SEEING IT HIS WAY : Sinatra’s Perfect Artistry Outweighs His Imprfect Life

A few years ago I received a kind note from Frank Sinatra, a response to a review lauding one of his Orange County performances. After ascertaining the letter was genuine--not something my associates had faked on joke shop stationery--the next step was figuring out what to make of it.

Sure, I was proud and kind of humbled to warrant his notice, but I also felt somewhat of a traitor to my craft. Hasn’t one of this world’s longest wars been the 50-year brawl between Sinatra and the press? Isn’t it practically a journalistic badge of honor to have caught a punch from Frank or one of his underlings?

And long before becoming a writer, I felt an antipathy towards him. In the Us-versus-Them schism that so marked the ‘60s, Sinatra was most certainly Them . Like the oldsters who had castigated him and his music 20 years earlier, Sinatra dismissed the rock music I loved, calling it the product of “cretinous goons” and “a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac.” This from the man whose albums were probably the greatest seduction tool since the advent of alcohol.

At the time, his whole brand of music seemed like a creaking sham, nearly corporate with its glib tunesmiths, glossy orchestrations, and Sinatra’s smug delivery. In both film and music, the whole notion of the groomed, classy “star” he represented was falling by the wayside, replaced by brooding young minds who, for better or worse, were doing their own thing.

Even Elvis seemed hopelessly old-fashioned in the ‘60s. After Dylan and the Beatles, artists had to be self-contained--writing their own songs and strumming their own instruments--and (so we imagined) untouched by the show-biz bull epitomized by Las Vegas and its greatest gaseous star, Sinatra. When we did look to the past, it wasn’t to his crafted wares but to the raw loam of Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Howlin’ Wolf. If we wanted jazz, it would be the consuming fire of a Billie Holiday or Charlie Parker, not the Chairman of the Board or whichever of his countless nicknames he was answering to then.

As the decade progressed, Sinatra’s offstage actions weren’t any too endearing to youth either.

When a generation took to the streets to protest an immoral war and the mailed hand of “law and order,” Sinatra abandoned his New Deal-New Frontier past and chummied up to Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon, whom--spiffy library or no--some of us still regard as traitors to democracy.

His shift to the right, some tomes have speculated, was due to Bobby Kennedy’s investigation of Sinatra’s mob buddies. Stories linking him to underworld figures continued to surface in the late ‘60s, and, until the release of “The Godfather” in 1972, the Vietnam generation wasn’t as enamored of mobsters as earlier generations had been--they seemed too much like the government we were stuck with.

So, the hell with Sinatra, I figured, as I cultivated holes in my faded jeans and hunkered down with pretentious Jethro Tull concept albums.

At a recent O.C. appearance, singer Michelle Shocked remarked that “political correctness has been a serious social disease for the last several years,” and ain’t it the truth?

Sinatra may have done little to redeem himself ethically since the ‘60s. Indeed, he’s since made unrepentant money-runs to South Africa’s Sun City, and Kitty Kelley’s 1986 biography, “His Way,” smudged out a damning portrait of Sinatra as a venal bully.

But even if every accusation of moral blindness in Kelley’s book were true, both it and many in my generation have been equally blind to the blatant, obvious humanity of the man.

Obvious? French singer Charles Aznavour had this to say about Sinatra: “It is impossible to sing like a saint and be a bad man.”

The grand effort of Sinatra’s 74 years wasn’t duking cameramen, bedding starlets or flinging his arms around politicos and “made men.” It was what he did behind a microphone, and the humanity revealed there, the emotion and revelatory genius of his talent, is one of the great treasures of this century.

Rock impresario Bill Graham once said that the two greatest performances he had seen in his life had been by Frank Sinatra and Jimi Hendrix, and the galactic distance I once perceived between those two performers doesn’t seem so great to me now. It was easier, perhaps, to recognize the genius in a pioneer like Hendrix, to applaud the courage in pushing a musical form into vast uncharted regions. But it is no less brilliant or brave to work within an established form, looking inward to the innumerable instants and delicate gradients that can render a work unique. In both, ultimately, it isn’t the form but the emotion shared that matters.

It took seeing Sinatra live for me to catch on to that. I went to review his 1984 Pacific Amphitheatre show and really hoped he’d fall right on his aging schnoz. Instead I was practically moved to tears by the warmth and artistry of his voice, the nearly unmatched way he could finesse a melody, the way his phrasing burnished hidden facets in every syllable it touched. It was a very giving performance, showing more commitment to craft than most performers half his age could muster, and it was deeply human, forcing the recognition that he’s felt the same hurts and joys as the rest of us.

The times I’ve seen him since then, including a thoroughly magical 1986 Pacific show, have only deepened that impression. Even without considering that his voice is supposedly on the wane, it’s a frightening lot of talent for one man to carry around. No wonder he seemed so cocky in his glory days.

While not the mercurial creator that Billie Holiday (whom he’s cited as his biggest vocal influence) was, he also was an innovator. Just as the films had allowed actors to scale down the broad gestures of the stage, so the sensitive microphones of the late ‘30s allowed singers to achieve a vocal intimacy that was previously impossible outside of the shower. Bing Crosby was the first great beneficiary of that technology, but it was Sinatra’s ‘40s recordings which made that intimacy truly intimate. He was able to bring new shadings and nuance to a lyric, and it was like he was crooning them directly into the ear of his fans.

To understand why Sinatra doesn’t love the press, listen to his daring early ‘40s Columbia records, and then read some of the dismissive comments of the press of the day, including: “Listening to The Voice is like being stroked by a hand covered with cold cream” and the writer who prescribed “Sinatra-ceptives” for the “emotionally unstable females who paraded naked and unashamed for the drooling, crooning, goonish syllables of a man who looked like a second-string basketball player.”

By the time they caught on that he was more than just the focus of girls’ wartime sexual frustrations, he had moved on.

Other singers have tried to claim “My Way,” but few people living have actually had their way as often as Sinatra. How many guys have hobnobbed with with F.D.R., Kennedy, Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner not to mention Sam Giacana and Lucky Luciano?

By many accounts his failed relationship with Gardner was the one great exception to Sinatra’s getting his way, and it may not be coincidental that blue then entered as a strong color on his song canvases.

Sometimes there is a change in people you can sense in their work, like the way the light went out of Clark Gable’s performances after he lost Carole Lombard. In Sinatra’s case, his unhappiness enriched his art. Much like the way Eskimos have scores of words to describe the minute variations in snow and ice, so despair and loneliness came to be expressed in his voice in a breathtakingly realized vocabulary of phrasing and vocal shadings. Just listen to his “In the Wee Small Hours” and “Only the Lonely.”

All of this speculation about the motivations behind that voice, is, of course, only speculation. Which in itself is a pretty good reason for him to be honked off at the press and sundry. Great art is supposed to inspire, and here he has been lobbing perfect passes with his voice for half a century, and rather than catch the damn ball and run with it (starting our own Rat Packs or whatever), all we can think to do is to continue to watch and weigh his every move.

If he has been imperfect in his private life (while also not forgetting his many impetuous acts of pure generosity), who’s to blame him? He has been more perfect in his art than most, and was that enough for us?

In 1963 he told a Playboy interviewer, “Whatever has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe, I’m honest.”

I’ll buy that, and if he ever records another album (his most recent was 1984’s “L.A. Is My Lady,” hardly a worthy farewell), I’ll buy that too. And he’s welcome to write me anytime.

Who

Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles and Pia Zadora.

When

Saturday, Sept. 8,

at 8 p.m.

Where

Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts

San Diego Freeway to Fairview Road exit, then go south.

Wherewithal

$10 to $50.

Where to call

(714) 634 -1300.