Pete Hamill - Why Sinatra Matters

“The New York guys are different,” he said. “Maybe because there’s so much else going on around them, they don’t have to cover me . Ah, shit, I like their company. It’s as simple as that.”

Maybe it was, but I doubt it.

IV. Jimmy Cannon, Murray Kempton, and William B. Williams are dead. So are Jilly Rizzo and Sugar Ray Robinson and all those others who once seemed so vividly alive that I could not imagine them leaving the world. Now Sinatra is dead too, and it’s like a thousand people have just left the room.

And yet the tale of Frank Sinatra isn’t only about Clarke’s and Hollywood and Las Vegas; the life he led in such places is part of the tale, but it would be meaningless without the art. Sinatra’s art can be experienced in the 1,307 recordings he made in studios from 1939 to 1995, in the recordings of his concerts, in his videos and movies. In the saloons of the city, you could see what Sinatra had become. But such evenings could never explain the long existential saga of a life entwined with art. He was, in some ways, as elusive and mysterious as Jay Gatsby, not simply to those who knew him but to himself. The keys to the life and the art can only be found somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city.

MANY IMMIGRANTS HAD BROUGHT ON BOARD BALLS OF YARN, LEAVING ONE END OF THE LINE WITH SOMEONE ON LAND. AS THE SHIP SLOWLY CLEARED THE DOCK, THE BALLS UNWOUND AMID THE FAREWELL SHOUTS OF THE WOMEN, THE FLUTTERING OF THE HANDKERCHIEFS, AND THE INFANTS HELD HIGH. AFTER THE YARN RAN OUT, THE LONG STRIPS REMAINED AIRBORNE, SUSTAINED BY THE WIND, LONG AFTER THOSE ON LAND AND THOSE AT SEA HAD LOST SIGHT OF EACH OTHER.

THE LIFE AND CAREER of Frank Sinatra are inseparable from the most powerful of all modern American myths: the saga of immigration. Because he was the son of immigrants, his success thrilled millions who were products of the same rough history. Through the power of his art and his personality, he became one of a very small group that would permanently shift the image of Italian Americans. Many aspects of his character were shaped by that immigrant experience, which often fueled his notorious volatility. More important, it infused his art.

“Of course, it meant something to me to be the son of immigrants,” Sinatra said to me once. “How could it not? How the hell could it not? I grew up for a few years thinking I was just another American kid. Then I discovered at — what? five? six? — I discovered that some people thought I was a dago. A wop. A guinea.” An angry pause. “You know, like I didn’t have a fucking name .” An angrier pause. “That’s why years later, when Harry [James] wanted me to change my name, I said no way, baby. The name is Sinatra. Frank fucking Sinatra.”

He grew up in a time when the wounds caused by nativism and anti-Italian bigotry were still raw. Those wounds, and the scar tissue they left behind, affected the way millions of Italian Americans lived, what they talked about, even how they chose to read the newspapers. In the years of his childhood, Sinatra was no exception.

“Growing up, I would hear the stories,” he said to me once. “Things that happened, because you were Italian. … I don’t mean it was the only thing people talked about. That would be a lie. But the stories were there. The warnings, the prejudice. You heard about it at home, in the barbershop, on the corner. You never heard about it in school. But it was there. Later, I heard the same kinds of things from my Jewish friends, how they learned about the ways they could get in trouble. Always the same old shit.”

The stories were about insults, exploitation, worse. Part of the trouble was caused by sheer numbers. From 1880 to the beginning of World War I, more than 24 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to America. About 4.5 million were Italians, 80 percent of them fleeing the exhausted hills and emptying villages of II Mezzogiorno, the neglected provinces of southern Italy and Sicily. Many thousands went to Brazil. Another million journeyed to Argentina and permanently transformed the character of that nation. The vast majority came to the United States. At first, the more adventurous Italians moved west, helping build thousands of miles of railroad tracks, finding jobs as fishermen on the sunny coasts of California or developing that state’s lush vineyards. Most settled in cities.

“I read a book once about how the Irish when they came to America never wanted to be farmers again,” Sinatra said. “I guess if you work on a farm and everything dies in the ground, you don’t ever trust the ground again. The Italians were like that too.”

Rural Italian and Irish immigrants shared that common grievance against the Old Country: the exhausted or poisoned land had failed them and, in a way, betrayed their faith and prayers; in the New World, they sought the solace of cities. Cement was better than hunger; a job and a lock on the door provided the only true safety. The Jews, haunted by the brutal realities of recurrent pogroms, or disenfranchised by a crippling, pervasive anti-Semitism, were drawn by the even brighter promise of freedom; no matter how terrible life might be in the slums of the Lower East Side, the Cossacks would not arrive at dawn with their sabers drawn. The Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants shared a suspicion of government and the police that helped form the style of the American cities where they settled. Their children were touched, in various degrees, by their Old Country lore and their nostalgias. Many of Frank Sinatra’s attitudes came from that mixture.

But in the last years of the nineteenth century, rural Italians faced some special problems in urban America, burdens that did not afflict the Irish and the Jews in the same way. Even in the Italian language, too many immigrants could not read or write. Depending upon the year, between 50 and 70 percent of the new arrivals were illiterate. This was a severe handicap in the booming, more complex cities of the United States and forced many into manual labor or trades that did not demand book learning. Four thousand Italian immigrants found work building the New York subways. Others labored in the building trades, helping erect the soaring monuments of twentieth-century New York. Many worked as barbers or seamstresses, as blacksmiths or mechanics or stone-masons. Some were chefs or bakers. Others were fruit and vegetable peddlers, bootblacks, or shoemakers. A few created an instant stereotype: the organ grinder. These small mustached men moved through many neighborhoods, equipped with hand organs, an occasional monkey, and a cup for coins. For most people the organ grinder was a passing amusement, singing “O Sole Mio” into the humid air of a Saturday morning; for many Italian Americans, the organ grinder was a humiliation, a beggar with a monkey and a voice.

Most of the time, the Italians did their work with silent courage and little public complaint. If you came from a place where there were never enough jobs, work itself was a kind of triumph. For those immigrants, there was no such thing as a meaningless job; the job itself was the meaning.

“They did whatever the hell they had to do to put food on the table,” Sinatra said to me once. “They took any kind of dumb job, and you know why? So their kids wouldn’t have to do those jobs. So you wouldn’t have to do it. So I wouldn’t have to do it. They were some kind of people.”