Piecework

Sinatra is now writing that autobiography and preparing a film about his own life. Alas, neither form seems adequate to the full story; autobiographies are by definition only part of the story, the instinct being to prepare a brief for the defense and give yourself the best lines. And a two-hour movie can only skim the surface of a life that has gone on for six decades. Faulkner says somewhere that the best stories are the ones we are most thoroughly ashamed of; it could be that the best movies are the ones that can’t be photographed. No, Sinatra deserves a novel.

The novelist, some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler, would recognize Sinatra as one of those rare public men who actually cast a shadow. The shadow is the mob, and who can tell what came first, the shadow or the act? A conventional autobiography will talk about the wives: Nancy Barbato, Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and Barbara Marx, one for each adult decade. It might mention, discreetly, all the other love affairs, passionate or glancing: Lana Turner, Juliet Prowse, Lauren Bacall, Kim Novak, Jill St. John, Lady Adele Beatty, Dorothy Provine, and the anonymous brigade of starlets, secretaries, models, stewardesses, and girls from the old neighborhood.

“I loved them all,” Sinatra says now, smiling ruefully, reminding you that he is now a grandfather and all of that was long ago. “I really did.”

But the novelist can come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do. Both would deal with the public career, the rise, fall, rise again of Frank Sinatra. We can see the high school dropout watching Bing Crosby sing from the stage of Loew’s Journal Square in Jersey City in 1933, vowing to become a singer. We can follow him, one of Balzac’s provincial heroes, as he wins an amateur contest and crosses the river to appear for the first time on a New York stage at the Academy of Music (now the Palladium) on 14th Street the following year. The hero then sings with a group called the Hoboken Four on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1935, plays local clubs, begs in the hallways of WNEW for the chance to sing for nothing on live remotes. And of course there will be the familiar story of the job at the Rustic Cabin on Route 9W in 1939, and how Harry James heard him late one night and gave him a job in the big time. And then how Sinatra went to work for Tommy Dorsey and played the Paramount and became a star.

And because this is a story with a hero, it must tell the story of The Fall. The hero hurtles into love with Ava Gardner, and his career becomes a shambles: He loses his voice, his wife, his children; he gets into public fights; he wins the love goddess; he loses her; he hits bottom. And then there is The Great Comeback: He pleads for the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, is paid $8,000, gives a stunning performance, wins the Academy Award, and comes all the way back. He leaves Columbia Records for Capitol, then starts his own company, Reprise, and makes his greatest records. At the same time he consolidates his power in Hollywood, investing his money brilliantly, producing his own films, using power with the instincts of a great politician. These are the years of the private jets, the meetings of the Clan on the stages of Las Vegas, the friendships with Jack Kennedy and other politicians, and the house at the top of Mulholland Drive, where the wounded hero heals his ruined heart with girls and whiskey and friends. It’s a good story. A sentimental education or a cautionary tale.

But as autobiography it is not enough. We must have some understanding of the shadows. In The Godfather Mario Puzo used some of the elements in the singer he called Johnny Fontane; other novels have used Sinatra-like figures in various ways; yet no fictional account has truly defined the man in all of his complexity. We only know that the mob runs through his story like an underground river. He is the most investigated American performer since John Wilkes Booth, and although he has never been indicted or convicted of any mob-connected crime, the connection is part of the legend. And to some extent, Sinatra exploits it. His opening acts feature comedians who tell jokes about Sinatra’s sinister friendships; if you cross Frank, the jokes say, you could end up on a meat hook in a garage. In some circumstances Sinatra laughs at the implications; other times, he explodes into dark furies, accusing his accusers of slander and ethnic racism.

“If my name didn’t end with a vowel,” he said to me once, “I wouldn’t have had all this trouble.”