SINATRA AT 80

In addition to the TV specials, the CD retrospectives, the radio marathons, the somber appreciations in the newsmagazines and the lifestyle sections of newspapers, the publicity machine is offering up a crateful of books that range from the merely worshipful to the hagiographic. For example, Sinatra! The Song Is You (Scribner, $ 30, 557 pages) a long and loving account of the singer’s work by the critic Will Friedwald, features praise worthy of Bach or Shakespeare, complete with Straussian terminology: “His artistic canon is as close to perfect as any of us are able to deliver.”

The self-described “saloon singer” has even inspired a “reader” — The Frank Sinatra Reader — a work that, unlike other “readers,” contains not a single word written by its eponymous subject. This compilation of tributes proves that, what- ever art Sinatra may have produced himself, he has inspired some of the worst writing of the century. All right: I exaggerate. But it’s catching. The novelist William Kennedy, asked to compose a tribute for Sinatra’s 75th birthday, sets the tone: “In the 1950s, there came In the In the Wee Small Hours, which conditioned your life, especially with a young woman with lush blond hair who used to put the record on and pray to Frank for a lover. All that perfumed hair, and it came undone. That certainly was a good year. ”

The beatification of Frank Sinatra is upon us. But once you fan away the wind y praise — “one of the three or four greatest interpretive artists the world h as ever known”; “a body of work unrivaled in twentieth century music”; many oth er sentences that contain the word oeuvre — the tributes have their uses. They allow us to reconstruct Frank’s world as it was before the moptops pushed him f rom center stage. And tell us wh y we should be forever grateful that they did.

The dicey task for Sinatra worshippers involves what is sometimes called the “Gauguin problem” — separating the brutishness of the artist from the beauty of his art. For Gauguin it was the coldblooded ditching of his family for Tahiti, where he producecl pictures of dangling fruit and overripe breasts; for Sinatra it was a “lifestyle” that entailed chronic misogyny, boozy brawls with pimps and whores, and lifelong social and business relationships with fellows named “The Weasel” and “Ratface.”

The lifestyle was chronicled with relish by Kitty Kelley in 1986’s His IVay, billed as an “unauthorized biography” but in fact an exhaustive catalogue of Frank’s pathologies. One enduring image from Kelley’s book — the image that sums up all that comes before and after — is of Frank in his Vegas suite after a show, late at night/early in the morning, knife and fork in hand, eating a hearty breakfast of steak and eggs — off the chest of a prostitute. He has always been a man of large appetites.

What better means to solve the Gauguin problem than a testament from the singer’s loyal, grateful, parasitic daughter Nancy? Her coffee-table-sized $ IFrank Sinatra: An American Legend (General Publishing Group, $ 45, 368 pages) inevitably recycles material from her earlier devotional memoir, $ IFrank Sinatra: My Father, but it offers scant comfort for fans hoping to get past the mythic Sinatra vulgarity. The new book is a day-by-day chronicle of the Chairman’s life, listing every gig at the Sands, every recording session, every Friar’s roast of Dean and Sammy. And more: Here is Frank, offended at the gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, sending her a full-sized tombstone with her name on it. Frank teaming up with Joe DiMaggio and a few ” associates” to break down the door of an apartment where they suspected Marilyn Monroe was fooling around unsupervised. Frank, talking his ” acquaintance” Sam Giancana into helping JFK “win” the West Virginia primary. Frank, denied credit at the baccarat table at the Sands, ripping the wires out of the switch-board and driving a golf cart through the lobby window. And this is the authorized biography.

Still, the daughter’s natural protectiveness is endearing. When Frank travels to pre-CastoHavana to meet with Lucky Luciano, she is careful to say he “allegedly” had his picture taken. When she quotes one journalist on Frank’s “alleged connections with mobsters,” you can almost see her ball her fists: “It’s obvious that Mr. Salerno had not done his homework, since my father had never been indicted for anything.” A daughter’s boast.

And yet, say Sinatra fans, and yet: There is, there will always be, the music, which they find mysteriously unspoiled by the personal shortcomings of the artist himself. The Frank Sinatra Reader (edited by Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazza, Oxford University Press, $ 27.50, 297 pages) contains a number of essays supporting this view. Sinatra came to his greatest fame in the years following the war, when the nation’s universities swelled with academics aching to apply their skills to the popular arts. As a consequence, he has probably had more baloney written about him than any other living American. The Reader offers a few of these efforts, but most of its critical appreciations of Sinatra the artist tend to be decidedly unacademic.

They tend, to the contrary, to be personal: some version, like William Kennedy’s, of Sinatra and Me, in which the music seems less an independent artifact than an occasion to recapture lost youth. As Friedwald puts it: “So much of our lives have been lived to the soundtrack of Sinatra’s [that] it’s ultimately impossible to tell where our actual experiences end and those we’ve felt vicariously through Sinatra’s lyrics begin.”

Fine, as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. Pop music of any time thrives on personal associations. Without them it loses much of its effect. A Beatles fan, contemplating the greatness of the band that changett the world, will almost inevitably end up remembering where he was when he first heard Rubber Soul, and then the Hendrix poster in his dorm room, and the incoreprehensions of Mom and Dad. . . . This is one of the things that separates pop music from music that endures. Beethoven’s appeal doesn’t turn on the fact that you used to make out in the back seat of your dad’s Chevy while the radio played the Andante from the Emperor Concerto.

The problem arises when those associations are rolled out to make the case fo r the pop musician as Artist. Sinatra’s greatest creative ative period, it’s ge nerally agreed, came in the 1950s, with the release of a series of albums on th e Capitol label. “Being an eighteen-carat manic depressive,” he once said, “I h ave an acute capacity for both sadness and elation.” The Capitol albums are the perfect reflection of his either/or personality. They express one of two moods, exclusively. The big brassy albums, like Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, show Frank the swinger, with lots of shouted “Jacks” and “babes” thrown in for emphasis. The rest — the “suicide albums,” like Where Are You? and Only the Lonely — show Frank in a funk, in danger of being swallowed whole by a lush, pillowy string orchestra. Even for someone who neither danced nor made out to them, the albums have moments that force you to catch your breath. It’s hard to imagine anyone listening to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” from Swingin’ Lovers, without getting giddy. And there are performances of surpassing delicacy: $ IOnly the Lonely closes with Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s great saloon song, “One for My Baby.” In the forties, Friedwald tells us, Sinatra had sung the song in B. Here, though his voice has deepened and mellowed, he ratchets the key up to D. A piano plays in the distance; the strings, for once, are muted. The result is art of a heightened kind that popular entertainers seldom reach. It’s almost enough to make you want to use the word oeuvre.

On the other hand . . . Has any entertainer ever been cut so much slack by so many? Aside from Judy Garland? The suicide albums, with Frank’s forced tremolo, his slides and funereal phrasing, are the work of a man for whom self- pity is the most pleasing indulgence. The mawkishness of, say, “I’m a Fool to Want You” from Where Are You?, verges on self-parody. (Frank, get a grip!) Throughout the albums he hits more than a few notes flat, and they are preserved for the ages, an indelible part of the oeuvre. By many accounts, including his own, his legendary perfectionism seems indeed to have been just legend. As a recording artist he was in a hurry. “Often I was a little impatient in making a record,” he said later, “and I said, “That’s it, press it, print it.'”

In extenuation for these lapses critics tend to overreach: Much is made of the conventions of the bel canto tradition, and technical terms like $ Iappogiatura (a vocal slur) are desperately invoked. It doesn’t wash. It should be no slight to Sinatra’s formidable talent to point out that the phrasing so celebrated by critics doesn’t cut the best singing of Fred Astaire, or that his tonal control and melodic sense can’t match those of the peerless Bing Crosby-neither of whom has been celebrated in cults of Sinatraphiliac intensity.

The swing albums are similarly uneven. They are often praised for their exuberance, but 40 years later the exuberance just sounds like strut and swagger. Brassy, up-tempo versions of ballads like “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay” make you wonder whether he’s even aware of what the :songs mean. Here the life really does infect the art. It’s not hard to imagine the Frank Sinatra of the swing albums — the self- regarding, finger-snapping hipster in the cocked fedora — finishing a recording session and ordering up a hooker for a nice chestful of steak and eggs.

By the mid-1960s, the swinger Frank had atrophied into a public persona. This was the Frank of the Rat Pack, trailing greasy sycophants like Peter Lawford and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., the Frank of shot-on-the-fly movies like Ocean’s Eleven, of croaking, late-night shows in Vegas done with a Camel in one hand and a glass of Black Jack in the other. His greatest recordings receded into the distant past, as he pushed unlistenable new product like “Strangers in the Night:” and (with Nancy) the aptly titled ” Something Stupid.” He was seldom photographed out of a tux. Onstage he indulged his taste for racist humor: “The Polacks are deboning the blacks. They want to use “em for wet suits.” There were more brawls, more vendettas against columnists who wrote unkindly. The life overtook the art.

Worse, the life suffused the culture of American popular entertainment. Most obviously there were the pale imitations like Al Martino and Vic Damone, ” class acts” with oil-can pompadours and spit-shine shoes. Sinatra-ism sunk to its most attenuated form in the half-forgotten careers of Fabian and Frankie Avalon and Bobby Darin, whose recording of “Mack the Knife” is a reductio ad absurdum of the swingin” Frank.

And then the Beatles arrived to sweep them all away.

The recent ABC special, “The Beatles Anthology,” broadcast that first American appearance on Ed Sullivan in 1964. From the opening notes of “All My Loving,” the suffocating oppressions of Sinatraism seemed to lift from all of show biz. The Beatles were jaunty and smiling, with a gift for melodies set to simple, unswinging beats, in songs they wrote themselves. There was plenty of cockiness but no brooding. They joked with the press. They didn’t know anyone named “Momo.”

Frank let it be known that the Beatles weren’t his cup of juice. Gay Talese’s famous 1966 profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (included in the Reader), opens with a scene of intergenerational ill will. The place is a Los Angeles drinking club. Sinatra is feeling petulant; Sinatra often does. He is in the midst of planning a TV special. The show’s press release is written in Sinatra-ese: “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons, it should be refreshing to consider the entertainment value of a video special titled Sinatra -A Man and His Music.”

Frank leans against the bar, watching a group of young men, psychedelically clad, playing pool. He isn’t pleased. He picks at one of them, the screenwriter of a new movie, The Oscar. “I’ve seen it,” Frank tells him, ” and it’s a piece of crap.” Before it’s too late, Frank’s “associates” escort the young fellow from Frank’s presence, and the Chairman of the Board turns to the club manager.

“I don’t want anybody in here without coats and ties,” he snaps. The manager nods and disappears, leaving Frank to drink in peace.

There’s a kind of poignancy in this vignette, a picture of a man before the deluge. But as the 1960s wore on he gave in, halfway. He appeared in Nehru jackets and gold chains, recorded songs, including Beatles songs, at soft-rock tempos, ordered up new toupees with bangs. He even married an exquisitely emaciated flower child, Mia Farrow, and let her travel to India (with the Beatles!) to sit at the feet of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In the supreme renunciation of his past he recorded an album of “sensitive” ,songs by . . . Rod McKuen.

In 1971 he threw in the towel, and retired. “He just feels his kind of show business era has ended,” Nancy said at the time. As if to prove the point, he returned from retirement to an endless series of stints in Vegas and fly-in, fly-out stadium gigs — some solo, some with Dino and the Candyman, all enormously lucrative. His vast constituency remained loyal as it aged. He enjoyed a great hit with “New York, New York,” whose chief virtue was that it replaced “My Way” as his signature song.

Sinatra-ism wouldn’t die, but even after the Beatles broke up it survived among baby boomers merely as a ready-made joke. Bill Murray’s lounge singer from Saturday Night Live — tuxedoed, tone-deaf, swingin’ hard to the latest charts from Neil Diamond — was late-phase Sinatra-ism distilled to its essence. (Frank himself per- formed a number of Diamond’s songs in the seventies.) The funniest piece ever written about Sinatra — not the biggest category in journalism — is Alex Heard’s 1985 New Republic article ” Frankie and Ronnie,” reprinted in still another commemorative collection, Legend: Frank Sinatra and the American Dream (edited by Ethlie Ann Vare, Boulevard Books, $ 13.00, 222 pages). Sinatra had just helped the Reagans celebrate the Inaugural in Washington, where he made a commotion by announcing to the assembled press: “You’re all dead, every one of you. You hear me? You’re all dead.”

“Most Americans,” Heard wrote, “have experienced that strange sensation produced by exposure to certain entertainers — a mixture of hatred, disgust, embarrassment, and pathos. Sometimes, if the performer is sufficiently schlocko or self-congratulatory, this feeling intensifies to a point at which, suddenly . . .it becomes highly pleasurable.”

Heard called the phenomenon “hathos,” and ticked off a number of instances: ” For many, watching Jerry Lewis “take on his critics” in the waning hours of the Labor Day Telethon arouses this emotion; as does Sammy Davis Jr.’s Mr. Bojangles routine. . . . But for me, the chairman of the Hathos Board has always been no other than Old Rheum Eyes himself, Mr. Frank Sinatra.”

The tragedy of artistic decline became farce. The baby boomers had made Frank a figure of fun.

What a difference a decade makes! Today Sinatra is every- where. Last month an 80th birthday celebration was held in Los Angeles, featuring tributes from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Salt-n-Pepa, Paula Abdul, and Hootie sans Blowfish. ABC will broadcast the festivities two days after Frank’s birthday. In the last two years he has released two albums of old standards, Duets and Duets II. Conceived by the rock producer Phil Ramone, they pair Sinatra with such contemporary stars as Luther Vandross, Gloria Estefan, Julio Iglesias, Carly Simon, and Bono from the rock group U2. As music the albums are toxic. As product they’re platinum-double platinum, in fact, having outsold every other Sinatra release. In 1994 he was awarded an honorary Grammy for Lifetime Achievement, and Bono took the stage to introduce him, bestowing the imprimatur of Generation X: “You know his story because it’s your story,” Bono said. “Frank Sinatra walks like America: cock- sure.”

Compare this with another recent quote from another GenX idol, Michael Stipe of the band REM: “I’ve never sat down and listened to a Beatles record from beg inning to end. Those guys didn’t mean a thing to me.” The three-night, massivel y publicized ABC special “The Beatles Anthology” tanked in the ratings. It’s no exaggeration to say that among people who matter — and in popular culture the people who matter are the youngest cohort of consumers with disposable income — Frank is hipper than the Beatles.

How to explain it? Unlike the Beatles, who are still close enough in time to be irony-proof, Frank can be kitsch — always a guarantee of big sales in our campy culture. One is reminded, too, of the old joke: Grandparents and grandchildren get along so well because they have a common enemy. Nothing could be more wounding than for a child of Beatlemaniacs to say that “Ring-a- ding-ding” speaks to him in a way that “Obla-di, Obla-da” does not.

But the music itself is really beside the point. One of Sinatra’s former arrangers, Billy Byers, has said, “Duets would be valid artistically if only the kids were learning to appreciate Frank Sinatra [the musician]. But they’re not investigating other Sinatra albums.” What they’re investigating, anti buying, is the Sinatra attitude, known now as Attitude. Generation Xers face the Gauguin problem their grandparents faced, only in reverse. For tastes shaped by Bono and Michael Stipe, Songs for Swingin” Lovers must be tough going. But with the Frank persona, they feel right at home. As long ago as 1984, the rock writer Stephen Holden identified Sinatra as “a kind of proto- punk rocker, spitting at the world with pugnacious arrogance.” Now there’s a guy kids today can look up to. Bono, in his uncontrolled way, finishes the thought: “Sinatra has got what we want: swagger and attitude. He’s big on attitude. Serious attitude. Bad attitude. Frank’s the chairman of the Bad … I’m not going to mess with him. Are you?” No, no. All that we can do — those of us caught in the middle, neither beatifiers nor detractors — is sit back and wonder at the durability, the resiliency, of Sinatraism, three decades after we thought it had been buried for good. It is once again Frank’s world. We just live in it.

By Andrew Ferguson