Image courtesy of Kate Gabrielle.
Frank Sinatra is, to me anyway, an Italian.
You could almost say Sinatra was a family member. Every wedding, reception or family reunion, he was there. Like one of the many cousins in my mother’s extended family, I didn’t know Uncle Frank all that well. Mixed in with the Tarantella, I couldn’t even tell you what songs were the real staples, but I knew the voice. To say I was a fan of his music would’ve been a disservice to my iPod.
I remember in high school gym class I learned to ballroom dance to “Fly Me To The Moon.” Over and over the teachers played the song, and we stepped in the same box pattern for painfully long until everyone could get it right. The exercise was excruciatingly dull, but the music was easy to step to. Sinatra’s voice sets a tempo and cadence all it’s own. Depending on which version you’re listening to, he pops his notes, and he lingers on the unexpected beats (“Let me see what life is like onnnnn… Jup-i-ter and Mars”). Hearing the song that many times, you start to pick up on his unique timing.
Today, we celebrate Sinatra’s 100th Birthday. He was called Ol’ Blue Eyes and The Voice, but Sinatra has endured not because he had the bluest eyes or, dare I say, even the best voice. Sinatra is a performer, a character, a personality, and a legacy. The persona he crafted in all his films and the rapport he had on stage have elevated him to that of the 20th Century’s definitive figure in pop culture, and in turn made him timeless.
Until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t seriously consider myself a fan, and yet Sinatra has invariably been a part of my life for 25 of his 100 years. Sinatra doesn’t belong to my generation, and not even quite my parents’ generation, but my grandparents. Yet somehow he has a place that all the other crooners, all the other oldies that get played at every Italian wedding don’t.
Young people today don’t discover Frank Sinatra; they become aware of him.
It’s not as though his movies or his music have had any sort of resurgence in whatever you want to label as “cultural relevance.” The Beatles, for instance, still get movies, apps, video games and Cirque Du Soleil shows made for them and seem to unequivocally reach new generations as a cultural force.
Michael Bublé is the closest performer we have to a contemporary crooner, and as one of Sinatra’s associates put it, suggesting to Frank that he’s anything like today’s teen idol Justin Bieber would’ve gotten you “a dirt nap.” Today we don’t have a “Rat Pack.” We had a “Brat Pack” for a while, and the remake of Ocean’s Eleven made it look as though we had a new class of Hollywood royalty, but today we really just have the “Frat Pack.”
It’d be easy to draw a straight line from say, The Rolling Stones, to countless bands performing today. But pinning down Sinatra’s influence on contemporary pop music is far more difficult.
That division between rock music and his style of crooning inherently makes him part of the “old guard,” even when he was at his peak in the Swinging ‘60s. In fact, Sinatra always felt old. Even as a teen idol in his Bobbysoxer days, Sinatra had a deep voice and some lines on his face that suggests he’s a kid who has been around. And though Sinatra reinvented himself several times over, there’s not a clear dividing line between “Young Sinatra” and “Old Sinatra”. Frank was always just Frank. Young John Lennon and late-in-life John Lennon are two very different people. You would never make the mistake between Elvis and Fat Elvis.
Sinatra was the new kid on the block, as this performance of “Well Did You Evah?” in High Society (1956) goes to show, but he drew his inspiration and his technique from Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and Big Band leader Tommy Dorsey. Crosby taught him to sing, Satchmo taught him to swing, and Dorsey taught him to breathe, sharing with Sinatra a technique brass musicians use called “circular breathing,” which allows the performer to hold a pitch on end without pausing for a breath.
Yet Sinatra has no doubt aged better than Crosby, or for that matter Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., or really any of his Rat Pack partners or contemporaries. In his Visions & Voices lecture celebrating Sinatra’s Centennial, Dr. Drew Casper of USC’s Cinematic Arts School argued that Sinatra has endured because he sang the Great American Song Book of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rogers & Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, you name it.
Sinatra performed with Elvis but he resisted the trends of American pop culture in the 60s and beyond. Late in his career, Sinatra had a massive blockbuster hit of an album in Duets (1993), which paired him with legends ranging from Tony Bennett to Bono, but on those recordings they sang the old standards. Sinatra was cool and classic without needing to be “hip” or “modern”. After The Beatles put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), everybody went psychedelic. But could you even imagine Sinatra singing about dames named Lucy up in the sky with her diamonds? Think of all the performers who throughout their career failed when they tried to be someone they weren’t. Sinatra never pretended to be anyone but himself, and he never let something he wasn’t get in the way.
Frank Sinatra’s handprint ceremony at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre, 1965. Mitock & Sons, North Hollywood, CA., via Wikimedia Commons
Sinatra’s persona is something that carried through all of his films, be it the biting, crazed energy he had as a hired assassin in Suddenly (1954), the alcoholic charm as a would be stand-up comic in The Joker is Wild (1957), the playboy womanizer in The Tender Trap (1955) or the down-on-his-luck gangster Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (1955). No matter where his character was from, no matter what his job, Sinatra always looked like the New Yorker, the confident ringleader with swagger and the hard-edged cynic with a tender heart.
And yet on screen and in his music, it took time for that persona to emerge. Despite what people may want to believe, he didn’t have it naturally, and he had to work to become an icon.
Back at the start of his film career, he was the song and dance man alongside Gene Kelly. Portraying a Navy sailor in On the Town (1949), the image of him as a “skinny little runt” who has “never been anywhere but Peoria” didn’t stick for long. His breakthrough was in his Oscar winning turn as Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953). In the film he’s a drunken goof with a whole lot of charm. He says his girlfriend “drinks like a fish” and then dumps a glass of water out the window onto an unsuspecting cop with a laugh. But he’s also a fighter, saying, “Only my friends can call me a little wop,” and giving his life in order to escape from Fatso Judson’s cruelty. He moves a mile a minute and is clearly Acting with a Capital A, but he feels effortlessly natural.
The same could be said of his vocal work. His early day crooning was smooth and syrupy, holding his notes long for maximum teen girl swooning. But in his age he became the Swinging Sinatra, popping his notes with the band and getting his body involved his rhythm. The way this new Sinatra sang, no performance ever sounded the same, and he could devote time to have a conversation with the audience.
Listen to him on “That’s Life” (1966), where he seems to be channeling his own life story. The song is of a man who has been through it all, worked countless jobs and met people who got their kicks “steppin’ on dreams.” But it’s also a song of ambition, of highs and lows and everything in between. On the album of the same name, it’s a jazzy track with call-and-repeat backup vocalists, but the live performance finds Sinatra doing a little more sing talking. The vocalists are gone, and he points skyward as though communicating to the audience that he’ll rise above.
Surprisingly many fans of Sinatra’s music, at least in my experience, are oblivious to his movie career. What they recognize is the persona, not the specific film or song.
I think of the quote from This is Spinal Tap (1984) in which limo driver Tommy Pischedda is asking one of the band’s groupies about reading Sammy Davis Jr.’s autobiography Yes I Can. “You know what the title of that book should be? Yes I Can, if Frank Sinatra says it’s OK.” Pischedda gets the soundproof window rolled up in his face, and he spits back about this generation. “They really don’t understand. When you’ve loved and lost the way Frank has, you know what life’s about.”
Everyone knows about Sinatra’s playboy lifestyle, but they love the stories because of the baggage and experience Sinatra brought with him. Perhaps even more so than his musical and movie legacy, Sinatra’s legacy is about those stories.
At a Visions & Voices panel discussion devoted to Sinatra’s musical legacy, the three Sinatra collaborators very quickly allowed the afternoon to devolve into a cocktail party of amusing anecdotes and stories about Frank, as they called him.
Frank Sinatra, 1947. William Gottlieb, Wikimedia Commons.
TV producer George Schlatter said working with an angry Sinatra was like staring down “two steel spears.” Schlatter loved the man, but he had run-ins with Sinatra’s mafia ties and called working with him a “monumental pain in the ass.” Drummer Gregg Field played with Sinatra for two years before Sinatra finally took notice and declared, “We gotta hire this guy!”
Sinatra was a New Yorker born and bred, but “Chicago” was one of many theme songs for “my home town.” I recognized Sinatra from The Simpsons, even if in my young age I didn’t know it at the time. And Sinatra was one of the few pop culture figures with which I could relate to my Nonna. Sinatra was a part of people’s lives. For a certain generation he grew old along with them, and for each generation since, including my own he’s been a constant presence. So in that way he was like a family member, one who will be at our sides as long as we live.
At this, his hundredth birthday, this Sinatra quote seems most apt: “May you live to be 100, and may the last voice you hear be mine.”