It should hardly be necessary to add to the millions of words about Frank Sinatra, yet one thing needs to be said. The saddest feature about his death wasn't his death, but that it didn't occur 30 years ago.
For Frank Sinatra was always going to sing as long as he lived, and he lived too long. Far too long. The only Sinatra concert I ever went to was at Lansdowne Road about 10 years ago, and it was a grisly business, a pantomime of ghouls which included the sad phenomenon called Lisa Minelli, and the even sadder creature Sammy Davis Junior. It was rather like witnessing the recumbents on a mortician's slab getting up and performing. Throughout the crowd, people began to search themselves for stakes to put through the performers' hearts.
Tollund man
Sammy Davis Junior initially seemed the most pitiful, a mere parody of himself. He couldn't sing, he couldn't dance, his jokes were excruciating, and in appearance resembled Tollund man, but not, alas, in his singing. Davis alone would have made the evening perfectly gruesome, as would Lisa Minelli, whose entire life seems to have been an essay in sadness, illuminated by one very great film indeed, Cabaret.
The distress one felt at tired old performers making fools of themselves, partly for money, partly because of that incurable addiction to audiences, was vast, but it was as nothing, nothing whatever, to the sadness aroused by the debacle that was Sinatra. He could not hold a note, his limbs were slow and old, and he had to abandon entire areas of song as a prudent general in defeat surrenders territory to the advancing enemy. But the greatest tragedy of all was that this mortifying display came from the man who had been the greatest singing artiste this century; perhaps ever.
Not just in ballad form, or in the realm of popular culture; I mean in all musical forms. In his prime, he was a greater singer that any of the great Italian tenors such as Caruso or Pavarotti, greater even than the Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling, who was actually a far more instinctually musical performer than any of the great Italians, and greater even than the sublime and intellectually pre-eminent German baritone Deitrich Fischer-Dieskau. He was the greatest, simply the greatest, and he immeasurably enriched the world with his songs and his singing; and in doing so, made many of the great ballads unsingable by anybody else.
That is a measure of his gigantic stature. A song sung by Sinatra in his prime from that moment onwards was dead from the vocal cords of any other singer. Nessun Dorma, to cite a cliche, has been sung by many, and will be by many: but nobody will ever dare even attempt to sing, One more for the road. Once Sinatra let that great Johnny Mercer number slip past his tonsils, nobody could touch it again. And to my knowledge nobody has recorded it since; to have Sinatra's lips touch a song was to give it the kiss of death.
Beyond description
He had everything a singer should have, but most of all, he had a divine musicality, of such perfection that it was rather like the disproportionate genius of an idiot-savant who can instantly tell what day of the week any date in history fell. It was as beyond description, beyond words, beyond ordinary communication as colour is to the sightless. In his prime, he could sing from the manual for greasing a gasket or removing a polyp from a colon and turn it into art. God had waved his wand over him, and the world was better for it, for him.
Of course, he was lucky that his genius coincided with the era of the great song writers - Johnny Mercer, Jimmy Van Heuson, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter and the Gershwins. But other singers had the chance to make their mark on the songs from those great men - none did. Come Fly with Me, Pale Moon, I'll be Seeing you, Fools Rush In, How Little we Know, In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, I've Got You under My Skin, Call me Irresponsible, Fly me to the Moon, are songs which he made his own - indeed, some were written for him.
But the measure of his genius was that when he got his hands on great songs which had been made famous by others, he placed the mark of his title deeds upon them. Old Man River, for example, which should have been made unsingable by Paul Robeson's superb original recording of it, became Sinatra's when he sang it.
Profound passion
This should not have been so. Robeson had a great voice, was a fiercely intelligent man, and felt the indignities heaped on him and on his race with a profound passion. All these qualities expressed themselves in his spellbindingly marvellous rendition. Yet Sinatra's is better. Why?
Because Sinatra felt songs. In addition to his idiot-savant musicality, he had idiot-savant feelings which were unrelated to his fairly grubby conscious self. He was a Hoboken bum. Like Marlowe and Caravaggio, he associated with murderers and pimps. His personal life, to paraphrase his advice to Joe, was sleazy and low. Yet shining through the squalor to which he seemed addicted was a sensitivity which propels great artists from the mundanity of their own existence to a profound intuition about other people's souls.
More than that. He sang of experiences which I have never had, but I know them vicariously through the medium of Sinatra's singing, at its most acutely beautiful in those golden years before his 50th birthday. That birthday, and the double-album he released then with its cheap and tawdry self-congratulation and its odious linking narrative was the turning point. Very little that he recorded afterwards was of true Sinatran quality. The gauche and self-preening My Way typified the late Sinatra, for whom contrived vocal melodrama was to replace the divine vocal subtlety of earlier years. He should have died young, and he didn't. What else is there to say about him that others haven't said? One thing: that his grandfather-in-law had been maimed for life while serving as an officer in the Connaught Rangers on the Western Front.