THE FIDELITY TO Sinatra on the part of certain disc jockeys—William B. Williams, Sid Mark, Jonathan Schwartz—is legendary. The last named, the son of composer Arthur Schwartz, has been a passionate Sinatra aficionado from the time he heard “The Birth of the Blues” as a teenager in the early 1950s. Some years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, he played a rare recording of Sinatra singing “Soliloquy” from Carousel. It’s an unusually long, musically varied tearjerker of a song in which the character, a ne’er-do-well carnival barker, imagines that the baby his wife is carrying will be a boy, enjoys the thought, then realizes that it may be a girl and that “you can have fun with a son but you’ve got to be a father to a girl,” and vows to make or steal the money needed for the child’s upbringing, or die trying. Sinatra gives it all he has. It’s his birthday, December 12, 2005. Frank has been dead now for nine years. The song ends: “Or die.” There ensues a hush. Then Jonathan says, “I know you’re listening,” and I get the strong feeling that he is talking not to the radio audience but to Sinatra.
“If you start with the fact that Frank is crazy, everything else falls into place,” Schwartz maintains. He may be right, but I prefer Pete Hamill’s way of saying the same thing—that with Sinatra you have to remember that never, from the time he was twenty-seven, did he know a day in which he was just another guy rather than the most famous voice of his generation, who was used to having special entrances and exits, bodyguards, an entourage.