Why Sinatra Matters Read Online Free Page B

his early years he had cooperated with the fan magazines and other components of the Hollywood publicity machine.
     At some points he had even groveled to the more powerful columnists when advised to do so (although the most powerful columnist
     of all, Walter Winchell, never joined in the attacks on Sinatra). But from the mid-1950s until his death, he worked with the
     press only on his own terms.
    “The New York guys are different,” he said. “Maybe because there’s so much else going on around them, they don’t have to cover
me
. Ah, shit, I like their company. It’s as simple as that.”
    Maybe it was, but I doubt it.
    IV.
Jimmy Cannon, Murray Kempton, and William B. Williams are dead. So are Jilly Rizzo and Sugar Ray Robinson and all those others
     who once seemed so vividly alive that I could not imagine them leaving the world. Now Sinatra is dead too, and it’s like a
     thousand people have just left the room.
    And yet the tale of Frank Sinatra isn’t only about Clarke’s and Hollywood and Las Vegas; the life he led in such places is
     part of the tale, but it would be meaningless without the art. Sinatra’s art can be experienced in the 1,307 recordings he
     made in studios from 1939 to 1995, in the recordings of his concerts, in his videos and movies. In the saloons of the city,
     you could see what Sinatra had become. But such evenings could never explain the long existential saga of a life entwined
     with art. He was, in some ways, as elusive and mysterious as Jay Gatsby, not simply to those who knew him but to himself.
     The keys to the life and the art can only be found somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city.

M ANY IMMIGRANTS HAD BROUGHT ON BOARD BALLS OF YARN, LEAVING ONE END OF THE LINE WITH SOMEONE ON LAND . A S THE SHIP SLOWLY CLEARED THE DOCK, THE BALLS UNWOUND AMID THE FAREWELL SHOUTS OF THE WOMEN, THE FLUTTERING OF THE HANDKERCHIEFS,
     AND THE INFANTS HELD HIGH . A FTER THE YARN RAN OUT, THE LONG STRIPS REMAINED AIRBORNE, SUSTAINED BY THE WIND, LONG AFTER THOSE ON LAND AND THOSE AT SEA
     HAD LOST SIGHT OF EACH OTHER.
    – L UCIANO D E C RESCENZO,
Quoted in La Merica:
Images of Italian
Greenhorn Experience
2
WRAP YOUR TROUBLES IN DREAMS
    T HE LIFE AND CAREER of Frank Sinatra are inseparable from the most powerful of all modern American myths: the saga of immigration. Because he
     was the son of immigrants, his success thrilled millions who were products of the same rough history. Through the power of
     his art and his personality, he became one of a very small group that would permanently shift the image of Italian Americans.
     Many aspects of his character were shaped by that immigrant experience, which often fueled his notorious volatility. More
     important, it infused his art.
    “Of course, it meant something to me to be the son of immigrants,” Sinatra said to me once. “How could it not? How the hell
     could it not? I grew up for a few years thinking I was just another American kid. Then I discovered at – what? five? six?
     — I discovered that some people thought I was a dago. A wop. A guinea.” An angry pause. “You know, like I didn’t have a fucking
name
.” An angrier pause. “That’s why years later, when Harry [James] wanted me to change my name, I said no way, baby. The name
     is Sinatra. Frank fucking Sinatra.”
    He grew up in a time when the wounds caused by nativism and anti-Italian bigotry were still raw. Those wounds, and the scar
     tissue they left behind, affected the way millions of Italian Americans lived, what they talked about, even how they chose
     to read the newspapers. In the years of his childhood, Sinatra was no exception.
    “Growing up, I would hear the stories,” he said to me once. “Things that happened, because you were Italian. … I don’t mean
     it was the
only
thing people talked about. That would be a lie. But the stories were there. The warnings, the prejudice. You heard about
     it at home, in the barbershop, on the corner.