucked into the middle of it does the car no favors.
On top of all that, the PLC competition of the time was severely lacking. Oh, the downsized GM FWD products weren’t too bad (especially the convertible versions of the Riviera and Eldorado). Still, the Imperial should have easily stomped the truly lackluster Thunderbird, Cougar, and even Mark VII into the ground.
There’s a great review in Car & Driver of the Imperial where they really lay into it. I think the caption was something like “return with us to those days of yesteryear”. It summed up the Imperial’s foibles well and is worth a read. Perhaps someone can find and post it here.
Link to Road Test
Sinatra didn’t collect a big paycheck for the Frank Sinatra Edition: He did it as a favor for Iacocca, for a nominal fee (a dollar a year) plus a car for himself (which broke down embarrassingly).
Mark me as being in the (very small) minority, but I find these gorgeous. I like every line – bold and muscular. Then again, I also liked the 2nd gen Seville and even the Aerodeck Cutlass and Century coupes in their sportier trims. Part of the appeal is that they were exceptionally rare on the ground, even when brand new. I was between 8-10 when these were on sale, and my neighbor, a braggadocios self-styled Iacocca, owned a Chrysler dealership in suburban Seattle. When these were first released, he took a few home as demos. That he stopped demoing them long before they were discontinued probably talks to the frustrating driveability issues.
Nothing to do with the Imperial or even cars:
Frank Sinatra went out big, in his usual style. That day was trumpeted by media gurus for the last episode of the TV sitcom “Seinfeld,” but Sinatra upstaged those upstarts by passing away. The next morning the death of Sinatra was front page material. “Seinfeld” was relegated to comparative oblivion where it belonged.
Well, the Seinfeld finale, relative to the rest of the series, was pretty bad, so there’s that.
It reminds me of the death of Groucho Marx. Unfortunately, he died only three days after Elvis, the details of which were still making front page news. The news of Groucho’s death was similarly moved further back in the newspaper.
Good point. I was not much of a Seinfeld fan but watched the finale and came away thinking, ” What was THAT?”
Now the finale of M*A*S*H…
Perhaps the producers of Seinfeld were trying too hard in trying to create a classic. Kind of like Iacocca and the Imperial.
Now how do we get rid of the damn ADs that block the page????
The irony of M*A*S*H is it would eventually become too much of a ‘message’ show, i.e., a show about something, the complete opposite of Seinfeld, famously known as a show about nothing.
But neither’s finale lived up to expectations. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever watched the M*A*S*H finale in its entirety, only catching bits and pieces of it in syndication rerurns decades later.
I was a big KISS fan in my youth. Their 2nd drummer, from 1980-1991, was the incredibly talented Eric Carr. He died suddenly on November 24, 1991, of heart cancer. The same day that Freddie Mercury passed. Poor guy never got his proper recognition.
Fantastic piece, as usual Aaron. Back in the day, I was never a fan of either Sinatra or the Imperial. This distance of time and age has given me a greater appreciation of both.
I don’t consider it to be a “bustleback”, only a quite subtle character line vaguely delineates it as such, perhaps a late attempt to cash in on what seemed to be a very short -lived (thankfully) trend, but the overall side profile is actually quite classic and tasteful imo.
As to Sinatra, I’m 75 now but unlike most of my peers I’ve appreciated him since my mid-20s as perhaps the greatest male singer of the 20th Century, flaws and all. Like Crosby, he knew how to swing. His Capitol era discs are some of my most prized.
Both this car and Sinatra were very far off my radar in 1982. My fleet was 100% Honda for most of the year, an ‘82 Civic and my CB900F motorcycle. I never cared for Sinatra and probably changed the station when Strangers in the Night was in Top 40 AM rotation in 1966. In fact I remember asking my mom about him, and she was very dismissive: “Oh, he was for high school kids”. She graduated in 1942.
But looking at it today, the Imperial is nicely styled and indeed much cleaner looking than contemporary Ford and GM PLC’s.
i remember reading the esquire reprint of FS Has a Cold decades after original publish. but not having enjoyed his voice at the time, it did not really speak to me as i did not know his full catalog. still, i appreciate its reference as the title of this article.
As to the writing, Aaron is once again spectacular. even down to the little grammatical details. “An Historical”, the grammatically proper version that is rather unusual to find in hasty writing today.
of late, i have my grandparents super high end radio from the mid 1930s. a McMurdo Silver Masterpiece V now electrically restored and able to receive standard broadcast band (AM) stations. while there is little of merit to listen on that band in my region, i have a good audio quality AM transmitter and source it from an “equally vintage” 1st gen iPod. grabbed a 4 CD volume of Sinatra -a Voice on Air – radio broadcasts from 35-55 from the public library. those songs sound just right coming out of the 45 lb speaker in this vintage anachronism device in 2025. not wholly unlike this imperial in todays automotive world. off topic from the car, but as possible interest. this article proved hugely valuable to my nearby vintage radio restoration biz when they did the work on our family heirloom. https://sparcradio.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Restoration-of-McMurdo-Silver-Masterpiece-V-Chassis-with-Appendix1.pdf
lastly, i was rather stunned to once read Willie nelson, a singer i quite enjoy, once mentioned that his greatest singing inspiration/model was FS. that started my reappraisal of Frank. my tastes in cars hew to much smaller rides. the Imperial is an interesting curiosity, but not one i am likely to ever own.
Let us not forget that Sinatra had a life-long soft spot for Mopars. I recall reading that he and first wife Nancy went on their honeymoon in a new Chrysler before the war, and a LeBaron T&C wagon was said to be his last as an old man. Fans of Chrysler were rooting awfully hard for both the company and Iacocca, and I believe that Sinatra was part of that group, thus his willingness to tie his reputation to a car, something he never did before or after this one.
The Imperial was a hard lesson for everyone, including Iacocca. I can see why he pushed it – Mark’s and Eldos had massive profit margins, and I think Iacocca saw some running room in that segment. Unfortunately, the company simply didn’t have the ability to execute at this car’s level, and don’t forget the awful economy that greeted the car’s intro. It was a perfect storm for failure, even with a car that presented better than the Mark VI.
Sinatra? Longtime fan, though my interest drops off after 1962 or so. Lots of celebrities are assholes but without the massive level of talent Sinatra brought to his craft. I think he deserves credit for still trying to grow artistically in his 50s and 60s, even if the records didn’t sell. And the first 2 discs of the Trilogy album were quite good for a 65 year old singer whose time had already passed according to much of the world.
I’m probably the only regular commenter here who regularly drives on Frank Sinatra Drive, and who has also driven a Frank Sinatra Imperial!
If you don’t know, Frank Sinatra Drive is a sort of a service road that is sandwiched between the back side of the casino/hotels lining the west side of the Las Vegas Strip, and I-15. At its northern end, the name changes to Sammy Davis Jr. Drive. A similar service road located to the west of I-15 is named Dean Martin Drive. It’s thoughtful that the city named these streets (and many others) after the men who helped make this city what it is, but at the same time, but it’s a bit ignominious that they are basically service roads, used by locals to *avoid* driving on The Strip, and filled with trucks delivering the mountains of goods that it takes to keep the place running.
Was a kid in the 80s, rarely saw these, but I liked the styling. Would love to have one of these as a fun weekend car.
The government regulations are what nearly bankrupted these automakers. The fuel system on these basically had to be retrofitted with carburetors. It was just too harsh of regulations too quickly for industry to adapt.
This always struck me as more or less a deluxe Cordoba. Not really a bad thing, but certainly not worth its price. None of the exclusivity of the Mark VI or Eldorado and conquest sales from these makes had to be non-existent. You had to be a true Chrysler die hard with money to buy one of these. Not exactly a large market pool.
Regarding Sinatra, he was basically a non-entity in my musical world until I hit my fifties. It was then I discovered his amazing vocal gifts. I despised practically everything about the man, but he possessed the voice of the century. Crosby came close, but Frank was the king.
Sinatra was my parents generation of music, he is just noise to me and when he was run out of Aussie the real Sinatra shone thru the veneer, so buying an ugly car with his moniker on it is a NO from me, his star crashed to earth long long ago.
I have never been a fan of cars with big butts like the Imperial, the bustle back Seville of the 1980s, the early 1980s Lincoln Contentials (which my father in-law owned) and more recently the bubble butt BMWs from the early 2000’s. They just ruin the proportions of a car. In my teenaged years, I did like the 1st generation of the Chrysler Cordoba. My sister’s boyfriend had one and once we raced on the FDR Drive in New York City. I was driving my father’s 1975 Oldsmobile 98.
That “electronic marvel”, I believe, referred to in the article some place was part/parcel of the car’s unpopularity.
I was told, years ago by one lady that her’s had ‘waay to many, rattles”.
Just hearsay, no reason not to believe her at the time.
Well, at least Chrysler marketed it to the right demographic.Could YOU imagine if they marketed it to rock fans of the Grateful Dead, The Who, or Led Zeppelin??
Cadillac did use Led Zep’s “Rock and Roll” in their advertising awhile back, so I suppose it’s feasible.
Don Henley once saw a dead head sticker on a Cadillac.
A little voice inside his head said, “Don’t look back, you can never look back”
But looking back on CC is always fun,
after the boys of our past summers have gone.
Thank you for this writeup – I love the Imperial, even with its many faults, though I wouldn’t at all want to buy one.
The FS Imperial fascinates me because its one of the few celebrity-themed car models where the celebrity in question had nothing to do with either cars or design. And I’ve looked at the FS package before, but, not being a Sinatra fan, I glossed over the contents of the cassettes. Very interesting to read your take on the music here… something I knew nothing about.
And finally, I’m not sure if Sinatra really picked out the Glacier Blue color, but I think it’s the Imperial’s best-looking color.
Another item Frank loaned his name to: Per AI, I remember this product when working in the grocery store: In 1990, Frank Sinatra launched a line of pasta sauces called Artanis (Sinatra spelled backward). The line featured three initial flavors based on his mother’s recipes, which were known for their rich yet simple preparation.
The three original flavors of Artanis pasta sauce were:
Tomato Basil with Parmesan Cheese: A classic combination featuring the fresh flavors of tomato and basil, elevated with the addition of Parmesan.
Milano Style: A variation reflecting the cuisine of Milan, known for being rich and savory.
Marinara with Mushrooms: A hearty marinara sauce with the added earthiness of mushrooms.
Thanks for a very interesting read. Frank Sinatra will live on much longer in the American mind and heart than the Imperial. I remember Sinatra when his music was still playing constantly on the AM radio dial in the 1960’s. I only developed an appreciation for his music when I heard the album Reprise, where he was accompanied by the Nelson Riddle orchestra. By this time his singing was notable for his expert phrasing. which I think was excellent on this album. I have some CDs of Sinatra’s early albums from the Harry James days and I prefer the later arrangements much more.
Unfortunately, I missed out on the final Rat Pack Reunion tour. Though I’ve heard some recordings from the concert, and there didn’t appear to be much singing going on, just a lot of reminiscing, and chatter going on between the three. I did manage to catch Sammy Davis Jr. in Tahoe one time, and I will say he was the perfect showman.
Count me in as someone that appreciates most of the PLCs of the time. I guess that these cars are something of a dream realized for someone that grew up blue collar and made it good enough to buy a fancy car like that. Sinatra was that kind of scrappy poor kid that made good due to his talent, but unfortunately his insecurities made him a difficult person to deal with.
Even vintage Rat Pack performances involved relatively little actual singing and a lot of semi-improvisatory banter, and when they did sing, it often segued into mocking parody or a joke. Obviously, Frank, Dean, and Sam COULD all sing, and Sammy could dance too, but their shows together were more of a goof — as with their movies, it was about hanging out with their pals more than actually performing.
Reprise was a record label, not an album — I think you might be thinking of Sinatra’s Sinatra, which had Sinatra and Riddle rerecording some of the same songs they’d done together at Capitol. There’s nothing really wrong with it, but the original versions are almost always better, and the Capitol versions were each designed to work as part of an album rather than just as a singles collection.
Was that the tour where Dean decided after a few shows he didn’t want to do it anymore, went to the airport and took Frank’s private jet home? He got replaced with Liza Minneli who finished the tour, and then I think Sammy died not long after.
Gonna comment before reading what I’m sure is another great AS piece.
Just want to say I always thought this was a great car, hindered by Chryslers reach being a bit greater than its grasp* in things engine fuel metering and electronics.
* but not out of line either its computers at ford with things like crappy electronic engine controls and fuel metering (Caddy V-8-6-4, Olds diesel, Ford Variable Venturi carb, etc).
The 1981-83 Imperial didn’t need expectations mainly because it simply wasn’t the right car for ‘then’, or even the day after then for that matter. To me it seemed to be aimed at a diminishing demographic that was already well-served by competing products, even some old favorites within the Chrysler stable. The cantakerous fuel injection system certainly didn’t help, it developed its reputation nearly right out of the box and some dealers were removing the systems before the cars were even sold. I seem to remember Bendix had much to do with it, and it was a some kind of continuous injection/throttle body unit that incorporated a Lean-Burn style engine management system. The high price was also an issue, particularly as the cars often needed heavy discounting to move off the lot. Had the car been little more reasonably priced and equipped with the standard 2bbl. carburetor 5.2L it probably would have made a good companion to the New Yorker 5th. Ave..
As for the Frank Sinatra edition, why not? Those old Bobbie-Soxers were exactly who Lee was going for. The glove box full of FS cassetts would have made for many miles of enjoyable cruising for that crowd had the fuel injection cooperated.
Great article Aarron, glad you tied the tape collection into it. BTW- there was a rare issue of the ‘Come Fly With Me’ album with a United DC-7C replacing the TWA Super G Connie on the cover. Guess someone at UAL didn’t think it was too cool.
The Beatles song “And Your Bird Can Sing” was inspired by the Esquire article on Sinatra. In the article I believe (read it many years ago) he dismisses their music and songwriting. He also talks about his bird and the Beatles song breaks down at one point and changes to “and your bird can swing” and Lennon practically laughs when he sings that. You can guess what Sinatra implied about the size of his bird.
If you read the lyrics thinking about John Lennon being angry at Sinatra, and knowing in the article Sinatra does a lot of bragging about his possession etc., then it makes sense.
Aaron, I enjoyed this article, which seems like somewhat of a change from your usual.
Frank Sinatra was a flawed person, but an amazing artist. He did love cars, which is probably part of the reason Iacocca wanted him to assist with Imperial sales. In this case, Lee’s reach exceeded his grasp—things would have turned out fine if the Imperial’s fuel injection had been reliable, even by early 1980s standards.
Eleven years ago, I wrote a blog post about the Imperial after seeing one being driven with alacrity on our local roads. Recently updated, that post is here:
https://eightiescars.com/2014/09/20/1983-imperial/
Incredibly, or perhaps tragically, Rod McKuen is the biggest selling poet in the history of publishing, no one else is even close. This is one of the best long form pieces of any kind I’ve read in the past few years. https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/rod-mckuen-bestselling-poet-songs-what-happened.html
IIRC, the issues with the Imperial’s EFI were two-fold. First, Chrysler mounted the ECM on the air cleaner, meaning the engine’s vibrations wreaked havoc with it. Further, that location also meant that external, electro-magnetic waves could get to it, too. Supposedly, driving an Imperial underneath high-tension electrical wires would shut it down.
If only Chrysler had been able to address these problems before production (and maybe used the larger 360 engine instead of the 318), the Imperial could have been a contender, even during times when gas prices were high. In fact, the PLC Imperial reminds me a lot of the previous generation Mark V, down to a very similar grille treatment.
I also recall high tension EMI as a key issue with this EFI setup. It’s amusing Chrysler’s 1st and 2nd acts with EFI were beset by electronics issues. Troubles with the second go around were inexcusable given the available expertise in Huntsville.
I like the 360 idea.
With the ’50s Bendix Electrojector system, the EMI thing was a myth. See John K. Grady’s comments here: https://www.chrysler300club.com/tech/efi/jgrad.html (Grady is an electrical engineer; I am not.) It did have problems with waxed-paper capacitors that weren’t very heat-tolerant, but the biggest issue was that the solenoid-operated injector valves just didn’t work right: They took too long to close, they didn’t close completely, and the variance in flow rates was much too great. The principle was basically sound, but Bendix and Chrysler really needed a LOT more development work before releasing any of the systems to customers, and there were some other problems that were never really resolved.
The injection system on the Imperial had no relationship with the Bendix system of more than 20 years earlier. My understanding is that the bête noire of the later system is any kind of air or vacuum leak, of which the 318 could have many. See here: https://www.web.imperialclub.info/Yr/1981/Repair.htm
If it was sensitive to EMI, that is tragic. Perhaps all the Chrysler engineers who were around for the 1958 Bendix fuel injection debacle were long gone by then. Same thing happened there, car would quit when driving by a TV broadcasting tower.
I think part of the issue with the ’58 Bendix design was electronics materials limitations specifically regarding capacitors IIRC.
The Bendix was the first modern EFI design commonplace now. Bosch bought the design and further developed it into a successful and reliable system.
Bosch did not buy the Bendix system — because Bendix had extensive patent coverage in this area, Bosch ended up having to sign a patent licensing agreement in 1966.
Compared to its competition-the stodgy Eldorado with its self destructive HT4100 or the Fairmont-esque Mark VI, the Imperial was easily the handsomest of the lot despite the muted bustle back.
The one who really got the ball rolling with reliable EFI for domestic vehicles was Ford. I don’t think there was ever any kind of issue with their EFI systems, and you have to wonder how they did it. Is it possible that they learned from Chrysler’s errors and, thus, avoided them? And then there was GM who eventually got on the bandwagon after everyone else.
I think there was a CC on the history of EFI for the masses but I don’t have the link.
Shame about this car, I always thought it was a handsome design.
Old Frank kind of predicted what was going to happen in the ad with Chairman Lee. “Come on, Lee, this country can put a man on the moon, but we can’t build an automobile right”
I’ll go on record as saying that I really like the bustle back look on these, the Cadillac and the Lincoln. But I don’t love them or have intent on owning one. I suppose in my head, car designer’s have only so many ways they “bend the steel” and most of those have been used.
To me, the sad part isn’t so much the look as much as the quality of the car. In 2025 we are seeing record breaking recalls on all shapes of vehicles.
Now my father in law did lease two Continental bustle backs- an 83 and an 85. The quality of the 83 was superior over the 85. The biggest issue (non mechanical) was that the 85 went to real wood trim and in the Florida heat, the veneer just couldn’t hold up. In the 3 years he had that car, lincoln replaced that veneer 5 times. So much for the “We hate plastic wood look.”
As to the Imperial, I had a customer in my store who was a mechanic at the local Dodge Chrysler dealership. He said he was replacing the FI with carbs all week long. And sometimes, the customer would just want to get rid of the car all together, he’d offer them more that the dealer would allow on trade in.
So I’ll take a simple Toyota, please. I can still like these designs, but at my age, quality is more important
This article was great. At least one thing I liked about Sinatra: he advocated for African Americans and equality at a time in U.S. history when it might have cost him.
At least one thing I liked about these Imperials: At one of its lowest points, Chrysler had the audacity to go ahead and build such an ambitious machine, regardless of the outcome.
I’m glad the last Imperial didn’t have the same rear license plate placement as seen here.
Bill at Curious Cars did an excellent review of the Imperial.
Pay attention at 19:06 where he talks about Frank & Lee.
He also covers the fuel injection issue.
Reading this finally after being out of touch backpacking, and what a fine piece it is. I’m repeatedly reminded about how much I appreciate you being here at CC. The quality of your material is unique on the web, and I’m very proud to be hosting it here at CC.
Like you, I’ve mellowed on the Imperial and the others of its genre. I’ve never spent much time listening to Sinatra, but clearly he was quite the artist. Maybe I’ll catch up with him one of these days when Stephanie is out of town; she can’t stand him.
Great looking car with clean lines, if it weren’t for the bustleback. Some of the pictures the lighting is right to where you don’t see the bustleback at all.
Sinatra type music was totally not my thing, and still isn’t. I’m more familiar with him being parodied by Phil Hartman on SNL.