This American Life; Sinatra; Part 1

All right, Mr. Kent Lane, whenever you're ready, we're going to sing a few of these songs we hope you enjoy. Yeah, we hope you enjoy them. From WBCSD Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. What are you staring at? Pozieres. I did go abroad with no brasier. This is a recording from 1962, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. performing in a club outside Chicago. And like everything else about Frank Sinatra, what's fascinating about this recording is how many different people he's able to be all at once cutting up on the one hand and then turning around and singing the most vulnerable possible love songs on the other. When your own. As for starlit sky. Where does it hurt, baby, when you are alone?

Not three minutes later, he's lashing into a gossip columnist, he hates Dorothy Kilgallen, I never met him. I mean, I've met many, many male thinks, but I never met a female singer until I met Dorothy Kilgallen. How's that for an opener? I wouldn't mind if she was a good looking to think that such beautiful music should emerge from such vulgarity is one of life's great mysteries. The Washington star once wrote the town where she came from. They had a beauty contest when she was 17 years old and nobody won. There was a poor little Chinese kid. The boy was standing there. There was nobody else that gave him the cup because he was better looking than a bride's on the line. Then this is the way he is on stage with Sammy Davis Jr.. In 1962, it was still groundbreaking for a mainstream white performer to be integrating his nightclub act at all.

But a good portion of the act is just Sinatra and Martin telling Davis to get off the stage and Davis pleading with him to stay. Yes, we can sing with you guys a couple of you know, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. I'll dance with you. I'll sing with you or swim with you. I'll cut along with you. I'll go to bar mitzvahs with you. But don't touch me. A third of a century after this was recorded, what is I think most striking about it is how many of the jokes are simply about the fact that a black man is on stage with these white guys. I'm going to play you a big chunk of this because it's amazing. Well, now that you're out here, you might as well do some leisure leave. Hey, how come he got a white stool? Oh. I do what, ladies and gentlemen, may I offer some impersonations or your name is Sam,

that's a good idea. What to do, Paul Revere, get on your horse and get the hell out of here. I tell you what. To James Meredith, the Mississippi. Helen. Ladies and gentlemen, my first impression that of Mr. Frank Sinatra. When somebody loves you, it's no good unless she loves you. Oh. And if you like him, you're going to be cuckoo about me.

He's just, you excuse the expression, a carbon copy. When Sammy Davis finally sings a duet with Sinatra, it is a duet between a black man and a white man that is, it's unimaginable to hear it. You know, it's you cannot imagine it being performed today by a black and a white man. It's when they for years, me and my shadow, I may close it in Beijing. That's getting a bit closer than my own shadow. So wherever you gone there, you find me just close. My eyes are all the blood hounds that lies me and Smoggiest and Frank Sinatra. We see the history of the 20th century in Frank Sinatra as a Chicago writer named Rennie Sparks. But it we don't just see a man. We see every man.

Frank Sinatra is my father and my brother, my first boyfriend and my last. He's a frail boy crooner and a floppy bow tie. He's a thug smashing his fist through a wall when his shirts come back with too much starch. And he's a bewildered old man falling off a stool during my way. Shirley MacLaine says he let her stick a gun behind his ear during takes off. Some came running, but he also like to grab an ice cube from his drink, thrusting into the palm of a Gaga fan snarling here. Go skate around on it. I wish someone would hurt you, he told Shirley, so I could kill him for you. She gets too hungry. They wait there for dinner at eight. I can barely see them above. Well, today on our program, of course, chairman of the Board Act,

one of our program, The Death of Frank Sinatra, Michael Ventura reads from his novel of the same name back to a modest request to all of American television from one Sinatra fan on her knees at three. History lesson for the Young People. Act for Frank Sinatra has a cold. We have Gay Talese on the program reading from his classic 1966 account of several weeks he spent following Frank Sinatra at the height of Sinatra Rat Pack power at five, a restaurant full of cabbies gets choked up over Frank. Stay with us. Patty, the lady Delaney, white lady. Echoing the death of Frank Sinatra, Michael Ventura grew up in the 1950s in New York City and on both sides of my family. And if you grew up as a seasoned kid in the 50s in New York, it was like Sinatra was part

of your family. He was the most famous Italian, except for some baseball stars, literally just a figure. People gossiped about and they listen to his songs. And he was held up to me by my father as an example. You see him, he can spit in anybody's eye and get away with it. Well, Michael Ventura published a novel in 1996 called The Death of Frank Sinatra. Sinatra's people were not pleased. The book, however, is not literally about Frank Sinatra. It's about men like Michael Ventura, whose sense of style and sense of self came in part from Frank's style. What's it mean to you, the death of Frank Sinatra? The death of a style. The death of the last and greatest. Embodiment of a kind of street elegance. A style that is particularly and

indelibly 20th century and that we will not see, again, Frank Sinatra himself when he appears in the book, once in the scene that he's in, he's doing a concert. And one of the things that's interesting is that in a work of fiction, you know, Michael Ventura could choose any any era Sinatra concert to to put in. And he decided to choose Sinatra in the mid 1990s. The reason why, he says, is because the Sinatra that exists for us today is the Sinatra of all of his ages. All of them come forward as he sings. We asked him to read his account of what Sinatra is as rendered in this one concert. As the old man walked out onto the stage, a curtain came up behind him to reveal a large orchestra. Every musician wore a tuxedo. The conductor was a small round man sitting at a grand piano and wearing earphones with a slash of the conductor's hand. The rhythm and brass burst into a loud tempo number, and Sinatra flashed a smile that made him look uncannily young. A young smile and the old pasty face and his eyes were the same as they'd always

been brighter in person than they ever registered on screen. And like the smile, the eyes were young to the point of seeming unnatural, for though no makeup could conceal the sad ravages of the face. The eyes and the smile seemed untouched. As though to put his listeners at ease with these contradictions, Sinatra grabbed the microphone from the top of the black grand piano and sang about how they made him feel so young. These strangers in this room had that power. They made him feel so young and he would feel that way even when he was old and gray. The song itself was keeping him alive. It was as though Sinatra's voice was living his entire life all over again at different stages throughout the song. The first bars were the voice of the old man, raspy, worn, unable to hold notes for longer than a beat, and only his mastery of rhythm kept the song alive and made each word surprising. Surprising, though everyone in the room knew the lyrics by heart. Then, on a high note, the voice cracked, and for an instant

the music soured and the audience flinched as one person. But instead of retreating from that bad sound, Sinatra leaned into it. Sinatra bent the note further into a jazz like harmony, and so he erased his mistake from memory by making it part of the performance. And then, instead of softening after the mistake, Sinatra held the new no longer and louder, as though diving into it then took a quick breath and sang the next note louder still and fuller until seamlessly for several bars. It was the voice of 30 or 40 years ago, full and unfettered, resonant and suggestive, until, again it began to crack. And again he used the cracking to modulate back into the voice and style of the old man on pitch. But roar one note per beat, sometimes right on the beat, sometimes just off it, keeping the performance tense until on the last note, the young man's voice returned as those saluting the old man who sang it and Sinatra let that note ride and the audience cheered. It was a breathless performance, like watching a trapeze artist work without a net.

With barely a pause, he started to sing of how the best was yet to come. And wouldn't it be fine? An old man in some ageless space who could make them believe for the length of a song that the best indeed was yet to come? And the voice again going to and fro between strength and fragility, youth and age. Sinatra's foot tap the beat with absolute certainty while his posture was ever so slightly wobbly, as though his energy was too much for his body and in his immaculate tuxedo, with the surety of his presence and the reckless confidence of his style, he seemed to be demonstrating his legend without trading on it, without needing to. The lyrics were trite, obvious, sentimental. Somehow he made them true. The music was simple to the point of childishness. Somehow he made it complex. They found themselves applauding and cheering at the songs and not in homage, but as the only way to release the energy it gave them. The man was dispensing something, a kind of vitality that surged from his darkness

with bright light, and he was giving it away with generous abandon, as though he had no fear that he would not have more to give in the next song, the next show, the next day. Anything in such an old man? Where could this vitality come from? I lit my cigarets like he did. I wore the kind of clothes he wore. I still do. I tried to stand as he stood. I tried to walk as he walked. I still do not because I was imitating him, but because I was imitating all the people who gave and taught me life. And they took so many of their cues from him. And where did he taken his cues from? From peasants who came to America, from an older, less sentimental world. Peasants who came with the intention of becoming aristocrats and who almost as soon as they arrived, began to stand and walk like those aristocrats they'd watched so closely. Yet from afar, for generations, European princes had taught them grace. American streets taught them flair. They didn't need to learn violence from anyone that they were born with. And Sinatra blended all this better than any and sang as he did so

sang of love and of pride, despairing of one and reveling in the other. And this is why cecilians especially gave him respect in the peculiar way cecilians use that word, meaning homage, deference, consideration and that invitation to betrayal, loyalty. Now, Sinatra sang about how they, whoever they were, couldn't take that, whatever that was away. To him that somehow, in the way she held her hat and the way she sipped her tea was beyond the world's possibility to destroy or erode. There was a scrapbook of Sinatras pictures, the pictures were all of Sinatra, but he was never alone. Sinatra with Lyndon Johnson without Ray Stevenson with Eleanor Roosevelt. He was holding her hand and looking into her eyes with Jack Kennedy, Bobby, Jackie Nixon, Reagan, Nancy and Sinatra with very different people. Sinatra with Johnny Roselli, Paul Castellano, Carlo Gambino, Carver's son, Joey Jimmy, Fred Triano, Sally Spatola, and still

another kind Sinatra with Marilyn Monroe. Lauren Bacall. Humphrey Bogart. Marlon Brando. Who was Armstrong? Elvis Presley. Duke Ellington. That man on the stage, that old man, was where it all connected, who else had held the hand of Eleanor Roosevelt and shaken the hand of Carlo Gambino both and on equal terms, that man on the stage, that old man. And why? Because he could sing love songs like No one else. History of a Kind, History Transfixed by love songs. That's life. That's what all the people say. The man is singing. Now some people get their kicks from stomping on a dream, but he don't let that get him down. And now he's singing that we're much too marvelous for words. The man who's speaking now, I'm just waiting for a downbeat, not a bus. Were you working tomorrow? The musicians left the conductor. That little round man laughed. That's my son. The guy with the earphones at the promises. Mother, I give the bum a job more laughter. But something was wrong on the stage.

The music was playing. Sinatra wasn't singing. He was looking around as though he's forgotten where he was. He started a lyric, then stopped. It didn't fit the music. He looked frightened. A scared boy in the body of an old man. He turned toward his son, whose presence seemed to remind him of who he was. He was Frank Sinatra. He was there to sing love songs to history, and he wheeled around and began to beg. But in the proudest terms that luck be a lady tonight. And that should keep the party polite and that should not blow on some other guy's dies. But it had been an awful moment to see that confidence suddenly abandoned with nothing in the man to take his place. He sang more slowly now that it seemed we stood and talk like this before. And he was right that we looked at each other in the same way then. But there was no way to remember where or when he sang in the young boys and the old back and forth where and when unknowable. And as the lyrics climbed to the final high note, he became in his voice, younger and younger, until he hit the last when roundly and fully and

held that note a long time. And when the note and the word were finally exhausted, the goose muscles of his fatty face trembled as though they had been unaccountably left behind and his eyes were frightened again. He had to know that it was very possible that this was the last time his voice would rise to such a height. And he looked like an old man who had said an irreparable goodbye. He took a few steps, tried to recover slowly, he started to speak I'm what they call a saloon singer. For most of the performance, he had been singing happily about love jauntily perhaps that was in part a function of age. It was easier with that ravaged and undependable voice to sing faster tempos that gave him the flexibility to go through many changes and use many approaches. Slow, sad songs required rounder tones and more control could not be played with as easily were far more dangerous. He's risking humiliation every moment.

Say what you like. That's a very brave man. The song began. He's telling us to drink up. Are we happy people? Nobody here looks very happy, but he's admitting that we're happier than him. He says he's paying for the drinks and the laughs. He's paying for everything because a woman with angel eyes is gone and she's really gone. What a tenderness he has for her. What a terrible, generous, all encompassing tenderness. He's not bitter. He's not angry at those angels had every right to look elsewhere. He asks us to excuse him because he must disappear and his voice is disappearing with him. A scratchy whisper like an old wax record played on a machine with unbearable politeness, with the tenderness close to death, the death of his voice. He is saying, Excuse me, I must disappear. There are no angels left in the room, no reason to stay. He's tired, he could not live unless he sang to us, but each time he sings, he dares humiliation, lets us watch the dying relationship

between him and his voice, him and his memory, him in that angelic one whom he could not hold, whom he was, no man for whom his tenderness could finally not sustain, whom his darkness drove away. Everything is ended. Everything is over. He can't even say excuse me anymore. He thanks us. He's leaving us. He touched what we like to think was our history and it has left him like this. And now he is leaving us. Everyone cheered as he walked off the stage. Do they know what they cherry do, they know they're watching a man rehearse his death, but one in every performance have you've seen us perform before? And it's called a saloon song. I do one in each performance because somebody somewhere sometimes dubbed me the saloon singer, so I don't want to disappoint him. And as it happens to have a lot of truth back to that, too, because when I was young and

I started working in joints in New Jersey and bars and grills and all kinds of places. To one day, somebody came in and offered me a better job. Look what happened to me. Nothing. Drink up all you people. Order anything that you see. The drink and the laughs. On me. Acto a fan gets on her knees, there's no polite way to say this, but Frank Sinatra has been in and out of hospitals. He's in his 80s. He's reported to have suffered from a pinched nerve, from pneumonia, from mild heart attack.

Right. Saval, like any Sinatra fan, knows what's coming. And only hopes that her media colleagues will handle the inevitable with some taste and some vision. Is there anything nicer than a really good TV obituary any day now? Peter Jennings will cut away from some freak mudslide story casualties. Six registered voters face another camera and announce old blue eyes death. Later the World News Tonight, credits will roll over a taste for montage of Franks film stills and album covers. The other networks will run similar tributes, as will the brainiacs at Entertainment Tonight and those swinger's on the NewsHour at PBS. But you know what? It will not matter whether Sinatras video work is hosted by the Tweedie, Jim Lehrer or the perky Katie Couric, because each and every remembrance will be accompanied by the same damn song, the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly dictatorial chestnut in the old man's vast and dazzling backlog.

My way when the guy who generously gave us greats like I get a kick out of you kicks it. We won't put on our basey boots or get a load of those coocoo things he's been saying will be bored, terrifically screaming at the TV set every time he and that sappy string section face the final curtain. So I face. The final curtain, I get it, he's dead and on tape from the grave talking about how the end is near spooky, I believe. Alive, that's the only way my way has ever worked, is if the person singing it is dumber than the song, which is why the only successful rendition of it was perpetrated by Sid Vicious. Frank and Elvis, for that matter, was always too complicated, too full of rhythmic freedom to settle into the song Simplistic Selfishness. My Way pretends to speak up for self-possession and personal vision when really

it only calls forth the temper tantrums of two year olds. Or perhaps the last words spoken to Eva Braun. There are rumors from Belgrade that each night when the government controlled evening news is on, the townspeople blow whistles are banging on pots and pans so they won't hear the state's lies. Keep that beautiful action in mind when Sinatra is dead and all the TVs in your more boring democratic world are playing my way. Drown it out. Play something else to the montage in your own heart or just turn off the TV sound, have your stereo cued up and ready to go. He could kill over any second. I mean, he might not even make it through this hour long radio show. Be prepared. Why not play Angel Eyes for its subtle reference

to the singer's Mediterranean windows to the soul for its knowing jaunty adieu. Scuse me while I do so. Are you listening, Peter Jennings, hear how great that would work under all those postwar black and white snapshots, how that nice Christian harp outro hints at Frank's unlikely salvation. Let's all listen again. Excuse me while I do soap. I admit this may not be quite stupid and obvious enough for network television,

so if the staff of the Today Show is hearing my voice right now, here's another suggestion. That's what all the people say. You're riding high in April. Shot down in May if Angel Eyes is off periods and pauses, this song is all exclamation point. Picture, please. Good Morning America staffers quick cut shots of Sinatra with Ava Gardner, Sinatra with daughter Nancy at age five, Sinatra with Kennedy, Sinatra with some mob boss no one will recognize anyway over these lyrics. Panel of. A pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king. I've been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing each time I find myself. It's really a terrible choice, just as corny as my way, but at least it's

got a little bit of the old ring, a ding ding, it swings. This is my Aviemore. I vote anything but my way. As for me, when I hear the big news, I'm tempted to think I'll be cranking up my favorite Sinatra side. Come dance with me. But it's too disrespectfully cheerful to work as a dirge and kind of creepy have taken literally who except Tom Petty wants to foxtrot with a corpse. I've decided instead to blare the Capitol recording of Cole Porter's What Is This thing called Love. It's the driving question behind the entire Sinatra research project. And it's a lovely pop song. Suitably melancholy for morning, reflective and wise, the orchestra starts off low into a clarinet that somehow lewd and ponderous. At the same time, Frank scrawls the topic sentence, then repeats it, adding one word. This funny thing called love. It begins as a rhetorical question and by the end turns into a cosmic inquiry

of God. What is this thing? Called LA. This funny thing. Just who can solve? It's mistery. And why should it make? Now, energy producers, are you paying attention at the end of the song, Frank

asked one more time to the Lord in Heaven above, just what is this thing called love? And then he cuts out as if he's off to face the creator in person. That's why I was the. And then once he's gone, the orchestra resolves to a sweet final chord, as if they have the answer, but Frank Sinatra is no longer around to hear it. Can't you just see the freeze frame, Frank, in the recording studio? The Capitol years, the hat askew, the tie loosened.

TV producers of America, I beg you for all of us, for Frank. Ixnay on the my.