Watched an old documentary on Frank Sinatra. He was a poor kid from Hoboken who eventually became an American success story — most-popular teen-age heart-throb singer, a song-and-dance comedy actor, rich, and famous. His popularity faded in the Fifties, he got a job as a dramatic actor, won an Oscar™, and had one of those rare things in America, a second act, surging back to the top.
He was early on a liberal, he fought racism; he was a womanizer who chased every attractive woman he desired; a father, but so-so at it. He had ties to Italian gangsters, hung out with JFK, and had a career that lasted well into rock-and-roll, which he hated, though as a businessman, he saw enough light that he sang a duet with Elvis, to stay relevant. He got more conservative with age, and hated the press as much as he did rock music.
It’s a pretty good two-part documentary, mostly positive, but it did touch on his flaws enough to give a viewer a pretty good idea of who he was.
He was talented, rich, famous, and entitled.
I was kinda hoping to see a reference to the Gay Talese article in Esquire Magazine in 1966.. Called “Frank Sinatra has a Cold,” it was one of the New Journalism pieces, was, and is, considered one of the best magazine celebrity profiles ever. Talese could write.
By then, Sinatra’s star was again in decline — he was fifty, dating Mia Farrow, who was twenty, and the Beatles were leading the British Invasion to the U.S. and blowing Sinatra and his aging crooner cronies off the charts. Old Blue Eyes’s dislike of the press was also in full swing, and he refused to allow Talese to interview him. Undeterred, Talese followed Sinatra around for months, interviewed people wherever Sinatra went, and used his own eyewitness-accounts to verify those interviews.
The article starts out with Sinatra and his entourage in a private club in Hollywood, and to set the tone of how that group was behaving, there is this passage:
“Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel—only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.”
Sinatra drifts into a room where men are playing pool. He spies a little man dressed in what he considers outlandish fashion (knee-length boots, rolled down, tight cord pants, a loose blouse fastened with leather laces, and he starts to rag on the fellow. “Those Spanish boots?” he says.
The pool-player says, “No.” Continues to play.
After a time, Sinatra says, “Italian boots?”
“No.”
“English boots?”
The player, who has caught on to being fronted looks at him: “Why are you talking to me? Do you know me?”
“I don’t like the way you dress.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t like the way you dress.”
Having deliberately buried the lede, I should mention here that the short pool player was Harlan Ellison, a well-known science fiction and fantasy writer, and a man who didn’t take any shit from anybody, at anytime, anywhere, all five-feet-five and a hundred and twenty-odd pounds of him.
Talese’s version has this back-and-forth going on for a few more exchanges, with Sinatra becoming more and more irritated, and ends with Ellison leaving.
Ellison’s retelling of the story is ever-so-much-more fun and interesting, and the link herein takes one to a twenty-three minute video that is well worth watching, trust me.
I must add a caveat to the video: I knew Harlan a little. We were not buddies — I bumped into him on panels at several conventions, shared a group meal at one, and talked to him by phone. We had a couple email exchanges when I wrote reviews of his work for the local paper, and I was on his web-discussion group, during which we had some, well … spirited exchanges. He called me a douche once, then apologized for that. I liked the man, and adored his work.
I knew Harlan well enough to know that he was a world-class story-teller, and that he never let truth stand in the way of telling one. He was capable of holding two contradictory-opinions at once, and you never knew which you would get.
That said, I think the gist of his recall is true, and I like his recollection of the event with Sinatra more than Talese’s …
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