Sinatra: Cocktail Brinksmanship

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. — Frank Sinatra, who died Thursday night at age 82, was one of those rare individuals who so defined his era that, in many ways, a good chunk of the postwar period might be considered the Age of Sinatra. As everyone knows, he had arrived in the early 1940s as a big-band crooner who sent bobby-soxers swooning the way Elvis Presley and the Beatles would lay prostrate later generations of teenage girls. Callow and cocky, with a slick mountain of dark hair atop his beanpole frame, Sinatra began as the promise of youthful romance in a time of brutal wartime reality. He kept those teens’ home fires burning.

But if Sinatra came to prominence in the 1940s as a teen idol, he came to dominance in the 1950s, as one of the presiding spirits of the period. He was able to do so because postwar America was riven between two extremes. At one end was a sense of angry rue that had been loosed by the traumas of the war and that surfaced in everything from film noir to jazz. At the other end was a new sense of rambunctiousness loosed by the U.S. victory and the economic good times that followed and that surfaced in everything from drive-in movie theaters to hot rods.

It may not have been an accident that arguably the two greatest popular artists of the decade, Marlon Brando and Sinatra, came to symbolize extremes. If Brando was the dark, roiling energy of disenchantment that followed the war, Sinatra was his foil. He was the light, bright exuberance of America’s growing power, a cavalier who denied the complexities of the new world by skating over them. While Brando brooded, Sinatra swung.

Yet, it wasn’t an easy road for him. Sinatra suffered a decline in popularity and confronted personal difficulties. When he made his famous comeback in 1953, as the beleaguered soldier, Maggio, in “From Here to Eternity,” for which he won an Academy Award, it was as a very different character than the juvenile crooner. Here was Sinatra browbeaten, belittled, Brando-ized, a man who seemed to have been to hell and back. One need only compare this Sinatra to the young gob in the 1949 musical “On the Town” to realize how far he had traveled from an innocent to the icon of 1950s insouciance.

Just as America had emerged from the war a changed nation, Sinatra emerged into his second stardom with a maturity and confidence that he would translate into a new kind of American bravado. What one heard in his singing now--the inventive phrasing, the vocal counterpoint, the seeming ease of delivery--was what one found in his new persona. This Sinatra was about setting his own rules, living by his own lights, doing it his way.

As great a singer as he was, Sinatra had become an attitude, and his real claim on the American imagination was the sense that his life was not only under his control but that it was one long cocktail party. Loose-limbed and ever-smiling, he became the ultimate hipster, the big swinger, the coolest cat, the guy who loved booze and broads and didn’t have any trouble with either--his tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner notwithstanding. The music was the soundtrack.

It was an attitude that comported perfectly with the casual confidence projected by some elements of postwar America--a cultural version of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ brinkmanship. But it also served as an antidote to the conformist, button-down 1950s--the age of Sloan Wilson’s “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and William Whyte’s “The Organization Man.” At a time when the typical middle-class American man’s idea of casual elegance was sipping a martini before dinner, Sinatra was the thinking man’s hedonist. Nicknamed the “Chairman of the Board,” he was an ironic reproach to the pallid business world and an envied model for its members.

In Sinatra’s world, nothing really seemed to matter, nothing bit deep. His Rat Pack was essentially a teenage gang for the middle-aged. Its appeal, with Sinatra and his pack-mates palling around like kids who managed to smuggle a six-pack from dad’s fridge, was the power inherent in the display of idiotic camaraderie. They could do whatever they wanted because they were so far above it all--so far above anything with which we had to concern ourselves.

Their good time was vicariously ours, so that by the time Sinatra sang his anthem, “My Way,” he was simply memorializing what we had known for decades. The whole point of Sinatra was that it was always his way.

It might not have mattered if Sinatra hadn’t had the authority to support the attitude. But he did. He had become a mega-star--a crossover hit in recording, movies, television, even business with his Reprise record label. He was so successful, so wealthy, that it became impossible to respond to his performance without also responding to the aura of impregnability that surrounded it. Sinatra exuded power. He was an imperial entertainer--you felt compelled to enjoy.

By the late 1960s, his music hadn’t much deteriorated but his image had. Though Sinatra had anticipated the ethos of the hippies, just as he himself had drawn on that of the beats, he had come to look like an anachronism. Loosening the tie, snapping the fingers, swirling the martini glass, crooning “doobie doobie do,” digging “chicks” seemed passe, and Sinatra’s alleged involvement with the Mafia only provided another antiquarian element to the Sinatra persona. He was more a grandfather than a hip cat. Figuratively and literally, the act had gotten old and the cool had grown tepid.

Had it remained that way, Sinatra would no doubt now be receiving dutiful encomiums as the greatest popular singer this country has ever produced. But Sinatra’s attitude has been enjoying a revival lately, with several new books on the singer and two films on the Rat Pack in the offing. Perhaps that’s because the idea of a life without limits is still so appealing or because there’s a nostalgia for the artless style of the ‘50s that Sinatra defined and embodied. Or perhaps Sinatra’s continuing popularity is simply a testament to our need to counteract the Brando that still lurks in the American psyche as Sinatra himself constantly kept suppressing his own pugnacious Brando. Sinatra suggested that in dreams begin irresponsibility. It is a powerful legacy.