Sinatra still swings like no other singer
This year marks Frank Sinatra’s centennial. Sinatra, born and raised in Hoboken, N.J., before, during and just after World War I, would have turned 100 this December.
On stages just across the river from Hoboken, in New York City, he first wowed girls screaming his name and fainting with longing as the crooner — a Bing Crosby knock-off — sang love songs each girl must have thought he was singing to them. This was in the early 1940s.
In the 1950s, Sinatra discovered and then perfected an artistry that remains little short of astounding.
Cue up any Sinatra album from the period, and you’ll soon appreciate The Voice (Yes, children, it’s not original with the TV show) who later blossomed into Old Blue Eyes and the chairman of the board.
Boomers encountered Sinatra in the 1960s. A song of his, “Strangers In The Night”, topped the charts in the middle of the decade, the Beatles be damned.
Sinatra retired, briefly, then returned in the seventies as the heavyweight champion of entertainers. He went on to record two marvelous albums, “Duets” I and II, in the 1990s with artists who someday, truth be told, will principally be known as singers who once upon a time collaborated with Frank. They should consider themselves lucky. They will be remembered because he endures.
His daughter Nancy says her father was a man of simple pleasures, needing only a sun-splashed day, a chaise lounge next to a swimming pool, a crossword puzzle, and a ballgame playing on a transistor radio to make him happy.
All of which may be true, but the truth about Sinatra is far more complex. First off, he couldn’t keep his hands off women. So said Lauren Bacall, a one-time girlfriend who refused to marry Sinatra on account of his high-charging libido and roving ways.
Sinatra married three times. And he probably had as many trysts as there are lights on Broadway or extras in an old MGM musical. The man got around.
In addition, Sinatra was dedicated to his own success. The second of his two daughters, Tina, has said her dad put his career ahead of his family, always. It seems he loved his kids, but he was frequently absent from their young lives. It was a price he willingly, even eagerly, paid.
Further complicating the picture is the suggestion that Sinatra was mobbed up. There is no doubt that he knew his share of mobsters, although the idea, perpetuated in ‘The Godfather” and by the FBI, that he owed his career to the Mafia is just crazy. Needless to say, he didn’t need Sam Giancana to book and fill one concert hall after another for decades.
As an Italian-American, he used to joke it was impossible for two goombas (his term) to stand on a street corner without one of them being slapped with a subpoena.
Besides which, Sinatra was in show business. He was a saloon singer. And who, pray tell, owned the saloons? In his day, mobsters did. So, yea, Sinatra hung with the mob. But so did, for instance, Jack Benny. Was Benny mobbed up? By the standard applied to Sinatra, everyone in show business in his era was just waiting for the day when they might swim with the fishes.
Sinatra could be loud and profane, even as he was being humble. Nothing proves the point better than a letter he wrote to The Los Angeles Time in 1990 scolding British rocker George Michael, “the reluctant pop star.”
“Come on, George. Loosen up. Swing, man. Be grateful to carry the baggage we’ve all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments.
“Talent must not be wasted,” Sinatra wrote. “Those who have it must hug it, embrace it, nurture it and share it lest it be taken away from you as fast as it was loaned to you.”
Trying to explain Sinatra’s artistry is impossible, least of all by a dummy like me. No one, to my mind, has explained the leap Sinatra made from crooning big band singer to a singer of unimagined skill. Occurring sometime in the early fifties, this transformation involved great intelligence and imagination as well as an astonishing amount of technical know-how. Why, it’s impossible to hear Sinatra catch a breath.
Frank Sinatra died in 1998. He was 82. Etched on his tombstone are the words “The Best Is Yet To Come”, a song title and a figure of speech that, even for a man of Sinatra’s talents, is too optimistic by half.
Still in all, Frank swings, and he will for a long, long time. So loosen up, baby. Ring-a-ding … doo-be-doo-be-doo.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.