Why Sinatra Matters (4 page)

And yet the tale of Frank Sinatra isn’t only about Clarke’s and Hollywood and Las Vegas; the life he led in such places is
part of the tale, but it would be meaningless without the art. Sinatra’s art can be experienced in the 1,307 recordings he
made in studios from 1939 to 1995, in the recordings of his concerts, in his videos and movies. In the saloons of the city,
you could see what Sinatra had become. But such evenings could never explain the long existential saga of a life entwined
with art. He was, in some ways, as elusive and mysterious as Jay Gatsby, not simply to those who knew him but to himself.
The keys to the life and the art can only be found somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city.

M
ANY IMMIGRANTS HAD BROUGHT ON BOARD BALLS OF YARN, LEAVING ONE END OF THE LINE WITH SOMEONE ON LAND
. A
S THE SHIP SLOWLY CLEARED THE DOCK, THE BALLS UNWOUND AMID THE FAREWELL SHOUTS OF THE WOMEN, THE FLUTTERING OF THE HANDKERCHIEFS,
AND THE INFANTS HELD HIGH
. A
FTER THE YARN RAN OUT, THE LONG STRIPS REMAINED AIRBORNE, SUSTAINED BY THE WIND, LONG AFTER THOSE ON LAND AND THOSE AT SEA
HAD LOST SIGHT OF EACH OTHER.

– L
UCIANO
D
E
C
RESCENZO,
Quoted in La Merica:
Images of Italian
Greenhorn Experience

T
HE LIFE AND CAREER
of Frank Sinatra are inseparable from the most powerful of all modern American myths: the saga of immigration. Because he
was the son of immigrants, his success thrilled millions who were products of the same rough history. Through the power of
his art and his personality, he became one of a very small group that would permanently shift the image of Italian Americans.
Many aspects of his character were shaped by that immigrant experience, which often fueled his notorious volatility. More
important, it infused his art.

“Of course, it meant something to me to be the son of immigrants,” Sinatra said to me once. “How could it not? How the hell
could it not? I grew up for a few years thinking I was just another American kid. Then I discovered at – what? five? six?
— I discovered that some people thought I was a dago. A wop. A guinea.” An angry pause. “You know, like I didn’t have a fucking
name
.” An angrier pause. “That’s why years later, when Harry [James] wanted me to change my name, I said no way, baby. The name
is Sinatra. Frank fucking Sinatra.”

He grew up in a time when the wounds caused by nativism and anti-Italian bigotry were still raw. Those wounds, and the scar
tissue they left behind, affected the way millions of Italian Americans lived, what they talked about, even how they chose
to read the newspapers. In the years of his childhood, Sinatra was no exception.

“Growing up, I would hear the stories,” he said to me once. “Things that happened, because you were Italian. … I don’t mean
it was the
only
thing people talked about. That would be a lie. But the stories were there. The warnings, the prejudice. You heard about
it at home, in the barbershop, on the corner. You never heard about it in school. But it was there. Later, I heard the same
kinds of things from my Jewish friends, how
they
learned about the ways they could get in trouble. Always the same old shit.”

The stories were about insults, exploitation, worse. Part of the trouble was caused by sheer numbers. From 1880 to the beginning
of World War I, more than 24 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to America. About 4.5 million were Italians, 80 percent
of them fleeing the exhausted hills and emptying villages of II Mezzogiorno, the neglected provinces of southern Italy and
Sicily. Many thousands went to Brazil. Another million journeyed to Argentina and permanently transformed the character of
that nation. The vast majority came to the United States. At first, the more adventurous Italians moved west, helping build
thousands of miles of railroad tracks, finding jobs as fishermen on the sunny coasts of California or developing that state’s
lush vineyards. Most settled in cities.

“I read a book once about how the Irish when they came to America never wanted to be farmers again,” Sinatra said. “I guess
if you work on a farm and everything dies in the ground, you don’t ever trust the ground again. The Italians were like that
too.”

Rural Italian and Irish immigrants shared that common grievance against the Old Country: the exhausted or poisoned land had
failed them and, in a way, betrayed their faith and prayers; in the New World, they sought the solace of cities. Cement was
better than hunger; a job and a lock on the door provided the only true safety. The Jews, haunted by the brutal realities
of recurrent pogroms, or disenfranchised by a crippling, pervasive anti-Semitism, were drawn by the even brighter promise
of freedom; no matter how terrible life might be in the slums of the Lower East Side, the Cossacks would not arrive at dawn
with their sabers drawn. The Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants shared a suspicion of government and the
police that helped form the style of the American cities where they settled. Their children were touched, in various degrees,
by their Old Country lore and their nostalgias. Many of Frank Sinatra’s attitudes came from that mixture.

But in the last years of the nineteenth century, rural Italians faced some special problems in urban America, burdens that
did not afflict the Irish and the Jews in the same way. Even in the Italian language, too many immigrants could not read or
write. Depending upon the year, between 50 and 70 percent of the new arrivals were illiterate. This was a severe handicap
in the booming, more complex cities of the United States and forced many into manual labor or trades that did not demand book
learning. Four thousand Italian immigrants found work building the New York subways. Others labored in the building trades,
helping erect the soaring monuments of twentieth-century New York. Many worked as barbers or seamstresses, as blacksmiths
or mechanics or stone-masons. Some were chefs or bakers. Others were fruit and vegetable peddlers, bootblacks, or shoemakers.
A few created an instant stereotype: the organ grinder. These small mustached men moved through many neighborhoods, equipped
with hand organs, an occasional monkey, and a cup for coins. For most people the organ grinder was a passing amusement, singing
“O Sole Mio” into the humid air of a Saturday morning; for many Italian Americans, the organ grinder was a humiliation, a
beggar with a monkey and a voice.

Most of the time, the Italians did their work with silent courage and little public complaint. If you came from a place where
there were never enough jobs, work itself was a kind of triumph. For those immigrants, there was no such thing as a meaningless
job; the job itself was the meaning.

“They did whatever the hell they had to do to put food on the table,” Sinatra said to me once. “They took any kind of dumb
job, and you know why? So their
kids
wouldn’t have to do those jobs. So
you
wouldn’t have to do it. So
I
wouldn’t have to do it. They were some kind of people.”

The Italians also had to undergo another peculiarly American rite of passage: they had to endure and then confront the ferocious
bigotry of those who had come before them. This was compounded by the American obsession with race. At the peak of the migration,
there were millions of African Americans still alive who had lived as slaves; political compromise was leading to an iron
segregation in the American South; various hare-brained race theorists spent their time sniffing out hidden racial strains
in individuals. Guilt over slavery, and over the partial extermination of American Indians, created self-serving notions about
the inferiority of those with darker skin. Along came the Italians. The majority of Italian immigrants were Sicilians, from
an island where Arab and Spanish conquerors had been dominant for centuries. The glories of those civilizations meant nothing
to many older Americans; the darker complexions of the Mediterranean were suspect among those who believed that Americans
were supposed to be fair-skinned. The coarse, hurting language of ethnic inferiority followed, and it affected Frank Sinatra.
Even in the years of his fame and power, Sinatra could not completely insulate himself from the social cruelties of that process.

“Every once in a while,” he told me, “I’d be at a party somewhere, in Hollywood or New York or wherever, and it would be very
civilized, you know, black tie, the best crystal, all of that. And I’d see a guy staring at me from the corner of the room,
and I knew what word was in his head. The word was
guinea
.”

Some of this social minefield was waiting for the Italians when they got off the boat at Castle Garden or Ellis Island. In
the 1890s, when Frank Sinatra’s grandparents made their separate passages from Italy, carrying with them the children who
would become his parents, a renewed nativist fever was surging through the United States. It was driven, of course, by fear.
A fear of Catholics, a fear of Jews, a fear of strange languages and secret societies, a fear of race, a fear of People Who
Are Not Like Us. The Irish had gone through this paranoid test for the half century following the Great Famine that sent them
to America. For a shorter period of time, the Jews who arrived on the same great immigrant tide as the Italians would suffer
similar humiliations. Mexicans, Dominicans, and many Asians are today objects of the same collective stupidity. For the Italians
and their children, this brutal ritual would last much longer than for other groups. And a hundred years ago it was not a
simple matter of manners, social slights, or bigoted jokes. It could be a matter of life and death.

“Guys my age, one reason they didn’t pay much attention to school was the schools didn’t tell stories
we
knew,” Sinatra said. “We heard what had happened in different places. We didn’t get it from school.”

One story that Sinatra heard was about an event that happened about the time his parents and grandparents arrived in the United
States. In 1891 a singular atrocity took place in New Orleans that drastically altered the situation of all Italian Americans.
A group of Italian immigrants were accused of murdering a corrupt police superintendent named David Hennessy. Nineteen were
charged with the crime; eleven were tried for murder. There was much lurid talk in the newspapers of the day about the Black
Hand, a secret gang of Sicilians dedicated to crime. Then, for the first time, many Americans heard the word
Mafia
. This was even bigger than the Black Hand. The Mafia myth, which conferred immense hidden powers to a relative handful of
hoodlums, was born. It didn’t matter that among the 4.5 million Italian immigrants, no more than a few thousand were connected
to the Honored Society; it didn’t matter that in the prisons of New York, the Italians were a tiny minority among an army
of Irish lawbreakers. The myth had been spawned in New Orleans. Spreading like a stain, inflated by novels and movies and
a cottage industry of hysterical politicians and prosecutors, the dark myth would affect all Italian Americans; it would directly
affect the life of Frank Sinatra.

“Half the troubles I’ve had,” he said once, “were because my name ended in a vowel. They tried to put me together with all
the other stuff that happened. I wasn’t the only one. But there I was, up on a goddamned stage. I was pretty easy to see,
a good target.”

In New Orleans the garish myth flowered in the imaginations of newspapermen. There were gangsters among us, the newspapers
said, who were different from Irish gangsters or American gangsters; they were darker, swarthier, spoke a different language,
and were bound together by blood oaths! In largely Catholic New Orleans, famous for its easy, tolerant ways, the myth had
crude power; paranoia usually does. Even among some supporters of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society if there
ever was one, it was believed that the Italians were different. The IRB wanted freedom for Ireland; the Mafia wanted
America!

But then a strange thing happened in the New Orleans trial of the Italian immigrants for the murder of David Hennessy: the
jury acquitted eight of the men and reached no verdict on the other three. The evidence simply wasn’t there. Not about this
specific murder. And not about the Mafia.

That verdict did not satisfy the respectable Americans of New Orleans. They claimed the fix was in. They claimed that the
shadowy Italian organization had paid off the jurors. Two days after the verdicts a mob of several thousand, led by sixty
leading citizens and including a small number of African Americans, surrounded the jail where the Italians were awaiting final
bureaucratic disposition of their cases. The Americans stormed the jail, dragged the Italians out of their cells, and murdered
them. Two were hanged screaming from lampposts. One of them tried climbing the hangman’s rope with his free hands and was
riddled with bullets. Seven were executed by firing squads in the yard of the jail. Two crawled into a prison doghouse to
hide from the mob, were discovered, and were shot to pieces. It remains the worst single lynching in American history.