In one of Kingsley Amis’s novels, the protagonist, Garnet Bowen, comes across his wife in the kitchen, helping their child into its coat to the accompaniment of “a song sung very loudly and badly” by Frank Sinatra: “You came, you saw, you conquered me,” Sinatra sang.
“Loudly and badly” is wholly unfair to Frank Sinatra’s 1950 treatment of “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You),” the song from which the lyrics are taken—although it might fairly be said of his signature song, “My Way,” sung hundreds of times in his later years in what one critic has called “a surly feat of self-congratulation.” But this is the Sinatra centenary, and the commentary on him has been eulogistic rather than disparaging.
A sterling instance of such eulogy—call it over-the-top admiration—is this delightful and incisive book by David Lehman. Lehman is a poet, critic, and editor, known for his book on the New York School of poets and Signs of the Times, a hard-hitting attack on deconstruction as a peculiarly toxic form of literary discourse. But who would have predicted this tribute to a singer with whom Lehman has had a lifetime love affair?
The subtitle, with its crisp pun on “notes,” takes the singer from his birth in Hoboken in 1915 to his death in Los Angeles in 1998. The notes vary
in length from one to four or five pages, but are always focused on some aspect of his career: His famous performance at New York’s Paramount Theatre in 1942, when the girls went wild; his rocky marriage and break-up with Ava Gardner; his affiliations with mob types and the infamous Rat Pack.
The notes are pithily, aggressively written, as if to live up to the feisty voice of Lehman’s hero, The Voice. He brings out vividly the style of a “generous, dictatorial, sometimes crude . . . powerful man unafraid to use his power,” which was what the skinny 130-pounder turned into. More than once, Lehman’s sentences consist of direct quotations from a Sinatra song, as in “This is a lovely way to spend an evening” or “This time it would be all or nothing at all.”
The latter reference is to Sinatra’s early, great 1939 recording with the Harry James band. Here, for the first time, the singer, not quite 24 years old, has in Lehman’s words “caught and embodied the spirit of the words” by way of communicating “that quality of vulnerability mixed with intransigence.” As always, in talking about a Sinatra recording, Lehman pays attention to minute but significant pleasures the singer brings out in “All or Nothing at All” by accenting the rhyme words (“appealed to me” with “could yield to me”) and softening his voice to an “infinite tenderness” as he imagines the tidal consequence of his passion: “And if I fell under the spell of your call, I would be caught in the undertow.”
We don’t need yet another biography of Sinatra, and Lehman has been wise not to try to get too much fact in that can already be sampled elsewhere. His relatively brief book is more like Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters (1998) but goes further and deeper than Hamill did into what makes Sinatra’s treatment of a song so memorable, inimitable. The crude outline of his career takes him as a band singer briefly with James, then with Tommy Dorsey, then with the launch out on his own—for example, doing nine shows and singing 100 songs on an average day at the Paramount Theatre. Then would come the career plunge in the early 1950s after his overtaxed voice gave out for awhile and he broke up with the love of his life, Ava Gardner.
He rebounded with his fine playing of the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, then moved into what some consider his greatest period, the 1950s recordings for Capitol Records with arrangements by Nelson Riddle, among others. The later decades include retirement, un-retirement, star performances all over the world—and the ubiquitous “My Way,” his defiant personal defense of his life as an artist (“The record shows I took the blows and did it my way”).
Lehman’s informed judgment is that, after Sinatra’s comeback in the 1950s, his voice on the Capitol recordings was “no longer quite as impressive or as naturally pleasing.” But though he had lost some range and ease, and hadn’t as great a voice as before, Lehman judges him a greater singer. Records like “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Night and Day” reveal emotions that are shaded: “His joy is edged with irony and sometimes with rue, with melancholy, and sometimes something more, a heartbreak bred in the bone.”
I was pleased to note that some listeners still prefer the timbre of Sinatra’s youthful voice, including his granddaughter, Nancy Sinatra’s daughter. And with those listeners, I align myself—feeling that, for all the fine tunes he would record and re-record, the early 84 sides on which he sang with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra are unsurpassed. It may be that, growing up in the 1940s myself and playing in a dance band, I detect greater force and life in those songs, partly because I have projected my own satisfactions and disappointments from long ago onto the songs that seemed to embody them.
The recordings with Dorsey begin with a lovely, completely forgotten song of 1940, “The Sky Fell Down,” and end in 1942 with “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” (Irving Berlin’s song in Holiday Inn) and “There Are Such Things” (“So have a little faith, and trust in what tomorrow brings, / You’ll reach a star, because there are such things”). Along the way we get a rollicking jitterbuggy “Let’s Get Away From It All,” and “Snootie Little Cutie,” in which the Pied Pipers (Jo Stafford singing) and cute little Connie Haines supplement Frank’s performance.
And how about the How songs? There are “How About You?” and “How Do You Do Without Me?” and the absolute charm of forgotten ones like “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” “Dolores,” and “In the Blue of Evening.” None of these songs, except for “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” makes Lehman’s list of his 20 favorite Sinatras from the 1940s—and tastes, of course, vary. After leaving Dorsey in 1942, he did many more fine things with a less interesting orchestra directed by Axel Stordahl.
I am an inadequate guide to the later Sinatra, largely because I’ve never been able to stop playing the early things again and again. But it’s fair to say that the last five decades of his singing life are more or less divided into the “swinging” and the soulful. And though there are many good things from the swinging period (“Learnin’ the Blues”), I don’t find the finger-snapping, wised-up guy who often substitutes his own words for the right ones—intruding “boot” into “I Get a Kick Out of You,” which Lehman tells us did not amuse Cole Porter—irresistible.
As for the soulful, a large box of C Ds was recently released, “Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain,” in which Sinatra sings beautiful ones like “The Very Thought of You” and “The Gypsy” at a tempo so slow that one’s mind or ear occasionally wanders. This is, of course, a curmudgeon speaking; but the sides with Dorsey combine lyric beauty with enough swingish band background—Buddy Rich on drums, Ziggy Elman on trumpet, Joe Bushkin on piano—to keep me going for the remainder of my days. How could the estimable Whitney Balliett have found the recordings with Dorsey mainly “vapid and inert”?
I learned things from Lehman’s notes that surely have been noted before, not just Ava Gardner’s famous tribute to sex with Sinatra (“He was good in the feathers”) but also her scornful response to his later erotic life when he married Mia Farrow (“I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy”). Although his antics with the Rat Pack don’t seem terribly amusing, it may be, as Lehman says, that their jokes about black (and Jewish) Sammy Davis Jr. and the white Italian “dagos” (Sinatra and Dean Martin) may amount to a “critique of racism and bigotry, debunking these things by turning them into jests.”
But finally it’s The Voice that counts, one that Lehman is very good at tracking in its various modes. It was a voice that, whether singing or acting in the movies, “inevitably caught its inflection from the spoken language.” The writer of those words, the English poet and critic Clive James, whose own inflected voice is memorable, saluted Sinatra’s “sense of the music inherent in speech.” Lehman’s tribute is itself made vivid by its continuous consorting with the spoken language in a fashion his subject might just have been pleased by.
William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst.
