Remembering Frank Sinatra, the voice of a century
"To Sinatra, a microphone is as real as a girl waiting to be kissed," E.B. White observed in The New Yorker in 1952. Frank Sinatra had not yet reached his peak as an artist and was at a professional low point: That same year, Hollywood agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar would call him "a dead man," noting, "Even Jesus couldn't get resurrected in this town."
Sinatra — who would have turned 100 on Dec. 12 (he died in 1998, at 82) — could, of course, and did. Over the next 15 years, the blue-eyed son of Hoboken, N.J., would confirm his place as one of the greatest performers of the 20th century (or since) and take the art of interpretive singing to new and still-unsurpassed heights.
Timeline: North Korea and the Sony Pictures hack
The sweet lyric baritone that had made bobby soxers swoon in the '40s ripened into a darker, more rugged instrument that Sinatra wielded with astonishing emotional and rhythmic dexterity. On albums ranging from In the Wee Small Hours and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely to Songs For Swingin' Lovers! and Come Fly With Me, his singing reflected the gamut of human feeling, from profound sadness to exuberant joy, without missing any of the crucial nuances in between — or sacrificing the intimacy that had brought his earlier recordings, groundbreaking in their own right, to the attention of more discerning fans.
Some proposed that Sinatra's tempestuous, doomed romance with Ava Gardner, his second wife and great love, played a central role in his evolution. "It was Ava who taught him how to sing a torch song," Nelson Riddle, his most famous arranger, famously theorized. But as longtime Sinatra chronicler Will Friedwald notes, "Many guys have their hearts broken, and they don't learn to sing like that." The larger truth, Friedwald says, is that Sinatra "was maturing both physically and as an artist, looking for deeper means of expression."
Sinatra resisted sentimentality by bringing a cool, intuitive intelligence, a tough but playful spirit and a sharp wit to that search, all evident in his peerless phrasing. White pop singers had absorbed jazz before him, notably Bing Crosby, whose work paved the way for his. But Sinatra injected something more muscular and dangerous, a sexual brio that made his singing revolutionary years before Elvis Presley emerged as his rival for airplay. Sinatra sustained that vitality and fluidity into middle age, along with his restless creative ambition, evidenced by his work in the 1960s with Count Basie and Antônio Carlos Jobim.
"Like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, who he loved, Sinatra grew up singing with big bands and learning how to sound like a horn, so he knew exactly where the beat was at all times," says Quincy Jones, who began working with Sinatra in the '50s and was conductor and arranger for 1964's It Might As Well Be Swing and 1966's live Sinatra at the Sands, both featuring the Count Basie Orchestra. (Sinatra had sung earlier for Tommy Dorsey, and studied the bandleader's sinuous trombone lines.)
Defying Lazar's predictions, Sinatra also conquered Hollywood. Fittingly, his most memorable work as a screen actor was not in glossy adaptations of classic musicals such as On The Town and Guys and Dolls but in the dramatic roles he played in films such as From Here to Eternity (which earned him an Oscar), The Man With the Golden Arm and The Manchurian Candidate. Sinatra tackled these parts with the same forthright naturalism, the insistence on direct and honest expression, that distinguished his singing.
There were, of course, the four marriages and many more affairs, the reports of Mafia ties and bad, sometimes violent behavior. There was also, by numerous accounts, Sinatra's lavish generosity and devotion to friends and colleagues, and his dedication to causes such as civil rights. "If he loved you, there was nothing he wouldn't do for you," Jones recalls. "If he didn't like you he would run over you like a Mack truck, three times."
Answering questions for a Playboy interview in 1963, Sinatra wrote (through ghostwriter Mike Shore) that most of what had "been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe." He made us believe as well, and his music continues to do so.