Put Your Dreams Away

By JAY COCKS

"Get that!" The story goes. "His name is Sinatra, and he considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business."

This is the bandleader Harry James talking in 1939, when Frank Sinatra, of Hoboken, N.J., had not yet moved the world. "No one's ever heard of him! He's never had a hit record, and he looks like a wet rag, but he says he's the greatest." Said it. Meant it. Proved it.

Harry James must have sensed it too, because he had hired Sinatra, then a scrawny spoiler in his mid-20s, to sing with the band. Present at the creation, James could not have read the signs. The title of an early Sinatra-James hit was one of those anthemic declarations of defiance that, over the years and through the decades, was to form the Sinatra autobiography: All or Nothing at All.

That was Sinatra, then, now and ever: how he took and what he gave.

Only his passing was uncharacteristic. It should have been something quick, furious, defiant. Instead, when he died of a heart attack last week at 82, it was lingering, pernicious, sad. He last performed live in the winter of 1995, but he was unsteady on his feet, and lyrics he'd known for years eluded him. His last original recorded tunes were the studio stunts of the two Duets albums, in which Sinatra revisited some of his classic songs in the company of spryer admirers, from Streisand to Bono.

But for the first time, the music was not enough to see him through. Age encroached. His attention strayed. His mind slipped. "Where am I?" he said one night, not too long ago, startled, looking up at the stars. "At the beach," he was told. "You're home." He nodded, but that look of sudden, alarmed absence stayed with him more and more.

His 80th-birthday celebration was televised. His wife Barbara stayed close. Friends and luminaries from across the generations paid their respects. Bruce Springsteen showed up, singing Angel Eyes as one Jersey boy to another. Bob Dylan performed his own song, Restless Farewell, and said, looking down from the stage at Sinatra, "Happy birthday, Mr. Frank." It was homage of a high order. The room was heavy with talent that night, but Sinatra contented himself with showing his appreciation by applauding them all. Not so many years before, he would have led them. Showed them all how the Chairman does it. But when he took the stage, proudly shaking off Tony Bennett's helping hand on his arm, he smiled and waved and sang only a little. The music stayed inside him.

That was a bit of a disappointment. A last triumph, a standoff against encroaching fate, would have crowned the evening and rounded memory with a perfect dramatic closure. Too much to expect perhaps, but in a sense that was Sinatra's own fault. Too much, he had always shown us, was the least we could expect from him. Not as excess, mind, but as abundance. So much heart, so much sorrow, such delicacy and such braggadocio, all for the music he made indelible, with enough to spare so that it spilled over into his life and into all the public refractions of it.

Sinatra lived the music at every tempo, the sad soul of it as well as the brash, brassy swing. Or maybe his need to graft his life onto every song he sang was an unintended effect of his artistry, a scramble to find personal corollaries for every melody he molded, every lyric he bent to his own will and purpose.

He sang songs so personally that he was remade in the image of the music, and the image shifted with each new generation. In the 1930s he quickly left his skeptical parents behind to launch a career based on iron self-confidence. In the '40s, married to his doting first wife Nancy, he was the heartthrob balladeer who sang I'll Be Seeing You to World War II G.I.s and their sweethearts. In the '50s, the persona went to war with the man. Sinatra at ballad tempo was the soul-sick, lovelorn, solitary man who closes down a midtown saloon. Up-tempo, and increasingly in his life, he was the unapologetic and (some said) unconscionable swinger, the ring-a-ding ringmaster of a million all-night parties. Which was the real Sinatra, the reveler or the lost man?

If the question ever bothered him--or even occurred to him--he never let on. He could walk the sunny side of the street as well as the boulevard of broken dreams, snap brim tilted off the right side of his head, raincoat slung over his shoulder like an open bandolier. The proud champion of classic American pop fought a pitched battle against the engulfing tide of rock in the '60s. Became music's elder statesman in the '70s. Then the resurgent master of the '80s. And--at last, at the end of his days--the icon who could be forgiven anything for a song.

He made everything he sang matter so much. He passed songs along like pieces of a shared life, an intimacy between himself and whoever was listening. You could play a Sinatra album all alone or hear him in a stadium. Either way, it was always the same: a one-on-one experience, the song a shared secret between the singer and you. Only you.

He knew your hidden heart. Did anyone know his? He sang and made us all believe we did. And then, just when we had his assurance, he changed and kept us guessing. How could the guy who made an album as naked, turbulent and forsaken as Only the Lonely get into all that Rat Pack huggermugger, knocking back drinks with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. and flattening intrusive photographers? How could the exuberance of Come Fly with Me, the joyful, rapturous carnality of I've Got You Under My Skin (the '56 version, with the brassy transcendence of Nelson Riddle's arrangement), the sinuous Summer Wind match up with the temperament of a tempestuous loner who traveled with a squadron of pals and protectors, who swung on and spat on the ladies and gents of the press and who declined to forswear certain companions--Vegas oddsmakers and knee breakers, sharply tailored gentlemen in New York and Chicago like Sam Giancana, with no discernible day jobs--in whom the law retained an inveterate interest?

Sinatra's attitude about all this was simple enough. He was responsible to the world for his music, but for his life answerable only to himself, and to hell with the rest of you. There was, all through him, a kind of animating anger, an Italian street-kid swagger that made such good cover for his black-and-blue soulfulness that it was easy, especially when he was living high or mouthing off, to take it at face value. But as much as anything else, that attitude was a dodge, barbed wire for the unwary, protecting his private preserve of deepest feeling and experience, saving it for where it was needed most: the songs.

He was a formidable public personality and retained an outspoken interest in politics. He was, at the start and for a long time, an out-front liberal, and--surely swayed by charm and power--eventually added some deep shadows to J.F.K.'s definition of executive privilege. He passed along a mistress to the President, Judith Exner, who was also a favorite of Giancana's. Kennedy used her, but eventually froze Sinatra out of Camelot. Sinatra responded bitterly and swung right. He golfed with Spiro Agnew, sang (wonderfully) at the Nixon White House and partied with the Reagans.

He lived out all the vagaries of celebrity, knew their value as well as their curse and could manage the trade-off, although he insisted on certain terms and boundaries. He dismissed purveyors of some of the seamier press gossip about him as "pimps and whores. Because they can't write their own name to earn a living properly. They got to lean on somebody else." But Sinatra in those years was natural tabloid fodder, doing the clubs with Ava Gardner (wife No. 2) and Juliet Prowse, and courting Mia Farrow, who became, fleetingly, wife No. 3. And scandal, spurious as it may have been, exerted its own fascination, deepened the dark edge of danger that Sinatra could use like a blade, to provoke when he wanted, to protect what he wished.

He was a superb actor, but he pretended not to take acting seriously. "I just felt that if you learned the words like you know your name...you're a cinch," he told Larry King. "If you have any brains at all, you should be able to do it very well." He was notoriously impatient on the set, wanted to get his job done with little fuss and less time, and often wouldn't hang around for the other actors in a scene to finish up. But in a film career that spanned some 40 years, he gave an impressive number of unforgettable performances. On the Town had good sport casting the kid who used to jump the Hoboken ferry to sneak into Manhattan. From Here to Eternity, which won him an Oscar, put his stalled career back into overdrive and led, through rumor and myth, to a memorable subplot in The Godfather.

And there was Suddenly, The Man with the Golden Arm, Some Came Running, Pal Joey, A Hole in the Head, The Joker Is Wild, The Manchurian Candidate. These are not the credits of a dabbler. Despite his professed approach to the craft, which was breezy to the point of gale force, he kept company with junkies for Golden Arm and hung around with cops whenever he had to play on the cool side of the law. He did his homework. He just didn't want anyone to see his notes.

Notes were for singing, and on the subject of music, Sinatra could write a book. He was generous to his singing contemporaries, maybe because he knew he had no serious rival, but probably too out of a genuine respect for musicianship. He would speak fondly and knowledgeably of Billie Holiday, Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett. And if he heard you had an ear and were ready to lend one, and if the mood was right and there was a bottle of Scotch in the neighborhood, he could talk about music far into the night. "A Johnny Mercer lyric," he said once, casually, "is all the wit you wish you had and all the love you ever lost." Music was the one subject that could make Sinatra drop his guard. He talked about music as he sang it: with diligence and respect and a passion that left no doubt that this above all was what mattered most.

It would be best, of course, if you were a player, a singer, a fellow musician. But with luck and fine timing, you could also be a casual guest, a dinner companion, a colleague's spouse--even, if the furies were snoozing, a journalist. In 1988 Sinatra, the paragon of show-biz sangfroid, told Larry King, "I swear on my mother's soul, the first four or five seconds, I tremble every time I take the step and I walk out of the wing onto the stage, because I wonder if it will be there when I go for the first sounds...From the minute you step into that spotlight, you've got to know exactly what you're doing every second on that stage. Otherwise...it's all good night."

He took that same fine-tuned tension and sense of challenge with him every time he cut a side. Out of the 1,414 studio recordings he made, and despite the hundreds of glories he left behind--from I'll Never Smile Again of 1940 to Hey Look, No Crying of 1981--there were songs that eluded him till the end. Studio outtakes and bootlegs show him chiding the arranger, bugging the conductor, riding the band and beating up on himself with a good-humored swagger that doesn't hide the disappointment and frustration that are chewing him up. You can hear the defeat in his voice, as if he had lost a chance at lasting love.

The songs went that deep in him, and not many ever got away. He made it seem as if they came easy, but he had to fight to have it look that way. When he was still active, he vocalized every day. Singing with the Dorsey band in the early '40s, he kept on tap a voice teacher who was a former opera singer. Later on he would turn to Metropolitan Opera soprano Dorothy Kirsten and baritone Robert Merrill for pointers on technique. "He knew they knew...how to maintain the equipment," Sinatra's longtime conductor, Vincent Falcone, told writer Will Friedwald. That stuff in the whiskey tumbler he used onstage was often tea. Booze, he knew, could batter the throat.

He was strong enough, proud enough and professional enough to handle his celebrity. He wasn't undone by it, as the teen idol of a later generation, Elvis Presley, was; he didn't exploit the gifts of his fame and talent, he built on them, and in the end beat time itself. Not only does his music define the time and temper of the American decades in which it was made, but his singing moves those songs out of time into something indistinct, everlasting. In Sinatra's music, there is no past tense.

You could say he was the greatest, and that's right. But that doesn't say enough. There's nothing you can call him that doesn't in some way sell him short. Except Sinatra.

After that...it's all good night.