Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Being an eighteen-karat manic-depressive,” Sinatra said once, “I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”

Over the years, those wildly fluctuating emotions became a basic component of the Sinatra legend — accepted, even demanded by his audience. That audience is now largely eastern, urban, and aging, with New York at the heart of the myth. The hard-core fans are Depression kids who matured in World War II, or part of the fifties generation, who saw him as a role model. In some critical way, Sinatra validates their lives — as individuals. He sings to them, and for them, one at a time. These Americans were transformed by the Depression and the war into unwilling members of groups — “the masses,” or “the poor,” or “the infantry” — and their popular music was dominated by the big bands. Sinatra was the first star to step out of the tightly controlled ensembles of the white swing bands to work on his own. Yes, he was 4-F (punctured eardrum), but the overwhelming majority of Americans experienced World War II at home, and the 1940s Sinatra was a reminder that Americans were single human beings, not just the masses, the poor, or the infantry. Later, in the 1960s, when crowds once again shoved individuals off the stage of history, he was submerged by musical groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones and in 1971 even went into a brief retirement. He came back later in the decade, when individual values were again dominant.

“I’ve seen them come and go, but Frank is still the king,” a New Jersey grandmother said at one of Sinatra’s weekend performances at Resorts International in Atlantic City. “He just goes on and on, and he’s wonderful.”

Indeed, Sinatra’s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored, their values demeaned, their musical tastes ignored and sneered at. They don’t care that Sinatra got fat; so did they. They don’t care that Sinatra moved from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan; many of them did the same thing, for the same basic reason: resentment at being ignored by the Democratic party. They had overcome poverty and survived two wars; they had educated their children and given them better lives; and sometimes even their children didn’t care. But it should never be forgotten that Frank Sinatra was the original working-class hero. Mick Jagger’s fans bought records with their allowances; Sinatra’s people bought them out of wages.

“There’s just not enough of Frank’s people around anymore to make him a monster record seller,” says one Warner Communications executive. “Sinatra is a star. But he’s not Fleetwood Mac. He’s not Pink Floyd.”

Sinatra has never been a big single seller (one gold record — more than a million sales — to twenty for the Beatles), but his albums continue to sell steadily. One reason: Most radio stations don’t play Sinatra, so that younger listeners never get to hear him and go on to buy his records. In New York, only WNEW-AM and WYNY-FM play Sinatra with any frequency. As a movie star, he had faded badly before vanishing completely with the lamentable Dirty Dingus Magee in 1970. Part of this could be blamed directly on Sinatra, because his insistence on one or two takes had led to careless, even shoddy productions. On his own, he was also not a strong TV performer; he needed Elvis Presley, or Bing Crosby, to get big ratings. Yet Sinatra remains a major star in the minds of most Americans, even those who despise him.

“What Sinatra has is beyond talent,” director Billy Wilder once said. “It’s some sort of magnetism that goes in higher revolutions than that of anybody else, anybody in the whole of show business. Wherever Frank is, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town and the action is starting.”

That electricity was in the air of Jilly’s that night in 1974. But its effect is not restricted to a platoon of gumbahs. The other night, Sinatra came into Elaine’s with his wife, Barbara, and another couple. It was after midnight, and Sinatra stayed for a couple of hours, drinking and talking and smoking cigarettes.

I was with some friends at another table. They were people who are good at their jobs and have seen much of the world. But their own natural styles were subtly altered by the addition of Sinatra to the room. They stole glances at him. They were aware that Sinatra’s blue eyes were also checking out the room, and unconsciously they began to gesture too much, playing too hard at being casual, or clarifying themselves in a theatrical way. Somewhere underneath all of this, I’m sure, was a desire for Frank Sinatra to like them.

I knew how that worked, because I’d felt those emotions myself. When I first met Sinatra, I was bumping up against one of the crucial legends of my youth, and sure, I wanted him to like me. Growing up in Brooklyn in the forties and fifties, it was impossible to avoid the figure of Frank Sinatra. He was armored with the tough-guy swagger of the streets, but in the songs he allowed room for tenderness, the sense of loss and abandonment, the acknowledgment of pain. Most of us felt that we had nothing to learn from cowboys or Cary Grant (we were wrong, of course). But thousands of us appropriated the pose of the Tender Tough Guy from Sinatra. We’ve outgrown a lot of things, but there are elements of that pose in all of us to this day, and when we see Sinatra perform, or listen to the records at night, the pose regains all of its old dangerous glamour.

And make no mistake: Danger is at the heart of the legend. At his best, Sinatra is an immensely gifted musical talent, admired by many jazz musicians. He is not a jazz singer, but he comes from the tradition. As a young band vocalist, he learned breath control from trombonist Tommy Dorsey; after work, he studied other singers, among them Louis Armstrong, Lee Wiley, Mabel Mercer, and another performer who became a legend.

“It is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early ’30s, who was and still remains the greatest single musical influence on me,” he wrote once, later telling Daily News columnist Kay Gardella that Lady Day taught him “matters of shading, phrasing, dark tones, light tones and bending notes.” And in the saloons of the time, the young Sinatra learned a great secret of the trade: “The microphone is the singer’s basic instrument, not the voice. You have to learn to play it like it was a saxophone.” As he matured, Sinatra developed a unique white-blues style, supple enough to express the range of his own turbulent emotions. And like the great jazz artists, he took the banal tunes of Tin Pan Alley and transformed them into something personal by the sincerity of his performance; Sinatra actually seemed to believe the words he was singing. But Billy Wilder is correct: The Sinatra aura goes beyond talent and craft. He is not simply a fine popular singer. He emanates power and danger. And the reason is simple: You think he is tangled up with the mob.

“Some things I can’t ever talk about,” he said to me once, when we were discussing the mandatory contents of his book. He laughed and added, “Someone might come knockin’ at my f- door.”

Sinatra is now writing that autobiography and preparing a film about his own life. Alas, neither form seems adequate to the full story; autobiographies are by definition only part of the story, the instinct being to prepare a brief for the defense and give yourself the best lines. And a two-hour movie can only skim the surface of a life that has gone on for six decades. Faulkner says somewhere that the best stories are the ones we are most thoroughly ashamed of; it could be that the best movies are the ones that can’t be photographed. No, Sinatra deserves a novel.