Melancholy Mood From Hoboken to Hollywood

In Palm Springs, convertibles cruised the palm-lined streets filling the hot desert air with Sinatra songs from the radio.

In Hoboken, they mourned a death in the family.

At Matteo’s restaurant in Westwood, a cozy den of red-leather booths and once a favorite of Sinatra, longtime maitre d’ Larry Cullen walked around alone and misty-eyed, nursing his fondest images of Frank.

In Las Vegas, the pulsating lights of the Strip went dark at 8:30 p.m. Friday for one minute--a blink of the eye and yet an eternity by the casino clock. And in Hollywood, Capitol Records, for which he recorded in the ‘50s, draped its cylindrical building in black.

For half the century, Frank Sinatra has been indelibly stitched into a cross-country landscape of music and memories. Palm Springs is defined by a swath of charitable donations that Sinatra lavished upon it. Las Vegas, where Sinatra arguably created the lounge act, is a different place because of him. On Friday, as the reality of his death settled in, the mood in all the places that Sinatra defined was as melancholy as his soft ballads.

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, two more classic figures of the old Hollywood, passed through the huge ornate gate of Sinatra’s Beverly Hills home early in the morning to pay their respects on what Gorme described as “the saddest day of my life.”

At Matteo’s, still a gathering place for old Hollywood, Cullen remembered his years taking care of Sinatra. He had been tending to the singer’s needs, protecting him from overzealous autograph hounds since those early days, when the owner would call from his home and alert the maitre d’ with the words, “Frank’s coming in tonight.”

At Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard--better known, perhaps, for selling the Verve or Master P--a customer came in to purchase a $500 leather boxed set of Sinatra’s CDs early Friday.

“They just don’t make people like that anymore,” store manager Todd Meehan said. He reached for a recently released CD of a Sinatra concert in Australia from the ‘50s. “Frank was selling right up to the end.”

With a fitting theatrical flair, fans placed flowers around one of Sinatra’s three stars on the Walk of Fame at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. A group of German tourists broke into a heavily accented and customized version of a popular Sinatra recording:

We’ve got Frank under our skin.

We’ve got him deep in our hearts.

Two blocks away, Trenton Miller was searching for Sinatra postcards in a souvenir shop.

“I may not look like it, but I really loved Frank,” confessed the 17-year-old, whose brows were twice pierced and whose feet were shod in Doc Marten boots. “My dad listens to him every night, but I pretend to hate it. I mean, Sinatra doesn’t exactly go with my image.”

Few mourners Friday were embarrassed by their love for the Chairman of the Board.

“His music was the soundtrack of my life,” said Martin Elriggi, 76, standing outside the Sinatra home amid the conclave of media trucks. He clutched a bouquet for Sinatra’s family in one hand and a prized autographed photo of the crooner in the other. “Part of me died with him last night.”

Nancy Wayne, 71, was one of those bobby-soxer fans. She founded the first Frank Sinatra fan club as a junior at Hoover High School in Glendale in 1943. Wayne said she had a premonition about Sinatra’s death. She just finished watching Jay Leno early Friday morning when programming broke for a special news report.

“I knew what it was going to say,” she said. “I started to cry. It’s a death of a really good friend.”

In Hoboken, fans turned the lot outside the shambles of Sinatra’s childhood home into a virtual shrine. The house burned down long ago; today there is nothing but a brick wall with a wooden gate. But this sidewalk, too, has a star, courtesy of the Hoboken Historical Museum, and on Friday fans placed bouquets of daisies, roses and tulips there. They also left pictures of Sinatra, burning candles, statues of the Virgin Mary, a teddy bear, a playing card--the king of clubs--even a loaf of Italian bread. Someone left a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels and the note: “One for the road.”

Hoboken is dotted with the keepers of the Sinatra flame. There is the shopkeeper with a back room so devoted to Sinatra memorabilia that he calls it the Sinatra Room. And Ed Shirak, who wrote a flattering book about Sinatra.

“Frank Sinatra was the last link between the time that was and the time that is,” Shirak said.

In Las Vegas, they remembered Sinatra in his prime, a decade before Elvis took over the town: making movies during the day, playing the Sands’ Copa Room at night, then cavorting into the early morning hours with the Rat Pack of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford--the forerunner of the celebrity traveling with a posse.

Sinatra made Las Vegas electric, boosting the gambling resorts of the ‘50s and ‘60s. When one member of the Rat Pack was playing Las Vegas, the rest would descend on it, remembered Peter Ruchman, general manager of the Gambler’s Book Shop in Las Vegas, which maintains a large archive of historical material. Especially after the 1960 release of his movie “Ocean’s Eleven”--about a stylish heist at five Las Vegas casinos--”he really defined a hip, cool, sophisticated era here.”

Frank and Barbara Sinatra sold their Rancho Mirage home three years ago as his health began to fail, but the legacy they left in the Palm Springs area was literally concrete. Sinatra helped build a hospital, support a synagogue and put on shows that raised millions for local charities. His last public performance was at the 1995 gala for his Frank Sinatra Celebrity Invitational Golf Tournament in Palm Desert.

“Just driving to work today, I saw the Riviera Hotel where Frank Sinatra underwrote terrific fund-raising shows,” said Jeffrey Close, chief executive officer of Desert Hospital’s fund-raising branch. “We’re lucky. Sinatra left everyone his music and his movies, but he left our little town so much more. There are his institutional donations, and there are all the anonymous donations he made every time someone around here would say, ‘Gee whiz, Frank, I heard a sad story the other day. . . .’ ”

Most everywhere, Sinatra fans had their own special way of memorializing him.

Casa de Pizza in Granada Hills is known for its Sinatra night on Thursdays. Vito Giovannelli, the owner and the bassist of a five-piece band, plays “The Sounds of Sinatra” to fans who come to eat pizza and other Italian staples. The lunch crowd Friday was talking about Frank--and annoyed that anyone would want to talk about anything else.

“Somebody got upset that all the talk at work was about the ‘Seinfeld’ episode last night and that there was not anybody talking about Frank Sinatra,” said Ron Hey, 52, an accountant from Burbank.

Deedee Ruhlow, an insurance claims adjuster from Burbank, said she came especially to Casa de Pizza to remember her favorite singer.

“You could just put on an LP, listen to them for hours and get lost in them,” she said of his songs as she wiped away tears. “They are so romantic.”