The Frank Sinatra we remember

Frank Sinatra records the song “Close to You” in 1956. (Frank Sinatra Enterprises/Courtesy of Capitol Photo Archives)



By George F. Will Opinion writer December 9

In today’s culture of hyperbole, born of desperate attempts to be noticed amid the Niagara of Internet and other outpourings, the label “genius” is affixed promiscuously to evanescent popular entertainers, fungible corporate chief executives and other perishable phenomena. But it almost fits the saloon singer — his preferred description of himself — who was born 100 years ago, on Dec. 12, 1915, in Hoboken, N.J.

It is, however, more precise and, in a way, more flattering to say that Frank Sinatra should be celebrated for his craftsmanship. Of geniuses, we have, it seems, a steady stream. Actual craftsmen are rarer and more useful because they are exemplary for anyone with a craft, be it surgery or carpentry. Sinatra was many things, some of them — libertine, bully, gangster groupie — regrettable. But he unquestionably was the greatest singer of American songs.

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming.

How should an artist’s character and private life condition our appreciation of his or her art? How, say, should knowledge of T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism condition one’s admiration for his poetry? With Sinatra, tune out the public personality and listen to his music as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan and Oscar Peterson did. They all, according to the culture critic Terry Teachout, named Sinatra their most admired singer.

For decades he was, Teachout says, “the fixed star in the crowded sky of American popular culture.” It speaks well of Sinatra, and reveals the prickly pride that sometimes made him volcanic, that he refused to adopt a less Italian name when ethnicity was problematic in the waning days of America’s Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. Anthony Dominick Benedetto (Tony Bennett) and Dino Paul Crocetti (Dean Martin) adjusted. Sinatra was an unadjusted man.

In spite of the spectacular vulgarity of Sinatra’s choices of friends and fun, he bequeathed to postwar America a sense of style, even male elegance. His Las Vegas cavorting with “The Rat Pack” (Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford) was an embarrassing manifestation of 1950s arrested-development masculinity — adolescence forever. But never mind his toupees and elevator shoes, his loutish flunkies and violent bodyguards, his many awful movies and public brawls, his pimping for Camelot. And never mind that the comedian Shecky Greene was not altogether joking when he said: “Sinatra saved my life in 1967. Five guys were beating me up, and I heard Frank say, ‘That’s enough.’ ”



Never mind the tawdriness so abundantly reported in the recently published second volume of James Kaplan’s 1,700-page biography (“ Sinatra: The Chairman”). But you must remember this: In a recording studio, Sinatra, who could not read music, was a meticulous collaborator with great musicians — including the Hollywood String Quartet — and arrangers.

For Sinatra, before a song was music, it was words alone. He studied lyrics, internalized them, then sang, making music from poems. His good fortune was that he had one of the nation’s cultural treasures, the Great American Songbook, to interpret. It was the good fortune of that book’s authors — Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer and many others — that Sinatra came along to remind some Americans and inform others of that book’s existence.

This is one kind of popular music:

“I can’t get no satisfaction,

I can’t get no girl reaction”

This is Sinatra’s kind:

“The summer wind came blowin’ in from across the sea

It lingered there, to touch your hair and walk with me

All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand

Two sweethearts and the summer wind

Like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin’ by

The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky

Then softer than a piper man, one day it called to you

I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind

The autumn wind, and the winter winds, they have come and gone

And still the days, those lonely days, they go on and on

And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end

My fickle friend, the summer wind”

Frequent performing, and too much Jack Daniel’s, and too many unfiltered Camel cigarettes took their toll before he acknowledged this and left the road, much too late. However, his reputation is preserved by the short-term memory loss of a nation that will forever hear the Sinatra of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

Kaplan reports, according to “legend,” that Sinatra’s casket in a Palm Springs-area cemetery contains some Jack Daniel’s and Camels. If so, even in death, Sinatra did it his way.

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra -- his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on -- and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself. We're very pleased to republish it here.

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FRANK SINATRA, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.



John Dominis

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra -- A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel -- only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.