Put Your Dreams Away

(4 of 4)
It would be best, of course, if you were a player, a singer, a fellow musician. But with luck and fine timing, you could also be a casual guest, a dinner companion, a colleague's spouse--even, if the furies were snoozing, a journalist. In 1988 Sinatra, the paragon of show-biz sangfroid, told Larry King, "I swear on my mother's soul, the first four or five seconds, I tremble every time I take the step and I walk out of the wing onto the stage, because I wonder if it will be there when I go for the first sounds...From the minute you step into that spotlight, you've got to know exactly what you're doing every second on that stage. Otherwise...it's all good night."

He took that same fine-tuned tension and sense of challenge with him every time he cut a side. Out of the 1,414 studio recordings he made, and despite the hundreds of glories he left behind--from I'll Never Smile Again of 1940 to Hey Look, No Crying of 1981--there were songs that eluded him till the end. Studio outtakes and bootlegs show him chiding the arranger, bugging the conductor, riding the band and beating up on himself with a good-humored swagger that doesn't hide the disappointment and frustration that are chewing him up. You can hear the defeat in his voice, as if he had lost a chance at lasting love.

The songs went that deep in him, and not many ever got away. He made it seem as if they came easy, but he had to fight to have it look that way. When he was still active, he vocalized every day. Singing with the Dorsey band in the early '40s, he kept on tap a voice teacher who was a former opera singer. Later on he would turn to Metropolitan Opera soprano Dorothy Kirsten and baritone Robert Merrill for pointers on technique. "He knew they knew...how to maintain the equipment," Sinatra's longtime conductor, Vincent Falcone, told writer Will Friedwald. That stuff in the whiskey tumbler he used onstage was often tea. Booze, he knew, could batter the throat.

He was strong enough, proud enough and professional enough to handle his celebrity. He wasn't undone by it, as the teen idol of a later generation, Elvis Presley, was; he didn't exploit the gifts of his fame and talent, he built on them, and in the end beat time itself. Not only does his music define the time and temper of the American decades in which it was made, but his singing moves those songs out of time into something indistinct, everlasting. In Sinatra's music, there is no past tense.

You could say he was the greatest, and that's right. But that doesn't say enough. There's nothing you can call him that doesn't in some way sell him short. Except Sinatra.

After that...it's all good night.