Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  “So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

  To the nation, on civil rights, June n, 1963:

  “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home — but are we to say to the world and, much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”

  Receiving an honorary degree at Amherst, October 26, 1963:

  “The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness. But the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.

  “Our national strength matters. But the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. ’I have been,’ he wrote, ’one acquainted with the night.’ And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. …”

  V.

  Years later, long after the murder in Dallas and after Vietnam had first escalated into tragedy and then disintegrated into defeat; long after a generation had taken to the streets before retreating into the Big Chill; long after the ghettos of Watts and Newark and Detroit and so many other cities had exploded into nihilistic violence; after Robert Kennedy had been killed and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; after Woodstock and Watergate; after the Beatles had arrived, triumphed, and broken up, and after John Lennon had been murdered; after Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had given way to Ronald Reagan; after passionate liberalism faded; after the horrors of Cambodia and the anarchy of Beirut; after cocaine and AIDS had become the new plagues — after all had changed from the world we knew in 1963,1 was driving alone in a rented car late one afternoon through the state of Guerrero in Mexico.

  I was moving through vast, empty stretches of parched land when the right rear tire went flat. I pulled over — and quickly discovered that the rental car had neither a spare nor tools. I was alone in the emptiness of Mexico. Trucks roared by, and some cars, but nobody stopped. Off in the distance I saw a plume of smoke coming from a small house. I started walking to the house, feeling uneasy and vulnerable — Mexico can be a dangerous country. A rutted dirt road led to the front of the house. A dusty car was parked to the side. It was almost dark, and for a tense moment, I considered turning back.

  And then the door opened. A beefy man stood there, looking at me in a blank way. I came closer, and he squinted and then asked me in Spanish what I wanted. I told him I had a flat tire and needed help. He considered that for a moment and then asked me if I first needed something to drink.

  I glanced past him into the house. On the wall there were two pictures. One was of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The other was of Jack Kennedy. Yes, I said. Some water would be fine.

  NEW YORK,

  November 28, 1988

  SINATRA

  I.

  One rainy evening in the winter of 1974, I was home alone when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, looking out at the wet street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century. It was Frank Sinatra.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Reading a book,” I said.

  “Read it tomorrow. We’re at Jilly’s. Come on over.”

  He hung up. I put the book down. I didn’t know Sinatra well, but despite all the rotten things I’d read about him, I liked him a lot and was sometimes touched by him. We’d met through Shirley MacLaine, who went back a long time with Sinatra. In 1958 Sinatra put her in Some Came Running, expanded her part to fit her talents, and made her a movie star. When they occasionally met, it was clear to me that Sinatra admired her relentless honesty, loved her in some complicated way, and was, like me, a little afraid of her.

  I took a cab to Jilly’s, a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eighth Avenue end of 52nd Street. The long, dark bar was packed with the junior varsity of the mob; of all the Sinatra groupies, they were the most laughable. They were planted at the bar like blue-haired statues, gulping Jack Daniel’s, occasionally glancing into the back room. A maitre d’ in a shiny tuxedo stood beside a red velvet rope that separated the back room from the Junior Apalachin conference at the bar.

  “Yes, sir?” the maitre d’ said.

  “Mr. Sinatra,” I said. “He’s expecting me.”

  He turned nervously, his eyes moving past the empty tables at the booths in the left-hand corner against the wall. Jilly Rizzo looked up from a booth and nodded, and I was let through. “ ‘Ey, Petey babe,” Jilly said, coming around a table with his right hand out. Jilly has one glass eye, which gives him a perpetually blurry look. “Hey, Frank,” he said, “look who’s here.”

  “Hey, Peter, grab a seat!” Sinatra said brightly, half rising from the booth and shaking hands. He moved clumsily, a newly heavy man who hadn’t learned yet to carry the extra weight with grace; he seemed swollen, rather than sleek. But the Sinatra face was — and is — an extraordinary assemblage. He has never been conventionally handsome: There are no clean planes, too many knobs of bone, scars from the forceps delivery he endured at birth. But the smile is open, easy, insouciant. And his blue eyes are the true focal point of the face. In the brief time I’d known him, I’d seen the eyes so disarmingly open that you felt you could peer all the way through them into every secret recess of the man; at other times they were cloudy with indifference, and when chilled by anger or resentment, they could become as opaque as cold-rolled steel.

  “You eat yet?” he asked. “Well, then have a drink.”

  As always, there was a group with him, squashed into the worn Leatherette booths or on chairs against tables. They had the back room to themselves and were eating chop suey and watching a Jets game on a TV set. Sinatra introduced Pat Henry, the comic who sometimes opens for him; Roone Arledge of ABC; Don Costa, one of Sinatra’s favorite arrangers; a few other men; and some young women. Sinatra was with a thin blond model in a black dress. He didn’t introduce her.

  The conversation stopped for the introductions, then started again. Sinatra leaned over, his eyes shifting to the TV screen, where Joe Namath was being shoved around.

  “I don’t get this team,” he said. “They got the best arm in football and they won’t give him any protection. Ah, shit!” Namath was on his back and getting up very slowly. “Oh, man. That ain’t right!”

  They cut to a commercial, and Sinatra lit a Marlboro and sipped a vodka. His eyes drifted to the bar. “Jesus, there’s about 43 indictments right at the bar,” he said loudly.

  “Present company excluded,” Pat Henry said, and everybody laughed.

  “It better be,” Sinatra said, and they all laughed again. The blonde smiled in a chilly way. The game was back on again, and Sinatra stared at the TV set but wasn’t really watching the game. Then the game ended, and Jilly switched off the set. There was more talk and more drinking, and slowly the others began to leave.

  “Hell, let’s go,” Sinatra said. He said something to Jilly, and then he and the blonde and I walked out. A photographer and a middle-aged autograph freak were waiting under the tattered awning.

  “Do you mind, Mr. Sinatra?” the photographer asked.

  “No, go ahead,” he said. The flas
hbulbs popped. The blonde smiled. So did Sinatra. “Thanks for asking.”

  Then he signed the woman’s autograph book. She had skin like grimy ivory, and sad brown eyes. “Thanks, dear,” Sinatra said. We all got into the waiting limousine and drove down the rainy street, heading east.

  “What do you think they do with those autographs?” he said. “Sell them? To who? Trade them? For what? How does it go? Two Elvis Presleys for one Frank Sinatra? Two Frank Sinatras for one Paul McCartney? I don’t get it. I never did.”

  We drove awhile in silence. Then the chauffeur turned right on a street in the Sixties and pulled over to the curb. Sinatra and the blonde got out. He took her into the brightly lit vestibule. He waited for her to find a key, tapped her lightly on the elbow, and came back to the limo.

  “You have to go home?”

  “No.”

  He leaned forward to the driver. “Just drive around awhile.”

  “Yes sir.”

  And so for more than an hour, on this rainy night in New York, we drove around the empty streets. Sinatra talked about Lennon and McCartney as songwriters (“That ‘Yesterday’ is the best song written in 30 years”) and George Harrison (“His ‘Something’ is a beauty”), prizefighters (“Sugar Ray was the best I ever saw”) and writers (“Murray Kempton is the best, isn’t he? And I always loved Jimmy Cannon”). It wasn’t an interview; Frank Sinatra just wanted to talk, in a city far from the bright scorched exile of Palm Springs.

  “It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”

  “Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”

  “And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”

  He laughed and settled back. We were crossing 86th Street now, heading for the park.

  “You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” Sinatra said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This was, of course, the Watergate winter; the year before, Sinatra sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon. “You like people, and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling again, “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”

  “Every day I know less,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is you get older and you know less.”

  After a while, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf, where Sinatra has an apartment. He told the driver to take me home.

  “Stay in touch,” he said, and got out, walking fast, his head down, his step jaunty, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. I remember thinking that it was a desperately lonely life for a man who was a legend.

  II.

  “I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault.”

  — Frank Sinatra

  At 64, Francis Albert Sinatra is one of that handful of Americans whose deaths would certainly unleash a river of tearful prose and much genuine grief. He has worked at his trade for almost half a century and goes on as if nothing at all had changed. He is currently in New York making his first feature film in ten years, The First Deadly Sin. His first new studio album in five years is in the record stores, a three-record set called Trilogy, and despite one astonishing lapse in taste (a self-aggrandizing “musical fantasy” written by banality master Gordon Jenkins), it reveals that what Sinatra calls “my reed” is in better shape than it has been in since the 1960s. In concert halls and casinos he packs in the fans, and the intensity of their embrace remains scary. But his work and its public acceptance are now almost incidental to his stature. Frank Sinatra, from Hoboken, New Jersey, has forced his presence into American social history; when the story of how Americans in this century played, dreamed, hoped, and loved is told, Frank Sinatra cannot be left out. He is more than a mere singer or actor. He is a legend. And the legend lives.

  The legend has its own symmetries. Sinatra can be unbelievably generous and brutally vicious. He can display the grace and manners of a cultured man and turn suddenly into a vulgar two-bit comic. He can offer George Raft a blank check “up to one million dollars” to pay taxes owed to the IRS; he can then rage against one of his most important boosters, WNEW disc jockey Jonathan Schwartz, and help force him off the air. In his time, he has been a loyal Democrat and a shill for Richard Nixon; a defender of underdogs everywhere and then a spokesman for the Establishment; a man who fought racism in the music business and then became capable of tasteless jokes (“The Polacks are deboning the colored people,” he said on the stage of Caesars Palace in 1974, “and using them for wet suits”). He has given magical performances and shoddy ones. He has treated women with elegance, sensitivity, and charm, and then, in Lauren Bacall’s phrase, “dropped the curtain” on them in the most callous way. He acts like royalty and is frequently treated that way, but he also comes on too often like a cheap hood. He is a good guy-bad guy, tough-tender, Jekyll-Hyde.

  “Being an eighteen-karat manic-depressive,” Sinatra said once, “I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”

  Over the years, those wildly fluctuating emotions became a basic component of the Sinatra legend — accepted, even demanded by his audience. That audience is now largely eastern, urban, and aging, with New York at the heart of the myth. The hard-core fans are Depression kids who matured in World War II, or part of the fifties generation, who saw him as a role model. In some critical way, Sinatra validates their lives — as individuals. He sings to them, and for them, one at a time. These Americans were transformed by the Depression and the war into unwilling members of groups — “the masses,” or “the poor,” or “the infantry” — and their popular music was dominated by the big bands. Sinatra was the first star to step out of the tightly controlled ensembles of the white swing bands to work on his own. Yes, he was 4-F (punctured eardrum), but the overwhelming majority of Americans experienced World War II at home, and the 1940s Sinatra was a reminder that Americans were single human beings, not just the masses, the poor, or the infantry. Later, in the 1960s, when crowds once again shoved individuals off the stage of history, he was submerged by musical groups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones and in 1971 even went into a brief retirement. He came back later in the decade, when individual values were again dominant.

  “I’ve seen them come and go, but Frank is still the king,” a New Jersey grandmother said at one of Sinatra’s weekend performances at Resorts International in Atlantic City. “He just goes on and on, and he’s wonderful.”

  Indeed, Sinatra’s endurance has become a rallying point for many people who feel that their sacrifices and hard work are no longer honored, their values demeaned, their musical tastes ignored and sneered at. They don’t care that Sinatra got fat; so did they. They don’t care that Sinatra moved from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan; many of them did the same thing, for the same basic reason: resentment at being ignored by the Democratic party. They had overcome poverty and survived two wars; they had educated their children and given them better lives; and sometimes even their children didn’t care. But it should never be forgotten that Frank Sinatra was the original working-class hero. Mick Jagger’s fans bought records with their allowances; Sinatra’s people bought them out of wages.

  “There’s just not enough of Frank’s people around anymore to make him a monster record seller,” says one Warner Communications executive. “Sinatra is a star. But he’s not Fleetwood Mac. He’s not Pink Floyd.”

  Sinatra has never been a big single seller (one gold record — more than a million sales — to twenty for the Beatles), but his albums continue to sell steadily. One reason: Most radio stations don’t play Sinatra, so that younger listeners never get to hear him and go on to buy his records. In New York, only WNEW-AM and WYNY-FM play Sinatra with any frequency. As a mo
vie star, he had faded badly before vanishing completely with the lamentable Dirty Dingus Magee in 1970. Part of this could be blamed directly on Sinatra, because his insistence on one or two takes had led to careless, even shoddy productions. On his own, he was also not a strong TV performer; he needed Elvis Presley, or Bing Crosby, to get big ratings. Yet Sinatra remains a major star in the minds of most Americans, even those who despise him.

  “What Sinatra has is beyond talent,” director Billy Wilder once said. “It’s some sort of magnetism that goes in higher revolutions than that of anybody else, anybody in the whole of show business. Wherever Frank is, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town and the action is starting.”

  That electricity was in the air of Jilly’s that night in 1974. But its effect is not restricted to a platoon of gumbahs. The other night, Sinatra came into Elaine’s with his wife, Barbara, and another couple. It was after midnight, and Sinatra stayed for a couple of hours, drinking and talking and smoking cigarettes.

  I was with some friends at another table. They were people who are good at their jobs and have seen much of the world. But their own natural styles were subtly altered by the addition of Sinatra to the room. They stole glances at him. They were aware that Sinatra’s blue eyes were also checking out the room, and unconsciously they began to gesture too much, playing too hard at being casual, or clarifying themselves in a theatrical way. Somewhere underneath all of this, I’m sure, was a desire for Frank Sinatra to like them.