Pete Hamill - Why Sinatra Matters

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In this unique homage to an American icon, journalist and award-winning author Pete Hamill evokes the essence of Sinatra-examining his art and his legend from the inside, as only a friend of many years could do. Shaped by Prohibition, the Depression, and war, Francis Albert Sinatra became the troubadour of urban loneliness. With his songs, he enabled millions of others to tell their own stories, providing an entire generation with a sense of tradition and pride belonging distinctly to them.
From Publishers Weekly Like a musical Elements of Style, Hamill’s slim meditation on Frank Sinatra is confident, smart and seamless. Since (and immediately before) Sinatra’s death in May 1998, countless tributes have been made to the singer; Hamill (A Drinking Life) seems to be writing to set the record straight, for he knew Sinatra and, before that, knew the singer’s music. But Hamill doesn’t fawn over Sinatra the way other, younger writers have recently done. Rather, he elegantly tells the Sinatra story, dwelling on the singer’s best recordings, dismissing “the Rat Pack, the swagger, the arrogance, the growing fortune, the courtiers,” because in the end, he writes, they are “of little relevance.” What matters, according to Hamill, is the music, chiefly that of Sinatra’s early mature years, when the singer released his celebrated albums on the Capitol label. Where a starry-eyed author might vaguely praise these albums for their pathos and vulnerability, Hamill points out that, before the singer’s Capitol comeback years, Sinatra’s fans were almost exclusively young women. The stubborn, post-Ava Gardner heartache of Sinatra’s later records, however, with their lack of self-pity, gained Sinatra a chiefly male audience. Of this, perhaps the singer’s greatest musical period, Hamill writes that Sinatra “perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy… Before him, that archetype did not exist in American popular culture.” That may be true, but Hamill sets his book apart from the many others about Old Blue Eyes by tempering intelligent superlatives with the retelling of touching, revelatory moments the two men shared. Hamill’s is a definitive introduction to Sinatra’s work.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal The barrage of recent Frank Sinatra books has resulted in his being the most written-about celebrity in the world after Monroe and Presley. Hamill’s slim essay is distinguished from other recent works by its objective focus on the components of the late singer’s enduring musical legacy. Veteran writer Hamill (e.g., A Drinking Life, LJ 1/94) is comfortable in the New York City milieu of late nights, saloons, and prizefighters, and he has captured the essence of Sinatra, who created something that was not there before he arrived: an urban American voice. The book’s strength is its insight into and evocation of the Italian American immigrant experience that had such a strong influence on Sinatra. Minor weaknesses are an oversimplified examination of prejudice and an underdeveloped 1974 vignette about Ava Gardner that fails to make its point. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Bruce Henson, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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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 Cannon 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.

“That Great Gatsby , come on, Jimmy, Hemingway couldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, but he could do a lot of other things,” Cannon said. “And Fitzgerald could only do that one thing.”

Rizzo returned and sat down. Cannon turned to me, the only other writer at the table: “What do you think?”

I repeated something Dizzy Gillespie once told me in an interview: “The professional is the guy that can do it twice.”

“Wow, is that true,” Sinatra said. “About everything . That’s a great line.”

“Yeah, and it’s a vote for Hemingway,” Cannon said. On the jukebox, Sinatra was singing “You Make Me Feel So Young.”

“What about you, Jilly? Hemingway or Fitzgerald?”

“Hey, no contest,” Jilly said, deadpan. “Ella all the way.”

They all laughed, and then the talk shifted, and “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me” was on the juke, and the waiter brought another round and clean ashtrays. Someone wanted to know the name of the worst living American. The nominations flowed and ebbed: Walter O’Malley, Mitch Miller, Richard Nixon (“Come on, lay off,” said Sinatra, who had supported Nixon over George McGovern). But then another name was offered and in a rush of enthusiasm, the table unanimously voted the title of worst living American to the boxer Jake La Motta.

“He dumped the fight to Billy Fox, and never told his father , who bet his life savings on Jake,” Sinatra said. “Lower than whale shit.”

And from La Motta, they moved seamlessly to Sugar Ray Robinson, another creature of the New York night. During the Depression Robinson had come down from Harlem to dance for pennies in the doorways of Times Square. Then he had become a fighter of extraordinary grace and power. He had owned a couple of apartment houses in Harlem, a lavender Cadillac, a bar called Sugar Ray’s, where women arrived each night to find him, and then lost them all. An accountant took all of Robinson’s money to the racetrack, and the fighter had to go back to a sport he no longer loved. Still, he had fought La Motta six times, winning five, including a thirteenth-round knockout that gave him the middleweight championship in a brutal fight in Chicago in 1951. In the fighter’s great days, Cannon and Robinson had been close; we didn’t know it that night, but Sinatra had privately arranged to support Robinson after the old champion moved to California. They all knew him.

“He used to come in here all the time,” Lavezzo said. “He was some beautiful-looking guy.” I had seen Robinson’s fierce 1957 war with Carmen Basilio, watched him a lot in the old Stillman’s Gym, and had covered Robinson’s sad last fight, a loss to Joey Archer in 1965 when Sugar Ray was forty-four. Sinatra remembered seeing Robinson knock out Jackie Wilson in Los Angeles in 1947. “You couldn’t believe it,” he said. “The hand speed, the power, the fucking elegance .” Jilly saw him decision Kid Gavilan in New York in 1948, and Williams and Lavezzo recalled specific rounds from the two fights with Basilio and the one-punch knockout of Gene Fullmer in the spring of ’57. They all talked with a kind of reverence.

“What was it the guy said?” Sinatra said. “There was Ray Robinson, and then there was the top ten.”

There was something else floating around in the talk about Robinson. They were all from the same generation, and Robinson symbolized that generation in the same way that Sinatra did. Nobody said so at the table in Clarke’s, but they knew it. If Sinatra had not been there (for ass-kissing was not part of the style), someone would have said, There’s Sinatra, and then there’s the top ten.

Suddenly, Sinatra rose from his seat, excusing himself. A few other patrons looked at him. A woman in her forties widened her eyes and whispered across the table to her man, who turned for a glance. Lavezzo tensed; Clarke’s was not the sort of place that encouraged customers to ask for autographs. From the speakers, Sinatra’s exuberant voice was now singing “I’ve Got the World on a String.” He was telling the world that he could make the rain go.

“Hey, Danny, don’t you have anything on the jukebox besides this dago kid?” Sinatra said to Lavezzo. The saloonkeeper laughed and got up too. Sinatra led the way into a narrow passageway that opened into the front room. A large unsmiling man rose from a small table and followed them. In Clarke’s, Sinatra didn’t need directions to get to the john.

“He looks good, Jilly,” Cannon said.

“Better than ever,” Jilly said.

“I wish he’d give up the goddamned Camels,” Williams said.

“That’s like asking him to give up broads,” Jilly said.

“He should give up marrying broads,” said Cannon, a lifelong bachelor.

There was another voice on the jukebox now. Billie Holiday. She was singing “Mean to Me” in the scraped, hurt voice of her last years. From the Ray Ellis album with strings. Lady in Satin .

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