Why Sinatra Matters Read Online Free

thing: he made many trips for the USO, entertaining troops in the company of comedians and beautiful women.
     But Sinatra was a separate case; he was the right age and he had two arms and two legs. Why couldn’t he do what stars such
     as Clark Gable, Glenn Miller, or Jimmy Stewart were doing, and insist on being taken by one of the armed forces? Why couldn’t
     he at least make a USO tour?
    The male anger against Sinatra came to a head in October 1944, when he played the Paramount again and 30,000 mostly female
     fans erupted into a small riot outside the theater. When a male dissenter in the Paramount balcony fired a tomato at the stage,
     he had to be rescued from women who were trying to beat him to death. Breathless accounts of these events were all over the
     newspapers and the radio. At the same time, the first V-2 rockets were falling on London and American troops were fighting
     their way into Germany, taking heavy casualties. In our neighborhood, where the war was not a distant abstraction, the phenomenon
     of young Frank Sinatra was discussed with much heat in the bars and on the street corners and in the kitchens.
    I don’t get it, my father would say. All those girls going nuts for a draft dodger.
    He’s not a draft dodger, my mother would say. He’s 4-F. He’s got a punctured eardrum. He tried to join three times, and they
     turned him down. It was in the papers.
    The papers, he sneered. You believe the papers?
    Flying north from Florida, I could remember all that argument and my own youthful wonder about its passion. At nine, I was
     too young to understand what Sinatra was doing with his music. I did know it was different. Crosby made us feel comfortable
     and, in some larger way,
American
. But there was a tension in Sinatra, an anxiety that we were too young to name but old enough to feel. During the last six
     months of the European war, when men were dying by the thousands in the Battle of the Bulge, it was confusing to hear songs
     that contained so much anguish. Or loss. Or loneliness. I would see young women pushing strollers along the avenue, their
     men off at war, see them pausing to look at the front pages on the newsstands, see the way their faces clenched, and I wished
     that Bing Crosby could sing to them and make them feel better. It took me a long while to understand that it was Frank Sinatra
     who was giving words and voice to the emotions of their own roiled hearts.
    III
. Years later, when I was a reporter and then a columnist for Dorothy Schiff’s
New York Post
, I got to know Sinatra. Cannon introduced me to him after the Floyd Patterson–Sonny Liston fight in Las Vegas in 1963. We
     were together on other evenings. On the surface, this seemed strange, another contradiction in the character of a man dense
     with contradictions. Sinatra had wasted too much of his adult life in vicious quarrels with newspapermen and gossip columnists,
     had punched out at least one columnist (the awful Lee Mortimer), and was continually in rumbles with paparazzi.
    “Sinatra’s idea of paradise is a place where there are plenty of women and no newspapermen,” said Humphrey Bogart, who was
     sixteen years older than the singer and a kind of hero to the younger man. “He doesn’t know it, but he’d be better off if
     it were the other way around.”
    Perhaps, as he moved toward sixty, Sinatra came to understand what Bogart meant. Certainly, when he was in New York, he sought
     out his favorite newspapermen. Cannon was his friend, while the rest of us were friendly acquaintances. Cannon was only five
     years older than Sinatra, a New Yorker shaped by Prohibition and the Depression, the myth of 1930s Broadway, and World War
     II in Europe, where he served as a correspondent for
Stars and Stripes
. They spoke the same language, shared passions for boxers, ballplayers, and beautiful women. Cannon brought a poetic language
     to his sports columns, some of which were shaped like songs, and his