Nicholas Stix, Uncensored: The Day the Music Died (A Photoessay on Frank Sinatra)

Monday, October 12, 2015

The Day the Music Died (A Photoessay on Frank Sinatra)

The man and his children: Tina, left; Nancy, right; and Frank “Jr.,” after Nancy, Ava, and Mia (1968)

The early 1940s

With Nancy during the Paramount Theater days, circa 1940

By Nicholas Stix
Saturday, May 14, 2011

Jonathan Schwartz just ended his Saturday show on NPR’s WNYC-FM (93.9) by remarking that today is the 13th anniversary of the death of Frank Sinatra, who was born on December 12, 1915.

“I was working that day, at a station that is defunct, happily in my opinion: WQEW….

“[Upon leaving work] I looked up at the Empire State Building: It was all blue, as in ‘ol’ blue eyes.’”

Schwartz then played 1983’s “All the Way Home,” which Schwartz considers to have been “his last great record.” Probably so.

In 1995, at 79

Long before Frank Sinatra died he was senile, his bodily systems were constantly failing him, and I considered that his death would be a blessing. Besides, what would I care? As famous as the man was, he was a complete stranger to me.

When I heard the news, it turned out that I cared a great deal, and was not at all relieved. For days, I was in a funk.

Frank Sinatra remains the greatest singer in the history of recorded music. There was not only his voice, which at the time of his greatest popularity was between a baritone and a tenor, until cigarettes pushed him over to baritone country. There was his phrasing, particularly with torch songs, and his way of swinging, ever upward, with up-tempo songs.

As Pvt. Angelo Maggio, dying in the arms of his best friend, Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift), in From Here to Eternity. Both men were nominated for Oscars, and the movie won eight, all told. Sinatra won for Best Supporting Actor. However, while Clift gave his greatest performance in FHTE, he did not win the Oscar for that role. His FHTE co-star, Burt Lancaster, matched him, scene for scene, step for step. So they knocked each other off, and William Holden won a combination spoiler/cumulative Oscar for Stalag 17 that year, and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Monty would be nominated for four Oscars, but never win. Sinatra would be nominated for Best Actor for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), but would lose out to his fellow paisan and FHTE antagonist, Ernest Borgnine, for Marty.

For about ten years, until he was hit by one of history’s longest mid-life crises, he was one of the world’s greatest movie actors. I only learned much later that, among millionaires, Sinatra was probably the most generous man on the face of the Earth. His kindness was, however, often overshadowed by thuggery. He described himself as a manic-depressive.

In this scene from The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Sinatra broke several bones in one hand, putting a karate chop through a table. He gave one of his finest performances in the picture. The movie, based on Richard Condon’s novel, worked as both anti-Communist drama, and anti-anti-Communist satire.

With his first wife, the former Nancy Barbato: “When you’ve had the best, all the others are disappointments.”

Marlene Dietrich called him “the Mercedes-Benz of lovers.” She was not alone in that judgment. He got around. About 25 years after the 1951 divorce of Sinatra and his first wife, Nancy, the mother of his three children went through, a reporter asked her why she never remarried. She said, “When you’ve had the best, all the others are disappointments.”

Dietrich—she got around, too

Nancy Barbato Sinatra is supposedly still alive. That would make her about 90 years old.

Sinatra considered wife number two, Ava Gardner (1920-1990), his great love. I read somewhere—maybe in Gardner’s ghostwritten autobiography—that between their 1957 divorce and the rest of her life, that they would periodically rendezvous in luxury hotels around the world.

With Ava

I dunno. That was surely his most passionate relationship, but his happiest? Including their extramarital affair, Sinatra and Gardner were together only about four years, were miserable most of the time they were together, the marriage was dead on arrival, and their divorce went through less than two years after they’d tied the knot. Gardner blamed her own jealousy, admitting that it drove her crazy whenever they were in public, and another woman looked Sinatra’s way. That’s a whole lotta crazy.

The only woman with whom he enjoyed any sort of happiness, I maintain, was his first wife.

Midlife crisis: Marrying third wife, Mia Farrow, on July 19, 1966. She was 21; he was 50. Close friend Dean Martin is supposed to have said either, "I've got bottles of Scotch older than Mia Farrow," or "For Chrissakes, Frank, I've got bottles of Scotch older than her"; maybe both.

Even tragic mistakes, such as his embrace of civil rights, were motivated by a fundamentally American sense of fairness that, unfortunately, was not reciprocated. Sinatra integrated Las Vegas, when he told clubs that if they wouldn’t hire his close friend, Sammy Davis Jr., then considered in many quarters to be the world’s greatest live entertainer, that they couldn’t have him, either.

He was the pugnacious little guy who won out, an “Angelo Maggio,” but unlike his tragic movie alter ego, one who lived and prevailed… with a little help from his broken-nosed friends.

He was the embodiment of the best of America, and only a little of her worst.

R.I.P., Francis.