One rainy evening in the winter of 1974, I was home alone when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, looking out at the wet street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century. It was Frank Sinatra.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading a book,” I said.
“Read it tomorrow. We’re at Jilly’s. Come on over.”
He hung up. I put the book down. I didn’t know Sinatra well, but despite all the rotten things I’d read about him, I liked him a lot and was sometimes touched by him. We’d met through Shirley MacLaine, who went back a long time with Sinatra. In 1958 Sinatra put her in Some Came Running, expanded her part to fit her talents, and made her a movie star. When they occasionally met, it was clear to me that Sinatra admired her relentless honesty, loved her in some complicated way, and was, like me, a little afraid of her.
I took a cab to Jilly’s, a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eighth Avenue end of 52nd Street. The long, dark bar was packed with the junior varsity of the mob; of all the Sinatra groupies, they were the most laughable. They were planted at the bar like blue-haired statues, gulping Jack Daniel’s, occasionally glancing into the back room. A maitre d’ in a shiny tuxedo stood beside a red velvet rope that separated the back room from the Junior Apalachin conference at the bar.
“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.
“I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault.”
— Frank Sinatra
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.
“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.
The novelist, some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler, would recognize Sinatra as one of those rare public men who actually cast a shadow. The shadow is the mob, and who can tell what came first, the shadow or the act? A conventional autobiography will talk about the wives: Nancy Barbato, Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and Barbara Marx, one for each adult decade. It might mention, discreetly, all the other love affairs, passionate or glancing: Lana Turner, Juliet Prowse, Lauren Bacall, Kim Novak, Jill St. John, Lady Adele Beatty, Dorothy Provine, and the anonymous brigade of starlets, secretaries, models, stewardesses, and girls from the old neighborhood.
“I loved them all,” Sinatra says now, smiling ruefully, reminding you that he is now a grandfather and all of that was long ago. “I really did.”
But the novelist can come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do. Both would deal with the public career, the rise, fall, rise again of Frank Sinatra. We can see the high school dropout watching Bing Crosby sing from the stage of Loew’s Journal Square in Jersey City in 1933, vowing to become a singer. We can follow him, one of Balzac’s provincial heroes, as he wins an amateur contest and crosses the river to appear for the first time on a New York stage at the Academy of Music (now the Palladium) on 14th Street the following year. The hero then sings with a group called the Hoboken Four on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1935, plays local clubs, begs in the hallways of WNEW for the chance to sing for nothing on live remotes. And of course there will be the familiar story of the job at the Rustic Cabin on Route 9W in 1939, and how Harry James heard him late one night and gave him a job in the big time. And then how Sinatra went to work for Tommy Dorsey and played the Paramount and became a star.
And because this is a story with a hero, it must tell the story of The Fall. The hero hurtles into love with Ava Gardner, and his career becomes a shambles: He loses his voice, his wife, his children; he gets into public fights; he wins the love goddess; he loses her; he hits bottom. And then there is The Great Comeback: He pleads for the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, is paid $8,000, gives a stunning performance, wins the Academy Award, and comes all the way back. He leaves Columbia Records for Capitol, then starts his own company, Reprise, and makes his greatest records. At the same time he consolidates his power in Hollywood, investing his money brilliantly, producing his own films, using power with the instincts of a great politician. These are the years of the private jets, the meetings of the Clan on the stages of Las Vegas, the friendships with Jack Kennedy and other politicians, and the house at the top of Mulholland Drive, where the wounded hero heals his ruined heart with girls and whiskey and friends. It’s a good story. A sentimental education or a cautionary tale.
But as autobiography it is not enough. We must have some understanding of the shadows. In The Godfather Mario Puzo used some of the elements in the singer he called Johnny Fontane; other novels have used Sinatra-like figures in various ways; yet no fictional account has truly defined the man in all of his complexity. We only know that the mob runs through his story like an underground river. He is the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth, and although he has never been indicted or convicted of any mob-connected crime, the connection is part of the legend. And to some extent, Sinatra exploits it. His opening acts feature comedians who tell jokes about Sinatra’s sinister friendships; if you cross Frank, the jokes say, you could end up on a meat hook in a garage. In some circumstances Sinatra laughs at the implications; other times, he explodes into dark furies, accusing his accusers of slander and ethnic racism.
“If my name didn’t end with a vowel,” he said to me once, “I wouldn’t have had all this trouble.”
But the facts indicate that he did know some shady people. He was friendly with Jersey hoodlum Willie Moretti until the syphilitic gangster was shot to death. He was friendly with Joseph “Joe Fisher” Fischetti, traveled with him to Havana in 1947, where he spent time with Lucky Luciano. A nineteen-page Justice Department memorandum prepared in 1962 said that its surveillance placed Sinatra in contact with about ten of the country’s top hoodlums. Some had Sinatra’s unlisted number. He did favors for others.
“I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him, without first investigating his past,” Sinatra said huffily during the Luciano uproar. The same could be said about the scandal over the photograph taken a few years ago with mob boss Carlo Gambino, backstage at the Westchester Premier Theater. More serious questions have now been raised about Sinatra and that same theater.
A federal grand jury is investigating whether Sinatra, his lawyer Mickey Rudin, and Jilly Rizzo took $50,000 under the table during a May 1977 gig there. Court papers filed by prosecutor Nathaniel Akerman said that the possible Sinatra connection arose during the trial of one Louis “Lewie Dome” Pacella, supposedly a friend of Sinatra’s. The court papers state: “The grand jury’s investigation was based in part on evidence introduced at Pacella’s trial, which showed that in addition to Pacella, other individuals close to Frank Sinatra had received monies illegally….” Once again, Sinatra is afloat on that dark underground river.
“Did I know those guys?” he said to me once. “Sure, I knew some of those guys. I spent a lot of time working in saloons. And saloons are not run by the Christian Brothers. There were a lot of guys around, and they came out of Prohibition, and they ran pretty good saloons. I was a kid. I worked in the places that were open. They paid you, and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t meet any Nobel Prize winners in saloons. But if Francis of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons, he would’ye met the same guys. That doesn’t make him part of something. They said hello, you said hello. They came backstage. They thanked you. You offered them a drink. That was it.”
He paused. “And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Most of the guys I knew, or met, are dead.”
One of them was Salvatore Giancana, sometimes known as Momo, or Mooney. A graduate of Joliet prison, he ducked World War II by doing a crazy act for the draft board, which labeled him “a constitutional psychopath.” He rose through the wartime rackets to the leadership of the Chicago mob in the 1950s. During that period he and Sinatra became friends and were seen in various places together. The star-struck Momo later began a long love affair with singer Phyllis McGuire, and the friendship deepened. In 1962 Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis played a special engagement at a Giancana joint called the Villa Venice, northwest of Chicago. When the FBI questioned the performers, Sinatra said he did it for a boyhood friend named Leo Olsen, who fronted the place for Momo. Sammy Davis was more to the point.
“Baby, let me say this,” he told an FBI man. “I got one eye, and that one eye sees a lot of things that my brain tells me I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.”
Sinatra’s friendship with Sam Giancana was most severely tested in 1963, when the Nevada Gaming Control Board charged that the Chicago hoodlum had been a week-long guest at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. His mere presence was enough to revoke the casino’s gambling license, and Sinatra first said he would fight the charge. When Edward A. Olsen, then chairman of the gambling board, said that he didn’t want to talk to Sinatra until he subpoenaed him, Olsen claims Sinatra shouted over the phone, “You subpoena me and you’re going to get a big, fat, f surprise.”
But when the crunch came two weeks later, Sinatra chose not to fight the revocation order. Apparently his friendship with Giancana was more important than his investment in Nevada, and he sold his interests for $3.5 million. In 1975 Giancana was shot to death in the basement of his Chicago home. Phyllis McGuire went to the funeral, but Sinatra didn’t. Sinatra is again trying to get a gambling license in Nevada.
“It’s ridiculous to think Sinatra’s in the mob,” said one New Yorker who has watched gangsters collect around Sinatra for more than 30 years. “He’s too visible. He’s too hot. But he likes them. He thinks they’re funny. In some way he admires them. For him it’s like they were characters in some movie.”
That might be the key. Some people who know Sinatra believe that his attraction to gangsters — and their attraction to him — is sheer romanticism. The year that Sinatra was fifteen, Hollywood released W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar; more than 50 gangster films followed in the next eighteen months. And their view of gangsters was decidedly romantic: The hoodlums weren’t cretins peddling heroin to children; they were Robin Hoods defying the unjust laws of Prohibition. Robert Warshow defined the type in his essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”:
The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world — in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and more brightly lit country — but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.
That is almost a perfect description of Frank Sinatra, who still carries his life in his hands like a placard, or like a club. His novel might be a very simple one indeed: a symmetrical story about life imitating art.
“My son is like me. You cross him, he never forgets.”
— Dolly Sinatra
Somewhere deep within Frank Sinatra, there must still exist a scared little boy. He is standing alone on a street in Hoboken. His parents are nowhere to be seen. His father, Anthony Martin, is probably at the bar he runs when he is not working for the fire department; the father is a blue-eyed Sicilian, close-mouthed, passive, and, in his own way, tough. He once boxed as “Marty O’Brien” in the years when the Irish ran northern New Jersey. The boy’s mother, Natalie, is not around either. The neighbors call her Dolly, and she sometimes works at the bar, which was bought with a loan from her mother, Rosa Garaventi, who runs a grocery store. Dolly Sinatra is also a Democratic ward leader. She has places to go, duties to perform, favors to deny or dispense. She has little time for traditional maternal duties. And besides, she didn’t want a boy anyway.
“I wanted a girl and bought a lot of pink clothes,” she once said. “When Frank was born, I didn’t care. I dressed him in pink anyway. Later, I got my mother to make him Lord Fauntleroy suits.”
Did the other kids laugh at the boy in the Lord Fauntleroy suits? Probably. It was a tough, working-class neighborhood. Working-class. Not poor. His mother, born in Genoa, raised in Hoboken, believed in work and education. When she wasn’t around, the boy was taken care of by his grandmother Garaventi, or by Mrs. Goldberg, who lived on the block. “I’ll never forget that kid,” a neighbor said, “leaning against his grandmother’s front door, staring into space. …”
Later the press agents would try to pass him off as a slum kid. Perhaps the most important thing to know about him is that he was an only child. Of Italian parents. And they spoiled him. From the beginning, the only child had money. He had a charge account at a local department store and a wardrobe so fancy that his friends called him “Slacksey.” He had a secondhand car at fifteen. And in the depths of the Depression, after dropping out of high school, he had the ultimate luxury: a job unloading trucks at the Jersey Observer.
Such things were not enough; the boy also had fancy dreams. And the parents didn’t approve. When he told his mother that he wanted to be a singer, she threw a shoe at him. “In your teens,” he said later, “there’s always someone to spit on your dreams.” Still, the only child got what he wanted; eventually his mother bought him a $65 portable public-address system, complete with loudspeaker and microphone. She thus gave him his musical instrument and his life.
She also gave him some of her values. At home she dominated his father; in the streets she dominated the neighborhood through the uses of Democratic patronage. From adolescence on, Sinatra understood patronage. He could give his friends clothes, passes to Palisades Park, rides in his car, and they could give him friendship and loyalty. Power was all. And that insight lifted him above so many other talented performers of his generation. Vic Damone might have better pipes, Tony Bennett a more certain musical taste, but Sinatra had power.
Power attracts and repels; it functions as aphrodisiac and blackjack. Men of power recognize it in others; Sinatra has spent time with Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Walter Annenberg, Hugh Carey, Ronald Reagan; all wanted his approval, and he wanted, and obtained, theirs. He could raise millions for them at fund raisers; they would always take his calls. And the politicians had a lot of company. On the stage at Caesars Palace, or at an elegant East Side dinner party, Sinatra emanates power. Certainly the dark side of the legend accounts for some of that effect; the myth of the Mafia, after all, is not a myth of evil, but a myth of power.
But talent is essential, too. During the period of The Fall, when he had lost his voice, he panicked; he could accept anything except impotence. Without power he is returned to Monroe Street in Hobo-ken, a scared kid. That kid wants to be accepted by powerful men, so he shakes hands with the men of the mob. But the scared kid also understands loneliness, and he uses that knowledge as the engine of his talent. When he sings a ballad — listen again to “I’m a Fool to Want You,” recorded at the depths of his anguish over Ava Gardner — his voice haunts, explores, suffers. Then, in up-tempo songs, it celebrates, it says that the worst can be put behind you, there is always another woman and another bright morning. The scared kid, easy in the world of women and power, also carries the scars of rejection. His mother was too busy. His father sent him away.
“He told me, ‘Get out of the house and get a job,’ “ he said about his father in a rare TV interview with Bill Boggs a few years ago. “I was shocked. I didn’t know where the hell to go. I remember the moment. We were having breakfast.…This particular morning my father said to me, ‘Why don’t you get out of the house and go out on your own?’ What he really said was ‘Get out.’ And I think the egg was stuck in there about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t swallow it or get rid of it, in any way. My mother, of course, was nearly in tears, but we agreed that it might be a good thing, and then I packed up a small case that I had and came to New York.”
He came to New York, all right, and to all the great cities of the world. The scared kid, the only child, invented someone named Frank Sinatra and it was the greatest role he ever played. In some odd way he has become the role. There is a note of farewell in his recent performances. One gets the sense that he is now building his own mausoleum.
“Dyin’ is a pain in the ass,” he says.
Sinatra could be around for another twenty years, or he could be gone tomorrow, but the jagged symmetries of his legend would remain. For too many years the scared kid lashed out at enemies, real or imagined; he courted his inferiors, intoxicated by their power; he helped people and hurt people; he was willful, self-absorbed, and frivolous. But the talent survived everything, and so did the fear, and when I see him around, I always imagine him as a boy on that Hobo-ken street in his Fauntleroy suit and remember him wandering the streets of New York a half century later, trying to figure out what all of it meant.