Two decades after his death, Frank Sinatra's defiance and vulnerability remain inescapable.By Yours Truly
https://www.themaven.net/theresurgent/community/chairman-sinatra-floHKPiZVkmKrfFAwLI9hg/It's been just past two decades since Frank Sinatra went to his reward, and there have always been those who wondered whether there were two Sinatras, one of whom God would claim leaving the other to the devil's patronage. The artist who found the poetry in the most banal and the most provocatively revealing lyrics at once fought with the rogue who found too much life in too much decadence. It's still debatable whether that fight ended in a draw.
A New York City disc jockey named William B. Williams designated Sinatra the Chairman of the Board, but there were no few wags on the street who designated him the Chairman of the Broads. His actual or alleged associations with, shall we say, men of respect were as remarked and overcooked as his interpretations of loneliness were transcendent. In between was Sinatra the most cocksure and terrified of men, who knew what he wanted, knew he’d get it, and was awfully tempted on their thresholds to find a hiding place.
But he was also a man to whom generosity was a dominant coil in his DNA. It's said that he gave a billion dollars to assorted friends and charitable interests during his life. You might require the equivalent of a single encyclopedia volume to name and note those to whom Sinatra gave without shame or hesitation, whether it was staring down bigots to get B.B. King room to perform in Las Vegas, giving a prized young pony to a three-year-old girl whose favourite horse was dying, or footing the medical bill for a paramour dying of leukemia.
From the autocratic bandleader Tommy Dorsey Sinatra learned breath control and gradually turned his voice of limited range but unlimited timbre into a human trombone before which swooning young ladies were at his mercy. He also learned, or re-learned, the music business’s caprices, dragging Dorsey to admit this pencil-thin kid with the ethereally powerful voice was singular and uncontrollable no matter how Dorsey hungered to command and control him. Sinatra forced America to accept a singer to whom the art and its beauty was deeper than the comfortable indifference of the crooners whose model he vaporised with unapologetic emotion. And he forced Dorsey to accept that not even the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing could break such a force into subordination.
From the stubborn, pugilistic beauty Ava Gardner he learned profound heartbreak and what his best arranger Nelson Riddle said "was how to sing a torch song. She was the love of his life, and he lost her." You can count on three fingers his songwriting credits, but it's no shock to discover one was "I'm a Fool to Want You." Sinatra sang it in such shameless agony as to make the most haunted blues singer blush in green. There's little equal to heartbreak for humbling the least humble.
When he swung in his music Sinatra strode almost like a braggart who knew that point at which his audience would call him out for it and kept himself enough steps from standing upon it, never mind crossing it. But put him in front of the Lord’s anointed of the swing, like Count Basie on three albums (
Sinatra/Basie,
It Might as Well Be Swing, and
Sinatra at the Sands) and Duke Ellington on a mere one but a trans-dimensional one (
Francis A. and Edward K.), perhaps the final genuinely great album of his career, and Sinatra found modesty impossible to resist even as he delivered with the depth Basie and Ellington took for granted from their own nonpareil band stars.
Sinatra had been high enough that the surface of the earth looked like a faraway moon and then low enough that the surface was the ceiling. He'd picked himself up, dusted himself off, started all over again, and graduated himself from a measly star to a myth. He could be the most elemental actor on the screen when he needed to be; he could be the most envied playboy even when barely making the effort; he could be the most petulant boor on the block when he was actually pushed or only thought he'd been wronged.
He changed politics almost as often as he changed his socks, some would have you believe, having graduated from a New Dealer-cum-New Frontiersman to a staunch Republican in the flick of a perceived Kennedy betrayal. He troubled himself to build a helipad on his compound to accommodate the president who'd choose instead to alight with Bing Crosby, after the fraternal attorney general suggested landing on the pad of a friend of the mob would be what we call bad optics today. The Chairman of the Board was not amused.
In his music was the one place above all others where you could find Sinatra grown up and the one thing a genuine grownup allows himself to be. Vulnerable and without a cell of pretense. While he was at it, he took volumes of standards into his stubborn possession while making new standards of songs written particularly for him, particularly by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. And when given the opportunity he could be a deft comedian, if unlikely to shove the giants of that art to one side; the most eloquent surviving evidence is "The Tea Break" from
Sinatra at the Sands.
Swinging jauntily or sighing alone, he sang of love as life's most valuable gift and elusive possession alike. If the man could not reconcile it to three failed marriages whose failures were his own, the boy who never died inside him refused to surrender the search. There may be no more transcendent art work in Sinatra's musical catalog than when he sighed alone while squaring off against a fat, swinging ensemble, singing every syllable of "Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week" as if to indict that singular party night for murder.
That may be why so many heartbroken men repairing to their local taverns listened to his torch songs or swung along with him and felt no emasculation hearing the most self-styled macho of men, who finally married happily in the September of his years, admit that lost love is as close as a mortal gets, this side of tyranny, to living death.
