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The patron saint of insecurity

Frank Sinatra reconsidered

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7 minute read
That loosened tie, that rakish hat angle… and a striking resemblance to Don Knotts.
That loosened tie, that rakish hat angle… and a striking resemblance to Don Knotts.

In his salad days, his publicists dubbed him “The Voice.” His very first album, in 1946, was titled The Voice of Frank Sinatra. A posthumous TV tribute in 1998 escalated the vocal hype: “Frank Sinatra: The Voice of the Century,” it was called. His records have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.

Yet if you listen to Frank Sinatra’s records today, that thin, reedy, often scratchy voice may strike you as the least of Frank Sinatra’s assets. If you’re old enough to remember Sinatra (who died in 1998 at age 82) in one of his constantly reinvented personas — boy singer with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, bobbysoxers’ heartthrob, movie actor, tap-dance sidekick to Gene Kelly, failed husband to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow, Mafia buddy, Rat Pack leader — perhaps that voice will conjure up memories of the highs and lows of his tempestuous 65-year career, not to mention the tempestuous century you and he endured, as well as his talent at persuading you that you and he endured it more or less together. But if you’re a millennial, say, or if you don’t speak English well enough to grasp the words he sings, or if you’re a Martian newly arrived from outer space, you may well wonder what the fuss over Sinatra’s voice was all about.

These thoughts occur to me because this month Potito’s Bakery has been piping the recordings of two of its favorite Italian-American singers — Sinatra and Dean Martin — from the ground floor of my Center City office building onto Walnut Street outside. When those two voices are shorn of their visual imagery and their finger-snapping showbiz trappings, so they can be consumed by passersby only in snippets, the contrast between the two is striking.

Ring-a-ding-ding braggadocio

Martin’s rich, warm, syrupy baritone continues to stand the test of time on its own merits, even 19 years after his death. His voice seems to fit his songs like a glove and vice versa. A standard like “That’s Amore," first introduced in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis film The Caddy in 1953, worked just as well — maybe better — as the theme song of Moonstruck in 1987. Sinatra, by contrast, seems to be straining to hold the attention of holiday shoppers with songs that he had no business singing in the first place, like “Luck Be a Lady,” from Guys and Dolls. To hear Sinatra warble “New York, New York” is to tell yourself, “He’s no Liza Minnelli.”

In such surroundings, you can’t help thinking: Dean Martin had a voice. So did Bing Crosby. So, for all his mass-market grandstanding, did Luciano Pavarotti. Maria Aleida has an incredible voice, as you can hear for yourself by listening to her rendition of the mechanical Doll Song from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann.

Sinatra, by contrast, was not so much a singer as a stylist who relied heavily on top-drawer arrangers like Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Billy May to adapt other people’s songs to his own special brand of insecurity, not to mention the opposite side of that psychological coin, braggadocio. As anyone who hears his renditions of “I’ll Be Around,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Same Old Saturday Night,” and “I Get Along Without You Very Well” can attest, Sinatra was the patron saint of the lonely — a label that could apply to a large chunk of his alienated American contemporaries. By the same token, Sinatra’s opposite extreme — his hip, swinging, ring-a-ding-ding persona, epitomized by songs like “Come Fly With Me,” by his ostensibly outrageous (but actually tepid) behavior with his Las Vegas “rat pack” (who for all their alleged wildness never forsook their jackets and ties), and by the artificially rakish tilt of his hat and loosened tie in the poses he struck for album covers — resonated with anyone who has ever tried to strike a bold front to mask his insecurities. (I am not the first observer to note the remarkable physical similarities between Sinatra and the equally skinny hyper-neurotic comic character actor Don Knotts, who himself did a hilarious Sinatra parody on the old Steve Allen TV show.)

Sinatra himself acknowledged as much. "Being an 18-karat manic depressive,” he told an interviewer in the 1950s, “and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.” That same capacity, I would submit, accounted for Sinatra’s success as a movie actor. Even in his best roles — as, say, the pathetic but stubborn Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953) or as the drug addict Frankie in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)— Sinatra wasn’t a great actor, just as he wasn’t a great singer. His singing and acting were pieces of a much larger, and consequently much more fascinating, puzzle.

Callas vs. Sutherland

A friend of mine, the longtime Tufts University athletic director Rocky Carzo, maintains that athletes fall into two groups: Those with the natural God-given physical attributes and those who lack the natural attributes and consequently have to work at it really hard. Athletes in the latter group, Rocky says, are always much more interesting. (Think, for example, of Eddie Stanky, the New York Giants second baseman in the ‘50s, of whom his manager, Leo Durocher, once said: “He can’t hit, field or run. He just beats ya.”)

Rocky Carzo’s observation, it seems to me, applies to other endeavors as well. Naturally gorgeous actresses like Penelope Cruz, Julia Roberts, or Scarlett Johansson, say, or hunky actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, or George Clooney aren’t nearly as interesting as more complicated actors like, say, Helen Mirren, Diane Keaton, Judi Dench, Philip Seymour Hoffman, or Daniel Day-Lewis. As an operatic tenor, Plácido Domingo developed into a great artist precisely because his voice lacked Pavarotti’s athletic power. Joan Sutherland and Leontyne Price possessed dynamic voices and powerful presences, but the most famous heroines of opera — frail and delicate characters like Gilda in Rigoletto, Violetta in La Traviata, Mimi in La Bohème, Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly, Marguerite in Faust, or Lucia di Lammermoorwere best evoked by vulnerable singers like Maria Callas and Anna Moffo, who had to work hard at their acting precisely because they lacked the voices of Sutherland or Price.

No voice, but bewitching

Or consider the Italian lyric soprano Magda Olivero, who died in September at the age of 104. Critics — and even Olivero herself — agreed that she never possessed much of a singing voice. Nevertheless, as the New York Times observed in its obituary, she “whipped audiences around the world into a frenzy of adulation that was operatic even by operatic standards.” Olivero often took the stage to screams of ecstasy and left it to thundering ovations. When she sang the title role in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut in Verona, Italy, in 1970 (opposite the young Plácido Domingo), Olivero required police protection from the hundreds of audience members who tried to swarm the stage.

Although Olivero lacked what Rocky Carzo would call a God-given operatic voice, she distilled her voice and stage manner into a potent combination — grandiose, stylized, hyper-realistic, and melodramatic — that audiences found bewitching. Her rigorous training endowed her with such immense technical facility — crystalline diction, superb breath control, exquisite mastery of tone and dynamics — that she could imbue her work with a level of interpretive nuance that often eludes even great singers. On Olivero’s lips, her admiring Magdamaniacs often observed, song sounded almost as natural as speech.

“I never had a voice,” Olivero remarked in 1993. “What I had was expression, a face, a body, the truth. If one prefers the opposite, that is their right.”

As Sinatra put it in his own personal standard, she did it her way, and she was much more compelling as a result. And so was Sinatra.

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