Frank Sinatra Had Some Brutally Honest Words For Sinead O'Connor

If we were to ask you to choose the two most bullheaded and notoriously outspoken artists in music history to butt heads before the watchful eyes of the public, myriad names are likely to come to mind. However, there's a good chance that some of you — perhaps even a large sum of you — would name Frank Sinatra and Sinéad O'Connor as the two most intensely vocal (no pun intended) and barbed personalities in music history. If that's where your mind went, congratulations, because this clash of melodic titans actually happened once upon a time, as Insider reports. 

If you know anything about Frank's personal life, you're probably already aware that the singer had a notoriously bad temper that he never really tried to shield from anyone at any given time. If Ol' Blue Eyes started seeing red, you'd best tuck tail and run, because things were liable to get ugly real quick when he got angry. O'Connor's temperament was a little more what you might call focused or tactful, given that most of her highly-publicized outbursts had something to do with her personal social and political views when they were, in her eyes, under siege. Case in point — the infamous pope scandal.

In 1992, Sinéad O'Connor was invited to perform on Saturday Night Live. Following an intensely charged rendition of Bob Marley's "War," she presented to the camera a photograph of Pope John Paul II before tearing it to pieces. She then fervently declared, "Fight the real enemy!" Despite the fact that the Catholic Church and the Vatican were under critical fire worldwide for charges of pedophilia and child abuse at the time, the incident became a widespread controversy (via CBC). 

According to CBC, O'Connor received a lifetime ban from all NBC programs following the stunt and was even booed off stage a few weeks later during a Bob Dylan tribute show. Tough crowd, eh? It wasn't long before Frank Sinatra heard about the whole fiasco and, being a good Catholic boy himself, chimed in with a few words of his own. And no, they weren't kind words. 

That's right — Frank Sinatra wasn't pleased with Sinéad O'Connor for her unsavory public gesture toward the pope, and if there's one thing Frank didn't do, it was remain silent when he wasn't pleased. According to Insider, the singer ascended the stage at a concert hall in his home state of New Jersey and, in the middle of the show, remarked, "This must be one stupid broad. I'd kick her a** if she were a guy. She must beat her kids to stay in shape."

Maybe the pope incident was just the straw that broke the camel's back, as Frank reportedly already had beef with O'Connor after she refused to perform the national anthem at one of her concerts in New Jersey. Once his remarks reached her ears, she told inquirers that she started "checking her bed for horse heads" (via Showbiz Cheat Sheet).