RECENTLY A ROOMFUL OF PEOPLE were almost killed by Frank Sinatra.
The scene was a Turkish kabob house in lower Manhattan. This is my neighborhood hang-out; the sort of place where only the employees are permitted to smoke, and the walls are amply coated in grease. I go there because so do a lot of others, Muslim cabbies on their breaks, fashion students from Kyoto, elegant immigrants from Teheran, techno gals in floor-length flares and techno boys in ball caps with bent-down brims.
So there we all were the other day, eating grilled lamb and deep-fried balls of chick peas off styrofoam plates with plastic forks and knives, when suddenly we heard a new sound—a television! Now many of you have already seen televisions, and most of us had too, but the surprise of it in my local kabob-ery was that thus far we’d only heard Turkish radio. So with all due respect we turned to look at it, as tradition tells you to do whenever anyone switches on a television in your presence.
There was a black and white movie. There was a man twitching on a train. There was a woman wearing pearls and a great deal of mascara, hairspray, and lipstick. There was Janet Leigh. And there was Frank Sinatra.
There are moments in a crowd when America makes so much sense, when you want to scream BRING ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUNGRY, AND LET’S ALL DIG FRANK SINATRA. I mean to say, this was one such moment.
So all of us fell silent, as again custom holds is the courteous thing to do when a television plays in a public setting, and through the steam of onions browning in olive oil we watched The Manchurian Candidate.
Now I have always wondered why you can never go into a place and hear my favorite Sinatra albums, his sad albums like No One Cares or In the Wee Small Hours, and instead you only hear songs like “New York, New York.” Well, there’s a reason, and it’s the same reason restaurants have to be careful when his movies are on TV—it’s a possible Health Code Violation: you can die from Sinatra.
In the movie, Sinatra is coming apart. He sets a cigarette between his lips, and it falls into his scotch and water. He looks around, embarrassed. Only Janet Leigh is watching. He tries to light a match, drops it, manages to light one—but his hands shake too badly and the match goes out. He asks Janet Leigh whether she minds if he smokes and their eyes meet and they fall in love. She tells him she doesn’t mind at all, please do. He tries to light one up again, looks like he’s going to vomit, bursts out of his chair, knocks over his drink, and runs.
There in the Turkish kabob house, our mouths were full of babaghannush and hummus and chopped beef and baby lamb . . . but all of us had stopped chewing. We were too struck by what we were seeing: a man we all recognized—that famous widow’s peak, that trim waist, those eyebrows drifting up there on his forehead like lost rainclouds—was on the television about to break down.
People will tell you Sinatra and Elvis Presley were similiar talents in that they both sang and acted well; but the fact is, there’s no picture Elvis ever shot which didn’t obligate him to do songs, whereas Sinatra made most of his movies without singing. In fact, in the movie we were all watching, he was about as far from bursting into song as anybody can be.
Sinatra has tried to flee the woman but she follows him. She is clever and gorgeous. Her eyes are dark as Turkish coffee and her voice like baklava. She asks him where his home is. He can’t look at her. He seems to be thinking: She doesn’t know what she’s doing. His voice catches on every syllable as he tells her he’s in the army. His eyelids flutter. He sucks on the cigarette she has lit for him. Some part of him is dying to get out of the conversation but that part of him is losing the battle. Softly he asks Janet Leigh for her name, in such a way that it’s clear her name is the one thing he’s always had to know. But he’s even more confused by her answer. He sighs, apparently at everything—the magnitude of life, of conversations, the sheer difficulty of what names we should call one another.
We all know people who hate Frank Sinatra for all sorts of reasons, mostly for how he treats other human beings in so-called real life, and they dismiss the undeniable beauty of his talent because of his undeniably sick soul. I wonder if these people had been in the Turkish kabob house with us what they would think seeing this scene, in which Janet Leigh, acting entirely on our behalf, reaches out to save this fragile bird-boned boy. As with his best albums, Sinatra doesn’t seem to be going from any script. There aren’t printed-up lyrics and dialogue for this kind of thing. This isn’t acting; it’s the real stuff. He is standing before us, letting his feelings utterly overwhelm him. It’s scary. Perhaps Frank Sinatra is a bad person but he defines the word “presence.” In this scene, he says almost nothing, he exhales and sweats and looks away, and yet Janet Leigh, who does all the talking, seems barely alive by comparison.
It’s time I mention what else was happening in our Turkish kabob house and that was that all of us—employees, bike messengers, cabbies—felt Sinatra’s confusion so completely that we ourselves were about to cry . . . we would have been crying, that is, if our throats weren’t clogged up with Turkish cuisine. Sinatra can barely talk. We could barely breathe.
On the television, Janet Leigh starts to tell Sinatra who she is, then she stops, instead tells him her address, tells him the apartment number, her phone number. She gently asks him if he can remember it. His larynx closes up as he tells her, yes. You aren’t sure how to take this response because he still can’t look at her. Janet Leigh repeats the phone number and he turns even further from her, shakes his head slightly, closes his eyes in weariness.
In that moment, finally, after attentively watching this, the whole group of us in the kabob-ery began to cough. Most everyone was choking back tears but by this time many of us were choking on shish kebab too, great wads of barbecued meat stuck somewhere mid-swallow. We were gagging into napkins, downing our sodas, poking ourselves in the ribs, crossing our hands at our throats. The look of serious injury was on everybody’s face and then, abruptly, just like that, it was gone. We were okay, we would be fine. We looked up at the television. Sinatra, our would-be killer, was breathing easier too.