Why Sinatra Matters

  Copyright © 1998 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Hachette Book Group

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  First eBook Edition: February 2009

  Photo Credits: Archive Photos: endpapers, page 90; Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos Inc.: page ii; Penguin/Corbis Bettmann, page 34; Personality Photos, page 66; UPI/Corbis Bettmann, page 124; Sid Avery/Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive, page 154

  ISBN: 978-0-316-06954-0

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  OVERTURE

  1: IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS

  2: WRAP YOUR TROUBLES IN DREAMS

  3: LONELY TOWN

  4: THE SONG IS YOU

  5: I’M A FOOL TO WANT YOU

  6: ALL OF ME

  THE BACK OF THIS BOOK

  Applause for Pete Hamill’s

  WHY SINATRA MATTERS

  “A snazzy ode to ‘Ole Blue Eyes.’”

  —People

  “Compelling reading for anyone with a feeling for the late singer.”

  —Adam Woog, Seattle Times

  “An engrossing book … sharply evocative.”

  —Don Freeman, San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Hamill conveys moments with memories so vivid that you can smell the smoke and taste the bourbon.”

  —Vicki L. Friedman, Virginian-Pilot

  “This is a beautiful thing, an admiring rumination on Sinatra the man, the persona, and the towering talent. … An absolutely terrific work.”

  —Liz Smith, Newsday

  “Hamill’s illuminations are considerable. … Any Sinatra fan hungry for a fresh take will eat up Why Sinatra Matters.”

  —Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Even if you think you know why Sinatra matters, this slim biographical essay proves the most intimate and thoughtful eulogy for ‘the Voice’ yet. … Hamill’s concise, eloquent musings leave you wanting not to read a full-blown biography but to listen again to Sinatra’s best songs.”

  —Megan Harlan, Entertainment Weekly

  “What a perfect match: the world’s greatest ‘saloon singer’ eulogized superbly by the author of A Drinking Life . … Why Sinatra Matters belongs in any collection of important books on American popular music of the 20th century.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The only thing wrong with this brief but penetrating essay is that it is far too short.”

  —Terry Teachout, New York Times Book Review

  THIS BOOK IS FOR ESTHER NEWBERG

  She can make the rain go

  ALSO BY PETE HAMILL

  Novels

  A KILLING FOR CHRIST

  THE GIFT

  DIRTY LAUNDRY

  FLESH AND BLOOD

  THE DEADLY PIECE

  THE GUNS OF HEAVEN

  LOVING WOMEN

  SNOW IN AUGUST

  Short Story Collections

  THE INVISIBLE CITY

  TOKYO SKETCHES

  Journalism

  IRRATIONAL RAVINGS

  PIECEWORK

  NEWS IS A VERB

  Memoir

  A DRINKING LIFE

  OVERTURE

  WHEN FRANK SINATRA died on the evening of May 14, 1998, the news made the front pages of newspapers all over the world. Many ran extra editions and followed with special supplements. There was little sense of shock; he had been a long time dying. He had also been a long time living, and so the obituaries were full of his life and times.

  It was mandatory to chronicle his wins and losses, his four marriages, his battles, verbal and physical, with reporters and photographers. His romances required many inches of type. There were accounts of his fierce temper, his brutalities, his drunken cruelties. Some described him as a thug or a monster, whose behavior was redeemed only by his talent. We read brief charts of his political odyssey from left to right. The shadow cast upon him by the Mob was also an inevitable part of the stories. And there were tales of his personal generosity to friends and strangers and the millions of dollars he had raised for charities. He was clearly a complicated man.

  “Being an eighteen-karat manic depressive,” he was quoted in many of the obituaries, “and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have perhaps an overacute capacity for sadness and elation.”

  But much of the language of farewell had a stale, even hollow quality, probably because most of the obituaries had been ready for too many months. Sinatra had been a virtual recluse since 1995, making only rare public appearances. Over the previous year he had been in and out of hospitals. There were reports from California that he had suffered several heart attacks and, with the possible onset of Alzheimer’s, had difficulty recognizing even old friends. Across those final months there was little hard news about his condition; his children insisted he was fine, although cranky and cantankerous, and so the vacuum was filled with rumor and supposition. The truth was probably a simple one. Frank Sinatra, after a life in which too many cigarettes and too much whiskey were part of the deal, was old; and as happens to all of us when we grow old, the parts just broke down. He had abused his body in a way that was special to his generation of American men; that he had survived until eighty-two was itself a kind of triumph over the odds.

  There were some peculiar components to the television coverage. Most of it was narrated by people from a much younger generation; as they mouthed words about loss and farewell, the tone had an odd insincerity – they could have been discussing someone from the nineteenth century. They were also prisoners of existing visual images. We saw Sinatra at different ages: a very young Sinatra in bow tie and padded shoulders when he was The Voice; a drawn, emaciated Sinatra, flaring at photographers or wearing a thin, pimplike mustache, during his time with Ava Gardner; Sinatra as Maggio in From Here to Eternity and a grinning Sinatra receiving his Academy Award afterward; clips from his television shows, including a bizarre image of Sinatra standing on two chairs, one foot on each, while singing “I’ve Got the World on a String”; Sinatra with the Rat Pack, horsing around on the stages of Las Vegas; Sinatra with various presidents, from Roosevelt to Reagan; and, of course, endless versions of “My Way.”

  It was difficult, reading and watching all of this, to remember why Sinatra mattered to so many people, and why he will continue to matter in the years ahead. The radio did a much better job than print or television, because on radio we heard the music. Not abrupt fragments of songs, not clipped, impatient digests. Late at night, driving through a great city, moving on the dark streets of New York or Paris, Tokyo or London, you could connect more directly to what truly mattered: the music.

  The music was the engine of the life. If there had been no music, there would have been no immense obituaries and no televised farewells. To be sure, Sinatra was one of those figures whose art is often overshadowed by the life. In the end, it is of minor interest that Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, that André Malraux flew in combat during the Spanish Civil War, or that Ernest Hemingway shot lions in Africa. In the end, only the work matters. Sinatra’s finest work was making music.

  Sinatra, however, did matter in other ways. He wasn’t simply an entertainer from a specific time and place in American life who lived on as a kind of musty artifact. Through a combination of artistic originality, great passion, and immense will, he transcended several era
s and indirectly helped change the way all of us lived. He was formed by an America that is long gone: the country of the European immigrants and the virulent America-for-Americans nativism that was directed at them; the country in which a mindless Puritanism, allied with that scapegoating nativism, imposed Prohibition upon the land and helped create the Mob; a country undergoing a vast transformation from a fundamentally rural society to one dominated by cities; a country that passed through Depression and war into the uncertain realities of peace. They were extraordinary times, and in his own way, driven by his own confusions, neuroses, angers, and ambitions, Frank Sinatra helped push the country forward.

  This book is about the accomplishments of Frank Sinatra and why he matters. Some of it is personal, because for a while, I was friendly with Sinatra, talked with him in saloons, in Las Vegas, even for a few days one year in Monte Carlo. At one point he wanted me to write his autobiography; it never happened, for reasons that are no longer important. But in the course of discussing his life, he talked about himself in ways that still had an element of wonder to them; part of him still could not believe that he had become the legend he was. To be sure, we were not friends in any conventional way; I did not visit his home and he did not visit mine. Only a very few intimate friends ever had such access, and I was certainly not one of them. But I liked him enormously.

  He was wonderful with children, including my two daughters. He was funny. He was vulnerable. I never saw the snarling bully of the legend. That Frank Sinatra certainly existed; on the day that his death made all those front pages, there were too many people who remembered only his cruelties. But he never showed that side of himself when I was around. On those nights, I was in the company of an intelligent man, a reader of books, a lover of painting and classical music and sports, gallant with women, graceful with men. Perhaps he was just donning a mask in my company, presenting images to a writer so that they would be remembered by the writer in a certain way: a kind of performance. Or perhaps the snarling bully was the true masked character, a clumsy personal invention, and behind the mask there was simply a young man afraid of the world. Or perhaps, by the time I knew him, he had just grown out of his angers, exhausted them, and settled for what he was and the way he was regarded. I don’t know. Like all great artists, Frank Sinatra contained secret places, abiding personal mysteries, endless contradictions. On occasion, a curtain would part, there would be a moment of epiphany, and I could see the uncertain older man who wanted to understand what it all meant, the man who said that dying was a pain in the ass. I liked that man very much.

  This book does not pretend to be the final word on Frank Sinatra. Several full-scale biographies have already been written, each with its attendant excellencies; more are sure to follow. But there were aspects of this man that should be remembered and honored. In Sinatra’s time, his fame as a singer spread from his own country to the world. His turbulent personality, often shadowed by notoriety, seemed inseparable from the style and originality of his art and gave him an essential place on the public stage of the American century. Now Sinatra is gone, taking with him all his anger, cruelty, generosity, and personal style. The music remains. In times to come, that music will continue to matter, whatever happens to our evolving popular culture. The world of my grandchildren will not listen to Sinatra in the way four generations of Americans have listened to him. But high art always survives. Long after his death, Charlie Parker still plays his version of the urban blues. Billie Holiday still whispers her anguish. Mozart still erupts in joy. Every day, in cities and towns all over the planet, someone discovers them for the first time and finds in their art that mysterious quality that makes the listener more human. In their work all great artists help transcend the solitude of individuals; they relieve the ache of loneliness; they supply a partial response to the urging of writer E. M. Forster: “Only connect.” In their ultimate triumph over the banality of death, such artists continue to matter. So will Frank Sinatra.

  HE HAD COME A LONG WAY TO THIS BLUE LAWN AND HIS DREAM MUST HAVE SEEMED SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD HARDLY FAIL TO GRASP IT. HE DID NOT KNOW THAT IT WAS ALREADY BEHIND HIM, SOMEWHERE BACK IN THAT VAST OBSCURITY BEYOND THE CITY, WHERE THE DARK FIELDS OF THE REPUBLIC ROLLED ON UNDER THE NIGHT.

  –F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

  I’M FOR WHATEVER GETS YOU THROUGH THE NIGHT.

  –FRANK SINATRA

  1

  IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS

  THIS WAS ON A NEW YORK midnight in 1970. A hard spring rain had emptied Third Avenue, and neon lights scribbled garishly across the glistening black asphalt. From the front window of P. J. Clarke’s saloon, you could see a few taxis cruising slowly among the spokes of ruined umbrellas and a trash basket lying on its side, its contents turning to pulp. Across the street, two old rummies huddled in the doorway of an antique store.

  On this night in the rain-drowned city, we were safe and dry at an oak table in the back room of the saloon. Clarke’s was, and remains, a place out of another time, all burnished wood and chased mirrors, Irish flags and browning photographs of prizefighters. A few aging men at the long, bright bar could gaze out the windows and still see the Third Avenue El, gone since 1955, or the Irish tenements that were smashed into rubble and replaced with steel-and-glass office buildings. They were each drinking alone and looked as if they remembered other nights too, evoked by the music of the jukebox.

  What good is the scheming, the planning and dreaming,

  That comes with each new love affair …

  The man singing for the lonesome men at the bar was at our table. Or more precisely, we were at his table. Anytime Frank Sinatra sat down at a table, it became his table. On this night he was in New York for a concert and he was in good spirits. To begin with, the hands of the clock had passed twelve, and he was in a large city, specifically the hard, wounded metropolis of New York. For decades now, Sinatra had defined the glamour of the urban night. It was both a time and a place; to inhabit the night, to be one of its restless creatures, was a small act of defiance, a shared declaration of freedom, a refusal to play by all those conventional rules that insisted on men and women rising at seven in the morning, leaving for work at eight, and falling exhausted into bed at ten o’clock that night. In his music, Sinatra gave voice to all those who believed that the most intense living begins at midnight: show people, bartenders, and sporting women; gamblers, detectives, and gangsters; small winners and big losers; artists and newspapermen. If you loved someone who did not love you back, you could always walk into a saloon, put your money on the bar, and listen to Sinatra.

  Here in one of the late-night places of an all-night city, Sinatra was wearing a dark suit, a perfectly knotted red tie, a pale blue shirt, silver cuff links, and was drinking Jack Daniel’s. He was still lean then. The famous face remained an arrangement of knobs and planes that didn’t assemble into any conventional version of masculine handsomeness but had an enormous vitality; it was a face that defeated painters and seduced photographers. His eyes were bright and blue (although nobody had yet called him Old Blue Eyes), and the mouth was mobile and expressive. He had a wonderful smile. The voice, of course, was a whiskey-and-cigarettes baritone.

  He sat with his back against the wall in the muted light of the room and seemed to ignore his own voice on the jukebox. He was facing Danny Lavezzo, who ran Clarke’s; William B. Williams, the disc jockey who had christened Sinatra “the Chairman of the Board”; Jilly Bizzo, who ran a saloon across town and had been one of Sinatra’s best friends for more than twenty years; two young women whose faces were too perfect; and the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. The table was crowded with glasses, ashtrays, bowls of peanuts and pretzels. Only Cannon sipped coffee. There were about eight other people at smaller tables, and you could see the rain racing down one of the small side windows. Lavezzo made certain the other customers were kept at a distance by seating them as far from Sinatra’s table as possible without handing them umbrellas. The sound of “When Your Lover Has Gone” made C
annon turn his head toward the jukebox.

  “That’s the saddest goddamned song ever written,” he said.

  “It’s right up there,” Sinatra said, shaking his head and lighting an unfiltered Camel with a heavy silver lighter.

  “You know where it’s from?” Cannon said. “It’s from a terrible movie called Blonde Crazy. Cagney and Joanie. 1931.”

  “Joanie who?” said Jilly Rizzo, his bad eye gleaming. “Crawford?”

  “Blondell, dummy,” Sinatra said. “Joan Blondell. Cannon used to go with her.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Rizzo said. “You went with Joan Blondell? A busted-down sportswriter went out with Joan Blondell?”

  “He didn’t always look this bad,” Sinatra said. Cannon smiled in an embarrassed way. He was a small man with a long, pudgy Irish face and horn-rimmed glasses.

  “It was a long time ago,” Cannon said. He looked relieved when the song ended, but its lonesome mood seemed to stain the air around him.

  Rizzo turned to one of the young women. “You ever hear of Joan Blondell?”

  The young woman shrugged. No.

  “What about Cagney? You know, James Cagney?”

  “I know him,” said the second woman brightly. “He was the guy, the captain, in that picture with Henry Fonda, right? About the navy?”

  “You win a dish of strawberries, sweetheart,” Sinatra said.

  “I don’t like strawberries,” she said in a baffled way. Sinatra laughed out loud. So did the rest of us, but it wasn’t until I was home, hours later, that I realized Sinatra had mixed up the strawberries scene from The Caine Mutiny with the potted palm scene from Mister Roberts. We’d all laughed with him, but the young woman was right to be baffled.

  After a while Rizzo got up to take the two young women to a taxi while the conversation roamed in other directions. Somehow it arrived at writers. Was Ernest Hemingway greater than F. Scott Fitzgerald? Cannon insisted on the superiority of Hemingway. Sinatra preferred Fitzgerald.