And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain. –From “My Way,” by Paul Anka
Frank Sinatra has been singing that lyric for more than two decades, but now, it seems, the end, and that final curtain, are here.
If he were in better health, if his eyesight were sharper, his memory keener, Sinatra right now would be touring the world in a flurry of concerts leading up to his 80th birthday, on Dec. 12.
On that night, he would walk onto the stage of Carnegie Hall in New York to sing a farewell concert that had been rumored for months and would have been the hottest ticket around.
A small army of cameramen would have been filming the show for videotapes and laserdiscs that would have sold as fast as they could be made. High-rollers from Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other, far-flung corners of Sinatra’s world would have flocked to Manhattan to bid the old man a proper goodbye.
Life, however, has a strange way of rearranging our best-laid plans. Though Sinatra was performing in the months leading up to his 80th–he gave an exuberant show last October in Chicago’s new United Center–he apparently won’t get to bask in the big finish.
On Dec. 12, “Mr. Sinatra probably will spend a quiet evening at home with his family,” says a Sinatra spokesman, which means, in effect, that it’s all over, with no further performances planned.
“Sinatra never will sing concerts in public again, it’s past time for that,” says singer-song-writer Paul Anka, a longtime Sinatra friend and collaborator.
“I still can’t believe, and I won’t believe, that he’s not going to go onstage anymore,” says singer-pianist Buddy Greco, another pal.
Greco isn’t the only one having difficulty with the concept. Sinatra devotees across the country have been canceling plans to travel to New York next month for what would have been the farewell blowout.
“I had been planning to go to Manhattan since last summer,” says one hard-core fan who has traveled coast to coast to hear Sinatra sing. “I even had an inside line on getting tickets to the Carnegie Hall show.”
Now, Ol’ Blue Eyes’ most ardent supporters will have to settle for an array of carefully orchestrated tributes, each minus a performance by the man himself (see list on Page 1).
No doubt many observers are applauding Sinatra’s quiet exit, believing him too old, too tired, too much a product of a distant past to command a spotlight in the late ’90s.
They would point out that, in recent years, Sinatra inevitably flubbed a line or two in concert, that his voice had long since lost the luster of his fabled recordings of the ’50s. Sinatra, they would say, wasn’t the singer he used to be and ought to leave his fans with their memories intact.
It wasn’t just the music
Certainly there’s a point at which any entertainer must step back from the spotlight, conceding that the infirmities of age stand in the way of top-notch performances. But Sinatra was able to keep going longer than most partly because of the allure and the cult of his personality.
“No one can really say why he’s still such a draw, but it’s partially because Frank doesn’t just sing, he performs,” Sinatra’s longtime pianist Bill Miller told the Tribune two years ago.
“People not only want to hear him, they want to see him. They want to look at him, they want to listen to him speak. They want to see him being Sinatra.”
Listeners have felt as strongly about the man as they have about his music at least since the early ’40s, when Sinatra emerged as a soloist, having paid his dues crooning in the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey.
“Frank Sinatra, who passed through Chicago yesterday en route to New York, lost his bow tie and almost his shirt to his fans,” reported the Tribune in 1944.
“The lad the bobby socks swoon for went to Henrici’s (restaurant), but his public, evidently knowing his habits and disappointed at the station, was there to greet him.
“Sinatra tried to leave by the back way, but a truck driver obligingly blocked the alley, detaining the Sinatra taxi and giving the Sinatra fans time to tear off the famous bow tie and rip the Sinatra shirt.”
The Sinatra aura clearly was established, and despite the inevitable ups and downs of a show-business career, Sinatra’s mystique inexorably grew over the years, thanks, in part, to several major film performances.
The army grunt who spits in the eye of his superiors and pays for it with his life in “From Here to Eternity” (the 1953 film that won Sinatra an Oscar and helped revive his flagging singing career); the junkie who goes through a harrowing withdrawal on screen in “The Man With the Golden Arm” (an Oscar-nominated performance of 1955); the military intelligence officer who has been brainwashed during the Korean War (“The Manchurian Candidate” of 1962)–these buck-the-system characters nurtured Sinatra’s image as rebel and anti-hero.
Even his work in lesser films fleshed out his persona as a go-for-broke hedonist whose fans might at least live vicariously through his misadventures.
“That string of films, `Robin and the Seven Hoods’ and the ones we did in Vegas, were fun, and I am sure we had more fun making the pictures than the audiences did seeing each movie,” Sinatra told me in 1991.
The Rat Pack in Chicago
True enough, when Sinatra and clan came to town to film “Robin,” they brought their off-screen shenanigans right onto the stage.
“The Rat Pack is in town–the Leader and all–for the first and possibly the only time, and night life is explosively exciting on the banks of the Des Plaines River at Milwaukee Avenue,” wrote Tribune nightlife critic William Leonard in 1962.
“The ancient Villa Venice has hit the jackpot with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., who croon, carol, caper and clown to the biggest cabaret audiences this town has seen in 30 years.
“Martin opens with 20 minutes of drinking songs, Sinatra fools everyone by coming on ahead of Davis with a quarter-hour of old Frankie favorites that cause the ladies to whimper with audible delight. Davis does the impossible by making the next 10 minutes an electrical follow up. Then the three unite for nearly an hour of corny comedy and swinging music. . . .
“Outside, throngs show up about sundown looking for autographs or glimpses of the Leader or his clan. Hundreds line up waiting for the next show, many of them looking for scalpers.”
The aura of the hell-raiser followed Sinatra on every stage he played and attracted audiences who wanted to savor it. Sinatra’s famous Las Vegas brawls and uncounted romantic liaisons didn’t hurt the mystique a bit.
Musically, Sinatra never stopped redefining his art. The crooner of the late ’30s and early ’40s who caressed “Star Dust” and “All or Nothing at All” transformed into the swing singer of the mid-’40s who brought hard-driving rhythms to “The Way You Look Tonight” and “All of Me.”
Though discarded by the bobby-soxers who had revered him during World War II, Sinatra by the ’50s had reinvented himself yet again, expressing remarkable romantic despair in brooding ballads such as “Only the Lonely” and “One for My Baby.” That Sinatra had learned about romantic pain from his well-documented, tumultuous marriage to Ava Gardner only made his music more believable.
Yet the defiant singer who in the ’60s roared forth with the Count Basie Band in “The Best Is Yet to Come” also learned to produce a more understated passion in bossa nova tunes such as “Dindi” and “Once I Loved.”
Thereafter, in the ’70s and ’80s, Sinatra gradually began to sing songs of farewell and regret, among them “Forget to Remember,” a searing ballad of romantic loss; “There Used to Be a Ballpark,” an ode to a vanished past; and “Here’s to the Band,” a poignant thank-you to the fellows who helped propel him to the top.
In recent years, Sinatra may have walked onstage more slowly and gingerly than in the past, but he brought with him all of the color and texture of a life lived boldly on the stage.
The man remained a perpetual work-in-progress, mercurial and volatile to the finish.
When he performed at Poplar Creek Music Theatre in 1990, for instance, his first encore was greeted with the kind of deafening ovation that demanded a second. Sinatra called out a tune, and when the bandleader, Frank Sinatra Jr., didn’t signal the downbeat instantaneously, the elder Sinatra clenched his fist and leaned toward the bandstand, as if ready to strike his music director.
The famous Sinatra temper that had made his personal life headline fodder and had made his screen performances so riveting clearly had endured into the final years of his career.
As the late songwriter Sammy Cahn used to say, “Sinatra has a certain menace about him, a sense of danger, which is tremendously exciting.”
Perhaps that’s why Sinatra never stopped selling out performances, no matter how large the hall, how long the engagement.
Still the master
For this listener, the most haunting performance was among the last, when Sinatra played the United Center last fall. As he approached the climax to “New York, New York,” he held back the melody line, even as the orchestra pushed forward. When he finally released the phrase, at the last possible moment, the audience burst into spontaneous applause, even though the song wasn’t yet finished.
Clearly, Sinatra still could play a crowd.
“I’ve never studied (voice) and can’t read sheet music very well,” Sinatra once told me, as if his fiercely individual brand of musicmaking could be taught.
His work always was too personal, too closely bound up with his own passions to be successfully mimicked. That simply makes his absence from the stage today all the more noticeable.
When Sinatra closed that 1994 Chicago performance, he slowly blew a kiss to the audience. Perhaps thinking that this might be his last time through town, he asked the crowd to “think about me once in a while.”
We haven’t stopped since.
