Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on Sinatra, ‘The Greatest Singer of American Songs’)

“Frank Sinatra should be celebrated for his craftsmanship. Of geniuses, we have, it seems, a steady stream. Actual craftsmen are rarer and more useful because they are exemplary for anyone with a craft, be it surgery or carpentry. Sinatra was many things, some of them — libertine, bully, gangster groupie — regrettable. But he unquestionably was the greatest singer of American songs.”— George F. Will, “The Frank Sinatra We Remember,” The Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2015

Today is the 100^th birthday of Frank Sinatra, baby. Forget it at your own risk.

One who seems to have done so, at least according to a good number of true believers, is columnist George F. Will, who came in for considerable flack from aficionados who perceived a slight of the Chairman of the Board in that sentence about “regrettable” failings.

Let’s grant right now that Will could have made more of Sinatra’s fierce opposition, early in his career, to racism, at a point when such a stance could have posed grave risks for his career, or of the singer’s legendary generosity, manifested publicly and privately (he came to the aid of a number of entertainers experiencing severe financial difficulties, including Woody Herman, Duke Ellington and Lee J. Cobb).

But—there’s really no way to get around it—Sinatra was a bully, someone who could not only turn on people close to him for years, but also capitalize on friendships with Mafia figures to order beatings of people who rubbed him the wrong way, including comic Jackie Mason and author Dominick Dunne.

Every one of us who has ever suffered or fought off a bully can never forget it. And when professional muscle is enlisted to do the bullying—well, I don’t see how you can look the other way, do you?

So, let’s grant that, too. We are still left with the Wills assertion--that Ol' Blue Eyes was "the greatest singer of American songs"--which makes so many people defend Sinatra no matter what, while making others regard the singer as an infinitely fascinating mass of contradictions.

You can certainly count me among the latter group. As I searched for past posts of mine about Sinatra, I was surprised to discover that the number of times I’ve written about him has probably only been exceeded by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Bruce Springsteen and Steven Sondheim. Considering how I regarded him when I was a teenager in the '70s--a hopelessly square representative of everything the older generation stood for--that's quite a turnaround--and, of course, a tribute to his extraordinary talent.

For what it’s worth, below are links to my considerations of different aspects of his career and life:

*From Here to Eternity: The Godfather-propagated legend of how Sinatra landed his Oscar-winning, comeback role of Maggio—and what was the more likely, prosaic truth.

*Guys and Dolls: Why the singer hated, hated, hated that movie’s co-star, Marlon Brando.

*Carousel: Why Sinatra felt such an affinity with "Soliloquy," the epic centerpiece of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—and why he walked away from the role of Billy Bigelow onscreen.

*Billie Holiday: How the example of “Lady Day” (whose 100^th birthday was also celebrated this year) proved crucial in Sinatra’s mid-career decision to refashion himself from youthful crooner to world-weary interpreter of song.

One last thing. You'll notice that to accompany this post, I haven't chosen one of his jaunty, "I've Got the World on a String"-style images, but one showing an infinitely more vulnerable side. This comes from another film for which he was Oscar-nominated, The Man With the Golden Arm, about a drug addict. 

The author of this post from the blog "More Stars Than in the Heavens" got it right in noting, "There’s real desperation in every second of his screentime here – the kind that, frankly, no actor can learn." It's the same type of desperation and pathos he mined in "saloon songs" such as "One More for My Baby (and One More for the Road)". 

This Day in Jazz History (Billie Holiday, Vocal Alchemist of Heartache, Born)

April 7, 1915—The circumstances of birth represent the elementary facts of life—and, increasingly, the most documented. But even the birth of Eleanora Fagan—better known as Billie Holiday—is subject to dispute. It began a life that, at first, was endlessly recounted in the annals of notoriety, but, more recently, just as frequently deconstructed.

Was she, in fact, born in Baltimore, as claimed in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, or in Philadelphia, as an unearthed birth certificate seems to show? Did her parents wait some time after her birth to wed—or did they do so at all? Did her sexual life encompass being nearly raped at age 10, teenage prostitution, abortion, and three marriages—or did it extend to bisexuality?

The list of these biographical disputes goes on and on. In the end, what remains incontestable about “Lady Day” are not the facts of her life but the fruits of her artistry—her legacy, if you will.

That legacy, I think, was not something I delved into to any great extent in my prior post on Holiday, which took, as its occasion, the poet Frank O’Hara’s elegy on her death in July 1959 at age 44. My post considered Holiday’s impact in literature and film, but not within the realm where her effect was most significant: music.

That legacy involves more than a few imitators. Several years ago, I was listening to a young singer I had never encountered before. But as I closed my eyes and took it all in, I knew that I had heard that voice before. “Does she have to be so derivative?” I thought. “Just what we need—someone else to channel her inner Billie Holiday.”

I shouldn’t have been so uncharitable. No matter what the field—music, literature, the visual arts—creative types look, inevitably, to someone who can light a way for them. There was no danger, in any case, that Holiday’s example could be followed in all particulars. Hers might not have been the most full-bodied or durable voice in jazz, but it was the most distinctive—and, sadly, the most fragile. Her example still beckons, even as it warns.

Perhaps the artist who acknowledged her most insistently and generously was “The Voice” himself, Frank Sinatra, who noted in 1958, a year before her death: "Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years."

He knew a kindred spirit—another vocal alchemist of heartache— when he saw one. In his superb essay collection, Visions of Jazz: The First Century, critic Gary Giddins identifies Holiday's limitations exactly (“a thin voice and a range of about fifteen notes”), but also how she made each song her own, in a way that must have struck Sinatra full force: “She embellished melodies, tailoring them to her own needs and limitations; lagged behind the beat, imparting suspense; harmonized well above the range of composition, projecting a bright authority; and inflected words in a way that made even banal lyrics bracing.”

In other words, Holiday injected drama into all that she touched—not merely a searing indictment of the American shame of lynching (“Strange Fruit”), but also purely individual despair (“Everything Happens to Me”). Don’t believe that Sinatra, the quintessential singer-actor, didn’t notice.

Holiday was already well into her own prolonged travails—drug addiction and New York’s refusal of a cabaret card, which meant she could never again play in a Gotham room that served liquor—when Sinatra hit his own professional and personal nadir. In Holiday’s case, substance abuse produced a voice that, while as expressive (and, in some cases, more so) as before, was also more ravaged, in something like the same process experienced by another addict, British rock ‘n’ roller Marianne Faithfull, in the late 1970s before her Broken English LP.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Sinatra’s reverses were also severe, so much so that he attempted suicide. In those years, he was let go of his movie contract by MGM; saw his teenage audience age and diminish; bridled at the insistence of Columbia Records exec Mitch Miller that he sing light pop tunes rather than the Great American Songbook repertoire that he preferred; and went through the wringer in his affair and short-lived marriage with Ava Gardner.

In this period, Sinatra’s throat, taxed to its limit by overwork and hard living, hemorrhaged, forcing him into complete rest for 40 days. When he reemerged, the sweet, smooth tone of his teenybopper years was gone.

It was at that moment, I would suggest, that Sinatra glimpsed an alternative offered by the example of Holiday. Even early in her career, she was able to overcome the vocal limitations underscored by Giddins through interpreting a song. That would become Sinatra’s stock in trade, too, now that he was up against a career wall. 

What he would lose in purity of tone, he would replace—and then some—with a raspiness, an edge, that imparted infinite knowledge of the entire emotional scale. It enabled him to try on successive roles: the lover all too familiar with loneliness (“In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”), the confident swinger with the wind at his back (“I’ve Got the World on a String”), and the bruised but unbowed survivor (“My Way”).

In no small part because of this mid-career makeover, Sinatra emerged from his personal ordeal to live for nearly another 50 years, rich and lionized, with a new generation of singers beating a path to his door for two late-career “Duets” CDs. Holiday ended up broke at the bank, broken in spirit—and, because of the toxic nature of her legal troubles, unable to acknowledge or call again on those who could have helped her. (John Szwed’s new book, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, describes how, for legal reasons, she was forced to delete from Lady Sings the Blues any detailed discussion of friendships with Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles).

The recent death of cabaret singer Julie Wilson, in contrast, offered a reminder of someone unapologetic about what she saw in Holiday. “No singer has ever moved me so much,” she told New Yorker music critic Whitney Balliett in a 1987 interview. “No one has ever had such pain and emotion in her singing. She is why I wear a gardenia in my hair every night.” (That gardenia, as well as the characteristic head thrown back mid-performance, is why I chose the image accompanying this post.)

In the run-up to her centennial, other female singers with very different vocal timbre have nevertheless paid tribute to Holiday, including Audra McDonald (Lanie Robertson's one-person play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill), and Cassandra Wilson (the CD Coming Forth By Day).

Quote of the Day (Frank O’Hara, on ‘The Day Lady Died’)

“Then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue  

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and  

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.”—Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen (1995)

Billie Holiday passed away at age 44 from liver and heart disease on this date in 1959, in circumstances as miserable as any she had known in her turbulent life. Denied a license to perform in any New York establishment where alcohol was served, she had seen her already meager savings evaporate. So fierce was her substance abuse that she felt the need to procure drugs on her deathbed in a New York hospital, leading police to stay outside her door, waiting to do again what had become a habit for them: arrest her.

You’ll find nothing about this in the above elegy by New York poet Frank O’Hara for the Angel of Harlem. Initially, there are only two indications that his poem is about the great jazz singer: the title (an inversion of her nickname, Lady Day) and the second line about “three days after Bastille day,” or July 17—the day of her death. Thereafter comes a procession of mundane details—planning for a vacation, buying cigarettes, summer heat—until the lines above.

O’Hara is alluding to the last time he saw Lady Day, at the Cooper Square jazz bar Five Spot, just a few months before. Friend Kenneth Koch, participating in a jazz-and-poetry night, was accompanied by Mal Waldrop. Holiday, there to cheer on the pianist, was eventually prevailed upon by the sympathetic, densely packed audience to sing—and, by so doing, break the law.

The singer displayed that night a husk of her once peerless instrument: “her voice [was] almost gone, just like a whisper, just like the taste of very old wine, but full of spirit,” Koch recounted years later in Brad Gooch’s 1993 biography of O’Hara, City Poet. O’Hara, back by the bathroom, absorbed the atmosphere.

Blessed with enough talent as a youngster to weigh becoming a professional concert pianist, O’Hara probably possessed more musical acumen than virtually everyone in that crowded venue that night. Yet he did not recapitulate all he heard. In fact, what happened then  passes swiftly in his final lines, much like Holiday’s life—and, as it turned out, his own. (He died seven years later: like Holiday, in his mid-forties, and like herself, in an almost bitterly bizarre fashion: struck down by a beach taxi on Fire Island.)

The poem circles back to the title in the last line: “everyone and I stopped breathing,” O’Hara writes. The audience’s mixture of awe and pity culminates in an action echoed in the most literal sense by Holiday’s death.

O’Hara’s was not the only work of literature inspired by Holiday. Langston Hughes and E. Ethelbert Miller would write poems; Elizabeth Hardwick, in Sleepless Nights, a vignette in her autobiographical novel; and Maya Angelou, a section in her memoir The Heart of a Woman. But the greatest amount of fiction penned about Holiday might have been written by the songstress herself, in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. Her opening—about her parents getting married when they were teenagers and she was three—is not true; they never married. The factual inaccuracies continue from that point.

In actuality, the music, full of beauty wrought from fierce pain, is where the truth of her life lies. Music critic Francis Davis, in an extremely perceptive December 2000 Atlantic Monthly essay on the jazz world’s “Our Lady of Sorrows,” noted: “With the obvious exception of Frank Sinatra, who was born in the same year as Holiday but outlived her by almost four decades, no other recording artist from the first half of the twentieth century seems more real to us -- more like our contemporary.”