Why Sinatra Matters (2 page)

H
E HAD COME A LONG WAY TO THIS BLUE LAWN AND HIS DREAM MUST HAVE SEEMED SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD HARDLY FAIL TO GRASP IT
. H
E DID NOT KNOW THAT IT WAS ALREADY BEHIND HIM, SOMEWHERE BACK IN THAT VAST OBSCURITY BEYOND THE CITY, WHERE THE DARK FIELDS
OF THE REPUBLIC ROLLED ON UNDER THE NIGHT.

–F. S
COTT
F
ITZGERALD
,
The Great Gatsby

I’
M FOR WHATEVER GETS YOU THROUGH THE NIGHT.

–F
RANK
S
INATRA

T
HIS WAS ON A
N
EW
Y
ORK
midnight in 1970. A hard spring rain had emptied Third Avenue, and neon lights scribbled garishly across the glistening black
asphalt. From the front window of P. J. Clarke’s saloon, you could see a few taxis cruising slowly among the spokes of ruined
umbrellas and a trash basket lying on its side, its contents turning to pulp. Across the street, two old rummies huddled in
the doorway of an antique store.

On this night in the rain-drowned city, we were safe and dry at an oak table in the back room of the saloon. Clarke’s was,
and remains, a place out of another time, all burnished wood and chased mirrors, Irish flags and browning photographs of prizefighters.
A few aging men at the long, bright bar could gaze out the windows and still see the Third Avenue El, gone since 1955, or
the Irish tenements that were smashed into rubble and replaced with steel-and-glass office buildings. They were each drinking
alone and looked as if they remembered other nights too, evoked by the music of the jukebox.

What good is the scheming, the planning and dreaming,

That comes with each new love affair …

The man singing for the lonesome men at the bar was at our table. Or more precisely, we were at his table. Anytime Frank Sinatra
sat down at a table, it became his table. On this night he was in New York for a concert and he was in good spirits. To begin
with, the hands of the clock had passed twelve, and he was in a large city, specifically the hard, wounded metropolis of New
York. For decades now, Sinatra had defined the glamour of the urban night. It was both a time and a place; to inhabit the
night, to be one of its restless creatures, was a small act of defiance, a shared declaration of freedom, a refusal to play
by all those conventional rules that insisted on men and women rising at seven in the morning, leaving for work at eight,
and falling exhausted into bed at ten o’clock that night. In his music, Sinatra gave voice to all those who believed that
the most intense living begins at midnight: show people, bartenders, and sporting women; gamblers, detectives, and gangsters;
small winners and big losers; artists and newspapermen. If you loved someone who did not love you back, you could always walk
into a saloon, put your money on the bar, and listen to Sinatra.

Here in one of the late-night places of an all-night city, Sinatra was wearing a dark suit, a perfectly knotted red tie, a
pale blue shirt, silver cuff links, and was drinking Jack Daniel’s. He was still lean then. The famous face remained an arrangement
of knobs and planes that didn’t assemble into any conventional version of masculine handsomeness but had an enormous vitality;
it was a face that defeated painters and seduced photographers. His eyes were bright and blue (although nobody had yet called
him Old Blue Eyes), and the mouth was mobile and expressive. He had a wonderful smile. The voice, of course, was a whiskey-and-cigarettes
baritone.

He sat with his back against the wall in the muted light of the room and seemed to ignore his own voice on the jukebox. He
was facing Danny Lavezzo, who ran Clarke’s; William B. Williams, the disc jockey who had christened Sinatra “the Chairman
of the Board”; Jilly Bizzo, who ran a saloon across town and had been one of Sinatra’s best friends for more than twenty years;
two young women whose faces were too perfect; and the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. The table was crowded with glasses, ashtrays,
bowls of peanuts and pretzels. Only Cannon sipped coffee. There were about eight other people at smaller tables, and you could
see the rain racing down one of the small side windows. Lavezzo made certain the other customers were kept at a distance by
seating them as far from Sinatra’s table as possible without handing them umbrellas. The sound of “When Your Lover Has Gone”
made Cannon turn his head toward the jukebox.

“That’s the saddest goddamned song ever written,” he said.

“It’s right up there,” Sinatra said, shaking his head and lighting an unfiltered Camel with a heavy silver lighter.

“You know where it’s from?” Cannon said. “It’s from a terrible movie called
Blonde Crazy
. Cagney and Joanie. 1931.”

“Joanie who?” said Jilly Rizzo, his bad eye gleaming. “Crawford?”

“Blondell, dummy,” Sinatra said. “Joan Blondell. Cannon used to go with her.”

“You’re kidding me,” Rizzo said. “You went with Joan Blondell? A busted-down
sportswriter
went out with Joan Blondell?”

“He didn’t always look this bad,” Sinatra said. Cannon smiled in an embarrassed way. He was a small man with a long, pudgy
Irish face and horn-rimmed glasses.

“It was a long time ago,” Cannon said. He looked relieved when the song ended, but its lonesome mood seemed to stain the air
around him.

Rizzo turned to one of the young women. “You ever hear of Joan Blondell?”

The young woman shrugged. No.

“What about Cagney? You know,
James Cagney?
”

“I know him,” said the second woman brightly. “He was the guy, the captain, in that picture with Henry Fonda, right? About
the navy?”

“You win a dish of strawberries, sweetheart,” Sinatra said.

“I don’t like strawberries,” she said in a baffled way. Sinatra laughed out loud. So did the rest of us, but it wasn’t until
I was home, hours later, that I realized Sinatra had mixed up the strawberries scene from
The Caine Mutiny
with the potted palm scene from
Mister Roberts
. We’d all laughed with him, but the young woman was right to be baffled.

After a while Rizzo got up to take the two young women to a taxi while the conversation roamed in other directions. Somehow
it arrived at writers. Was Ernest Hemingway greater than F. Scott Fitzgerald? Cannon insisted on the superiority of Hemingway.
Sinatra preferred Fitzgerald.

“That
Great Gatsby
, come on, Jimmy, Hemingway couldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, but he could do a lot of other things,” Cannon said. “And Fitzgerald could only do that one thing.”

Rizzo returned and sat down. Cannon turned to me, the only other writer at the table: “What do you think?”

I repeated something Dizzy Gillespie once told me in an interview: “The professional is the guy that can do it twice.”

“Wow, is
that
true,” Sinatra said. “About
everything
. That’s a great line.”

“Yeah, and it’s a vote for Hemingway,” Cannon said. On the jukebox, Sinatra was singing “You Make Me Feel So Young.”

“What about you, Jilly? Hemingway or Fitzgerald?”

“Hey, no contest,” Jilly said, deadpan. “Ella all the way.”

They all laughed, and then the talk shifted, and “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me” was on the juke, and the waiter brought another round
and clean ashtrays. Someone wanted to know the name of the worst living American. The nominations flowed and ebbed: Walter
O’Malley, Mitch Miller, Richard Nixon (“Come on, lay off,” said Sinatra, who had supported Nixon over George McGovern). But
then another name was offered and in a rush of enthusiasm, the table unanimously voted the title of worst living American
to the boxer Jake La Motta.

“He dumped the fight to Billy Fox, and
never told his father
, who bet his life savings on Jake,” Sinatra said. “Lower than whale shit.”

And from La Motta, they moved seamlessly to Sugar Ray Robinson, another creature of the New York night. During the Depression
Robinson had come down from Harlem to dance for pennies in the doorways of Times Square. Then he had become a fighter of extraordinary
grace and power. He had owned a couple of apartment houses in Harlem, a lavender Cadillac, a bar called Sugar Ray’s, where
women arrived each night to find him, and then lost them all. An accountant took all of Robinson’s money to the racetrack,
and the fighter had to go back to a sport he no longer loved. Still, he had fought La Motta six times, winning five, including
a thirteenth-round knockout that gave him the middleweight championship in a brutal fight in Chicago in 1951. In the fighter’s
great days, Cannon and Robinson had been close; we didn’t know it that night, but Sinatra had privately arranged to support
Robinson after the old champion moved to California. They all knew him.

“He used to come in here all the time,” Lavezzo said. “He was some beautiful-looking guy.” I had seen Robinson’s fierce 1957
war with Carmen Basilio, watched him a lot in the old Stillman’s Gym, and had covered Robinson’s sad last fight, a loss to
Joey Archer in 1965 when Sugar Ray was forty-four. Sinatra remembered seeing Robinson knock out Jackie Wilson in Los Angeles
in 1947. “You couldn’t believe it,” he said. “The hand speed, the power, the fucking
elegance
.” Jilly saw him decision Kid Gavilan in New York in 1948, and Williams and Lavezzo recalled specific rounds from the two
fights with Basilio and the one-punch knockout of Gene Fullmer in the spring of ’57. They all talked with a kind of reverence.

“What was it the guy said?” Sinatra said. “There was Ray Robinson, and then there was the top ten.”

There was something else floating around in the talk about Robinson. They were all from the same generation, and Robinson
symbolized that generation in the same way that Sinatra did. Nobody said so at the table in Clarke’s, but they knew it. If
Sinatra had not been there (for ass-kissing was not part of the style), someone would have said, There’s Sinatra, and then
there’s the top ten.

Suddenly, Sinatra rose from his seat, excusing himself. A few other patrons looked at him. A woman in her forties widened
her eyes and whispered across the table to her man, who turned for a glance. Lavezzo tensed; Clarke’s was not the sort of
place that encouraged customers to ask for autographs. From the speakers, Sinatra’s exuberant voice was now singing “I’ve
Got the World on a String.” He was telling the world that he could make the rain go.

“Hey, Danny, don’t you have anything on the jukebox besides this dago kid?” Sinatra said to Lavezzo. The saloonkeeper laughed
and got up too. Sinatra led the way into a narrow passageway that opened into the front room. A large unsmiling man rose from
a small table and followed them. In Clarke’s, Sinatra didn’t need directions to get to the john.

“He looks good, Jilly,” Cannon said.

“Better than ever,” Jilly said.

“I wish he’d give up the goddamned Camels,” Williams said.

“That’s like asking him to give up broads,” Jilly said.

“He should give up
marrying
broads,” said Cannon, a lifelong bachelor.

There was another voice on the jukebox now. Billie Holiday. She was singing “Mean to Me” in the scraped, hurt voice of her
last years. From the Ray Ellis album with strings.
Lady in Satin
.

“This album always makes me want to cry,” Williams said.

“Just don’t cry into the whiskey,” Rizzo said. “Makes it too salty.” Cannon smiled. He’d given up whiskey in the 1940s but
never gave up the night shift. Whiskey was a big part of nights in that city, and he knew it was futile to deliver sermons
to his friends.

“What makes
you
cry, Jilly?” Cannon asked.

“Poverty,” Jilly answered. And he laughed out loud.

Then Sinatra was coming back through the passageway, with the large dour man guarding his back. Two young women stared from
the far end of the passage, giggling and tentative, as if having a small debate, and then turned back.

“You know what I love most about this joint?” Sinatra said. “Taking a piss. Those urinals … You could stand Abe Beame in one
of them and have room to spare.”

“The really great thing is the ice at the bottom,” Cannon said. “It’s like drilling a tunnel.”

“That’s
power
,” Sinatra said, laughing, reaching for the Camels. Lavezzo returned, looking as if he’d just flown a combat mission.

“That better?” he said, gesturing toward the unseen speakers and the anguished voice of Lady Day.

“Like fine wine,” Sinatra said, allowing smoke to leak from his mouth. I glanced at my watch. 2:25, the rain still falling.
Cannon sipped his coffee. Jilly smothered a yawn. Then Billie Holiday began to sing “I’m a Fool to Want You.” A song out of
Sinatra’s past. Out of 1951 and Ava Gardner and the most terrible time of his life. Everybody at the table knew the story.
Sinatra stared for a beat at the bourbon in his glass. Then shook his head.

“Time to go,” he said.

We all rose and went to the side door and followed Frank Sinatra into the night.