Put Your Dreams Away

Monday, May. 25, 1998 By JAY COCKS
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"Get that!" The story goes. "His name is Sinatra, and he considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business."

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This is the bandleader Harry James talking in 1939, when Frank Sinatra, of Hoboken, N.J., had not yet moved the world. "No one's ever heard of him! He's never had a hit record, and he looks like a wet rag, but he says he's the greatest." Said it. Meant it. Proved it.

Harry James must have sensed it too, because he had hired Sinatra, then a scrawny spoiler in his mid-20s, to sing with the band. Present at the creation, James could not have read the signs. The title of an early Sinatra-James hit was one of those anthemic declarations of defiance that, over the years and through the decades, was to form the Sinatra autobiography: All or Nothing at All.

That was Sinatra, then, now and ever: how he took and what he gave.

Only his passing was uncharacteristic. It should have been something quick, furious, defiant. Instead, when he died of a heart attack last week at 82, it was lingering, pernicious, sad. He last performed live in the winter of 1995, but he was unsteady on his feet, and lyrics he'd known for years eluded him. His last original recorded tunes were the studio stunts of the two Duets albums, in which Sinatra revisited some of his classic songs in the company of spryer admirers, from Streisand to Bono.

But for the first time, the music was not enough to see him through. Age encroached. His attention strayed. His mind slipped. "Where am I?" he said one night, not too long ago, startled, looking up at the stars. "At the beach," he was told. "You're home." He nodded, but that look of sudden, alarmed absence stayed with him more and more.

His 80th-birthday celebration was televised. His wife Barbara stayed close. Friends and luminaries from across the generations paid their respects. Bruce Springsteen showed up, singing Angel Eyes as one Jersey boy to another. Bob Dylan performed his own song, Restless Farewell, and said, looking down from the stage at Sinatra, "Happy birthday, Mr. Frank." It was homage of a high order. The room was heavy with talent that night, but Sinatra contented himself with showing his appreciation by applauding them all. Not so many years before, he would have led them. Showed them all how the Chairman does it. But when he took the stage, proudly shaking off Tony Bennett's helping hand on his arm, he smiled and waved and sang only a little. The music stayed inside him.

That was a bit of a disappointment. A last triumph, a standoff against encroaching fate, would have crowned the evening and rounded memory with a perfect dramatic closure. Too much to expect perhaps, but in a sense that was Sinatra's own fault. Too much, he had always shown us, was the least we could expect from him. Not as excess, mind, but as abundance. So much heart, so much sorrow, such delicacy and such braggadocio, all for the music he made indelible, with enough to spare so that it spilled over into his life and into all the public refractions of it.

Sinatra lived the music at every tempo, the sad soul of it as well as the brash, brassy swing. Or maybe his need to graft his life onto every song he sang was an unintended effect of his artistry, a scramble to find personal corollaries for every melody he molded, every lyric he bent to his own will and purpose.