Enough of Sinatra, Already

by Joyce Marcel

Forgive me for not sounding reverent, but I never much cared for Sinatra and his music. In fact, I'll bet I'm not the only female music critic who feels this way. I've noticed that almost all the glowing Sinatra testimonials this week were written by men, men who probably wanted to be Sinatra and have as many women as they could, discarding in advance the uglier ones.

But here we are, a week after his death, and newspapers are still devoting pages -- not column inches, but pages -- to every detail of his life and times. People are putting flowers and candles near the monuments associated with him -- on both sides of the continent. His old concerts are everywhere on television. His movies -- and he made over 50 movies, most of them truly dreadful -- are being played all over the tube. And the radio -- my God! In my dreams I'm hearing him sing "New York, New York" and "Come Fly With Me" -- perfect phrasing, snapping fingers and all.

Even though I realize I am virtually alone in this, please make it stop.

Sinatra started out with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, the (enormously talented) white guys who took black big band swing and cleaned it up for the racist white American masses.

But after Sinatra held it in a death grip for 25 years, the music became an impenetrable wall. Sinatra doesn't want you -- or at least me -- to fly with him, and he certainly doesn't want us to dance. He wants us to stay as far away from him as we can, watch him with worship, and pay the freight.

The other night I saw three Sinatra television shows back-to-back. In one, a 1965 piece, Sinatra was singing (without an audience) to the music of Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins. He was singing the songs he'd become identified with, but without emotion. He didn't care at all.

Another channel showed a concert Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. did with a live audience. They used two bands, one white and one black; I guess the black musicians weren't too comfortable with "That's Amore."

In the May 25 New Yorker, Nancy Franklin writes that "The Wee Small Hours" and "Only the Lonely" and the other dark Sinatra classics show him "at his most vulnerable, his most mortal, his most human... the Sinatra you can touch."

To find that Sinatra, to my mind, you have wait around a long time, do a lot of hard work, and get through a lot of really bad renditions of "Lady is a Tramp."

I'll concede that the 1940s crooning Sinatra made a beautiful music that slithered longingly all over a woman, warming and comforting her. But by the 1950s and the "Rat Pack" days, it was over.

The real Rat Pack centered around Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and their Hollywood friends -- tough, intelligent, compassionate, talented and humane people who hung together because the film scene they found themselves in was so dumb and corrupt that they chose to stay apart from it.

When Sinatra took the Rat Pack over after Bogart's death, and after he dumped the grieving Bacall, it became the glorification of all the Hollywood values that Bogart had hated: cruelty, the use of power for the sake of power.

It is a shameful American truth that Sinatra, along with his good friend Jack Kennedy for a while, managed to glorify the kind of reckless lifestyle that treated with contempt at least half the population of the United States. After this degradation of women had become institutionalized in American life, can anyone wonder why the Women's Movement had such an impact?

I don't contest Sinatra's overwhelming personal power. I saw him in concert a few years ago -- it must have been one of his very last -- and even though he was still blowing the lyrics after reading them off monitors, a force emanated from him that was impossible to ignore. It was thrilling to be in the same room with him. My problem is how Sinatra used his power.

In his New York Times column about Sinatra's death, Frank Rich tried to reconcile Sinatra the thug with Sinatra the musical genius: "In mourning," Rich wrote, "we should acknowledge who the man was, wonder at the mystery by which art of such purity and power emerges from so flawed a vehicle, and then go right back to listening. Not that we ever stopped for long, not that we ever could."

I could.

I've had this problem with many great artists, from Hemingway to Picasso and back again. In the end, I, like Rich, have always referred to the work. But the more I wrestle with this question, the more I realize that I am starting to see the ugliness in the work -- and it is getting in the way of the (supposed) beauty.