He Did It His Way: ‘Ol Blue Eyes from Coast to Coast Again

   I always wanted to meet Frank Sinatra.

    I wanted to meet a lot of people, but Sinatra in particular because he was rarely in public and very secretive. My wife and I were walking through the second floor lobby of Resorts International Hotel in Atlantic City in the 1980s and suddenly there he was. Sinatra was hosting a dinner party for some twenty people and the hotel had set up a gigantic table for them right in the middle of the lobby. There were people all around, gawking, and here was my chance. I walked straight at him and, all of a sudden, whoa! Security! I told the guards that I was with the press and just wanted to say hello and ask a few quick questions. I was told, gently, but sternly, that Sinatra was not talking to anybody, and especially not the press. So I backed off.

   Oh well, I made it to within twenty feet.

I thought about that near meeting last week when I walked into the Sinatra: An American Icon  exhibit at The New York Library for the Performing Arts, part of the city’s public library system, at Lincoln Center, in New York, one of the several coast to coast celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the singer’s birth this year. I saw the splendid two part HBO special on his life and career on television last week and enjoyed it. I had been a Sinatra admirer since I was 19 and a hopeless rock and roll fan. I first heard a Sinatra album on my father’s old stereo in the fall that year. I was hooked. Over the years, when I was with the press, I heard him sing at live concerts nine or ten times, at amphitheaters and in hotels, saw his movies, heard him on the radio and read any stories in the newspapers about him.

   The guy could sing.

It was not just his singing that made him so famous around the world, though. Sinatra was a very public person. He had been a singing superstar in his early twenties, then his career fell apart. Relentless in his determination, he bounced back in acting, winning the Oscar for playing Maggio in From Here to Eternity. He had four wives. His son Frank Jr. had been kidnapped.  There were very good films and very bad ones. He had jumped from movies to television and become a star all over again in his later years. He was reportedly tied up with the mob. He feuded with numerous people, hated the press with a passion (remember his chilly moments with TV reporter Rona Barrett?). He was a huge public figure outside of the music business as well as within it, as famous as famous can get. Everybody had an opinion about Frank Sinatra.

I went to the Sinatra exhibit at the Performing Arts Library’s Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery, Shelby Cullom Davis Museum, that just opened, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon because I was certain it would be empty at that day and hour and I would have plenty of time to see everything. Wrong. It was packed with people. There were folks from Italy arguing over which of his hits was the best, a couple from Germany in a deep discussion about  the movie Pal Joey, an elderly woman who moved from table to table screaming “I remember that!” There were people there from New York and all over the country. The room where you can watch him in concert on a huge six screen wall was so crowded that I had to stand and crane my neck to look over a man’s shoulder to see the show. Tuesday afternoon. I guess he had some fans…

When you walk into the dazzling exhibit, the first thing you see is wall of his gold records and, next to it, another wall listing all of his hit albums and singles. Then you slip into a time vault and follow his life from Hoboken, N.J. right across the Hudson from Manhattan, and his early days at the Rustic Cabin club, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., where he was discovered by big band leader Harry James in 1939 and taken on the road with his fabled orchestra. There is a wonderful, mammoth wall size photo of Sinatra at the Rustic Cabin. Then it is off to superstardom in New York in the forties and a huge photo of a city theater where he performed with several pictures of him near his name in big letters and lights on the marquee.

     The walls and tables of the library exhibit, curated by Bob Santelli, executive director of the  GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles, are jammed with black and white photos of Sinatra. There is a marvelous set of videos that feature  people explaining what events in the world in the 1930s and 1940s influenced Sinatra and his music.

                  The exhibit is broken down nicely into period of his life, such as ‘Columbia (Records) Years,’ ‘Teen Idol Years’ and ‘Movie Years.’ There are sets of headphones everywhere so that you can listen to him sing his classic hits. The sound on the headsets is wonderful.  You hear ahis music no matter where you are in the exhibit.

The movie section is filled with enormous posters of his most famous films, such as On the Town and Pal Joey. Amid the colorful posters are the clothes he wore in some of the films. The Library even replicated parts of the studio where Sinatra cut his records.

                  The singer’s personal items on display include his fedora, passport, address book, 1955 contract with Capitol Records, a half dozen of his paintings (not bad, either) and several tuxedoes (he was skinnier than in his movies!).

                  Tucked away in a corner of the exhibit is a television with Sinatra home movies playing on it. You should stop here. Sinatra always seemed to be just glitter and glamour, but the home movies show a quiet, happy guy with his wife and kids having a good time. It adds a nice personal dimension to his larger than life story.

                  For me, the centerpiece of the entire exhibit is a 1950s juke box that was filled with 81 Sinatra hits. You just pushed a button and up came Witchcraft, My Way or Night and Day. You don’t even have to drop a quarter in, either!

                  The strength of the exhibit is that it shows how popular Sinatra was over fifty years of American entertainment and in an era when popular singer and actor careers only spanned a few years. It gives the visitor a good look at the singer, but a nice, warm look at America, too.

                  The exhibit is not as comprehensive as it might have been, though. It contains little of the controversies and scandals that surrounded Sinatra throughout his adult life. There is nothing here about his reported connections to the mob. There is little on his breakup with wife Nancy to run off with Ava Gardner, his tension filled marriage to actress Mia Farrow or his last, happy, marriage to Barbara Marx. His days as the leader of the ‘Rat Pack’ in Las Vegas were pretty much left out. The library exhibit has a happy, feel good atmosphere and is a celebration of his life.

                  In conjunction with the exhibit, the library has a film series of Sinatra movies. Coming up are  High Society on June 4, Pal Joey on June 8, A Hole in the Head on June 15, Ocean’s Eleven on July 2, The Manchurian Candidate on July 20 and Tony Rome on August 6. Interspersed with the films are numerous music concerts and events at which singers and songwriters talk about their association with the singer.

                  I finished walking through the exhibit and started to leave. Then I saw a set of headphones on the northern wall with a poster next to it telling you that you could pick up the headset and hear Sinatra sing Strangers in the Night, one of my own favorite tunes of his. I slipped the headset on and there was that lush, rich music intro and then him singing the 1966 song that really revived his career. Wow!

    Then I stepped outside in New York City, his town (New York, New York), and drifted off into the crowd, humming Strangers in the Night.

The exhibit at Lincoln Center will run through September 4.