Tag: frank sinatra (Page 2 of 2)

Cooked for him, cleaned for him, sewed his bow ties back together when the bobby-soxers tore ’em to shreds, all that old-school Italian wife shit: Nancy did that for her Frank. There’s wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her Frankie, and he was particular. Liked his steak this way, and his eggplant that way. Like his mother used to do. Frank’s mom did a number on him. She was, as we used to say in New Jersey, a real piece of work. Nancy didn’t mind. Anything for her Frankie.

They met in ’35, and got married in ’39. He was a singing waiter at the time, so she needed to work, too. She didn’t care. Frank was gonna be a star–anyone who couldn’t see that was some sort of asshole–and she’d support the family until then. When he got hired by the Big Band leader Harry James, she hopped on the bus and traveled the country with the troupe. No one else could make Frank’s supper right, you see. He liked things a certain way.

And, O, then comes the money.

And, hey, here comes the fame.

And Frank dives in dick-first.

Nancy…well, you know about Nancy. She was pretty for a Jersey girl. But they’re in Hollywood now, and no way Nancy Barbato from Hoboken could compete with Juliet Prowse or Lana Turner. Or Ava. How could Nancy Barbato compete with Ava Gardner? All she ever did was give Frank three kids and a home and all of her heart every single second. The studios sent some aestheticians over to glam her up. Fixed her teeth. Shaved down her thick nose. There was eyebrow work, to be sure.

But the heart wants what the heart wants–that’s something men say when they’re listening to their dicks–and Frank’s heart was with Ava. Nancy wouldn’t give him the divorce for two years, and it wasn’t to be cruel or petty. She loved him, and didn’t want to let him go.

But she did, and then he never left. Frank went through three more wives, but holidays were always at Big Nancy’s place. (After their daughter, Nancy, was born, she became Big Nancy.) Birthdays, too, and when things went wrong with Frank’s life–generally because Frank had punched someone or driven a golf cart through a casino while screaming racial epithets–he always showed back up on the doorstep of the Holmby Hills mansion she got in the divorce. For all their carousing, Dean Martin wasn’t Frank’s best friend. He didn’t have one. He had Big Nancy.

Frank died in 1998, which means this is the part where I write “Ha, ha, she outlived the sonofabitch by 20 years,” but that isn’t how this story goes. She missed him every day of those two decades, and if they’re reunited in the afterlife, she’ll make him his eggplant the way he likes it. Anything for her Frankie.

Frank did this tune a few times, first in 1942 with Tommy Dorsey (Axel Stordahl arranged and conducted);  then in ’57 and ’62 the way Nelson Riddle heard it; and holy shit even a disco version in ’77.

The ’57 swings hardest. Pour yourself some gasoline and don’t be a clyde.

A book is the closest we’ve gotten to telepathy. That’s what a book is: take the thoughts in one brain and put them in another. Doesn’t work all the time, and not for some thoughts. For example: “You’re about to walk into a door,” is a thought poorly handled by literature, as the process is too slow; that thought should be yelled out loud.

And they’re not a user-friendly technology, not compared to–say–refrigerators. Open door, insert perishable, close door; open door, remove perishable, close door; clean semi-regularly. And, sure, it takes children a while to fully grasp the “close door” part, but by and large a fridge is an intuitive device.

Not a book. That’s why you have to ease a human into them: first, they get read to you; and then big and colorful picture books to teach you that thoughts go from left to right; and then chapter books and the wild journey of the narrative; and then you lie about reading Tolstoy; and then you notice that Barnes & Noble is selling adult coloring books and you set fire to the mall. The circle of literary life.

It takes years of training just to learn to read, and decades after that to make any real sense of the suckers. Most books assume you’ve read other books, and some require that you have. There are several volumes in Fillmore South’s library that are completely incomprehensible unless you have a second book to explain the one you’re reading. (And what is a bibliography but a genealogy? Just a list of books that the book in your hands has been made out of.)

And they bounce off each other, sometimes, if you make them.

I just finished two books–this is not a review; don’t worry about that, though I recommend them both–Sinatra: The Voice & The Chairman by James Kaplan and The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (The Sinatra book is two volumes; I liked the second one better, when Frank was rich and crazy and could only communicate through punching, fucking, or singing.) And, you know: one’s better than the other. Let’s not fuck around with equivalences.

They’re both stories about a guy who leaves home. Other than that, they’re different.

Dry recitation of fact sticks in the craw, gets loogied out when no one’s looking, so from now on when we’re trying to explain the 20th Century to the Younger Enthusiasts, we should just give ’em these two books; take away their phones and lock the door. They can have a smoothie every three hours; teens love smoothies, because teens are too lazy to chew.

That was the 20th Century: the Lubyanka vs. Las Vegas. And these two stories–both about a guy who leaves home; other than that, they’re different–sum it up like no textbook could, or at least like no textbook did for me when I was a terrible student.

But the 20th Century died this year–it had hung around like a bruise–and now we have a new century, and there will be two stories written about it.

I wonder which story we will be in.

You got fucked, Junior. He did to you what he did to everyone else.

Tony Sinatra. Michael Sinatra. Tommy’s a good name.

But he had to call you Frank.

Resquiat in pacem, paisan.