Yesterday afternoon I watched Part I of the excellent Netflix documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. I knew that he had been the heartthrob of the bobby soxers, but seeing the old footage made me realize that he had been a precursor of the Beatles, the group that would eventually, temporarily, make him irrelevant.
I also knew that he had gone from a fresh-faced crooner to a master of phrasing, but I had always assumed the transformation had been seamless if necessarily - for the precise emotion in all those saloon songs - painful (thank you, Ava Gardner). But the documentary showed the hard times in between when, amazing to imagine now, no one wanted anything to do with him. This dark period created the man we think of today when we hear the name Sinatra, the man a freelancer by the name of Don Gillmor captured in the lede of a travel story about Chicago I published in the Sun-Sentinel:
“Few cities make me feel like Frank Sinatra. Not the literal Sinatra, hoarse and bloated, eating eggs, as Kitty Kelley described, from the naked stomach of a prostitute – most cities make me feel that way. But the mythical, Songs-for-Swinging-Lovers Sinatra, jacket slung over one shoulder, fedora cocked to the side, a man unburdened.”
