Why Sinatra Matters

6 ALL OF ME

AFTER THE FALL, the Comeback.

For two long and terrible years, Sinatra was a mess. He continued working, making records, appearing on television, performing in small clubs. But in 1952 and 1953 he had no records at all on the Billboard singles charts; he had made those lists every previous year since 1940. His three-year television contract with CBS was canceled after thirteen weeks because he wouldn’t take the time to rehearse and was abusive to too many people. A 1952 movie called Meet Danny Wilson contained many semi-autobiographical touches, including a racketeer who takes 50 percent of the earnings of a singer played by Sinatra. The movie has many fine songs, including “All of Me,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “She’s Funny That Way.” But it was poorly directed and shabbily produced. Sinatra did a live engagement to help the movie when it opened at the Paramount in New York in 1952. That year I was sixteen, and I went to see him, for the first time, in the theater that only eight years earlier was loud with hysterical adoration. He was as good as everybody said he was: in command, singing with energy and feeling. But the theater was half empty. In other parts of the United States the movie opened and closed. That seemed to be the end of Frank Sinatra’s Hollywood career.

Sinatra was drinking hard and smoking too much, and then drinking again. Failure stoked the fires of his rage and increased his need for alcohol; both increased his sense of personal dissolution. His artistic energies were also being exhausted by the fierce entanglement with Ava Gardner. Any love affair is a creative act, part imagination, part practice; often, it can lift an artist to new levels of exalted energy. But a doomed and tumultuous love affair, on the model of the Sinatra and Gardner coupling, can destroy creativity. For months their affair and marriage seemed to obliterate the basic optimism required by the romantic impulse, so essential to Sinatra’s art. The vision of earthly happiness, that elusive goal that calls forth so much lyricism, was being maimed by a corrosive cynicism.

While Sinatra’s career declined, Ava’s star shone more brightly. He began to resemble an adjunct to her career, following her to movie locations in Spain, England, Africa, and Mexico. They drank hard. They quarreled. They reconciled. Sometimes Sinatra did his drinking in the empty time when she was away making movies and he was trying to make an impact on television. But distance didn’t help him regain clarity or a sense of perspective. Instead, jealousy ate at his guts. In Clarke’s or Toots Shor’s in New York, in the haunts of a fading Hollywood, or in his own apartment (since he and Ava never did establish a home), he seemed to bounce off the walls, like a drunk who had stayed too long at a party.

But then, slowly, there was a shift. He tried, and failed, to get the part of Johnny Romano in the film of Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door; the role went to young John Derek, whose impossibly perfect looks resembled an illustration from Cosmopolitan magazine. Sinatra, at thirty-four, was too old, but Johnny Romano’s motto was one that Sinatra might have felt deeply: “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.”

After he was dropped by MCA, Sinatra moved to the William Morris agency and began focusing his attention on a novel by James Jones called From Here to Eternity. The book was a huge bestseller, a densely detailed story about soldiers based in Schofield Barracks in Pearl Harbor on the eve of the Japanese attack. All the characters, in one form or another, had been shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, but Sinatra focused on the role of a tough little Italian American named Angelo Maggio. “I knew Maggio,” Sinatra said. “I grew up with him in Hoboken.” Unlike Meet Danny Wilson, this was to be a major film, with a healthy budget; it would have what Sinatra liked to call “class.” It was to be made by Columbia Pictures, whose boss was the tough, vulgar Harry Cohn. The director was to be Fred Zinnemann. His High Noon the year before was a parable about McCarthyism that simultaneously breathed new life into the western and into the career of Gary Cooper, who won an Academy Award as best actor. Sinatra began to plead for a chance to play Maggio.

He had a little help from his friends. There is neither proof nor logic to Mario Puzo’s fictional version in The Godfather, where the Mob cuts off the head of a racehorse owned by the studio boss and deposits it in his bed, thus persuading the studio to give the part to a character based loosely on Sinatra. To be sure, Cohn knew Longie Zwillman, who had an affair with Columbia star Jean Harlow in the 1930s, and probably took loans from Zwillman in the lean days of the Depression. But Maggio was a minor part in a movie starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, and Deborah Kerr. If the Mob had occult powers, why not get him the starring role? The myth endures. As Mario Puzo himself once said, fiction is the art of “retrospective falsification.”

The facts were more banal. Sinatra’s new agents were working hard behind the scenes. Sinatra himself pleaded with producer Buddy Adler for a chance to do a screen test. He also called Adler’s boss, Harry Cohn, who owed him a favor. More important, Ava interceded with Cohn’s wife, Joan, who put in a good word with her husband. Ava also met with Cohn himself, offering to make a movie at Columbia for nothing, if only he’d give Sinatra the part of Maggio. The studio moved cautiously, primarily because the success of High Noon had given director Zinnemann some power; they could suggest Sinatra but couldn’t order him into the movie. Most of the key players at the studio, including Zinnemann, believed that Sinatra was primarily a singer, not an actor, and would add nothing to the movie’s box-office appeal. Everybody in Hollywood knew that Sinatra was a troubled man, increasingly viewed by the public as Mr. Ava Gardner. It would be better to just get a good actor. A fine, but then unknown, New York actor named Eli Wallach was the favorite.

In November 1952 Sinatra was in Kenya with Ava as she worked with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly in John Ford’s Mogambo. At this point, he seemed to have given up any realistic hope of getting the part. Then, suddenly, the call came from Columbia, asking him to fly home for a screen test. Sinatra was elated. So was Ava. Sinatra took the next plane out. Without Frank’s knowledge, Ava flew to London for her second abortion of the year.

Sinatra’s screen test was splendid. When it was over, Zinnemann called Adler and said, “You’d better come down here. You’ll see something unbelievable.” At the same time, Sinatra’s luck began to return. The men who made such decisions agreed that Wallach’s screen test was even better than Sinatra’s. But then Wallach got the opportunity to work with director Elia Kazan on Camino Real, the new play by Tennessee Williams. Kazan and Williams were at the peak of their artistic success; Wallach chose the theater over the movies. And Sinatra agreed to play Maggio for a mere $8,000. Shooting would begin in March of 1953. Nobody yet knew it, not even Sinatra, but the Comeback had begun.

III. Musically, Sinatra was also getting up off the floor. In March 1952, in a studio in New York, he made one of his last great records for Columbia, a song called “I’m a Fool to Want You.” For many people, including Sinatra, as I saw almost twenty years later in P. J. Clarke’s, it became the abridged version of his relationship with Ava. He is supposed to have done it in one take, before walking out into the night alone. He had again merged his life with his art. But the song did not sell; it was, in fact, released as the flip side of the infamous single with Dagmar. By the end of the year he knew that his career at Columbia Records was over, that his contract would not be renewed. On September 17, 1952, he made an elegant recording of Cy Coleman’s “Why Try to Change Me Now?” And that tortured part of his professional life was over.

The musical part of the Comeback took place at Capitol Records. The only major record company then based in Los Angeles, it was producing many hits for Nat Cole, Kay Starr, and the team of Les Paul and Mary Ford. Among its founders were songwriters Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva. They respected the music of the big bands and recorded Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, along with older stars such as Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Duke Ellington. They obviously believed that instant hits were not the only music that could make money; in the long run, excellence would pay off too. The technology of the Capitol studios was top of the line. Sinatra was at such a low point in his career (and facing serious doubts among some Capitol executives) that he was given only a one-year contract, with options for another six, and had to pay for his own recording sessions. Still, after the long misery at Columbia, he once more had a musical home.

At first, he did more of what he had been doing. His first Capitol recording session took place on April 2, 1953, after his return from eight exhilarating weeks of work on From Here to Eternity. Once again, he used Axel Stordahl as his arranger and recorded “Lean Baby” (words set to a riff-driven Billy May instrumental), “Don’t Make a Beggar Out of Me,” “Day In, Day Out,” and “I’m Walking Behind You” (which would be a huge hit for Eddie Fisher). There was a renewed confidence in Sinatra’s voice, as if he knew just how good he had been in the movie and was anticipating what was coming. But he was not yet the great Sinatra; there was a feeling in the songs that we had been there before. They were released as singles and did not sell. Then there was another moment of good luck. Stordahl was signed as musical director of Eddie Fisher’s new television show. Sinatra had two more studio sessions scheduled before leaving on a long summer tour of Europe. He needed a new arranger in a hurry.

Alan Livingston, then a vice-president in charge of artists and repertoire at Capitol Records, had already brought up a name.

“Do me one favor, and do yourself a favor,” Livingston told Sinatra. “Work with Nelson Riddle.”

And so he did.

III. Nelson Smock Riddle Jr. was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, on June 1, 1921, about a half an hour from where Frank Sinatra was growing up in a much different way. Riddle’s father, of Anglo-Irish and Dutch descent, was a commercial artist who loved popular music and played a little trombone. His mother had Alsatian and Spanish roots and loved the literary and musical classics. Both parents encouraged their son’s musical ambitions. Riddle started taking piano lessons when he was eight, and when he was fourteen, he turned to the trombone, using his father’s instrument. That was 1935, and again we see the effects of the Depression. He began taking trombone lessons from a Professor Dittamo in Paterson.

“After eight lessons,” Riddle wrote, in an autobiographical sketch published in 1985, “the professor told me not to come again, since my dad had not paid him anything so far. It seems his fee was one dollar a lesson, and this being 1935, dimes, much less dollars, were difficult to come by for anything more esoteric than a loaf of bread.”

The piano lessons stopped; the music didn’t. Riddle joined the Ridgewood High School band and, after his junior year, started playing with “kid bands” around the town of Rumson, getting permission from his parents to stay alone in a summer bungalow without electricity. Just before his senior year, he met Bill Finegan, who was older than Riddle and already arranging for bands out of his home in Rumson. “We would sit up all night listening to classical music, especially that of Shostakovich, whose First Symphony, premiered in 1937, captured Bill’s interest and imagination.” Finegan began teaching Riddle the basics of arranging for dance bands, giving him assignments, correcting his work. Those lessons ended when Finegan went off to work for Glenn Miller. But he had set some high standards for young Riddle.

“Bill Finegan taught me to enjoy and appreciate the classics as the prime source of musical richness,” Riddle remembered later. “He also, by example, showed me that much effort is required to produce one’s best work and that it is unwise and unfair to settle for any less. I remember showing up for a lesson one afternoon and being confronted by a very exhausted Finegan, up all the previous night, unshaven, red-eyed, and standing in the midst of a small pile of score pages, representing no less than twenty-six possible introductions for the same arrangement, as yet unfinished.”

During this period one of Riddle’s aunts gave him one of those wind-up Victrolas that were changing Frank Sinatra’s Hoboken, along with the rest of the country. She also presented him with a 78 rpm recording of Debussy performed by Paderewski. He remembered playing it over and over again, trying to understand its components. In the bungalow in Rumson, however, he had no radio. On weekends Riddle’s father would drive down from his studio in Ridgewood, and the young musician would sit in his father’s car, listening to classical and popular music on the car radio. Often the car battery would go dead. “In contrast, however, my personal musical battery was always ‘super-charged’ by the time the weekend was over.”

On his nineteenth birthday, in 1940, Riddle landed his first professional job, playing trombone and doing some minor arranging for an Artie Shaw carbon copy named Tommy Reynolds, and then moved up to the Charlie Spivak orchestra. This was a good swing band, ranking just below the top level, and it was a great place to serve an apprenticeship. Riddle spent two years with Spivak, learning something every day, as Sinatra had with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. But now the war was on, and Riddle was facing the draft. To avoid the army, he left Spivak for the Merchant Marine band, based in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where he first arranged for strings. He was there for eighteen months, playing at concerts, dances, and parades, having fun. Then he was abruptly declared 1-A; he reported for induction but was put into a bureaucratic limbo and told to wait. He then got the dream job: working in the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. Sinatra was gone, but Riddle was able to dig into the glorious library of Dorsey arrangements done by his friend Finegan, Eddie Sauter, and Hugo Winterhalter, along with earlier works by Sy Oliver and others. As a trombone player, Riddle admired Dorsey; he also liked him, which was not as easy.

“Tommy was pleasant to me in his own particular gruff way and quite supportive of my budding career as an arranger,” Riddle said. “He was, and always will be, one of my heroes.”

In April 1945 the army finally demanded the immediate services of Nelson Riddle. The war was almost over, and Riddle never left the United States. For “fifteen fun-packed months” he worked in an army band, and was discharged in June 1946. But during his army service, his teeth were knocked out in an accident; he was never able to play trombone effectively again and was forced to commit to arranging and, he hoped, composing. He free-lanced around New York for a few months and then left for the West Coast, where he thought he had a job with the Bob Crosby orchestra; that gig evaporated almost as soon as he arrived, and he cobbled together a living as a freelancer. Like millions of other young men, he also took advantage of the educational benefits of the GI Bill, which for Riddle meant studying with an Italian composer named Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. “His method of teaching orchestration was to have his young pupils study a piece written for piano and assign the voices, or lines, in the piano solo to various sections or solo instruments of the orchestra. I found this process to be a most instructive and broadening experience, since many of his pianistic examples were works of such brilliant and diversified composers as Albéniz, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy and many more.”

Riddle always credited Castelnuovo-Tedesco with giving him “skill and fluency” in handling large groups of instruments and later regretted that his commercial success forced him to cut short his studying after two years. At the same time, Riddle was studying with a Russian named Victor Bay, who taught him the rudiments of conducting. Through this period his family was growing; to support his wife and three children, he arranged music for NBC Radio and freelanced for film composer Victor Young. He took whatever other work he could get, as Sinatra would say later, to put food on the table; some members of the Depression generation never had the psychological luxury of turning down jobs. But in 1950 and 1951 he broke through. He had arranged, without credit, two tunes for the singer and jazz pianist Nat Cole. One was “Mona Lisa.” The other was “Too Young.” Each was a gigantic hit. Cole insisted that he wanted Riddle for his future work, and Riddle soon joined the staff at Capitol Records. He was there when Frank Sinatra arrived in the spring of 1953.

The odd thing was that Sinatra didn’t seem to know much about the thirty-one-year-old Riddle when they did their first session together on April 30, 1953. Perhaps he was too absorbed in the melodrama of the Fall to notice the huge success of “Mona Lisa” and “Too Young”; perhaps he just didn’t want to know about it. But according to Will Friedwald, in his exhaustive (and excellent) book Sinatra! The Song Is You, Sinatra thought he was cutting four sides by bandleader-arranger Billy May. In fact, Riddle, with May’s agreement, had arranged two tunes in May’s style and two in his own. When Sinatra saw Riddle in the studio, his first question was “Who’s he?”

Assured that Riddle was only conducting, because May was on the road with his own band, Sinatra recorded “South of the Border” and “I Love You.” Both had some of the slurping saxophone mannerisms of Billy May, and Sinatra sounded better than he had in years. Then they turned their attention to “I’ve Got the World on a String,” written in 1932 by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler for a Cotton Club revue. Sinatra had sung it in clubs and a few larger venues, using an arrangement from an old radio show. But he had never done it this way. With its wonderful decrescendo opening and the passionate trombone playing of Milt Bernhart, the recording was their first masterpiece.

Years later, Alan Dell, then a Capitol executive, gave Friedwald an account of the session. When it was over, Sinatra said, “Hey, who wrote that?” Dell replied, “This guy, Nelson Riddle.” Sinatra said, “Beautiful!” Dell added, “And from that the partnership started.”

That partnership would include 318 recordings made over the next quarter of a century. Sinatra recorded with many other arrangers, including Billy May, but Riddle brought a special sound to the work that became the mature sound of Frank Sinatra, the sound of the Comeback, the sound of the years when Sinatra always wore a hat and truly seemed to have the world on a string. The relationship wasn’t always easy; according to Riddle, Sinatra was one of those men incapable of paying compliments to the people he truly admired. He expressed approval with silence; if he thought something wasn’t working, he said so. Each had taken from Tommy Dorsey a sense of discipline and excellence.

“Frank and I both have, I think, the same musical aim,” Riddle said in 1961. “We know what we’re each doing with a song, what we want the song to say. The way we’d work is this: he’d pick out all the songs for an album and then call me over to go through them. He’d have very definite ideas about the general treatment, particularly about the pace of the record and which areas should be soft or loud, happy or sad. He’d sketch out something brief, like, ‘Start with a bass figure, build up second time through and then fade out at the end.’ That’s possibly all he would say. Sometimes he’d follow up with a phone call at three in the morning with some other extra little idea. But after that he wouldn’t hear my arrangement until the recording session.”

Sinatra also admired Riddle’s care for details: “Nothing ever ruffles him. There’s a great depth somehow to the music he creates. And he’s got a sort of stenographer’s brain. If I say to him at a planning meeting, ‘Make the eighth bar sound like Brahms,’ he’ll make a cryptic little note on the side of some crappy music sheet and, sure enough, when we come to the session the eighth bar will be Brahms. If I say, ‘Make like Puccini,’ Nelson will make exactly the same little note and that eighth bar will be Puccini all right, and the roof will lift off.”

There were a number of components to the Sinatra-Riddle collaboration. Friedwald emphasizes one of them: “Lightness shines as the primary ingredient of the Riddle style. Whether he has ten brass swinging heavily or an acre of strings, Riddle always manages to make everything sound light; that way, the weightiest ballad doesn’t become oversentimental and insincere, and the fastest swinger doesn’t come off as forced.”

The many records Sinatra made with Gordon Jenkins don’t have this quality; the strings are heavy, gloppy, like musical cream cheese, and Sinatra’s own ironical readings often sound more sentimental than they really are, because they are overwhelmed by the heaviness of the arrangements. Riddle was always too hip to clog the music with a lot of sugar.

“A lot of musicians and writers don’t get the full value out of a tune,” Miles Davis said in 1958. “[Art] Tatum does and Frank Sinatra always does. Listen to the way Nelson Riddle writes for Sinatra, the way he gives him enough room and doesn’t clutter it up. Can you imagine how it would sound if Mingus were writing for Sinatra? But I think Mingus will settle down; he can write good music. But about Riddle, his backgrounds are so right that sometimes you can’t tell if they’re conducted.”

Riddle’s own distinctive sound almost always included flutes; a muted, commenting trumpet played by Harry (Sweets) Edison, who provided accents and emphases; trombones, of course; and a solid rhythm section. But he experimented with the combinations, always hoping to keep the sound fresh, while serving the needs of Sinatra as a singer. On the Only the Lonely album, for example, he used for the first time a full woodwind section, made up of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, and two bassoons. He would use that combination again and again, sometimes playing into and against sheets of strings, all of them united by harmonies he had absorbed from listening to Ravel, Debussy, and other impressionist composers.

“I loved how Nelson used Ravel’s approach to polytonality,” said Quincy Jones, who has written arrangements for everyone from Count Basie and Ray Charles to Michael Jackson. “Nelson was smart because he put the electricity up above Frank. He put it way upstairs and gave Frank the room downstairs for his voice to shine, rather than building big, lush parts that were in the same register as his voice.”

Sinatra, the musician, was always involved in the actual execution of the complete piece of music.

“Frank accentuated my awareness of dynamics by exhibiting his own sensitivity in that direction,” Riddle would later write. “It is one thing to indicate by dynamic markings … how you want to have the orchestra play your music. It is quite another to induce a group of blase, battle-scarred musicians to observe those markings and to play accordingly. I would try, by word or gesture, to get them to play correctly, but if after a couple of times through, the orchestra still had not effectively observed the dynamics, Frank would suddenly turn and draw from them the most exquisite shadings, using the most effective means yet discovered, sheer intimidation.”

Within a year they would combine on “Young at Heart,” and Sinatra would have his first single to make the top five since 1947. The amazing comeback would be complete.

IV. While Sinatra was practicing his art with renewed vitality, he was still struggling to make sense of his private life. The relationship with Ava Gardner remained jagged and self-destructive. They were together, fought, split, reconciled: a familiar pattern of obsession. The squalid little drama was in horrid counterpoint to the rise in his fortunes in other areas. In August From Here to Eternity was released, and Sinatra received rave reviews. The movie also shifted the way he was viewed by large numbers of men. Many seemed to merge Sinatra with Maggio, and when the thin, brave character of the movie is beaten to death by the character played by Ernest Borgnine, it was a kind of symbolic expiation. Sinatra had shown an aspect of his character that many had never witnessed before in a Sinatra movie or heard singing from jukeboxes. Sinatra/Maggio had lost. But in death, he had won.

Before the movie opened, Sinatra had been booked into Bill Miller’s Riviera, on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Only a year before, he had played that room to many empty tables. Now, suddenly, the place was packed, celebrities were using pull to get in, the parking lot was jammed, and even the gangsters had problems getting tables. Sinatra was exultant.

At the same time, in the fall of 1953, Ava Gardner decided to end the marriage. Her account of the decision in her autobiography has a kind of hard-boiled poignancy:

“I don’t think I ever sat down and made a conscious decision about leaving Frank; as usual I simply acted on impulse and allowed events to sweep me along. But I remember exactly when I made the decision to seek a divorce. It was the day the phone rang and Frank was on the other end, announcing that he was in bed with another woman. And he made it plain that if he was going to be constantly accused of infidelity when he was innocent, there had to come a time when he’d decide he might as well be guilty. But for me, it was a chilling moment. I was deeply hurt. I knew then that we had reached a crossroads. Not because we had fallen out of love, but because our love had so battered and bruised us that we couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Sinatra went on to win the Academy Award for best supporting actor. His records began selling. He appeared before large crowds in New York, Miami, and Las Vegas. Offers arrived every day for television shows and movie roles. But it took him a long time to get over Ava Gardner. She had decided to live in Europe, and he followed her to London and Spain, sometimes begging for a reconciliation that never happened. Back at home, without hope, the wounds slowly healing, he transformed himself into the Sinatra who wore a hat. The swinger whose best friends were men. The man with a lot of women, which was, of course, like having no woman at all. The message was there in the music, the attitude, even the hat: he had come through a hard, dark time, and he wasn’t ever going back to the darkness.

But some of the hardest times in life never completely end. The only time I ever met Ava Gardner was in 1974. A mutual friend took me to see her. She had been drinking and kept whacking a small dog with a rolled-up tabloid newspaper. She was staying at Frank Sinatra’s apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria.

V. By the mid-1950s Sinatra was expressing the feelings and yearnings of men. And they were listening. Most Americans love stories of redemption, of course, but men identify more often with the tale of the return of the hero, the man who comes back wearing the scars of battle, harder and wiser than he was when he left. Looking at, or listening to, Sinatra, particularly after the release of the masterful album called In the Wee Small Hours, men changed their attitude about Frank Sinatra. They identified with the personal drama of the Fall, with the cliché of the hero led astray by the vixen and his eventual release from her wiles. Or they embraced another cliché he had paid his dues. At last. Such men once believed that everything had been too easy for Frank Sinatra. But now he had paid for his good luck and his endless hubris in the ways they had paid: with anguish and suffering and loss.

Even some of the old soldiers forgave him. The Korean War had confused all notions of the nobility of serving your country; it was an undeclared “police action,” without a Pearl Harbor, and deepened the cynicism of many men. The fighting was ended in 1953 by the new president, Dwight Eisenhower, who knew as a general that it was folly to fight a land war in Asia. The men seemed to say, Don’t trust history, trust only the personal. And for many men, the personal involved a merging of reality and fiction. In war or peace, they all knew men like Maggio.

On the records, the voice was deeper, richer, with more timbre, the voice of a man. But it also had a newer attitude. In the ballads, most of them torch songs, he was protected now with the armor of the stoic. The songs from In the Wee Small Hours said that in spite of loss, abandonment, defeat, he — and you — could get through the night. You could still get hurt, but it was worth the risk because you knew that no defeat was permanent. There would be another day, a new woman, another chance to roll the dice. There was rue in some of the songs. There was regret. There was no self-pity.

“Ava taught him how to sing a torch song,” said Nelson Riddle many years later. “She taught him the hard way.”

Everything that flowed from the comeback — the Rat Pack, the swagger, the arrogance, the growing fortune, the courtiers — is, in the end, of little relevance. It has as much to do with Sinatra’s art as Hemingway’s big-game hunting had to do with his. For a while Sinatra appeared to be the only man in America who could not be hurt again. Not ever. Onstage he exuded power and confidence; even the shadow of the Mob helped his image because it added a dangerous glamour to the performance and a dark resonance to his art. He made some good movies after the comeback: The Man with the Golden Arm, Pal Joey, Some Came Running, High Society, and The Manchurian Candidate. He also made some appalling, self-indulgent junk. But he simply didn’t take acting seriously enough to become a great actor. Too often he settled for the first, most superficial take, avoiding the effort that would force him to stretch his talent, acting as if he were double parked. Too often, in too many movies, he cheated the audience and cheated himself. He never cheated in the music.

In the end, his most durable expression lies in that music. While living his life, Sinatra had learned something about human pain and found a way, through his music, to turn that hard-won knowledge into a form of human consolation. As the country changed, and the music along with it, as rock and roll took over and the baby boomers sneered at the children of Prohibition and the Depression, he was often baffled about the world and his role in it. But he continued practicing his own consoling art until the words and music could no longer rise from him into the trembling air.

Before leaving the stage, Sinatra had come to realize that life was not one long string of triumphs. As he grew older, he sometimes even floundered in the music (he made an entire album of songs based on Rod McKuen’s ninth-rate poetry). But even his slumps did not last long. He could always find his way home to the music that had lasted him a lifetime, and almost until the end, he was capable of surprise. To be sure, much of what he did in life was also predictable. Watching the disorder and chaos of the sixties, his politics changed. But then, he was not the only old New Dealer who moved to the right, where he embraced Richard Nixon, a man he detested, and Ronald Reagan, a man he enjoyed. During that period of disorder he married and divorced Mia Farrow, who was thirty years his junior, and came away baffled at himself. “I still don’t know what that was all about,” he said to me a dozen years after it had ended. With his fourth wife, Barbara Marx, he retreated deeper into the bright, ritualized fortress he had erected in the California desert, far from the places that had hurt him into art. And I remember now a night I spent with him in 1974, driving around New York in a limousine, just talking.

“It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”

“Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”

“And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”

He laughed and settled back. We were crossing Eighty-sixth Street, heading for Central Park.

“You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” he said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This was the Watergate winter. The year before, Sinatra, the old Democrat, sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon; the Watergate tapes would reveal a Nixon who retailed crude anti-Italian slurs. “You like people,” Sinatra said softly, “and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling again. “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”

I said that every day I knew less.

“Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is, you get older and you know less.”

I liked the man who talked that way on a chilly night in New York. I liked his doubt and his uncertainty. He had enriched my life with his music since I was a boy. He had confronted bigotry and changed the way many people thought about the children of immigrants. He had made many of us wiser about love and human loneliness. And he was still trying to understand what it was all about. His imperfections were upsetting. His cruelties were unforgivable. But Frank Sinatra was a genuine artist, and his work will endure as long as men and women can hear, and ponder, and feel. In the end, that’s all that truly matters.