Why Sinatra Matters (3 page)

II
. That night came back to me, along with a dozen others, when I heard that Frank Sinatra was dead at eighty-two. I was in
the Miami airport, catching an early flight back to New York, after sitting on a panel about the future of newspapers. I had
checked in and picked up my boarding pass. Then I saw about a dozen people staring up at a monitor. CNN. The announcer looking
grave. I couldn’t hear the sound. But then there were some clips and the legend “Frank Sinatra 1915–1998.” And I was like
all the others in that sterile morning place, sliding into the blurred places of memory.

There was a radio on the window ledge in the kitchen of the tenement in Brooklyn. Through that window, past the radio, out
across the backyards, we could see the skyline of New York to the right and the Statue of Liberty in the harbor and the low
ridge of Staten Island and the gray smudge of New Jersey beyond. The harbor was thick with ships, heading off through the
Narrows to the war. Sometimes the sky was dark with B-17s. At night the skyline vanished into blackness, the lights turned
off, as were so many other things, for the duration. There was no television then, and so the radio served us kids as narration
and sound track. From that little Philco, we heard about the invasion of North Africa and the assault on Sicily and the fighting
at Anzio. The story of the war was all mixed up with the crooning of Bing Crosby and the score from
Oklahoma!
and the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller and, at some point, Frank Sinatra.

All or nothing at all …

On days of snow or rain, when we could not go down the three flights to the street, those words drifted through the railroad
flat. They seemed thin, even trembling, unlike the confident baritone of Crosby, but there was a kind of defiance in them
too. I was six when the war started in 1941, and my brother Tommy was two years younger; we were too innocent to connect Sinatra’s
words to a longing for women. They seemed to be about unconditional surrender, as declared by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose
picture was up on the kitchen wall. It was as if Sinatra were saying the words to Hitler and Tojo. We’re coming to get you.
And it’s all or nothing at all.

In the neighborhood we began to hear arguments among the kids just older than us. Crosby versus Sinatra arguments. They had
nothing to do with the words. And it was not simply another division between the Italian American kids and the Irish American
kids. Some of the Irish guys were Sinatra fans; some of the Italians went for Crosby. It was about his sound. And sometimes
about other things.

There were always newspapers in our flat. The
News
and the
Mirror
, the
Journal-American
and the
Brooklyn Eagle
. And they began printing stories about Sinatra. The Voice. Swoonatra. Hysterical girls roaring at the Paramount, over in
Manhattan, which we called New York. In June 1944 the Allies invaded France, heading for Berlin, and the lights went on again
in the mighty skyline. For weeks after D-Day I would go up to the roof alone and stare at the skyline, glittering and impossibly
beautiful, like the towers of Oz. And from the open windows of the tenements I could hear the battle between Crosby and Sinatra.

I was too young to choose sides. But my father was definitely a Crosby man. He was a good singer and could deliver pretty
fair Crosby renditions at christenings or wakes or from his spot at the bar of Rattigan’s. In dinner-table discussion my mother
was also a fan of Crosby. But in the Brooklyn mornings she always listened to Martin Block on WNEW, and that meant she also
listened to Frank Sinatra. She would sing along with him in her light soprano voice, not judging the music but embracing it.
Still, among the immigrants in the neighborhood, Crosby was generally triumphant. He was all over the radio. The few people
who owned phonographs played him all the time. (We did not own one.) The jukebox in Rattigan’s Bar, across the street, was
fat with Crosby 78s, and in the summer you could hear him singing through the open doors. He was sunny. He was optimistic.
He was casual. He said we had to accentuate the positive, ee-liminate the negative, and not mess with mister in-between. He
said that if we didn’t give a feather or a fig, we could grow up to be a pig.

In addition, Crosby had played a priest in
Going My Way
. A
Catholic
priest, for God’s sake, whose best friend was an Irishman from Ireland, an older priest played by Barry Fitzgerald. In the
movie, which the whole neighborhood went to see during the summer of 1944, Father Crosby saved Father Fitzgerald’s run-down
parish, St. Dominic’s, by writing songs, and the church was in a neighborhood that looked very much like ours. Ordinarily,
that would have been enough for my father, who was an immigrant from Ireland, as was my mother. But there was still another
factor.

Our small part of America was seeing many things through the prism of the war. We lived in a working-class neighborhood of
Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans; most of its young men were off at the war. It was the kind of neighborhood that provided
troops for the infantry, and in many windows, as the war ground on, there were small flags bearing gold stars, indicating
that one of the young soldiers would be young forever. My father didn’t go to the war. He had lost his left leg while playing
soccer in the immigrant leagues in 1927; the bones were smashed, gangrene set in overnight, penicillin did not yet exist,
and they amputated in the morning. Crosby didn’t go because he was too old, but in the judgment of the neighborhood, he did
the next best thing: he made many trips for the USO, entertaining troops in the company of comedians and beautiful women.
But Sinatra was a separate case; he was the right age and he had two arms and two legs. Why couldn’t he do what stars such
as Clark Gable, Glenn Miller, or Jimmy Stewart were doing, and insist on being taken by one of the armed forces? Why couldn’t
he at least make a USO tour?

The male anger against Sinatra came to a head in October 1944, when he played the Paramount again and 30,000 mostly female
fans erupted into a small riot outside the theater. When a male dissenter in the Paramount balcony fired a tomato at the stage,
he had to be rescued from women who were trying to beat him to death. Breathless accounts of these events were all over the
newspapers and the radio. At the same time, the first V-2 rockets were falling on London and American troops were fighting
their way into Germany, taking heavy casualties. In our neighborhood, where the war was not a distant abstraction, the phenomenon
of young Frank Sinatra was discussed with much heat in the bars and on the street corners and in the kitchens.

I don’t get it, my father would say. All those girls going nuts for a draft dodger.

He’s not a draft dodger, my mother would say. He’s 4-F. He’s got a punctured eardrum. He tried to join three times, and they
turned him down. It was in the papers.

The papers, he sneered. You believe the papers?

Flying north from Florida, I could remember all that argument and my own youthful wonder about its passion. At nine, I was
too young to understand what Sinatra was doing with his music. I did know it was different. Crosby made us feel comfortable
and, in some larger way,
American
. But there was a tension in Sinatra, an anxiety that we were too young to name but old enough to feel. During the last six
months of the European war, when men were dying by the thousands in the Battle of the Bulge, it was confusing to hear songs
that contained so much anguish. Or loss. Or loneliness. I would see young women pushing strollers along the avenue, their
men off at war, see them pausing to look at the front pages on the newsstands, see the way their faces clenched, and I wished
that Bing Crosby could sing to them and make them feel better. It took me a long while to understand that it was Frank Sinatra
who was giving words and voice to the emotions of their own roiled hearts.

III
. Years later, when I was a reporter and then a columnist for Dorothy Schiff’s
New York Post
, I got to know Sinatra. Cannon introduced me to him after the Floyd Patterson–Sonny Liston fight in Las Vegas in 1963. We
were together on other evenings. On the surface, this seemed strange, another contradiction in the character of a man dense
with contradictions. Sinatra had wasted too much of his adult life in vicious quarrels with newspapermen and gossip columnists,
had punched out at least one columnist (the awful Lee Mortimer), and was continually in rumbles with paparazzi.

“Sinatra’s idea of paradise is a place where there are plenty of women and no newspapermen,” said Humphrey Bogart, who was
sixteen years older than the singer and a kind of hero to the younger man. “He doesn’t know it, but he’d be better off if
it were the other way around.”

Perhaps, as he moved toward sixty, Sinatra came to understand what Bogart meant. Certainly, when he was in New York, he sought
out his favorite newspapermen. Cannon was his friend, while the rest of us were friendly acquaintances. Cannon was only five
years older than Sinatra, a New Yorker shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, the myth of 1930s Broadway, and World War
II in Europe, where he served as a correspondent for
Stars and Stripes
. They spoke the same language, shared passions for boxers, ballplayers, and beautiful women. Cannon brought a poetic language
to his sports columns, some of which were shaped like songs, and his essentially romantic vision of that world was saved from
sentimentality by a knowing New York tone. Like Sinatra, he was afflicted by insomnia and bouts of personal loneliness; he
read widely and intelligently, deep into the night. Sinatra never gave up the whiskey, but he was a reader too; he and Cannon
talked at all hours of the night about books, and it was Cannon who urged him to read Nelson Algren’s
The Man with the Golden Arm
, which was the basis of one of Sinatra’s finest movies. It didn’t matter where they were staying; insomniacs without wives
can always be reached by phone.

Cannon also got Sinatra to read Murray Kempton, who was writing his brilliant column for the
New York Post
in the same years that Cannon was the star of the sports section. Kempton was an absolute original who brought a unique,
mandarin style to newspapers; on some days it was as if Henry James had agreed to cover the longshoremen’s union. He had an
extraordinary sympathy for rascals, outcasts, those subjected to lofty moralizing. Nobody ever wrote more intelligently about
Sinatra than Kempton did in a handful of columns across the years. But Kempton, who also liked his whiskey, was not a man
who moved easily through the night. It was hard to imagine him sitting around in saloons. But Sinatra loved his work and would
have his columns (and Cannon’s) airmailed to him each day in California. “The man is a marvel,” he said to me once about Kempton.
“It’s like listening to Louis Armstrong, or Roy Eldridge: you don’t know where the hell he is going, but somehow he gets there
and it knocks your socks off.” He made certain that Kempton covered the 1961 inaugural party for John F. Kennedy, which Sinatra
produced. He joined him occasionally at more formal parties in New York, sometimes at his own apartment on East Seventy-second
Street, near Third Avenue. He sent him fan mail, which he signed “Francis Albert.” But he didn’t call much on the telephone.
“Kempton is one of those guys,” he explained, “that makes me feel tongue-tied.”

I was twenty years younger than Sinatra, but he seemed to be comfortable when I was around. It certainly helped that Cannon
and Shirley MacLaine had vouched for me, and he was impressed that I knew Kempton. There might have been one other factor:
Cannon and I were both high school dropouts, as was Sinatra. (Oddly, Cannon and I had dropped out of the same institution,
a great Jesuit high school called Regis.) This might have meant more to Sinatra than it did to us; in a very important way
he defined success as a triumph over the odds.

“Every time they print your column,” he said to me once, “you are getting your fucking diploma.”

I laughed. But he was serious.

Later, Sinatra had one other newspaper friend, Sidney Zion, now a fine columnist for the
New York Daily News
. Zion came out of Paterson, New Jersey, went to law school, worked as a prosecutor, and then became a reporter for the
New York Post
. Like all of us at the paper, he worshiped Kempton. But he had been shaped by the traditions and lore of urban New Jersey.
The figure of Frank Sinatra was an immense part of that tradition. Zion loved the music that Sinatra loved most, the music
of the hours after midnight. He loved saloons. He loved smoking and drinking (and still does). He is a wonderful storyteller.

“I got to know him around 1980, the time of the
Trilogy
album,” Zion told me. “I did a piece about the old music for the
Times
, and one thing led to another. A mutual friend introduced us, and I’d see him when he was in New York. I think he liked me
because he’d never met a Jew who drank as much as I did.”

Sinatra was always more cynical about the Hollywood press corps. He thought most of them were freeloaders, or on the take.
“I’ve seen the bills, baby,” he said once about reporters and columnists who took money from the publicity budgets of the
studios. In his early years he had cooperated with the fan magazines and other components of the Hollywood publicity machine.
At some points he had even groveled to the more powerful columnists when advised to do so (although the most powerful columnist
of all, Walter Winchell, never joined in the attacks on Sinatra). But from the mid-1950s until his death, he worked with the
press only on his own terms.

“The New York guys are different,” he said. “Maybe because there’s so much else going on around them, they don’t have to cover
me
. Ah, shit, I like their company. It’s as simple as that.”

Maybe it was, but I doubt it.

IV.
Jimmy Cannon, Murray Kempton, and William B. Williams are dead. So are Jilly Rizzo and Sugar Ray Robinson and all those others
who once seemed so vividly alive that I could not imagine them leaving the world. Now Sinatra is dead too, and it’s like a
thousand people have just left the room.