To the end, Frank Sinatra liked to call himself a saloon singer.
His saloon - the world - now mourns the voice that shall never be surpassed.Sinatra was pronounced dead at 10:50 p.m. Pacific time Thursday in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his publicist, Susan Reynolds. He was 82. A private funeral is planned.
Like the wine from the fine old kegs of "It Was a Very Good Year," Sinatra's voice poured sweet and clear across the decades, across the airwaves, into kitchens and diners and dance halls, into darkened living rooms at the end of romantic evenings, into the shadows of empty barrooms where his muse of heartache dwelled. "The Voice" - as it was dubbed early in his career - seemed to be everywhere, part of the ether. It was the sound of celebration for the best of our times, the sound of solace for the hardest.
No achievement could match the miraculous gift of Sinatra's voice. The sound could be street-tough, tender-strong or nightclub-silky; it was as full of contradictions as the nation itself. Yet it was the sound of an America free of doubt, claiming its birthright to the good life.
Sinatra reportedly has the most compact discs (206) in print of any music maker, and he was on the national singles charts for an unsurpassed four consecutive decades (1940-1980). He and his lis-ten-ers had some very good years.
Could there be any serious argument that Sinatra was the greatest singer of popular music who ever lived?
Sinatra was at his best singing of loss. We pictured him singing through ghostly wraiths of cigarette smoke into the wee small hours of the morning. His indelible image from his golden age (the Capitol Records years of the 1950s) is that of "The Swinger": loosened tie, fingers snapping on the downbeat, snap-brim hat pushed back (but not far enough to reveal the balding head).
He was born Francis Albert Sinatra in Hoboken, N.J., on Dec. 12, 1915, the son of native Italians - a quiet, passive firefighter father, Anthony, and a colorful, ribald mother, Dolly, a midwife and Democratic Party organizer. She not only dominated the household but much of Hoboken.
Across the great, grubby Hudson River, the Manhattan skyline was within sight but seemingly out of reach. As a teenager, the future saloon singer offered his services at bars and weddings - but he was often asked to shut up before finishing a song.
At 21, he took fiancee Nancy Barbato to see Bing Crosby at a local vaudeville house and, leaving the theater, informed her, "I'm going to be a singer."
Trumpeter Harry James, organizing a band, happened to hear Sinatra on a low-watt radio broadcast from the dinky Rustic Cabin in north Jersey and "the hairs stood up on my neck after eight bars." He signed the singer to a $75-a-week contract in 1939. Sinatra was 24 and still living at home with his parents.
After a few months, he joined the famous Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. In the next three years, he smashed record sales marks with such songs as "I'll Never Smile Again." The relatively unschooled singer learned his phrasing technique from watching how trombonist Dorsey would "sneak" breaths out of the corner of his mouth.
Going solo in 1942, Sinatra began an eight-week engagement at the Paramount Theatre in Times Square that old-time New Yorkers still recall as something never matched for sheer frenzy - not by Elvis, the Beatles or Madonna.
The madness featured a new phenomenon: the screaming teen "bobby-soxer." Sinatra's publicists hired girls to swoon on cue - then were stunned to see that dozens of other girls were swooning for real.
Of course, the bobby-soxers abandoned Sinatra when they got down to adult business in their gleaming new postwar kitchens and offices. "Gone for Frankie in '42 - Gone in '52," said one mocking headline. Sinatra appeared to be washed up.
From 1955 to 1958, Sinatra reeled off five famous Capitol albums: "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," "Songs for Swingin' Lovers," "A Swingin' Affair," "Come Fly With Me" and "Only the Lonely" - the mood-drenched, all-ballad collection that he would describe as his favorite.
"Lonely" contained "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)," in which the singer speaks to a bartender ("So set 'em up, Joe") and to his own inner self about his lost love. New York Times music critic John Rockwell singles out this song as the prime example of "the booze sensibility" - the mix of nocturnal glamour and grit, romance and regret that was such an evocative setting for the saloon singer. Sinatra's new persona was a creation of the will: an immigrant kid struggling to sound like "class." Those who'd known the dese-and-dose Jersey accent of his youth (which slipped back into his speech in old age) were amazed at the posh new diction he developed in speech classes. Start became staht, river became rivah. Hoboken strove to become Harvard.
In those days Sinatra's voice had such clarity that it seemed etched more sharply in the air than other voices. It was a classically American, iconic clarity, like the engraved silhouette of the silvery Chrysler Building against the Manhattan skyline.
Sinatra was not the master of all he surveyed in popular music, however. He recorded lots of Cole Porter ("Night and Day"), but his virility worked against him in the composer's arch, playful style; it was Ella Fitzgerald who owned Porter.
The point is that Sinatra never gave up trying to expand his repertoire, and even his core repertoire was diverse.
As a late-'50s pop-culture icon, Sinatra was already in the shadow of the next great male sex star of music - Elvis Presley. But many of those enamored of Sinatra could never take rock 'n' roll seriously - setting the stage for the so-called generation gap of the '60s.
Nancy Sinatra, Sinatra's first child, helped him to briefly bridge the gap in the mid-'60s with their sweet pop duet, "Somethin' Stupid." There were other scattered hits, "Strangers in the Night" in the '60s; "My Way" (the unofficial anthem of the "Me Decade") in the '70s; "New York, New York" in 1980. They were "comeback" songs, but Sinatra continued to fade into the background of the country's psyche.
These were years in which the romantic myth Sinatra had created in the '50s was undermined by the harsher realities of his public life. The sophisticated swinger turned into the more boorish leader of the "Rat Pack" (Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., et al.), a kind of glorified college fraternity. When Sinatra's third marriage, to 21-year-old Mia Farrow, came to the quick end that surprised no one, the actress said the Rat Pack "doesn't know about anything except drinking, telling dirty jokes, breaking furniture and pinching waitresses."
Much of America wanted Sinatra to remain its blue-eyed boy forever, though it could see that there was a darker side. He said he only had "social" connections with the most notorious gangsters of the land - but they wore his sapphire "friendship rings." Mario Puzo's novel "The Godfather" had a subplot based on the long-circulated rumor that Mafia muscle opened Sinatra's doors for the movie comeback.
The singer could be incredibly generous. Actor Lee J. Cobb wept as he recalled how Sinatra covered his huge hospital bills when the actor was down on his luck. Often, Sinatra stood by friends who were unfairly ostracized for various reasons - as communist sympathizers or career washouts.
Sinatra was slowing down, mellowing even faster than his image could go sour. America seemed to embrace him once more as its padrone (grandfather), better known as "Old Blue Eyes."
The light baritone became cracked and more growly. For a raspier voice such as Tony Bennett's, age was not an enemy. Still, Sinatra capitalized on his new, flawed sound to seize a late vocal triumph, "New York, New York." The crooner became a belter, delivering the song with the thrilling, rough-edged abandon of an aging lion ("King of the hill - top of the heap!").
And singing defined his sense of self, so he worked almost to the end. Even though his faulty memory required that he keep a giant TelePrompTer onstage (it was laughably obvious on his 1990 visit to Chastain Park, feeding him the lyrics to "New York, New York"), Sinatra kept pushing himself. He kept touring, meeting the crowds, basking in their waves of love with what seemed to be a new humility.
"You're a mahvelous audience," he said on that magical Chastain night. "Thank you for letting us work for you this evening."
It was as if, in those mellowing years, Sinatra had a clear, calming sense of the nearness of the end, the dearness of his art.
It seems so long ago, but only yesterday, that Sinatra sang "Fly Me to the Moon." Destiny has finally obliged him. Now he's there, to play among the stars.