by Stephen Holden
May 16 1998
Frank Sinatra, the singer and actor whose extraordinary voice elevated popular song into an art, died on Thursday night in Los Angeles. He was 82.
 |
| Sinatra performing at his 75th birthday concert. Photo: Bill Kostroun AP |
The cause was a heart attack, said his publicity agent, Susan Reynolds. Ms. Reynolds said his fourth wife, Barbara, his son, Frank Jr., and daughters, Tina and Nancy, were at his side at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She said he would be given a private funeral.
Widely held to be the greatest singer in American pop history and one of the most successful entertainers of the 20th century, Sinatra was also the first modern pop superstar. He defined that role in the early 1940's when his first solo appearances provoked the kind of mass pandemonium that later greeted Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
During a show business career that spanned more than 50 years and comprised recordings, film and television as well as countless performances in nightclubs, concert halls and sports arenas, Sinatra stood as a singular mirror of the American psyche.
His evolution from the idealistic crooner of the early 1940's to the sophisticated swinger of the 50's and 60's seemed to personify the country's loss of innocence. During World War II, Sinatra's tender romanticism served as the dreamy emotional link between millions of women and their husbands and boyfriends fighting overseas. Reinventing himself in the 50's, the starry-eyed boy next door turned into the cosmopolitan man of the world, a bruised romantic with a tough-guy streak and a song for every emotional season.
In a series of brilliant conceptual albums, he codified a musical vocabulary of adult relationships with which millions identified. The haunted voice heard on a jukebox in the wee small hours of the morning lamenting the end of a love affair was the same voice that jubilantly invited the world to ''come fly with me'' to exotic realms in a never-ending party.
Sinatra appeared in 58 films, and won an Academy Award as best supporting actor for his portrayal of the feisty misfit soldier Maggio in ''From Here to Eternity'' (1953). As an actor, he could communicate the same complex mixture of emotional honesty, vulnerability and cockiness that he projected as a singer, but he often chose his roles indifferently or unwisely.
It was as a singer that he exerted the strongest cultural influence. Following his idol Bing Crosby, who had pioneered the use of the microphone, Sinatra transformed popular singing by infusing lyrics with a personal, intimate point of view that conveyed a steady current of eroticism.
The skinny blue-eyed crooner, quickly nicknamed The Voice, made hordes of bobby-soxers swoon in the 1940's with an extraordinarily smooth and flexible baritone that he wielded with matchless skill. His mastery of long-lined phrasing inspired imitations by many other male crooners, notably Dick Haymes, Vic Damone and Tony Bennett in the 1940's and 50's and most recently the pop jazz star Harry Connick Jr.
After the voice lost its velvety youthfulness, Sinatra's interpretations grew more personal and idiosyncratic, so that each performance became a direct expression of his personality and his mood of the moment. In expressing anger, petulance and bravado -- attitudes that had largely been excluded from the acceptable vocabulary of pop feeling -- Sinatra paved the way for the unfettered vocal aggression of rock singers.
The changes in Sinatra's vocal timbre coincided with a precipitous career descent in the late 1940's and early 50's. But in 1953, Sinatra made one of the most spectacular career comebacks in show business history, re-emerging as a coarser-voiced, jazzier interpreter of popular standards who put a more aggressive personal stamp on his songs.
Almost singlehandedly, he helped lead a revival of vocalized swing music that took American pop to a new level of musical sophistication. Coinciding with the rise of the long-playing record album, his 1950's recordings -- along with Ella Fitzgerald's ''song book'' albums saluting individual composers -- were instrumental in establishing a canon of American pop song literature.
With Nelson Riddle, his most talented arranger, Sinatra defined the criteria for sound, style and song selection in pop recording during the pre-Beatles era. The aggressive uptempo style of Sinatra's mature years spawned a genre of punchy, rhythmic belting associated with Las Vegas, which he was instrumental in establishing and popularizing as an entertainment capital.
By the late 1950's, Sinatra had become so much the personification of American show business success that his life and his art became emblematic of the temper of the times. Except perhaps for Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, probably nobody did more to create a male ideal in the 1950's. For years, Sinatra seemed the embodiment of the hard-drinking, hedonistic swinger who could have his pick of women and who was the leader of a party-loving entourage.
That personality and wardrobe, borrowed in part from his friend Jimmy Van Heusen, the talented songwriter and man about town who liked to insouciantly sling his raincoat over his shoulder, was, in turn, imitated by many other show business figures. It was a style Sinatra never entirely abandoned. Even in his later years, he would often stroll onto the stage with a drink in his hand.
On a deeper level, Sinatra's career and public image touched many aspects of American cultural life. For millions, his ascent from humble Italian-American roots in Hoboken, N.J., was a symbol of ethnic achievement. And more than most entertainers, he used his influence to support political candidates. His change of allegiance from pro-Roosevelt Democrat in the 1940's to pro-Reagan Republican in the 1980's paralleled a seismic shift in American politics.
By the end of his career, Sinatra's annual income was estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, from concerts, record albums, real estate ventures and holdings in several companies, including a missile-parts concern, a private airline, Reprise Records (which he founded), Artanis (Sinatra spelled backward) Productions and Sinatra Enterprises.
Sinatra left his imprint on scores of popular songs and was the background voice, it seemed, for the romances of most Americans, from the earliest to the second time around. Among the standards he recorded at least three times were ''All or Nothing at All,'' ''Angel Eyes,'' ''Autumn in New York,'' ''I Concentrate on You,'' ''I Get a Kick Out of You,'' ''I'll Be Seeing You,'' ''I'll Never Smile Again,'' ''I've Got a Crush on You,'' ''I've Got You Under My Skin,'' ''Nancy (With the Laughing Face),'' ''Night and Day,'' ''One for My Baby,'' ''September Song'' and ''Stormy Weather.''
His personal signature songs included ''Put Your Dreams Away'' (his 1945 theme) and later ''Young at Heart'' (1954), ''All the Way'' (1957), ''It Was a Very Good Year'' (1965), ''Strangers in the Night'' (1966), ''My Way'' (1969) and ''New York, New York'' (1980).
For decades, his private life, with its many romances, feuds, brawls and associations with gangsters, was grist for the gossip columns. But he also had a reputation for spontaneous generosity, for helping singers who were starting out and for supporting friends who were in need. And over the years he gave hundreds of millions of dollars to various philanthropies.
First published at The New York Times, May 16, 1998
No comments:
Post a Comment