Why Sinatra Matters

  I laughed. But he was serious.

  Later, Sinatra had one other newspaper friend, Sidney Zion, now a fine columnist for the New York Daily News. Zion came out of Paterson, New Jersey, went to law school, worked as a prosecutor, and then became a reporter for the New York Post. Like all of us at the paper, he worshiped Kempton. But he had been shaped by the traditions and lore of urban New Jersey. The figure of Frank Sinatra was an immense part of that tradition. Zion loved the music that Sinatra loved most, the music of the hours after midnight. He loved saloons. He loved smoking and drinking (and still does). He is a wonderful storyteller.

  “I got to know him around 1980, the time of the Trilogy album,” Zion told me. “I did a piece about the old music for the Times, and one thing led to another. A mutual friend introduced us, and I’d see him when he was in New York. I think he liked me because he’d never met a Jew who drank as much as I did.”

  Sinatra was always more cynical about the Hollywood press corps. He thought most of them were freeloaders, or on the take. “I’ve seen the bills, baby,” he said once about reporters and columnists who took money from the publicity budgets of the studios. In his early years he had cooperated with the fan magazines and other components of the Hollywood publicity machine. At some points he had even groveled to the more powerful columnists when advised to do so (although the most powerful columnist of all, Walter Winchell, never joined in the attacks on Sinatra). But from the mid-1950s until his death, he worked with the press only on his own terms.

  “The New York guys are different,” he said. “Maybe because there’s so much else going on around them, they don’t have to cover me. Ah, shit, I like their company. It’s as simple as that.”

  Maybe it was, but I doubt it.

  IV. Jimmy Cannon, Murray Kempton, and William B. Williams are dead. So are Jilly Rizzo and Sugar Ray Robinson and all those others who once seemed so vividly alive that I could not imagine them leaving the world. Now Sinatra is dead too, and it’s like a thousand people have just left the room.

  And yet the tale of Frank Sinatra isn’t only about Clarke’s and Hollywood and Las Vegas; the life he led in such places is part of the tale, but it would be meaningless without the art. Sinatra’s art can be experienced in the 1,307 recordings he made in studios from 1939 to 1995, in the recordings of his concerts, in his videos and movies. In the saloons of the city, you could see what Sinatra had become. But such evenings could never explain the long existential saga of a life entwined with art. He was, in some ways, as elusive and mysterious as Jay Gatsby, not simply to those who knew him but to himself. The keys to the life and the art can only be found somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city.

  MANY IMMIGRANTS HAD BROUGHT ON BOARD BALLS OF YARN, LEAVING ONE END OF THE LINE WITH SOMEONE ON LAND. AS THE SHIP SLOWLY CLEARED THE DOCK, THE BALLS UNWOUND AMID THE FAREWELL SHOUTS OF THE WOMEN, THE FLUTTERING OF THE HANDKERCHIEFS, AND THE INFANTS HELD HIGH. AFTER THE YARN RAN OUT, THE LONG STRIPS REMAINED AIRBORNE, SUSTAINED BY THE WIND, LONG AFTER THOSE ON LAND AND THOSE AT SEA HAD LOST SIGHT OF EACH OTHER.

  – LUCIANO DE CRESCENZO,Quoted in La Merica:Images of ItalianGreenhorn Experience

  2

  WRAP YOUR TROUBLES IN DREAMS

  THE LIFE AND CAREER of Frank Sinatra are inseparable from the most powerful of all modern American myths: the saga of immigration. Because he was the son of immigrants, his success thrilled millions who were products of the same rough history. Through the power of his art and his personality, he became one of a very small group that would permanently shift the image of Italian Americans. Many aspects of his character were shaped by that immigrant experience, which often fueled his notorious volatility. More important, it infused his art.

  “Of course, it meant something to me to be the son of immigrants,” Sinatra said to me once. “How could it not? How the hell could it not? I grew up for a few years thinking I was just another American kid. Then I discovered at – what? five? six? — I discovered that some people thought I was a dago. A wop. A guinea.” An angry pause. “You know, like I didn’t have a fucking name.” An angrier pause. “That’s why years later, when Harry [James] wanted me to change my name, I said no way, baby. The name is Sinatra. Frank fucking Sinatra.”

  He grew up in a time when the wounds caused by nativism and anti-Italian bigotry were still raw. Those wounds, and the scar tissue they left behind, affected the way millions of Italian Americans lived, what they talked about, even how they chose to read the newspapers. In the years of his childhood, Sinatra was no exception.

  “Growing up, I would hear the stories,” he said to me once. “Things that happened, because you were Italian. … I don’t mean it was the only thing people talked about. That would be a lie. But the stories were there. The warnings, the prejudice. You heard about it at home, in the barbershop, on the corner. You never heard about it in school. But it was there. Later, I heard the same kinds of things from my Jewish friends, how they learned about the ways they could get in trouble. Always the same old shit.”

  The stories were about insults, exploitation, worse. Part of the trouble was caused by sheer numbers. From 1880 to the beginning of World War I, more than 24 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to America. About 4.5 million were Italians, 80 percent of them fleeing the exhausted hills and emptying villages of II Mezzogiorno, the neglected provinces of southern Italy and Sicily. Many thousands went to Brazil. Another million journeyed to Argentina and permanently transformed the character of that nation. The vast majority came to the United States. At first, the more adventurous Italians moved west, helping build thousands of miles of railroad tracks, finding jobs as fishermen on the sunny coasts of California or developing that state’s lush vineyards. Most settled in cities.

  “I read a book once about how the Irish when they came to America never wanted to be farmers again,” Sinatra said. “I guess if you work on a farm and everything dies in the ground, you don’t ever trust the ground again. The Italians were like that too.”

  Rural Italian and Irish immigrants shared that common grievance against the Old Country: the exhausted or poisoned land had failed them and, in a way, betrayed their faith and prayers; in the New World, they sought the solace of cities. Cement was better than hunger; a job and a lock on the door provided the only true safety. The Jews, haunted by the brutal realities of recurrent pogroms, or disenfranchised by a crippling, pervasive anti-Semitism, were drawn by the even brighter promise of freedom; no matter how terrible life might be in the slums of the Lower East Side, the Cossacks would not arrive at dawn with their sabers drawn. The Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants shared a suspicion of government and the police that helped form the style of the American cities where they settled. Their children were touched, in various degrees, by their Old Country lore and their nostalgias. Many of Frank Sinatra’s attitudes came from that mixture.

  But in the last years of the nineteenth century, rural Italians faced some special problems in urban America, burdens that did not afflict the Irish and the Jews in the same way. Even in the Italian language, too many immigrants could not read or write. Depending upon the year, between 50 and 70 percent of the new arrivals were illiterate. This was a severe handicap in the booming, more complex cities of the United States and forced many into manual labor or trades that did not demand book learning. Four thousand Italian immigrants found work building the New York subways. Others labored in the building trades, helping erect the soaring monuments of twentieth-century New York. Many worked as barbers or seamstresses, as blacksmiths or mechanics or stone-masons. Some were chefs or bakers. Others were fruit and vegetable peddlers, bootblacks, or shoemakers. A few created an instant stereotype: the organ grinder. These small mustached men moved through many neighborhoods, equipped with hand organs, an occasional monkey, and a cup for coins. For most people the organ grinder was a passing amusement, singing “O Sole Mio” into the humid air of a Saturday morning; for many Italian Americans, the organ grinder w
as a humiliation, a beggar with a monkey and a voice.

  Most of the time, the Italians did their work with silent courage and little public complaint. If you came from a place where there were never enough jobs, work itself was a kind of triumph. For those immigrants, there was no such thing as a meaningless job; the job itself was the meaning.

  “They did whatever the hell they had to do to put food on the table,” Sinatra said to me once. “They took any kind of dumb job, and you know why? So their kids wouldn’t have to do those jobs. So you wouldn’t have to do it. So I wouldn’t have to do it. They were some kind of people.”

  The Italians also had to undergo another peculiarly American rite of passage: they had to endure and then confront the ferocious bigotry of those who had come before them. This was compounded by the American obsession with race. At the peak of the migration, there were millions of African Americans still alive who had lived as slaves; political compromise was leading to an iron segregation in the American South; various hare-brained race theorists spent their time sniffing out hidden racial strains in individuals. Guilt over slavery, and over the partial extermination of American Indians, created self-serving notions about the inferiority of those with darker skin. Along came the Italians. The majority of Italian immigrants were Sicilians, from an island where Arab and Spanish conquerors had been dominant for centuries. The glories of those civilizations meant nothing to many older Americans; the darker complexions of the Mediterranean were suspect among those who believed that Americans were supposed to be fair-skinned. The coarse, hurting language of ethnic inferiority followed, and it affected Frank Sinatra. Even in the years of his fame and power, Sinatra could not completely insulate himself from the social cruelties of that process.

  “Every once in a while,” he told me, “I’d be at a party somewhere, in Hollywood or New York or wherever, and it would be very civilized, you know, black tie, the best crystal, all of that. And I’d see a guy staring at me from the corner of the room, and I knew what word was in his head. The word was guinea.”

  Some of this social minefield was waiting for the Italians when they got off the boat at Castle Garden or Ellis Island. In the 1890s, when Frank Sinatra’s grandparents made their separate passages from Italy, carrying with them the children who would become his parents, a renewed nativist fever was surging through the United States. It was driven, of course, by fear. A fear of Catholics, a fear of Jews, a fear of strange languages and secret societies, a fear of race, a fear of People Who Are Not Like Us. The Irish had gone through this paranoid test for the half century following the Great Famine that sent them to America. For a shorter period of time, the Jews who arrived on the same great immigrant tide as the Italians would suffer similar humiliations. Mexicans, Dominicans, and many Asians are today objects of the same collective stupidity. For the Italians and their children, this brutal ritual would last much longer than for other groups. And a hundred years ago it was not a simple matter of manners, social slights, or bigoted jokes. It could be a matter of life and death.

  “Guys my age, one reason they didn’t pay much attention to school was the schools didn’t tell stories we knew,” Sinatra said. “We heard what had happened in different places. We didn’t get it from school.”

  One story that Sinatra heard was about an event that happened about the time his parents and grandparents arrived in the United States. In 1891 a singular atrocity took place in New Orleans that drastically altered the situation of all Italian Americans. A group of Italian immigrants were accused of murdering a corrupt police superintendent named David Hennessy. Nineteen were charged with the crime; eleven were tried for murder. There was much lurid talk in the newspapers of the day about the Black Hand, a secret gang of Sicilians dedicated to crime. Then, for the first time, many Americans heard the word Mafia. This was even bigger than the Black Hand. The Mafia myth, which conferred immense hidden powers to a relative handful of hoodlums, was born. It didn’t matter that among the 4.5 million Italian immigrants, no more than a few thousand were connected to the Honored Society; it didn’t matter that in the prisons of New York, the Italians were a tiny minority among an army of Irish lawbreakers. The myth had been spawned in New Orleans. Spreading like a stain, inflated by novels and movies and a cottage industry of hysterical politicians and prosecutors, the dark myth would affect all Italian Americans; it would directly affect the life of Frank Sinatra.

  “Half the troubles I’ve had,” he said once, “were because my name ended in a vowel. They tried to put me together with all the other stuff that happened. I wasn’t the only one. But there I was, up on a goddamned stage. I was pretty easy to see, a good target.”

  In New Orleans the garish myth flowered in the imaginations of newspapermen. There were gangsters among us, the newspapers said, who were different from Irish gangsters or American gangsters; they were darker, swarthier, spoke a different language, and were bound together by blood oaths! In largely Catholic New Orleans, famous for its easy, tolerant ways, the myth had crude power; paranoia usually does. Even among some supporters of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society if there ever was one, it was believed that the Italians were different. The IRB wanted freedom for Ireland; the Mafia wanted America!

  But then a strange thing happened in the New Orleans trial of the Italian immigrants for the murder of David Hennessy: the jury acquitted eight of the men and reached no verdict on the other three. The evidence simply wasn’t there. Not about this specific murder. And not about the Mafia.

  That verdict did not satisfy the respectable Americans of New Orleans. They claimed the fix was in. They claimed that the shadowy Italian organization had paid off the jurors. Two days after the verdicts a mob of several thousand, led by sixty leading citizens and including a small number of African Americans, surrounded the jail where the Italians were awaiting final bureaucratic disposition of their cases. The Americans stormed the jail, dragged the Italians out of their cells, and murdered them. Two were hanged screaming from lampposts. One of them tried climbing the hangman’s rope with his free hands and was riddled with bullets. Seven were executed by firing squads in the yard of the jail. Two crawled into a prison doghouse to hide from the mob, were discovered, and were shot to pieces. It remains the worst single lynching in American history.

  “When I was young,” Frank Sinatra said when he was in his sixties, “people used to ask me why I sent money to the NAACP and, you know, tried to help, in my own small way. I used to say, Because we’ve been there too, man. It wasn’t just black people hanging from the end of those fucking ropes.”

  The story of the New Orleans outrage spread swiftly through the world of the Italian immigrant in America, underlined by the decision of the Italian government to withdraw its ambassador in protest. Mainstream America didn’t express much horror. According to Professor Richard Gambino, in his book Vendetta, the lynchings were approved by the editorial writers of the New York Times, Washington Post, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and San Francisco Chronicle, along with about 50 percent of the other newspapers in the nation. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the leading younger Republicans, said the lynchings were “a rather good thing” and bragged that he had said so at a party to “various dago diplomats.”

  “Maybe that’s why so many people didn’t trust the newspapers, even if they could read them,” Sinatra said, almost eighty years later. Then he laughed. “Maybe it’s why I did so many dumb things with newspapermen too.”

  The message from New Orleans was clear to the immigrants. Americans didn’t like Italians. An American was supposed to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. He was supposed to come from northern Europe. Yes, the Americans talked big about democracy and equality and the virtues of hard work; but in reality, the game was rigged. In the aftermath of the New Orleans lynchings, a grand jury couldn’t find enough evidence to indict the murderers, in spite of the presence of hundreds of eyewitnesses. Instead, the grand jurors indicted six men who worked for the defense attorneys, charging th
em with jury tampering. This chilling illustration of the failure of the American criminal justice system was part of a wider pattern. There were anti-Italian murders in the Midwest and barn burnings on the property of Italian farmers in the American South. Men from the drought-stricken fields of Sicily and Calabria were in awe of the rich earth of La America, but too often they were driven off that land by night riders. It was no surprise that many of those once-optimistic and naive Italians sought refuge in the cities. And no surprise that their ghettos became fortresses, where only one social unit mattered: the family. Nobody else could be trusted, up to and including the president of the United States.

  In such places the Mafia did begin to establish itself, usually victimizing Italians but bringing a kind of authority to the social structure of the ghetto. If the government treated you with contempt or suspicion, if trade unions rejected you, if at last your children had a chance for an education and the teachers made fun of them, then you would have to live by your own rules, or pack up and leave. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Italians did go home, many of them embittered by their American experience. For them, the promises implied by the Statue of Liberty were part of a cruel joke; more Italian immigrants returned home than any other nationality.

  But millions stayed on, seeking their own means of protection within the warm fortress of the family and its extension, the ghetto. If, in the pursuit of justice or progress they could not depend upon the police or the courts, if they could not obtain loans from the banks, then they would go to the man in the white suit from Francis Ford Coppola’s version of The Godfather, the agent of the Honored Society. He could arrange for extortionary loans. He could settle disputes. He could dispense rough justice. Always at a price, of course. In cash, or in obligations. During the years before World War I, he was a parochial figure, strictly local, an exotic import, a poisonous flower unique to the closed ghetto hothouse. But he was created by an American failure. More than anything else, he emphasized how cut off many Italian immigrants were from the larger American society.