IN 1997, A man accused of threatening to kill a former lover seemed to conduct himself according to the lyrics of Sinatra songs. Interviewed by a journalist in a diner, he sang variations on “My Way” to summarize his situation. On his former lover’s answering machine he sang “This Love of Mine” in an attempt to reconcile. (Did he know that Sinatra himself had composed the lyrics to “This Love of Mine”?)
In season seven of Mad Men, the penultimate episode is set in June 1969. Peggy and Don are having a heart-to-heart about an ad she is supposed to create. Suddenly the familiar opening chords of “My Way” are heard. You hear it everywhere, she murmurs. It’s on everybody’s radio. And Peggy and Don dance as Sinatra sings. It’s a way of telling time, a marker of the late sixties, proof of the show’s verisimilitude. But it is also an important thematic marker: from that moment on, Peggy is hoping she will get to do things her way.
There isn’t a made man anywhere who doesn’t hold a special place in his heart for “My Way.” Recorded on December 30, 1968, Sinatra’s version sold well in the United States and possibly even better in the United Kingdom, where it spent seventy-five weeks in the top forty list.
In the Philippines, “My Way” seems to be the populace’s karaoke song of choice, but you’d be a fool to sing it, because if you don’t do it justice, you might pay for the failure with your life. There is a subcategory of Filipino crime dubbed the “‘My Way’ Killings.” In 2010, the New York Times reported that the song had precipitated the deaths of at least six persons in karaoke bars “in the past decade.” Why? Butch Albarracin, the owner of Manila’s Center for Pop, an influential singing school, speculated that the macho lyrics lead to fights. Roland B. Tolentino, a professor at the University of the Philippines, pointed out that it “is a very violent society” and insists that “karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken”—when somebody hogs the microphone, for example, or kills a much-loved tune because of a tin ear or a weak voice. The professor conceded, however, that the “triumphalist” qualities of “My Way” may play a part in the karaoke killings.*
“My Way” is not every Sinatra fan’s favorite song. Rugged individualism is typically celebrated in the breach, not the observance, and this is rugged individualism squared. We protect ourselves with a coat of irony from our deepest, most passionate, impulses, and some cringe at the singer’s shameless self-coronation. I understand these objections and recoil from “making it” narratives, but am sentimental enough that the song brought tears to my eyes on the day he died and again one day when I drove across the George Washington Bridge into the city and a CD of The Best of the Reprise Years was playing in the car. The quiet coda—“Yes, it was my . . . way”—is calculated to have that effect. This is Sinatra’s song, ego, life. Who else could get away with such blatant self-mythologizing? No one else can sing “My Way” except in direct reference to Sinatra’s treatment. This is true, for instance, of “Mein vayg” (Yiddish lyrics by Herman Yablokoff), the Barry Sisters’ cover on their 1973 album Our Way, and even the punk-rock version Sid Vicious did in 1978, parts of which you can hear in the closing credits of Goodfellas, as well as in a 2014 commercial for the Acura TLX.
So, then, here is yet another role for the born role-player to play, another episode in the life of this self-made nonconformist. He has been the boy wonder, almost terminally cute. He is the gum-chewing good buddy, and then suddenly he is the leader of the pack, the king rat. He has been the loner, the lover, the loser, three L-nouns that differ by only one letter. He is the playboy of The Tender Trap, the entertainer who overcomes adversity in The Joker Is Wild. He is the winking seducer on album covers: Come Fly with Me, Come Dance with Me. He is a flamboyant drunk, capable of outrageous behavior. Sometimes he goes too far, like the September night in 1967 when he threw an intolerable fit at the Sands in Las Vegas and got socked in the jaw by casino manager Carl Cohen and lost the caps off two front teeth. Now he is the gangster hero of the opera. “There were times, I guess you knew / when I bit off more than I could chew”—lines as if written for Sinatra, as if they applied to him and only he could do them justice.
You probably knew that the lyrics for “My Way” were written by Paul Anka. But perhaps you didn’t know that the music is from a French song called “Comme d’habitude” (meaning “as usual”) written by Claude François and Jacques Revaux in 1967. Anka, on holiday in the South of France, heard the former sing it and immediately decided to acquire the rights. After a dinner with Sinatra and cronies at which Frank said he was thinking of getting out of the business, Anka went to his IBM Selectric and asked himself, “If Frank were writing this, what would he say?” He tried to mimic the way Sinatra talked. “I’d never before written something so chauvinistic, narcissistic, in-your-face and grandiose,” Anka recalls in his autobiography. “Everything in that song was Sinatra.” Anka says he finished the song at five in the morning and immediately phoned Sinatra at the Las Vegas bar where he knew the singer would be. After he played the song, Sinatra said, “That’s kooky, kid. We’re going in.” Anka: “Coming from Mr. Cool, that meant he was ecstatic.”