As long as there are women to swoon and men to croon, scores to settle and tears to cry, Vince Guerrieri says, the late Frank Sinatra will continue to hold sway over us all.
By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]
A fella came up to me the other day with a nice story. He was in a bar somewhere and it was the quiet time of the night. Everybody’s staring down at the sauce and one of my saloon songs comes on the jukebox. “One for My Baby,” or something like that. After a while, a drunk at the end of the bar looks and and says, jerking his thumb toward the jukebox, “I wonder who he listens to?”
--Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert Sinatra cashed in his chips at the Big Casino in the sky more than five years ago. At the time of his death at the age of 82, he hadn’t released an album of new material in more than 15 years, since “L.A. is My Lady” in the early 1980s. He hadn’t acted in almost as long, with bit parts in the “Cannonball Run” movies and a cameo on the TV show “Who’s the Boss.”
But on that Friday morning in May 1998 when he finally shuffled loose this mortal coil, his death merited wall-to-wall coverage on news channels. It pushed stories of Seinfeld’s last episode out of entertainment sections and even front pages. We still care about Frank Sinatra today. "Ocean’s Eleven" was remade. Sinatra’s former valet, George Jacobs, came out with a book about his 15 years with “Mr. S.” The book covers Sinatra’s dark days in the early 1950s to his halcyon days in the early 1960s to his decline into irrelevance in the late 1960s, when his wife Mia Farrow got more ink than he did.
Even today, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack holds a mystique. Ashton Kutcher and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs have said they’re the new Rat Pack. That sound you hear is The Chairman of the Board spinning in his grave (or that might be due to the fact that the featured entertainment in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, his old stomping grounds, is Celine Fucking Dion!). Ashton, I love you in That 70s Show, but don’t compare yourself to Sinatra until you’ve won an Oscar. That goes for you, too, Puffy. People are still buying 50-year-old Sinatra albums. Will they buy yours in half a century? (Although I do give you credit for Jennifer Lopez … she could turn out to be your Ava.)
Why does Frank Sinatra still hold the public’s attention? Simply put, it’s because he endured and influenced. His musical career spanned half a century, starting with big bands, and his last album was produced by Quincy Jones. Before Eric Clapton poured out his soul on “Layla,” Frank sang “I’m a Fool to Want You.” Before Motley Crue was tearing up hotel rooms, Frank was throwing his own epic tantrums and slugging (and in one case, running over) members of the Fourth Estate. Bruce Springsteen, who was three years old when Sinatra was in From Here to Eternity, called Sinatra the patron saint of New Jersey. Bono, who wasn’t even born when Sinatra made Ocean’s Eleven, said he invented cool.
A bit of full disclosure here: I am a Sinatra fan. My grandfather, first generation American, listened to Sinatra, and introduced me to him via his copy of Strangers in the Night on vinyl (which also features “Summer Wind”). My friend and mentor, the Rev. Dr. Joe Boyle, said he related to Springsteen because “I’ve never met him, but he knows me.” I feel the same way about Springsteen (in fact, I introduced Dr. Joe to his music), but I also feel that way about Sinatra. He was one of us, only a little better. I wear fedoras, and people say they make me look like a real reporter. Matt Drudge can kiss my ass. I’ve been wearing them since high school, when my hair started to thin, the same reason Frank started wearing them.
Lost love? It sucks, but if Frank could still pine for Ava Gardner decades later, then maybe I’d be all right. In the dumps? He’s been there, and sang about it to make us feel a little better. (Although I prefer his Capitol works, my favorite Sinatra song is a Reprise tune, “Here’s to the Losers”). Been at those moments where you got the world by the short hairs, and you want to beat your chest and do your Tarzan yell? Well he’s been there, too. What makes this even more impressive is that unlike Springsteen and many other singers, Sinatra didn’t write his own material. Paul Anka wrote “My Way.” Johnny Mercer wrote “Summer Wind.” Rodgers and Hart wrote “It Never Entered My Mind.” But Sinatra made them all, and many other songs, his own.
What makes Sinatra’s story more incredible is that he started out as the Justin Timberlake of his day. His fans were almost exclusively women, bobby soxers of the 1930s and 1940s who screamed and fainted, as their daughters would do a generation later for Elvis and the Beatles. Franklin Roosevelt complimented the skinny Wop from Hoboken, New Jersey, for reviving the lost art of swooning.
As the 1950s dawned, Sinatra was a nobody, a Charlie Brown-Shoes, a loser. He had divorced his wife, who bore him his three children, for Ava Gardner. Ava, the love of his life, screwed around on him incessantly and indifferently, prompting Humphrey Bogart to tell her during their filming of The Barefoot Contessa, “You’ve got a guy that every woman in America wants to go to bed with, and you’re screwing bullfighters!” Columbia Records dropped him, and his movie contract wasn’t renewed. He still performed in some clubs, but his voice, The Voice, was a shadow of what it was a decade earlier.
This is where George Jacobs meets up with Sinatra in Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra. Sinatra fired Jacobs 15 years after he hired him, after gossip columnists reported that Jacobs was dancing with Mia Farrow (Sinatra’s wife only on paper at the time) at a club in Los Angeles. Sinatra, a self-described manic-depressive, fired Jacobs in a rage and didn’t talk to him for years. Yet Jacobs doesn’t give Sinatra a Kitty Kelley hatchet job, nor is he as fawning as Esquire writer Bill Zehme in The Way You Wear Your Hat. Jacobs comes down closer to the latter, but he’s still willing to talk about Sinatra’s flaws. Jacobs’ tale starts out with Sinatra as a loser, when he had time to be nice to people. As his star rises, he becomes more magnanimous, but his vindictive Sicilian temperament always lurks under the surface. In the late 1960s, with the Rat Pack days behind him, and largely his movie career as well, Sinatra becomes bitter at the changing world around him, and fires Jacobs in that bitterness and frustration.
The book is packed with lurid little details about the life of Sinatra and those around him. Marilyn Monroe was a slob who liked to parade around in the nude. Sinatra said Judy Garland gave the best blow jobs (The Wizard of Oz, one of the first movies I ever saw, is never going to be the same for me). Cole Porter, a homosexual, wrote “I get a Kick Out of You” about a truck driver who stomped him (kinda gives new meaning to the lyric about flying too high with a girl in the sky is his idea of nothing to do, huh?). Jacobs saw John Kennedy snorting cocaine with Peter Lawford (who, according to the book, got off on S&M) at Sinatra’s Palm Springs home. Jacobs also saw the 5’7” Sinatra come out of the shower, and realized Ava Gardner was right when she said, “Frank was only 120 pounds, but 110 of it was pure cock.” Sinatra, who cited as his main acting influence none other than Boris Karloff, tried to follow up his Oscar-winning performance in From Here to Eternity with the lead in On the Waterfront, but was bumped for Marlon Brando. Sinatra hated Brando, calling him “Mumbles” when he worked with him on Guys and Dolls. Sinatra also thought his role in The Man With the Golden Arm would win him an Oscar, but he lost to Ernest Borgnine, whose performance as Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity, ironically, helped Sinatra win his Oscar.
The book mentions nary a word about Sinatra’s music on the Capitol label, which was arguably his best stuff. A decade before the Beatles gave us concept albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Sinatra gave us In the Wee Small Hours and Only the Lonely, albums so desolate that you feel like you’re in a basement bar in Manhattan on a rainy miserable night, and you can smell the bourbon and Lucky Strikes. But where the book excels is in its stories about the days in the 1950s and early 1960s when it truly was Frank’s World, when he was a serious Oscar-winning actor and turned out some of his best music. Sinatra’s torch songs and acting career got him a following among the half of the population with external genitals, the people who still idolize him after women have found out what a shit he could be.
Today, Frank Sinatra’s lifestyle remains popular to men, thanks to movies like the new Ocean’s Eleven and Swingers, while his love songs remain popular to women. A friend of mine, who’s getting married in the fall, was desperately looking for Sinatra’s rendition of “It Had to Be You,” a song made popular by Harry Connick Jr’s rendition in When Harry Met Sally. Of course, I found it for her, and sent her a copy of the CD as an early wedding present. I’m only too happy to share Sinatra’s music with the people I know. I’ve been known to sing his songs at friends’ weddings, or at work (I get looks for that). I listen to his down music when I’m feeling down, or his up music when I’m feeling up (or on the rare occasion when I’m in mixed company in my apartment…ring a ding ding, baby!).
At that, really, is the key to his popularity. Women love his love songs, and men use them to get laid.
And as long as men want to score, Sinatra will endure.