Piecework

Power attracts and repels; it functions as aphrodisiac and blackjack. Men of power recognize it in others; Sinatra has spent time with Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Walter Annenberg, Hugh Carey, Ronald Reagan; all wanted his approval, and he wanted, and obtained, theirs. He could raise millions for them at fund raisers; they would always take his calls. And the politicians had a lot of company. On the stage at Caesars Palace, or at an elegant East Side dinner party, Sinatra emanates power. Certainly the dark side of the legend accounts for some of that effect; the myth of the Mafia, after all, is not a myth of evil, but a myth of power.

But talent is essential, too. During the period of The Fall, when he had lost his voice, he panicked; he could accept anything except impotence. Without power he is returned to Monroe Street in Hobo-ken, a scared kid. That kid wants to be accepted by powerful men, so he shakes hands with the men of the mob. But the scared kid also understands loneliness, and he uses that knowledge as the engine of his talent. When he sings a ballad — listen again to “I’m a Fool to Want You,” recorded at the depths of his anguish over Ava Gardner — his voice haunts, explores, suffers. Then, in up-tempo songs, it celebrates, it says that the worst can be put behind you, there is always another woman and another bright morning. The scared kid, easy in the world of women and power, also carries the scars of rejection. His mother was too busy. His father sent him away.

“He told me, ‘Get out of the house and get a job,’ “ he said about his father in a rare TV interview with Bill Boggs a few years ago. “I was shocked. I didn’t know where the hell to go. I remember the moment. We were having breakfast.…This particular morning my father said to me, ‘Why don’t you get out of the house and go out on your own?’ What he really said was ‘Get out.’ And I think the egg was stuck in there about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t swallow it or get rid of it, in any way. My mother, of course, was nearly in tears, but we agreed that it might be a good thing, and then I packed up a small case that I had and came to New York.”

He came to New York, all right, and to all the great cities of the world. The scared kid, the only child, invented someone named Frank Sinatra and it was the greatest role he ever played. In some odd way he has become the role. There is a note of farewell in his recent performances. One gets the sense that he is now building his own mausoleum.

“Dyin’ is a pain in the ass,” he says.

Sinatra could be around for another twenty years, or he could be gone tomorrow, but the jagged symmetries of his legend would remain. For too many years the scared kid lashed out at enemies, real or imagined; he courted his inferiors, intoxicated by their power; he helped people and hurt people; he was willful, self-absorbed, and frivolous. But the talent survived everything, and so did the fear, and when I see him around, I always imagine him as a boy on that Hobo-ken street in his Fauntleroy suit and remember him wandering the streets of New York a half century later, trying to figure out what all of it meant.

NEW YORK,

April 28, 1980

GLEASON

Here he comes, “the Great One,” in a maroon stretch limousine, its planes and curves glistening in the summer sun. The limousine moves in a stately way down a curving path and stops in front of a huge pile of stone, brick, and mortar that is the centerpiece of the Riverdale estate known as Wave Hill. The Great One steps out of the limousine, blinks in the bright sunshine, glances at the cables, massed trailers, busy extras, grips, and electricians who are part of every movie location. Then he steps into the huge Beaver 36 mobile home that is parked on the shoulder of the driveway.

“Come on in,” Jackie Gleason calls behind him. “Have a seat, I’ll be with you in a minute.”

He’s 69, and looks in good shape, given what he has done to the body over the years: the gorging and the pig-outs, the monumental drinking bouts, a broken arm in the forties, a broken leg in the fifties, the crash diets, careening horseplay, billions of cigarettes. He’s six feet tall, and large, but he doesn’t look fat. He goes to the back of the trailer with a valet, closes the door, and emerges in a black shirt and slacks. The face is now a draftsman’s delight: pouches, slashes, the large upper lip sliced by a thin mustache, eyes that alternately sparkle and grieve, a face made for expression. He lights a cigarette, sits back on a couch.

A production assistant leans in through the open door. “Can I get you anything, Mr. Gleason?”

“Yeah,” he says, “a couple of broads.”

Everybody laughs except Gleason. He blinks in a deadpan way and takes a drag on a cigarette.