Hipper than thou

It's still Frank's world

by Jon Garelick

THE WAY YOU WEAR YOUR HAT: FRANK SINATRA AND THE LOST ART OF LIVIN' By Bill Zehme. HarperCollins, 244 pages, $23.

FRANK SINATRA: THE ARTIST AND THE MAN By John Lahr. Random House, 163 pages, $32.50.

At 82, Frank Sinatra goes on -- reclusive and apparently ill, but enduring nonetheless. The legend is celebrated in two new large-format, photo-filled books. One is an unabashed love letter, disguised as Frank's advice on life, from Esquire writer Bill Zehme; the other is an essay on the more complex realities of the artist and the man from John Lahr (an extended version of his recent New Yorker profile). Sinatra began as a heartthrob for screaming teenage girls ("the first performer of the twentieth century to require crowd control," writes Lahr) but came to represent adult hip. In fact, Sinatra represents the last time hip was adult -- suits, ties, and tuxedos were hip, and so was the Chivas-Regal-good-life advice of Playboy magazine. Sinatra's ascendance as the grown-up hipster (in the '50s and early '60s) shared a spotlight with the rise of youth culture. For a while, adult and adolescent modes of hip blended in a bizarre pop-culture stew. So that Playboy -- which was publishing Kerouac and Nabokov and Lenny Bruce -- was part of a mix that included Sinatra, James Bond, Brando, and Elvis. After all, when Elvis was asked who he emulated, he named Rat Packer Dean Martin. It was the pop-culture fantasyland of the swingin' male, before Vietnam and women's lib, before the black leather jacket of rock and roll overtook completely the pop-culture idea of hip, but in the midst of civil rights (Sammy Davis Jr. was an essential member of the Rat Pack). There's no equivalent for it now, unless you count the cigar-bar scene as some kind of baby-boomer rear-guard action.

The Way You Wear Your Hat is a full-on, unapologetic homage to that swingin' bachelor fantasy. Zehme's book grew from his 1996 Esquire article "And Then There Was One" (which he began working on shortly after the death of Dean Martin). "Men had gone soft and needed help, needed a Leader, needed Frank Sinatra. I wanted to ask him essential questions, the kind that could save a guy's life."

Of course. Who else would you ask -- Eddie Vedder? Zehme's book takes off from the premise of Sinatra as the last swingin' patriarch and never drops character. Rat Pack fellow travelers -- Sammy Davis Jr., Don Rickles, Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Angie Dickinson -- they all pay homage to the Chairman.

The Sinatra fantasy is still so potent because it's the classic American story: the second-generation ethnic trying to pass, the skinny dago from Hoboken achieving greatness and lording it over the goyem, beating them at their own game. Lahr calls him the Jackie Robinson of Italian America. That's why the Rat Pack ethnic mix was so apt: Italians (Frank and Dean), Jews (Joey Bishop and Don Rickles), blacks (Sammy Davis Jr.). The Rat Pack flaunted ethnicity (Dean was "Dag" and Sammy was "Smokey") and transcended it with style. Sinatra was all hot-tempered Sicilian, living out his love life in the press. ("I can't eat. I can't sleep. I love her," he told gossip columnist Louella Parsons about Ava Gardner.) Or throwing a punch at a columnist, or calling a Washington Post reporter a "cunt" to her face. "I can't help myself," he was wont to say.

But at the same time, Sinatra is all cool and poise, flaunting his mastery of the world: to always be punctual and impeccably turned out, maintaining complete social and political savvy, the Chairman of the Board who can pitch the woo with any woman in Hollywood, swing an election for JFK, command enormous wealth and numerous business interests.

The Way You Wear Your Hat is full of great moments -- howlers of Sinatra-esque proportion. Zehme is unafraid to fawn over every bon mot and anecdote. Chapters are often headed with the written exchanges that led to his article. Q: "What details should not be overlooked when dressing in black tie?" A: "For me, a tuxedo is a way of life. When an invitation says black tie optional, it is always safer to wear black tie." One day Steve Lawrence shows up at Sinatra's beach house in jeans. "Thanks for dressing, pally!" shoots Frank. "Are we expecting the Queen of England?" asks Steve. "You never know," says Frank.

The lower-class peasant is transformed into a high-society sharpie, meticulously bathed and turned out. "Cleanliness was paramount to Dean and Frank," Zehme quotes Shirley MacLaine. "I was always fascinated by the pockets," says Nancy Sinatra Jr. "Everything had its own little home, neat and tidy. The white linen handkerchief on the inside pocket. The little mints. The individually folded tissues on the outer left -- he didn't grab a bunch; he separated each one. A single key on a fob" (one master key to all his various residences, Zehme points out).

Of course, to complete the Sinatra fantasy, it's necessary to have money, "the money clip that held denominations big and new." To be able to leave the house in your black Savile Row suit, with your arrangement of tissues and hankies and mints, and that gold money clip with its 20 crisp hundred dollar bills, meant for a night of big spending and big tipping ("Duke 'em a hundred," Frank liked to tell a henchman regarding some lucky waiter or valet).

All of which leads to Zehme's finest howler of all. To Frank's hot, swingin' Sicilian, Dean was the stoic Abruzzese, preferring plenty of sleep, lots of golf, not nearly as much booze as his persona would imply, and, solid family man that he was, no parade of Rat Pack-sniffin' chicks. To each his own: the two gave each other space. "Not that gauntlets weren't thrown," explains Zehme. "Once Frank gave a broad a grand to wait naked in Dean's bed. Dean gave her two grand to go back and tell Frank he was fabulous." Zehme's conclusion: "Such was their love and mutual understanding." Zehme tends to write like that when he's especially moved. He cites evidence that Frank, in his limitless hospitality and generosity, never forgot anyone's drink: "Such was the depth of his commitment to communal carousal."

The testimonials pour forth with the booze: the women who felt pampered, the friends on whom he bestowed gifts and whose side he came to in their hour of need, the tough stands he took on social equality. Segregationist coffee-shop countermen were punched out, the lyrics to "Old Man River" got altered, and Little Nancy, chuckling innocently over a picture of Albert Einstein and saying, "He looks so Jewish!", was immediately reprimanded: "Nobody looks anything -- remember that!"

Lahr gives us the dark side of these encomiums: the generosity that was also an assertion of power, the confidence on stage that came with an edge of arrogance -- his link with mobsters being part of his connection to a president. His general air of menace. The Hoboken tarnish was buffed with elocution lessons, voice lessons, even ballet lessons to help him with his movements on stage. He cavorted with mobsters and kings and for his troubles was labeled both a Mafioso and a Commie.

Lahr's Sinatra is given the context of real life, and yet he's still larger than life. Because, of course, there's the music, without which the legend would be meaningless. Aside from Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra's readings of American popular song stand as authoritative interpretations -- he sweated out a technique that was informed by all those contradictions. So the lyricists of the Great American Songbook (an idea that wouldn't exist without Sinatra) -- Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Lorenz Hart -- were, points out Lahr, "the voices of the educated middle-class mainstream, whose sophisticated wordplay, diction, and syntax had an equipoise and a class that contrasted with the social stutter that so bedeviled Sinatra. . . . When he opened his mouth in song, he was calm; he was smooth; he was sensitive; he had no hint of the Hoboken streets in his pronunciation; what he called his `Sicilian temper' was filtered through the charm of lyrics and music into poetic passion. In singing, the outsider found an unobtrusive way of getting inside."

And thus the big-band boy singer was transformed into the first and probably last adult king of hip. "The new Sinatra," Lahr says of the great Capitol recordings of the '50s, after a period of professional and personal defeat in love and the music business, "was not the gentle boy balladeer of the forties. Fragility had gone from his voice, to be replaced by a virile adult's sense of happiness and hurt."

It's a story even Eddie Vedder could get into. And there are elements of Frank's "bella figura" Cavanaugh-wearing ring-a-ding-ding guy that any rock-and-roller can identify with -- the outsider's stance, the artist's temperament, and the ferocious ambition. "Frank is the most fascinating man in the world," said his former boss, bandleader Tommy Dorsey, "but don't stick your hand in the cage."