Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Yes, sir?” the maitre d’ said.

“Mr. Sinatra,” I said. “He’s expecting me.”

He turned nervously, his eyes moving past the empty tables at the booths in the left-hand corner against the wall. Jilly Rizzo looked up from a booth and nodded, and I was let through. “ ‘Ey, Petey babe,” Jilly said, coming around a table with his right hand out. Jilly has one glass eye, which gives him a perpetually blurry look. “Hey, Frank,” he said, “look who’s here.”

“Hey, Peter, grab a seat!” Sinatra said brightly, half rising from the booth and shaking hands. He moved clumsily, a newly heavy man who hadn’t learned yet to carry the extra weight with grace; he seemed swollen, rather than sleek. But the Sinatra face was — and is — an extraordinary assemblage. He has never been conventionally handsome: There are no clean planes, too many knobs of bone, scars from the forceps delivery he endured at birth. But the smile is open, easy, insouciant. And his blue eyes are the true focal point of the face. In the brief time I’d known him, I’d seen the eyes so disarmingly open that you felt you could peer all the way through them into every secret recess of the man; at other times they were cloudy with indifference, and when chilled by anger or resentment, they could become as opaque as cold-rolled steel.

“You eat yet?” he asked. “Well, then have a drink.”

As always, there was a group with him, squashed into the worn Leatherette booths or on chairs against tables. They had the back room to themselves and were eating chop suey and watching a Jets game on a TV set. Sinatra introduced Pat Henry, the comic who sometimes opens for him; Roone Arledge of ABC; Don Costa, one of Sinatra’s favorite arrangers; a few other men; and some young women. Sinatra was with a thin blond model in a black dress. He didn’t introduce her.

The conversation stopped for the introductions, then started again. Sinatra leaned over, his eyes shifting to the TV screen, where Joe Namath was being shoved around.

“I don’t get this team,” he said. “They got the best arm in football and they won’t give him any protection. Ah, shit!” Namath was on his back and getting up very slowly. “Oh, man. That ain’t right!”

They cut to a commercial, and Sinatra lit a Marlboro and sipped a vodka. His eyes drifted to the bar. “Jesus, there’s about 43 indictments right at the bar,” he said loudly.

“Present company excluded,” Pat Henry said, and everybody laughed.

“It better be,” Sinatra said, and they all laughed again. The blonde smiled in a chilly way. The game was back on again, and Sinatra stared at the TV set but wasn’t really watching the game. Then the game ended, and Jilly switched off the set. There was more talk and more drinking, and slowly the others began to leave.

“Hell, let’s go,” Sinatra said. He said something to Jilly, and then he and the blonde and I walked out. A photographer and a middle-aged autograph freak were waiting under the tattered awning.

“Do you mind, Mr. Sinatra?” the photographer asked.

“No, go ahead,” he said. The flashbulbs popped. The blonde smiled. So did Sinatra. “Thanks for asking.”

Then he signed the woman’s autograph book. She had skin like grimy ivory, and sad brown eyes. “Thanks, dear,” Sinatra said. We all got into the waiting limousine and drove down the rainy street, heading east.

“What do you think they do with those autographs?” he said. “Sell them? To who? Trade them? For what? How does it go? Two Elvis Presleys for one Frank Sinatra? Two Frank Sinatras for one Paul McCartney? I don’t get it. I never did.”

We drove awhile in silence. Then the chauffeur turned right on a street in the Sixties and pulled over to the curb. Sinatra and the blonde got out. He took her into the brightly lit vestibule. He waited for her to find a key, tapped her lightly on the elbow, and came back to the limo.

“You have to go home?”

“No.”

He leaned forward to the driver. “Just drive around awhile.”

“Yes sir.”

And so for more than an hour, on this rainy night in New York, we drove around the empty streets. Sinatra talked about Lennon and McCartney as songwriters (“That ‘Yesterday’ is the best song written in 30 years”) and George Harrison (“His ‘Something’ is a beauty”), prizefighters (“Sugar Ray was the best I ever saw”) and writers (“Murray Kempton is the best, isn’t he? And I always loved Jimmy Cannon”). It wasn’t an interview; Frank Sinatra just wanted to talk, in a city far from the bright scorched exile of Palm Springs.

“It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”

“Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”

“And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”

He laughed and settled back. We were crossing 86th Street now, heading for the park.

“You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” Sinatra said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This was, of course, the Watergate winter; the year before, Sinatra sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon. “You like people, and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling again, “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”

“Every day I know less,” I said.

“Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is you get older and you know less.”

After a while, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf, where Sinatra has an apartment. He told the driver to take me home.

“Stay in touch,” he said, and got out, walking fast, his head down, his step jaunty, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. I remember thinking that it was a desperately lonely life for a man who was a legend.

At 64, Francis Albert Sinatra is one of that handful of Americans whose deaths would certainly unleash a river of tearful prose and much genuine grief. He has worked at his trade for almost half a century and goes on as if nothing at all had changed. He is currently in New York making his first feature film in ten years, The First Deadly Sin. His first new studio album in five years is in the record stores, a three-record set called Trilogy, and despite one astonishing lapse in taste (a self-aggrandizing “musical fantasy” written by banality master Gordon Jenkins), it reveals that what Sinatra calls “my reed” is in better shape than it has been in since the 1960s. In concert halls and casinos he packs in the fans, and the intensity of their embrace remains scary. But his work and its public acceptance are now almost incidental to his stature. Frank Sinatra, from Hoboken, New Jersey, has forced his presence into American social history; when the story of how Americans in this century played, dreamed, hoped, and loved is told, Frank Sinatra cannot be left out. He is more than a mere singer or actor. He is a legend. And the legend lives.

The legend has its own symmetries. Sinatra can be unbelievably generous and brutally vicious. He can display the grace and manners of a cultured man and turn suddenly into a vulgar two-bit comic. He can offer George Raft a blank check “up to one million dollars” to pay taxes owed to the IRS; he can then rage against one of his most important boosters, WNEW disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, and help force him off the air. In his time, he has been a loyal Democrat and a shill for Richard Nixon; a defender of underdogs everywhere and then a spokesman for the Establishment; a man who fought racism in the music business and then became capable of tasteless jokes (“The Polacks are deboning the colored people,” he said on the stage of Caesars Palace in 1974, “and using them for wet suits”). He has given magical performances and shoddy ones. He has treated women with elegance, sensitivity, and charm, and then, in Lauren Bacall’s phrase, “dropped the curtain” on them in the most callous way. He acts like royalty and is frequently treated that way, but he also comes on too often like a cheap hood. He is a good guy-bad guy, tough-tender, Jekyll-Hyde.