That was it, the drink and the cigarette. He was cool and warm at the same time.

He was the essence of cool, on stage with a drink and a cigarette, a swinging, singing, ring-a-ding kind of guy who could croon midnight into a romantic fantasy.

His music was after-hours music, when women with perfumed hair snuggled up to guys in tuxes and Frank filled the starry sky with a voice as warm and sweet as honey in hot rum.

There was a quality to that voice we had never heard before or will ever hear again, something more than just perfect resonance and phrasing and the seamless beauty of a compelling ballad.

There was Sinatra behind it, a composite of the magic that God gives to only a few people in each lifetime, a man who could stand alone in a spotlight surrounded by 10,000 people and dominate the room.

I saw him walk through a casino in Las Vegas once, where the marquee that announced his presence said simply “Frank,” and the crowds parted before him like the Red Sea for Moses.

He didn’t have to say anything and it wasn’t that people were afraid of him, but rather they realized instinctively that you did that for a king, you opened the way. After he had passed, you closed again and stood there watching him disappear into the crowd, occupying the space he once owned.

At Matteo’s, a restaurant on the Westside where Sinatra used to hang out when he was in town, they ushered me to a corner booth once and informed me in a reverential whisper that it was where Frank sat and should he wander in out of a summer night I was to move. It was the least I could do.

*

I was still in high school when Sinatra began sending teenage girls into screaming fits the way the Beatles would a generation later. It was the beginning of a love-hate relationship that would never change.

I didn’t really admire Sinatra the man, at least not some of the time, not when he was calling newspaper reporters and columnists the kinds of names that even now you can’t print, now that almost anything goes.

But there were times, too, when you heard that he’d do things like buy a school bus for some kids in a poor district without the usual kind of hype that accompanies celebrity giving, filling a need, not fattening an ego, and you had to respect him for that.

And there was the time he called off his lawyers who were warning a saloon singer named Nick Edenetti to stop using Sinatra’s name in a show where Nick did a kind of Sinatra take-off, wearing a brim hat and a trench coat tossed over his shoulder. You liked him for that too.

Edenetti sang “Make It One for My Baby” the way Frank did, trying to emulate the voice that no one could really copy, and setting up the spots so that in a certain light he looked a little like Frank. Sinatra saw the show and afterward said to Nick, “You got balls, kid.” It was the emotional equivalent of a papal blessing.

At Matteo’s, Larry Cullen was Frank’s special waiter for 24 years and remembers him as the master of class and generosity, sipping a dry martini at Station 8, the corner booth, dining on veal Milanese and then afterward going into the kitchen to sneak a smoke and tip the cooks and the dishwashers.

“He was a sweet man at important times,” the comic Shelley Berman said, recalling a night when Sinatra praised him from the stage. “He loved to talk boxing,” bail bondsman and ex-lightweight contender Joey Barnum said, remembering the night he sat at Frank’s booth. “But I never saw him without a drink in his hand.”

*

That was it, you see, the drink and the cigarette. We all drank and we all smoked back then when Sinatra began chronicling his own years in a ballad that took us into the twilight of his life, cloaking us in a sense of time and mortality that bordered on the mystic.

When I was 17, it was a very good year . . .

He was cool and warm at the same time, if you know what I mean, smoothly bridging the gap between the up-yours, I’m-doing-it-my-way-guy to the singer who could translate dreams into music and embrace love as though he’d invented it.

We saw him in concert in Oakland once, my wife and I, and up until then she wasn’t a Sinatra fan, not the way I was. There’s a saying in show biz, probably emanating from San Francisco, that says, “When you think you’re good, play Oakland.”

Frank did, standing alone on a small stage, isolated by a single spotlight, selling moonlit walks and soft summer nights and the snap of recognition between two people who had never met but would never part.

Strangers in the night, exchanging glances. . . . Lovers at first sight, in love forever . . .

When the concert was over, I could see the change in my wife’s attitude. She had never seen anything like that before, one man casting a spell over thousands with almost effortless sorcery.

She sensed the magic the way we all did, and I guess that’s why a lot of us guys wished secretly we had that power. It wasn’t just the cool or the mellow or the talent; it was the complexity that created the whole, the persona that hallmarked the lovers and the lonely who came out when the sun went down.

Frank showed us how to be cool and showed us how to grow old and in the end he showed us how to die. It was simple. He did it his way.