Piecework

At 64, Francis Albert Sinatra is one of that handful of Americans whose deaths would certainly unleash a river of tearful prose and much genuine grief. He has worked at his trade for almost half a century and goes on as if nothing at all had changed. He is currently in New York making his first feature film in ten years, The First Deadly Sin. His first new studio album in five years is in the record stores, a three-record set called Trilogy, and despite one astonishing lapse in taste (a self-aggrandizing “musical fantasy” written by banality master Gordon Jenkins), it reveals that what Sinatra calls “my reed” is in better shape than it has been in since the 1960s. In concert halls and casinos he packs in the fans, and the intensity of their embrace remains scary. But his work and its public acceptance are now almost incidental to his stature. Frank Sinatra, from Hoboken, New Jersey, has forced his presence into American social history; when the story of how Americans in this century played, dreamed, hoped, and loved is told, Frank Sinatra cannot be left out. He is more than a mere singer or actor. He is a legend. And the legend lives.

The legend has its own symmetries. Sinatra can be unbelievably generous and brutally vicious. He can display the grace and manners of a cultured man and turn suddenly into a vulgar two-bit comic. He can offer George Raft a blank check “up to one million dollars” to pay taxes owed to the IRS; he can then rage against one of his most important boosters, WNEW disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, and help force him off the air. In his time, he has been a loyal Democrat and a shill for Richard Nixon; a defender of underdogs everywhere and then a spokesman for the Establishment; a man who fought racism in the music business and then became capable of tasteless jokes (“The Polacks are deboning the colored people,” he said on the stage of Caesars Palace in 1974, “and using them for wet suits”). He has given magical performances and shoddy ones. He has treated women with elegance, sensitivity, and charm, and then, in Lauren Bacall’s phrase, “dropped the curtain” on them in the most callous way. He acts like royalty and is frequently treated that way, but he also comes on too often like a cheap hood. He is a good guy-bad guy, tough-tender, Jekyll-Hyde.

“Being an eighteen-karat manic-depressive,” Sinatra said once, “I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”

Over the years, those wildly fluctuating emotions became a basic component of the Sinatra legend — accepted, even demanded by his audience. That audience is now largely eastern, urban, and aging, with New York at the heart of the myth. The hard-core fans are Depression kids who matured in World War II, or part of the fifties generation, who saw him as a role model. In some critical way, Sinatra validates their lives — as individuals. He sings to them, and for them, one at a time. These Americans were transformed by the Depression and the war into unwilling members of groups — “the masses,” or “the poor,” or “the infantry” — and their popular music was dominated by the big bands. Sinatra was the first star to step out of the tightly controlled ensembles of the white swing bands to work on his own. Yes, he was 4-F (punctured eardrum), but the overwhelming majority of Americans experienced World War II at home, and the 1940s Sinatra was a reminder that Americans were single human beings, not just the masses, the poor, or the infantry. Later, in the 1960s, when crowds once again shoved individuals off the stage of history, he was submerged by musical groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones and in 1971 even went into a brief retirement. He came back later in the decade, when individual values were again dominant.

“I’ve seen them come and go, but Frank is still the king,” a New Jersey grandmother said at one of Sinatra’s weekend performances at Resorts International in Atlantic City. “He just goes on and on, and he’s wonderful.”

Indeed, Sinatra’s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored, their values demeaned, their musical tastes ignored and sneered at. They don’t care that Sinatra got fat; so did they. They don’t care that Sinatra moved from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan; many of them did the same thing, for the same basic reason: resentment at being ignored by the Democratic party. They had overcome poverty and survived two wars; they had educated their children and given them better lives; and sometimes even their children didn’t care. But it should never be forgotten that Frank Sinatra was the original working-class hero. Mick Jagger’s fans bought records with their allowances; Sinatra’s people bought them out of wages.