Remembering Frank.

MUCH OF WHAT'S BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT FRANK SINATRA smacks of the sexism with which the singer was associated, especially the endlessly repeated declaration that he was "the greatest popular singer of all time." The rhetorical frenzy inevitably associated with the passing of an artist of genius frequently assumes the character of that artist's best or worst traits. For instance, tributes to Ella Fitzgerald were testimonials to her godlike elegance, disinterestedness, and intelligence. She was the platonic ideal of American song; her distinct lack of vulgar ego inspired the same in her eulogists. The elevation of personal preference into absolutist dictum, in Frank's case, has everything to do with gender, race, and class: He was a rich, powerful, macho white guy, so naturally he's the greatest ever, blah, blah, blah. Tiresome.

Accompanying this process of apotheosis, whereby the Chairman of the Board becomes Master of the Universe, is a near-universal acknowledgment that the guy was an insufferable bastard. In most of what I've read, the implication is clear: His glorious music proves that there's something redeemable in rich white bastards, a contention with which I take serious issue. An ardent fan of Richard Wagner and Ezra Pound, I am accustomed to admiring the work of deeply shitty people, for God sometimes makes real monsters who happen to be great artists. Sinatra's heartbreaking "Willow Weep for Me" no more redeems right-wing, skirt-chasing boozehounds as a group than the Cantos redeem right-wing, paranoiac racists (redundant, that). Whether those recordings redeem this particular boozehound is a question for theologists; there are, after all, nine circles of hell, and maybe one of the more comfortable ones has a spot reserved for Frank. The lower, more unpleasant circles are reserved for the presidents with whom the singer has been recently associated. Sinatra's personality changes for the worse were concurrent with the deterioration of the righteousness of his politics. When he was young and dazzling, he was the son of Dolly Sinatra the Hoboken abortionist; he supported FDR, campaigned for Adlai Stevenson, and sang "The House I Live In." He was a skirt-chasing boozehound when he made his greatest recordings but still a Democrat and a proponent of civil rights; nevertheless, a myopic, self-pitying despair begins to settle in. Sinatra's talent and taste didn't desert him till he started campaigning for Nixon and dancing with Nancy Reagan, after which, for the first time in his recording career, he started to sound dated, corny, unsubtle, caricature-macho, less and less like himself, and more and more like his seedy imitators. He came to care not a feather nor a fig, and he grew up to be a pig.

I don't understand anything about sports, so mourning Sinatra gives me a rare opportunity to feel queasily comradely with the guy-guys from whose enthusiasms I usually feel utterly alienated. It's touching/fascinating to see a straight man in his 60s talk about another man with a look of what can only be called intense romantic love in his eyes. These guy-guys really loved Frank, and Frank loved them. As my Aunt Martha observes, he sang a lot about women, but he obviously didn't love women; Dean Martin and Joey Bishop (!?) he loved. Read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men. When Sinatra married Mia Farrow, she cut her hair extremely short, prompting Ava Gardner to say, upon viewing the wedding photos in the papers, "I always thought Frank would do better with a boy."

At his best, Sinatra's really a. "girl singer"--the most fem, the least butch, the least obnoxiously phallic of male singers. What he called honesty is vulnerability, tenderness, decency, an ability to articulate sorrow free of protective belligerence and rage. He said that he learned to sing listening to Billie Holiday records, and he was a great admirer of Judy Garland, whose career of artistic reinvention Sinatra's somewhat resembles. Holiday, Garland, and Sinatra understood more deeply than most bow full of agony and shadow Tin Pan Alley's professionally optimistic productions are.

By the time he's yowling about doing things his way, the great artist is gone. Freaked out by rock and roll's cultural triumph and the political revolution of the `60s, possessed by GOP demons, older Sinatra sounds in need of an exorcist. We are all always in danger, in our senescence, of becoming Republicans. Let Sinatra stand as a cautionary tale. And mourn him as he once was: the rhapsodizer of pluralism and democracy who told us we could be better than we are or as the guy at a quarter to 3, singing a lonely love song to a bartender named Joe. Listen close. Do you doubt that Frank wants Joe to take him home? And how could Joe, how could anyone, resist?