Sinatra Faces the Final Curtain
My Frank 1993 Essay Generates Support and Dismay
It's a quarter to three. I'm sitting at home with the stereo on, quietly so as not to wake the family. The floor is strewn with more than 20 Frank Sinatra albums, from the Dorsey sessions of 1940 to my '50s favorite, One More for the Road.
On a chair is Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), in which Sinatra takes an absurd Sonny Bono song and makes it sound as forlorn and lonely as something written for the man by my fondly remembered late acquaintance, Mr. Sammy Cahn.
There's no one in the place except me . . . and two of the friends that Sinatra used to introduce at many of his concerts: "Mr. Chivas" and "Mr. Regal." (Frank would make a toast to the audience, saying something like: "May you live to be 115...and the last voice you hear be mine.") Soon they too will be gone. We're drinking, my friend, to the end of a long episode. Sinatra is singing "one for my baby, one more for the road." But soon he must sing it no more, for the road is coming to an end.
It is difficult to imagine a world without Sinatra singing. But it is a subject we must confront. Over and over in my mind, I have been reliving the night of June 10, 1993, the first of three consecutive evenings of Sinatra performances at Westbury Music Fair on Long Island.
It was agony to watch the greatest entertainer of our lifetimes stumble around the rotating stage in this theater-in-the-round, unable to read the seven plus-sized video screens that coached him with the lyrics, unable to remember the words to songs he has sung thousands of times. "What the hell are the words?" he shouted in the middle of "I've Got a Crush on You."
Some viewers of this sad spectacle were satisfied just to be in the presence of a legend. "Sure he forgot words and his voice sometimes failed him but . . . we love him for it!" one reader wrote.
Love is a funny thing. Sometimes it makes us blind to the faults of those closest to us, which is a good thing. But sometimes that love also protects us from facing painful truths about those we cherish: that a sibling is an alcoholic, a child is a drug abuser, or an elderly relative is becoming infirm. And that they need care.
And, of course, people with those problems find it difficult to admit the truth to themselves. Let us stop our denial and face the uncomfortable fact that for the sake of his health and his reputation, Frank Sinatra should be elevated to Chairman of the Board Emeritus. He should retire, with dignity.
It has been an extraordinary run. For more than 50 years -- 50 years! -- Sinatra has been the standard by which every other popular singer is judged and found, in whatever way, wanting.
Others may have better pipes, but Sinatra was never just about singing. It is about charisma, those intangible qualities of confidence and power the great ones possess. And the way he sells the songs he performs, the phrasing, the lived-through torments and ecstasies.
Sinatra is the most formidable entertainer of our history. He's already outlived Elvis by 35 years. If Sinatra and the Beatles had started the same year, the Beatles would have broken up shortly after the end of the Second World War.
So the fact that Sinatra 's voice these days has a rusty creak to it doesn't bother me at all. I've seen him perform at least 10 times -- roughly every two years since 1974, when, as a young man of 58, he returned to Madison Square Garden in New York for a series of concerts, the last of which was taped as a TV special called "The Main Event." Standing in what looked like a boxing ring, with a huge television audience watching, the heavyweight musical champion of the world sang with the force of Dempsey, Louis and Ali combined.
Five years ago, at New York's Radio City Music Hall, Sinatra was still indomitable. We had front row center seats: We could see Sinatra's own reflection in the mirrored-shine of his impeccable black patent leather shoes.
His delivery was crisp, his timing razor sharp. He sang "September of My Years" as a profound rumination on mortality, and delivered "Mack the Knife" with provocative swagger. The only hint of diminished strength came when Sinatra joked, "I'd like to pause a minute to catch my breath. What breath?"
Three years ago, Newsday 's review of his Radio City show recognized that the "vital and spirited" Sinatra is "still peerless in his ability to communicate the most fragile nuances of a lyric."
But a year-and-a-half ago, at Nassau Coliseum in New York, change was evident. Even with the Teleprompters, Sinatra flubbed a few lines -- nothing dramatic, but worrisome.
At that point I began to think the road was taking its toll. Why does he keep doing it?
Sinatra can't need the money. Neither does that 90-something whiz kid George Burns, or that just-90 gag machine Bob Hope. My hunch is that these men stay on the road because it's what they do, it's what they are. They are hooked on the spotlight, addicted to applause. You can't tell them to slow down and smell the roses: They can only smell the roses when they're on the stage.
But Sinatra may have stayed in the ring too long, and now he is risking his reputation. It wasn't just one show: It was a series of shows I saw in the early 1990s: Nassau Coliseum, Westbury Music Fair, Radio City, moments of diminished attention, and most essential, struggling with lyrics. Sinatra has always had the grace to name the composers of each song he performed. Sometimes he'd forget a name, and this has nothing to do with his penchant for describing the Beatles' "Something," a staple of his later repertory, as a song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, rather than the correct answer, George Harrison. You forgive him the slight; Sinatra never was much of a rock guy.
Enough people spend $100 to see him stumble around a stage, they'll start to think of him as a punch-drunk club fighter, not the champion of all champions.
That's what it was like June 10. Sinatra disoriented. Unsure where he was, geographically. Losing his place in the songs, not even able to find cues in the arrangements he's been using for more than 30 years.
In the introduction to "One for My Baby," the classic saloon song by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, Sinatra set the mood by putting a cigarette in his mouth.
Scene: He flicks his lighter, but can't get he cigarette to burn. He shrugs, snaps the lighter again, tosses the cigarette on the floor. It’s still burning. I fear that he is so oblivious he will pocket the lighter while it's still lit. Sinatra wipes his brow. Surely he knows the words to one of his most intimate and familiar ballads. "It's a quarter to three, there's no one in the place, except you and me." But that is not what Sinatra sings. "I ..." lurches from his mouth. Sinatra pauses, perplexed. "... And when it's gloomy." Bad guess.
He finally meanders back to the melody, but it's too late. It's time to say thanks for the cheer. And for the people who love him to take the keys from his hand before he hurts himself. It's time for Frank to sing one for my baby, but no more for the road.
The After Story: This version of the story appeared in the Hamilton, Ont., Spectator, June 23. 1993. After appearing in Newsday, the article immediately went out on our wire service with the Los Angeles Times, which also printed the story, drawing many angry (and a few supportive) members of the show business community who were close to Frank. The singer Eydie Gorme wrote to the Times and asked who the heck I was.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a story about the controversy on July 16, 1993, that was longer than the original. The reporters, Mike Weatherford and Michael Paskevich, interviewed me and many others, and were fair and kind to me: They made it clear I didn’t have an axe to grind. Their story: "Chairman Emeritus? Critic Renews Debate by Calling for Sinatra to Retire" described me as a critic and Sinatra fan for 20 years, who "regretfully argued" in Newsday and the L.A. Times it was time for the champ to retire from the ring.
"Sinatra's entertainment contemporaries reacted with the same mix of anger and sadness as Robins' readers," they wrote. Las Vegas resident and regular Steve Rossi, "a singer and straight man for comedian/partner Marty Allen," said: "On a given night, there's nobody better and he knows that . . . I also think performing is what keeps him alive and I hope he keeps going forever. But I do think he pushes himself very hard and could play fewer dates and be more effective." Jerry Vale said he was "furious" when he read it, but conceded the writer "may have seen him on an off night." Peggy Lee said she broke into tears, and that my article “hurt her deeply."
Paul Anka, with whom I had a few off-the-record phone conversations over the years (he had my home number), called me to discuss on background some of the reactions. He understood my point of view, but gave his best lines on the record to the reporters from the Las Vegas newspaper.
"If I know this man, he must work," Anka told the Review-Journal reporters. If he could, he said, he'd organize Sinatra's life better, "to keep him the champ that he is." But, "to tell him he can't work, it ain't gonna fly. Sinatra's greatest enjoyment is “when he's on that stage. That's his fix. That's his needle up the arm. . . We've got to allow this man to finish the way he wants. He's just that special." Sinatra died of a heart attack (not his first) May 14, 1998, age 82, in Los Angeles.