Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [Hamill, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Rich & Famous
ISBN: 9780316069540
Google: wSI6AQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00FOR2CTQ
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 1998-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

OH, GOD, FRANK SINATRA COULD BE THE SWEETEST, MOST CHARMING MAN IN THE WORLD WHEN HE WAS IN THE MOOD.

– AVA GARDNER

I AM VERY MUCH SURPRISED WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING IN THE NEWSPAPERS BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DARLING WIFE. REMEMBER YOU HAVE A DECENT WIFE AND CHILDREN. YOU SHOULD BE VERY HAPPY. REGARDS TO ALL.

–TELEGRAM TO FRANK SINATRA FROM WILLIE (WILLIE MOORE) MORETTI, 1949

5

I’M A FOOL TO WANT YOU

ONE OF SINATRA’S most mysterious achievements was also the one that allowed him to endure for more than half a century after Harry James heard him in the Rustic Cabin. It was the nature of his audience. Sinatra started out with far more female than male fans. He ended up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.

On the simplest level it was connected to the times themselves. For millions of women during the war, Sinatra was the romantic voice of the American homefront. He was singing to Rosie the Riveter, the symbolic woman who had walked into a war plant and found employment that was ordinarily reserved for men. She was more than a self-reliant patriot or an earner of a day’s pay for a day’s work. She was something new, and her newness began to transcend the work itself; Rosie the Riveter was soon asserting some of the prerogatives of men – smoking cigarettes, drinking when she wanted to drink, right up against the bar, sleeping around if she wanted to sleep around, or choosing her own erotic fantasies. The music of Frank Sinatra wasn’t used only by men to seduce women; during the conflict that Studs Terkel called “the good war,” some women used that music, with its expression of sheer need, to seduce the available men. Yes, Sinatra was singing to all those girls whose boyfriends were fighting in Anzio or Guadalcanal; some maintained a patriotic virginity; others went their own ways. At the same time, he was singing to those women, of whatever age, who had never managed to find a boyfriend at all and for whom Saturday night truly was the loneliest night of the week.

In his life Sinatra’s sudden, immense fame worked as a kind of aphrodisiac. There were then, as there would be during the long reign of rock and roll, groupies who would sleep with famous men to add them to scoreboards; the names were like the downed Messerschmitts or Zeroes painted by pilots on the sides of P-51s during the war. But there were also many less calculating females suddenly knocking on Frank Sinatra’s door. He certainly wasn’t so perfectly handsome that he seemed unattainable; he looked to some young women that he’d be as happy to meet them as they would be to meet him.

But the Sinatra fantasy was also safe because its consummation seemed so unlikely. The big reason was that he was also married, was living after June 1944 in Toluca Lake, California, with his wife, Nancy, his daughter, Nancy, and after September 28, 1944, his son.

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