Why Sinatra Matters (17 page)

Even some of the old soldiers forgave him. The Korean War had confused all notions of the nobility of serving your country;
it was an undeclared “police action,” without a Pearl Harbor, and deepened the cynicism of many men. The fighting was ended
in 1953 by the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, who knew as a general that it was folly to fight a land war in Asia. The
men seemed to say, Don’t trust history, trust only the personal. And for many men, the personal involved a merging of reality
and fiction. In war or peace, they all knew men like Maggio.

On the records, the voice was deeper, richer, with more timbre, the voice of a man. But it also had a newer attitude. In the
ballads, most of them torch songs, he was protected now with the armor of the stoic. The songs from
In the Wee Small Hours
said that in spite of loss, abandonment, defeat, he — and you — could get through the night. You could still get hurt, but
it was worth the risk because you knew that no defeat was permanent. There would be another day, a new woman, another chance
to roll the dice. There was rue in some of the songs. There was regret. There was no self-pity.

“Ava taught him how to sing a torch song,” said Nelson Riddle many years later. “She taught him the hard way.”

Everything that flowed from the comeback — the Rat Pack, the swagger, the arrogance, the growing fortune, the courtiers —
is, in the end, of little relevance. It has as much to do with Sinatra’s art as Hemingway’s big-game hunting had to do with
his. For a while Sinatra appeared to be the only man in America who could not be hurt again. Not ever. Onstage he exuded power
and confidence; even the shadow of the Mob helped his image because it added a dangerous glamour to the performance and a
dark resonance to his art. He made some good movies after the comeback:
The Man with the Golden Arm, Pal Joey, Some Came Running, High Society,
and
The Manchurian Candidate.
He also made some appalling, self-indulgent junk. But he simply didn’t take acting seriously enough to become a great actor.
Too often he settled for the first, most superficial take, avoiding the effort that would force him to stretch his talent,
acting as if he were double parked. Too often, in too many movies, he cheated the audience and cheated himself. He never cheated
in the music.

In the end, his most durable expression lies in that music. While living his life, Sinatra had learned something about human
pain and found a way, through his music, to turn that hard-won knowledge into a form of human consolation. As the country
changed, and the music along with it, as rock and roll took over and the baby boomers sneered at the children of Prohibition
and the Depression, he was often baffled about the world and his role in it. But he continued practicing his own consoling
art until the words and music could no longer rise from him into the trembling air.

Before leaving the stage, Sinatra had come to realize that life was not one long string of triumphs. As he grew older, he
sometimes even floundered in the music (he made an entire album of songs based on Rod McKuen’s ninth-rate poetry). But even
his slumps did not last long. He could always find his way home to the music that had lasted him a lifetime, and almost until
the end, he was capable of surprise. To be sure, much of what he did in life was also predictable. Watching the disorder and
chaos of the sixties, his politics changed. But then, he was not the only old New Dealer who moved to the right, where he
embraced Richard Nixon, a man he detested, and Ronald Reagan, a man he enjoyed. During that period of disorder he married
and divorced Mia Farrow, who was thirty years his junior, and came away baffled at himself. “I still don’t know what
that
was all about,” he said to me a dozen years after it had ended. With his fourth wife, Barbara Marx, he retreated deeper into
the bright, ritualized fortress he had erected in the California desert, far from the places that had hurt him into art. And
I remember now a night I spent with him in 1974, driving around New York in a limousine, just talking.

“It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned
world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”

“Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”

“And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”

He laughed and settled back. We were crossing Eighty-sixth Street, heading for Central Park.

“You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” he said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This
was the Watergate winter. The year before, Sinatra, the old Democrat, sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of
Richard Nixon; the Watergate tapes would reveal a Nixon who retailed crude anti-Italian slurs. “You like people,” Sinatra
said softly, “and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling
again. “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”

I said that every day I knew less.

“Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is, you get older and you know less.”

I liked the man who talked that way on a chilly night in New York. I liked his doubt and his uncertainty. He had enriched
my life with his music since I was a boy. He had confronted bigotry and changed the way many people thought about the children
of immigrants. He had made many of us wiser about love and human loneliness. And he was still trying to understand what it
was all about. His imperfections were upsetting. His cruelties were unforgivable. But Frank Sinatra was a genuine artist,
and his work will endure as long as men and women can hear, and ponder, and feel. In the end, that’s all that truly matters.

O
VER THE YEARS
I’ve learned much about Frank Sinatra and his music from a number of people, ranging from my old neighborhood friend, Bill
Powers, to the great producer, Jerry Wexler. Nelson Riddle, while making his albums with Linda Ronstadt in the 1980s, also
gave me insights into the man and his work. But across the years much of my instruction has come from Jonathan Schwartz. He
is a fine writer, a musician, and a disc jockey at WQEW in New York. Sinatra once said of him: “He knows more about me than
I do.” Jonathan was generous in reading an early draft of this book and I am, again, in his debt. He is not, of course, responsible
for errors that might have eluded both of us nor for my interpretations of the man and his music.

The Sinatra music has been scrambled and repackaged by various companies into a confusing mess. This was compounded by Sinatra
himself, who for reasons of contractual argument, artistic dissatisfaction, or sheer laziness repeatedly went back to certain
songs. But these albums are my own favorites:
In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Only the Lonely, Come Fly with Me, A Swingin’ Affair, Songs for Young Lovers,
Come Dance with Me, Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim, September of My Years, Sinatra at the Sands
(in spite of the wretched monologue),
Nice ’n’ Easy,
and
Swing Along with Me.
There are a variety of boxed sets of his work at Columbia and earlier music with Tommy Dorsey and Harry James. All are rewarding,
even the dumb novelties of the moment. I like the two-CD set from Columbia called
Portrait of Sinatra
and the five-CD package from RCA Victor called
The Song Is You,
which contains virtually all the Tommy Dorsey recordings. It is particularly interesting as a means of tracing the musical
lessons learned by Sinatra from Dorsey. Needless to say, reactions to anyone’s music are always subjective, but for me, the
above albums offer many pleasures.

In writing this book, I was informed, entertained, or enriched in various
ways by the following works:

Bacall, Lauren.
Lauren Bacall by Myself.
New York: Ballantine, 1978.

Behr, Edward.
Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America.
New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996.

Carner, Gary.
The Miles Davis Companion.
New York: Schirmer, 1996.

Clarke, Donald.
All or Nothing at All.
New York: Fromm International, 1997.

Dellar, Fred.
Sinatra: His Life and Times.
New York: Omnibus Press, 1995.

Douglas-Home, Robin.
Sinatra.
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1962.

Ellis, Edward Robb.
A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929–1939.
New York: Kodansha, 1995.

Farrow, Mia.
What Falls Away.
New York: Doubleday, 1997.

Friedwald, Will.
Sinatra! The Song Is You.
New York: DaCapo Press, 1997.

Gambino, Richard.
Vendetta.
New York: Doubleday, 1977.

Gambino, Richard.
Blood of My Blood.
Buffalo, N.Y.: Guernica, 1997.

Gardner, Ava.
Ava: My Story.
New York: Bantam, 1990.

Immerso, Michael.
Newark’s First Ward.
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Kelley, Kitty.
His Way.
New York: Bantam, 1986.

La Sorte, Michael.
La Merica.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985.

Lahr, John.
Sinatra: The Artist and the Man.
New York: Random House, 1997.

Lees, Gene.
Singers and the Song II.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

O’Brien, Ed with Robert Wilson.
Sinatra 101.
New York: Boulevard Books, 1996.

Petkov, Steven and Leonard Mustazza.
The Frank Sinatra Reader.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Riddle, Nelson.
Arranged by Nelson Riddle.
New York: Warner, 1985.

Ringgold, Gene and Clifford McCarty.
The Films of Frank Sinatra.
Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1993.

Sinatra, Nancy.
Frank Sinatra, My Father.
New York: Pocket Books, 1985.

Taraborrelli, J. Randy.
Sinatra: Behind the Legend.
Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing, 1997.

Vare, Ethlie Ann, ed.
Legend: Frank Sinatra and the American Dream.
New York: Boulevard Books, 1995.

The Sinatra movies that remain worth seeing are:

Anchors Aweigh
(1945),

On the Town
(1949),

From Here to Eternity
(1953),

Suddenly
(1954),

Young at Heart
(1955),

The Man with the Golden Arm
(1955),

High Society
(1956),

The Joker Is Wild
(1957),

Pal Joey
(1957),

Some Came Running
(1958),

The Manchurian Candidate
(1962),

and
The Detective
(1968).

Forever

A novel

“Hugely readable. … Hamill’s long history as a New York journalist, his knowledgeable love for the city, and his writerly
exuberance explode here into a New York fantasy. …
Forever
is old-fashioned storytelling at a gallop.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“A swashbuckling, ribald tale told with flair and, sometimes, unbridled emotion. … A serious look at what makes a city more
than just bricks and mortar.”

—Denver Post

Snow in August

A novel

“Wonderful. … This page-turner of a fable has a universal appeal.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Lovely yet heartbreaking. … A moving story of a boy confronting morality. … In Michael Devlin, Hamill has created one of
the most endearing characters in recent fiction. …
Snow in August
is a minor mirfsqe in itself.”

—Hartford Courant

A Drinking Life

A memoir

“A vivid report of a journey to the edge of self-destruction. Tough-minded, brimming with energy, and unflinchingly honest.”

—New York Times

“A remarkable memoir. Energetic, compelling, very funny, and remarkably — indeed, often brutally — candid, Hamill’s tale won’t
soon be forgotten. An author of rare distinction and moral force.”

—Entertainment Weekly

—Adam Woog,
Seattle Times

Frank Sinatra and Pete Hamill, as products of the same urban landscape, have both been credited with giving the American city
a voice. In this widely acclaimed and bestselling appreciation, Hamill draws on his intimate experience of the man and the
music to evoke the essence of Sinatra, illuminating the singer’s art and his legend from the point of view of a confidant
and a fan.

“Hamill’s illuminations are considerable without ever stooping to facile psychologizing. … He does a better job of placing
Sinatra’s saga in a social and political context than any of his biographers have. …
Why Sinatra Matters
is most valuable in its explication of how Sinatra came to formulate a musical style that was a sound track to urban American
life.”

—Dan DeLuca,
Philadelphia Inquirer

“A graceful reminiscence of Sinatra after hours serves as the frame for shrewd reflections on the singer’s art, his personality,
his audience, and—most interesting—his ethnicity, a subject about which Hamill, against all odds, contrives to say fresh and
persuasive things.”

—Terry Teachout,
New York Times Book Review

“A brief but eloquent homage. … Hamill succeeds—convincingly, with natty aplomb—in explaining why Sinatra, even now, matters.”

—Tom Chaffin,
LA Weekly