Why Sinatra Matters (9 page)

“The thing about Bing was, he made you think you could do it too,” Sinatra said, half a century later. “He was so relaxed,
so casual. If he thought the words were getting too stupid or something, he just went buh-ba, buh-ba, booo. He even walked
like it was no effort. He was so good, you never saw the rehearsals, the effort, the
hard work
. It was like Fred Astaire. Fred made you think you could dance too. I don’t mean just me. I mean millions and millions of
people. You saw Fred dance, you heard Bing sing, and it was like you were doing it. After a movie you saw guys in the street
dancing. You heard them singing to their girls. It was amazing, what those men did, Bing and Fred. Some people, they danced
and sang right through the fucking Depression. Every time Bing sang, it was a duet, and you were the other singer.”

Young Frank Sinatra began to develop a theatrical personality to go with his singing. His mother arranged for credit at a
clothing store, and he soon had so many pairs of slacks that he was nicknamed Slacksey O’Brien. He owned a phonograph and
a growing collection of records. When he was sixteen, his father allowed him to use the family Chrysler, and he would take
his friends for rides, often wandering as far as Atlantic City. The new house even had the ultimate luxury: a telephone. Frank
Sinatra did not have a hard Depression.

“We never went hungry,” he said later. “It wasn’t luxury, but it wasn’t bad.”

He began to live a split life. On the street he donned the mask of the wise guy, an image fed by the gangster films that had
taken the place of westerns in creating the myth of the American outsider. He posed like Cagney, like Edward G. Robinson.
He dressed “sharp.” He jingled change in the pockets of his slacks. He cursed. He talked tough. He showed his friends he would
fight if he had to, and what he lacked in street-fighting talent, he made up for with courage. On the street he was developing
an act, a disguise that would protect him from the world while asserting his presence in his own small piece of that world.

Alone, he was conceiving a different vision, and it had nothing to do with the neighborhood streets of Hoboken. As a teenager,
he must have realized that loneliness might be his lot, but even then he refused to accept it as inevitable. Across a lifetime
he would make many attempts to relieve loneliness, submerging it in marriages and love affairs, hard-drinking camaraderie,
bursts of movement and action and anger, but the only thing that ever permanently worked was the music. And when he was an
adolescent, a combination of words and music began to create the vision of escape. From solitude. From obscurity. From the
polarities represented by Marty and Dolly Sinatra. Sometimes he would wander down to the waterfront alone, past the Hoovervilles,
past the rusting tracks of the railroad spurs, out to the edge of the piers. There, he would gaze across the harbor at New
York, the spires of its skyline rising toward the sky.

THE BIRTH OF A CREATURE OF HUMAN FANTASY, A BIRTH WHICH IS A STEP ACROSS THE THRESHOLD BETWEEN NOTHING AND ETERNITY, CAN ALSO
HAPPEN SUDDENLY, OCCASIONED BY SOME NECESSITY.
A
N IMAGINED DRAMA NEEDS A CHARACTER WHO DOES OR SAYS A CERTAIN NECESSARY THING; ACCORDINGLY THIS CHARACTER IS BORN AND IS PRECISELY
WHAT HE HAD TO BE.

– L
UIGI
P
IRANDELLO
, 1925

“W
HAT THE FUCK WAS THAT
?”

– B
ENNY
G
OODMAN,
his back to the audience at the New York Paramount, as Frank Sinatra made his entrance and the fans roared, December 30,
1942

H
IS FINEST ACCOMPLISHMENT,
of course, was the sound. The voice itself would evolve over the years from a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle
register and dark bottom tones. But it was a combination of voice, diction, attitude, and taste in music that produced the
Sinatra sound. It remains unique. Sinatra created something that was not there before he arrived: an urban American voice.
It was the voice of the sons of the immigrants in northern cities – not simply the Italian Americans, but the children of
all those immigrants who had arrived on the great tide at the turn of the century. That’s why Irish and Jewish Americans listened
to him in New York. That’s why the children of Poles in Chicago, along with all those other people in cities around the nation,
listened to him. If they did not exactly sound like him, they
wanted
to sound like him. Frank Sinatra was the voice of the twentieth-century American city.

In life even the mature Sinatra would sometimes speak in the argot of the street. He could be profane, even vulgar. The word
them
could become
dem,
and
those
could become
dose
. It depended on the company. But in the songs the diction was impeccable. The children of the Italians, the Irish, and the
Jews wanted to believe that they could express themselves that way, and many of them did. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, many
of us understood that we were not prisoners of the Brooklyn accent,
because
Sinatra’s singing refused to use it. And he was like us. His diction was something that Sinatra learned early, from the movies.

“I’d go to the movies, and hear the leading man speaking English – not just Cary Grant, but Clark Gable and all the other
guys – and I knew that my friends and I were talking some other version of the language,” he said once. “So I started becoming,
in some strange way, bilingual. I talked one kind of English with my friends. Alone in my room, I’d keep practicing the other
kind of English.”

His taste in music was formed early. He grew up listening to and memorizing the words and music of the great popular composers
and lyricists of the first forty years of the twentieth century. These included Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter,
Harold Arlen, and Johnny Mercer, to mention only a few of this extraordinary generation. Many were themselves part of the
immigrant saga. Arthur Schwartz was the grandson of a buttonmaker from Russia. Harry Warren was the child of immigrants from
Italy. Yip Harburg’s parents were from Russia. Irving Berlin, author of “God Bless America” and a thousand other tunes, was
himself an immigrant from Siberia. All were very American, creators of most of those songs that became known as the “standards”
of twentieth-century American music.

As the reigning citizens of Tin Pan Alley, they wrote music for the Broadway theater. They wrote for musical revues. They
wrote for the movies. Above all, they were city people, and their audiences were composed of city people. Often building on
forms derived from African American rhythms, adapting European melodic structures and harmonies, the best of their music was
full of wit, regret, insouciance, and sly humor. During Prohibition the music celebrated good times and a sophisticated hedonism,
becoming the unrecorded sound track of the speakeasies. When the Depression hit, there was a chastened undertone to the music,
a feeling of rue (as there was in the late writing of Scott Fitzgerald). Some writers were capable of biting social commentary,
as in Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Most of the time, the attitude was less direct. Perhaps the apocalypse was
here, the songs declared; if so, let’s dance. That music was absorbed by the men and women of an entire generation. Sinatra
was one of them, but he had begun to hear the music in a new way.

He heard it through the diverse filters of the streets of Hoboken, his own childhood, his personal solitude, and above all
through the masculine street codes forged in the years of Prohibition. When the Noble Experiment ended on December 5, 1933,
Americans didn’t revert in the morning to the kind of people they were before Prohibition started; they had emerged from the
era a lot more cynical and a lot tougher, qualities that would get many of them through the Depression. Sinatra applied some
of those attitudes to his music.

If love lyrics were too mushy, he could sing them and make wised-up fun of the mush, and still, in some part of the self,
acknowledge that there was some truth to the words. He could be tender and still be a tough guy. Ruth Etting could sing her
weepy torch songs, but for men, whining or self-pity was not allowed; they were forbidden by the male codes of the city. Sinatra
slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. When he finally took command of his own
career, he perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that
archetype did not exist in American popular culture. That is one reason why he continues to matter; Frank Sinatra created
a new model for American masculinity.

Sinatra was not, of course, a jazz singer, but his process resembled the way many jazz musicians worked. The best of them
listened
creatively
to the tunes of Tin Pan Alley but heard them through the filter of their own experience, which was dominated by being black
in segregated America. They transformed those songs, edited them, reinvented them, found something of value in even the most
banal tunes. The instrument didn’t matter. Over the years Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis found something different in the
same tunes; so did Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young and Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Dexter Gordon. They
understood the specific lyrics of what had become known as American standards and the general intentions of the songs; they
insisted on making them more interesting as
music,
more authentic, more personal, finding a subtle core that more closely resembled the blues. The results could be entertainment,
a transient diversion from the hardness of life; but the songs could be art, too, digging deep into human pain and folly.
They could also be both. But these musicians approached the music with a seriousness that was pure. Sinatra worked in a similar
way. He didn’t play trumpet, trombone, saxophone, or piano; he rarely composed music or wrote lyrics; but he did function
as a musician.

“I discovered very early that my instrument wasn’t my voice,” he said to me once. “It was the microphone.”

II
. In the tradition of the Old Country, Frank Sinatra served a long apprenticeship. He seems to have conceived the notion of
being a professional singer when he was fifteen. Again, the instinct to create legend or myth obscures the facts, and not
even Sinatra was a reliable witness to his own beginnings, and he knew it.

“Sometimes I think I know what it all was about, and how everything happened,” he said one rainy night in New York. “But then
I shake my head and wonder. Am I remembering what really happened or what
other
people think happened? Who the hell knows, after a certain point?”

One thing that really happened was the discovery that he actually did have a voice and could sing. I reminded him once of
the story that Rocky Marciano, the old undefeated heavyweight champion, used to tell. He said that when he first knocked out
a man in a gymnasium when he was a kid, it was like discovering he could sing opera.

“Hey,” Sinatra said, “when I first realized I could sing a song, I felt like I’d just knocked out Jack Dempsey.”

But in Hoboken in 1930 there were dozens of young men (and surely a few women) who could sing well. They could carry a tune.
They could remember the words. Few of them thought they could become stars. That required an act of the imagination, the kind
of gleaming vision that is often unique to artists, along with the type of will that is sometimes mistaken for arrogance.
Above all, it took guts. To walk out of the safety of the parish is never easy; to do so during the Depression was an act
of either foolishness or courage. And yet a small number of people chose to go out and try to make it in America, no matter
what the odds against them.

“There really was nothing to lose,” Sinatra said later. “Yes, you might fall on your ass. But so what? You could always work
on the docks or tend bar. What was important was to
try
.”

The lure of big-time success was underlined by the grinding horrors of the Depression. Crime was one way out; with audacity
and a gun, a kid might become a big shot. But talent was another. By the early 1930s the radio and the phonograph record,
along with sound movies, were creating the first national pop singing stars. One was Russ Columbo, who had a light operatic
voice and made an immense hit of “Prisoner of Love.” He showed that an Italian American could be accepted beyond the boundaries
of the parish, but his career was cut short in 1934 by his accidental death while cleaning an antique pistol. Rudy Vallee
was another early star. But his voice was light and tremulous, he looked a bit goofy, and in personal appearances he used
a megaphone; he couldn’t play college sophomores forever. In the cities of the Northeast there weren’t many college sophomores
to identify with him anyway. Certainly kids like Frank Sinatra never wanted to grow up to be Rudy Vallee. But Bing Crosby
was an altogether different model.