Put Your Dreams Away

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He sang songs so personally that he was remade in the image of the music, and the image shifted with each new generation. In the 1930s he quickly left his skeptical parents behind to launch a career based on iron self-confidence. In the '40s, married to his doting first wife Nancy, he was the heartthrob balladeer who sang I'll Be Seeing You to World War II G.I.s and their sweethearts. In the '50s, the persona went to war with the man. Sinatra at ballad tempo was the soul-sick, lovelorn, solitary man who closes down a midtown saloon. Up-tempo, and increasingly in his life, he was the unapologetic and (some said) unconscionable swinger, the ring-a-ding ringmaster of a million all-night parties. Which was the real Sinatra, the reveler or the lost man?

If the question ever bothered him--or even occurred to him--he never let on. He could walk the sunny side of the street as well as the boulevard of broken dreams, snap brim tilted off the right side of his head, raincoat slung over his shoulder like an open bandolier. The proud champion of classic American pop fought a pitched battle against the engulfing tide of rock in the '60s. Became music's elder statesman in the '70s. Then the resurgent master of the '80s. And--at last, at the end of his days--the icon who could be forgiven anything for a song.

He made everything he sang matter so much. He passed songs along like pieces of a shared life, an intimacy between himself and whoever was listening. You could play a Sinatra album all alone or hear him in a stadium. Either way, it was always the same: a one-on-one experience, the song a shared secret between the singer and you. Only you.

He knew your hidden heart. Did anyone know his? He sang and made us all believe we did. And then, just when we had his assurance, he changed and kept us guessing. How could the guy who made an album as naked, turbulent and forsaken as Only the Lonely get into all that Rat Pack huggermugger, knocking back drinks with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. and flattening intrusive photographers? How could the exuberance of Come Fly with Me, the joyful, rapturous carnality of I've Got You Under My Skin (the '56 version, with the brassy transcendence of Nelson Riddle's arrangement), the sinuous Summer Wind match up with the temperament of a tempestuous loner who traveled with a squadron of pals and protectors, who swung on and spat on the ladies and gents of the press and who declined to forswear certain companions--Vegas oddsmakers and knee breakers, sharply tailored gentlemen in New York and Chicago like Sam Giancana, with no discernible day jobs--in whom the law retained an inveterate interest?

Sinatra's attitude about all this was simple enough. He was responsible to the world for his music, but for his life answerable only to himself, and to hell with the rest of you. There was, all through him, a kind of animating anger, an Italian street-kid swagger that made such good cover for his black-and-blue soulfulness that it was easy, especially when he was living high or mouthing off, to take it at face value. But as much as anything else, that attitude was a dodge, barbed wire for the unwary, protecting his private preserve of deepest feeling and experience, saving it for where it was needed most: the songs.