54: Sinatra

All right, Mr. Ken Lane, whenever you're ready, we're going to sing a few of these songs. We hope you enjoy them. Yeah, we hope you enjoy them.

On WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, this is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. What are you staring at? Brassieres.

I dig a broad with no brassieres. This is a recording from 1962 of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. performing in a club outside Chicago. And like everything else about Frank Sinatra, what's fascinating about this recording is how many different people he's able to be all at once.

Cutting up on the one hand, and then turning around and singing the most vulnerable possible love songs on the other. When you're alone, who cares for starlet skies? When is it heard, baby? When you're alone.

About three minutes later, he's lashing into a gossip columnist he hates, Dorothy Kilgallen. I never met a female fink until I met Dorothy Kilgallen. How's that for an opener? I wouldn't mind if she was a good-looking fink.

That such beautiful music should emerge from such vulgarity is one of life's great mysteries, the Washington Star once wrote. The town where she came from, they had a beauty contest when she was 17 years old, and nobody won. There was a poor little Chinese kid, the boy was standing there, there was nobody else that gave him the cup, because he was kind of looking at a broad on the line. Then there's the way he is on stage with Sammy Davis Jr.

In 1962, it was still groundbreaking for a mainstream white performer to be integrating his nightclub act at all. But a good portion of the act is just Sinatra and Martin telling Davis to get off the stage, and Davis pleading with them to stay. If you ask me out, can I sing with you guys? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I'll dance with you, I'll sing with you.

I'll swim with you, I'll cut the lawn with you, I'll go to bar mitzvahs with you, but don't touch me. A third of a century after this was recorded, what is, I think, most striking about it is how many of the jokes are simply about the fact that a black man is on stage with these white guys. I'm going to play you a big chunk of this, because it's amazing. Well, now that you're out here, you might as well do some...

Let's all leave. Hey, how come he got a white stool? I'll tell you what, ladies and gentlemen, may I offer some impersonations of you nice folks? Sam, that's a good idea.

Why don't you do Paul Revere, get on your horse, and get the hell out of here? I'll tell you what, do James Meredith at the Mississippi. Help! Ladies and gentlemen, my first impression of that of Mr.

Frank Sinatra. When somebody loves you, it's no good unless she loves you all the way. Man, if you like him, you're going to be cuckoo about me. He's just your excuse expression, a carbon copy.

When Sammy Davis finally sings a duet with Sinatra, it is a duet between a black man and a white man that is unimaginable to hear it. You cannot imagine it being performed today by a black and a white man. It's only performed for years, Me and My Shadow. We're closer than pages, that's so close.

We're closer than ripples, so when the brook. Wherever you'll find me, you'll find me just. We're closer than a miser or the bloodhounds that lies of me. Closer than smog is to.

In Frank Sinatra, we see the history of the 20th century. In Frank Sinatra, as a Chicago writer named Rennie Sparks puts it, we don't just see a man, we see every man. Frank Sinatra is my father and my brother, my first boyfriend and my last. He's a frail boy crooner in a floppy bow tie.

He's a thug smashing his fist through a wall when his shirts come back with too much starch. And he's a bewildered old man falling off a stool during My Way. Shirley MacLaine says he let a stick of gum behind his ear during takes if some came running. But he also liked to grab an ice cube from his drink, thrusting it into the palm of a gaga fan and snarling, here, go skate around on it.

I wish someone would hurt you, he told Shirley, so I could kill them for you. Well, today on our program, of course, Chairman of the Board. Act one of our program together, Frank Sinatra, Michael Ventura reads from his novel of the same name. Act two, a modest request to all of American television from one Sinatra fan on her knees.

Act three, history lesson for the young people. Act four, Frank Sinatra has a cold. We have Gay Talese on the program reading from his classic 1966 account of several weeks he spent following Frank Sinatra at the height of Sinatra Rat Pack power. Act five, a restaurant full of cabbies gets choked up over Frank.

Stay with us, Polly. Act one, The Death of Frank Sinatra. Michael Ventura grew up in the 1950s in New York. I'm Sicilian on both sides of my family.

And if you grew up as a Sicilian kid in the 50s in New York, it was like Sinatra was part of your family. He was the most famous Italian except for some baseball stars. Literally, just a figure people gossiped about and they listened to his songs. And he was held up to me by my father as an example.

You see him, he can spit in anybody's eye and get away with it. When Michael Ventura published a novel in 1996 called The Death of Frank Sinatra, Sinatra's people were not pleased. The book, however, is not literally about Frank Sinatra. It's about men like Michael Ventura whose sense of style and sense of self came in part from Frank's style.

What's it mean to you, The Death of Frank Sinatra? The death of a style. The death of the last and greatest embodiment of a kind of street elegance. A style that is particularly and indelibly 20th century and that we will not see again.

Frank Sinatra himself only appears in the book once in the scene that he's in. He's doing a concert. One of the things that's interesting is that in a work of fiction, Michael Ventura could choose any era Sinatra concert to put in. And he decided to choose Sinatra in the mid-1990s.

The reason why he says is because the Sinatra that exists for us today is the Sinatra of all of his ages. All of them come forward as he sings. We asked him to read his account of what Sinatra is as rendered in this one concert. As the old man walked out onto the stage, a curtain came up behind him to reveal a large orchestra.

Every musician wore a tuxedo. The conductor was a small round man sitting at a grand piano and wearing earphones. With a slash of the conductor's hand, the rhythm and brass burst into a loud up-tempo number and Sinatra flashed a smile that made him look uncannily young. A young smile in the old pasty face.

And his eyes were the same as they'd always been. Brighter in person than they ever registered on screen. And like the smile, the eyes were young to the point of seeming unnatural. For though no makeup could conceal the sad ravages of the face, the eyes and the smile seemed untouched.

As though to put his listeners at ease with these contradictions, Sinatra grabbed the microphone from the top of the black grand piano and sang about how they made him feel so young. These strangers in his room had that power. They made him feel so young and he would feel that way even when he was old and gray. The song itself was keeping him alive.

It was as though Sinatra's voice was living his entire life all over again at different stages, throughout the song. The first bars were the voice of the old man, raspy, worn, unable to hold notes for longer than a beat. And only his mastery of rhythm kept the song alive and made each word surprising. Surprising though everyone in the room knew the lyrics by heart.

Then in a high note, the voice cracked. And for an instant, the music soured and the audience flinched as one person. But instead of retreating from that bad sound, Sinatra leaned into it. Sinatra bent the note further into a jazz-like harmony.

And so he erased his mistake from memory by making it part of the performance. And then instead of softening after the mistake, Sinatra held the new note longer and louder as though diving into it. Then took a quick breath and sang the next note louder still and fuller. Until seamlessly for several bars, it was the voice of 30 or 40 years ago.

Full and unfettered, resonant and suggestive. Until again it began to crack. And again he used the cracking to modulate back into the voice and style of the old man. On pitch, but raw.

One note per beat. Sometimes right on the beat. Sometimes just off it. Keeping the performance tense until on the last note, the young man's voice returned as though saluting the old man who sang it.

And Sinatra let that note ride and the audience cheered. It was a breathless performance. Like watching a trapeze artist work without a net. With barely a pause, he started to sing of how the best was yet to come and wouldn't it be fine.

An old man in some ageless space who could make them believe for the length of a song that the best indeed was yet to come. And the voice again going to and fro between strength and fragility, youth and age. Sinatra's foot tapped the beat with absolute certainty while his posture was ever so slightly wobbly as though his energy was too much for his Salish Patoa. And still another kind, Sinatra with Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Duke Ellington.

That man on the stage, that old man, was where it all connected. Who else had held the hand of Eleanor Roosevelt and shaken the hand of Carlo Gambino both and on equal terms? That man on the stage, that old man. And why?

Because he could sing love songs like no one else. History of a kind. History transfixed by love songs. That's life.

That's what all the people say. The man is singing now. Some people get their kicks from stomping on a dream, but he don't let that get him down. And now he's singing that we're much too marvelous for words.

The man was speaking now. I'm just waiting for a downbeat, not a bus. Where are you working tomorrow? The musicians laughed.

The conductor, that little round man, laughed. That's my son, the guy with the earphones. I had to promise his mother I'd give the bum a job. More laughter.

Because something was wrong on the stage. The music was playing, but Sinatra wasn't singing. He was looking around as though he's forgotten where he was. He started a lyric, then stopped.

It didn't fit the music. He looked frightened, a scared boy in the body of an old man. He turned toward his son, whose presence seemed to remind him of who he was. He was Frank Sinatra.

He was there to sing love songs to history. And he wheeled around and began to beg, but in the proudest terms, that luck be a lady tonight, and that she keep the party polite, and that she not blow on some other guy's dice. But it had been an awful moment to see that confidence suddenly abandoned, with nothing in the man to take its place. He sang more slowly now, that it seemed we'd stood and talked like this before, and he was right.

That we've looked at each other in the same way then, but there was no way to remember where or when. He sang in the young voice and the old, back and forth, where and when unknowable. And as the lyrics climbed to the final high note he became in his voice, younger and younger until he hit the last when, roundly and fully, and held that note a long time. And when the note and the word were finally exhausted, the goose muscles of his fatty face trembled as though they'd been unaccountably left behind, and his eyes were frightened again.

He had to know that it was very possible, that this was the last time his voice would rise to such a height. And he looked like an old man who had said an irreparable goodbye. He took a few steps, tried to recover. Slowly he started to speak.

I'm what they call a saloon singer. For most of the performance he had been singing happily about love, jauntily. Perhaps that was in part a function of age. It was easier with that ravaged and undependable voice to sing faster tempos that gave him the flexibility to go through many changes and use many approaches.

Slow, sad songs required rounder tones and more control. Could not be played with as easily, or far more dangerous. He's risking humiliation every moment. Say what you like, that's a very brave man.

The song began. He's telling us to drink up, all we happy people. Nobody here looks very happy, but he's admitting that we're happier than him. He says he's paying for the drinks and the laughs.

He's paying for everything. Because a woman with angel eyes is gone. And she's really gone. What a tenderness he has for her.

What a terrible, generous, all-encompassing tenderness. He's not bitter. He's not angry at her. Those angel eyes had every right to look elsewhere.

He asks us to excuse him because he must disappear. And his voice is disappearing with him. A scratchy whisper, like an old wax record played on an old machine. With unbearable politeness, with a tenderness close to death, the death of his voice, he is saying, excuse me, I must disappear.

There are no angel eyes left in the room. No reason to stay. He's tired. He could not live unless he sang to us.

But each time he sings, he dares humiliation. Let us watch the dying relationship between him and his voice, him and his memory, him and that angelic one whom he could not hold, whom he was no man for, whom his tenderness could finally not sustain, whom his darkness drove away. Everything has ended. Everything is over.

He can't even say excuse me anymore. He thanks us. He's leaving us. He touched what we like to think was our history, and it has left him like this.

And now he is leaving us. Everyone cheered as he walked off the stage. Do they know what they're cheering? Do they know they're watching a man rehearses death?

We put one in every performance if you've seen us perform before, and it's called a saloon song. I do one in each performance because somebody somewhere sometime dubbed me the saloon singer. So I don't want to disappoint him. That is good.

It happened because I have a lot of truth back of that too, because when I was very young and I started working in joints in New Jersey and bars and grills and all kinds of places. But one day somebody came in and offered me a better job. Look what happened to me. Nothing.

Drink up! Drink up all you people! Order anything that you see. And have fun, all you lovely people.

The drinks and the laughs on me. Act 2. One Sinatra fan versus all of network TV. Our program today was first broadcast a few years back when Frank Sinatra was still alive.

And in the original broadcast, writer Sarah Vowell made a plea to American television newscasters and a prediction about what would happen when Sinatra finally died. Here's what she said, I'll tell you at the end of her story whether her prediction came true. Any day now, Peter Jennings will cut away from some freak mudslide story, casualties, six registered voters, face another camera and denounce Old Blue Eyes' death. Later, the World News Tonight credits will roll over a tasteful montage of Frank's film stills and album covers.

The other networks will run similar tributes, as will the brainiacs at Entertainment Tonight and those swingers on the NewsHour at PBS. But you know what? It will not matter whether Sinatra's video wake is hosted by the tweety Jim Lehrer or the perky Katie Couric because each and every remembrance will be accompanied by the same damn song, the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly dictatorial chestnut in the old man's vast and dazzling backlog, My Way. When the guy who generously gave us greats like I Get a Kick Out of You kicks it, we won't put on our bassy boots or get a load of those cuckoo things he's been saying.

We'll be bored terrifically, screaming at the TV set every time he and that savvy string section face the final curtain. And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain. Get it? He's dead and on tape from the grave talking about how the end is near.

Spooky. I've lived a life that's full. The only way My Way has ever worked is if the person singing it is dumber than the song, which is why the only successful rendition of it was perpetrated by Sid Vicious. Frank, and Elvis for that matter, was always too complicated, too full of rhythmic freedom to settle into the song's simplistic selfishness.

My Way pretends to speak up for self-possession and personal vision when really it only calls forth the temper tantrums of two-year-olds, or perhaps the last words spoken to Eva Braun. I did it my way. Remember the stories from Belgrade, how each night when the government-controlled evening news aired, the townspeople blew whistles or banged on pots and pans so they wouldn't hear the state's lies? Keep that beautiful action in mind when Sinatra's dead and all the TVs in your more boring democratic world are playing My Way.

Drown it out. Play something else to the montage in your own heart. Or just turn off the TV sound. Have your stereo queued up and ready to go.

He could keel over any second. I mean, he might not even make it through this hour-long radio show. Be prepared. Why not play Angel Eyes for its subtle reference to the singer's Mediterranean windows to the soul, for its knowing, jaunty adieu?

Skew me while I disappear. Are you listening, Peter Jennings? Hear how great that would work under all those post-war black and white snapshots, how that nice Christian harp outro hints at Frank's unlikely salvation. Let's all listen again.

Skew me while I disappear. I admit this may not be quite stupid and obvious enough for network television, so if the staff of the Today show is hearing my voice right now, here's another suggestion. That's life. That's what all the people say.

You're riding high in April, shot down in May. If Angel Eyes is all periods and pauses, this song is all exclamation points. Picture, please, Good Morning America staffers, quick cut shots of Sinatra with Ava Gardner, Sinatra with daughter Nancy at age 5, Sinatra with Kennedy, Sinatra with some mob boss no one will recognize anyway over these lyrics. I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.

I've been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing. Each time I find myself flat on my face, I pick myself up and get back in the race. That's life. That's life.

I tell you. It's really a terrible choice. It's just as corny as my way, but at least it's got a little bit of the old ring-a-ding-d The capital years, the hat askew, the tie loosened. TV producers of America, I beg you, for all of us, for Frank, ixnay on the my way.

Excuse me now, while I disappear. Well, although Sarah Vowell's plea to network television was broadcast twice on our show and once on NPR's All Things Considered when Frank Sinatra died on May 14, 1998, just a month after we last played Sarah's commentary, every network newscast used the song My Way in its obituary. So much for the power of public radio to alter the national debate. The one exception was ABC's Nightline, which is often a maverick force in TV news.

The night Sinatra died, Nightline ended its special hour-long tribute to Sinatra by playing Sarah's radio story. In other words, the person who got the last word on American network news that day, the day of Sinatra's passing, was Sarah. Her essay is now collected in her book of radio essays, Take the Canoe. Coming up, Gabe Talese on the road with Sinatra in '66.

That's in a minute from Public Radio International. One Hour program continues. This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers to take a whack at that theme with fiction and nonfiction radio monologues, whatever we can think of.

And the subject of today's show, what, what was his name again? My name is Francis Albert. And I sing love songs, mostly after dark, mostly in saloons. Yes, you cannot have a career as long and distinguished as Frank Sinatra's without some experiments that fail.

Witness Frank Sinatra's cover of Bad, Bad Leroy Brown with the Rod McCuen poetry he recorded. I can just about get through the day, but the night makes me nervous. Not for any reason, except maybe that it catches you, unaware. And follows you, the way a woman follows when she wants something.

What, what is that? The night makes Frank Sinatra nervous? Frank Sinatra? John Connors, who provides a lot of music for our radio program, has a huge, huge Frank Sinatra collection, was playing me some of these Sinatra turkeys.

And we had this odd little moment. He was playing me Sinatra's cover of the Simon and Garfunkel hit Mrs. Robinson. So how's your bird, Mrs.

Robinson? Dandy, Mrs. Robinson, you say. Hey, hey, hey.

Well, have you heard? It's hard for me to think it's bad, because for me, bad is boring. Is boring. And none of this is boring.

I still like him. It's really weird. And it's, it's really weird because these are the songs that made me like him. You know, I'm just, I'm just thinking of this now, because like, when I was growing up, I didn't hear the Beatles.

I heard the chipmunks doing the Beatles. Because you are post-baby boom. I'm post-baby boom, but, but my mother was going out and was buying Sinatra singing Mrs. Robinson.

So this is the song. This is Mrs. Robinson to me. When I hear the Simon and Garfunkel version of Mrs.

Robinson, it's the new version. It's the cover. This is the original. The Simon and Garfunkel version is the cover.

Act three. So what makes Sinatra so special anyway? From the time of his big breakthrough as a solo singer in 1942, Frank Sinatra simply was more emotionally expressive, more vulnerable, more openly sensual than any male pop singer to that point. But the Frank Sinatra that we think of as Frank Sinatra did not appear until the 1950s.

After a career slump, after his second marriage with Ava Gardner broke up, he went into the studio to record songs with a much more tough, more swinging sound than he had done before. His public image was becoming the character who we know now, half tough guy, half sentimental saloon singer. And Nelson Riddle invented this sound for these albums with heavy input apparently from Sinatra. The 50s are the era of nearly everything we think of today as a Sinatra standard.

Those fingers in my hair, that sly come-hither stare, that strips my conscience bare. It's witchcraft. Music writer Will Friedwald says that the sound that Riddle invented for Sinatra is built around bass trombone, flute, muted trumpet, and strings. And there's this lightness to the orchestration, with a much more complicated mix of melodies and countermelodies on different instruments than other composers were using them on top records.

Witness, for example, how Riddle used trumpeter Harry Sweets Edison. Essentially, he was not hired as a trumpeter to sit in the section, but he was hired strictly as a soloist or an obligatoist. And he would not sit in the section, but he has his own, he would sit to the side and had his own special microphone. And so Sweets would just improvise these little trumpet fills here and there on the muted trumpet.

And when he plays, he's only playing almost in between the breaths. Well, as Gary Giddens points out, Sweets essentially plays three kinds of solos, beep, beep, beep, and beep, beep, beep. Let me play a little bit of this. He comes in here, if I understand right, right after Sinatra sings with people she'd hate.

She loves the theater, but never comes late. She'd never bother with people she'd hate. That's why the lady is a tramp. I'm just going to come back again in a couple seconds.

She'll have no crap games with sharpies and frauds. And she won't go to Harlem in Lincoln's or Fords. And she won't dish the dirt. Sinatra's at his peak in the 50s and the early 60s.

These are the years of his greatest recordings, of his movies, of the Rat Pack. And this now brings us to our next act, act four. Sinatra has a cold. If we want a glimpse into the life that Sinatra led during his heyday, one of the most famous accounts is by journalist Gay Talese, first published in Esquire magazine in 1966, called Sinatra Has a Cold.

It's this long, funny, sad story with many, many, many scenes. We only have time for an excerpt here, which Gay Talese agreed to read for us. Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of a bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing.

He had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills, he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke in the semi-darkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the climber's clang of folk rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his 50th birthday. Sinatra had been working on a film that he now disliked and could not wait to finish. He was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the 20-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight.

He was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life to be shown in two weeks was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendships with mafia leaders. He was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra, a man in his music, which would require that he sing 18 songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was a victim of ailments so common that most people would consider it trivial, but when it gets to Sinatra, it can plunge him into a state of anguish and deep depression, panic, even rage.

Frank Sinatra had a cold. Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel, only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that unshakable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche, but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond, as surely as a president of the United States suddenly sick can shake the national economy.

For Frank Sinatra was now involved with many things involving many people. His own film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile parts firm, his real estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of 75, which are only a portion of the power he is and has come to represent. He now seemed to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has the money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. All the way, all or nothing at all.

This is the Sicilian Sinatra. He permits his friends, if they wish to remain that, none of the easy Anglo-Saxon outs. But if they remain loyal, then there is nothing Sinatra will not do for them. Fabulous gifts, personal kindnesses, encouragement when they're down, adulation when they're up.

They are wise to remember, however, one thing. He is Sinatra, the boss, Il padrone. Or better still, he is what traditional And when Sinatra laughed, everybody laughed. And Rickles pointed toward Joey Bishop and said, Bishop keeps checking with Frank to see what's funny.

Then after Rickles told some Jewish jokes, Dean Martin stood up and yelled, Hey, you're always talking about the Jews, never about the Italians. And Rickles cut him off. What do we need the Italians for? All they do is keep the flies off our fish.

Sinatra laughed. They all laughed. And Rickles went on this way for nearly an hour until Sinatra, standing up, said, All right, all right, come on, get this thing over with. I gotta go.

Shut up and sit down, Rickles yelled. I gotta listen to you sing. Who do you think you're talking to, Sinatra yelled. Dick Hames, Rickles replied, and Sinatra laughed again.

And then Dean Martin, pouring a bottle of whiskey over his head, entirely drenching his tuxedo, pounded the table. By 4 a.m., Frank Sinatra led the group out of the Sahara, some of them carrying the glasses of whiskey with them, sipping along the sidewalk and into the cars. And then returning to the Sands, they walked into the gaming casino. It was still packed with people.

Frank Sinatra, holding a shot glass of bourbon in his left hand, walked through the crowd. He, unlike some of his friends, was perfectly pressed. His tuxedo tied precisely, his shoes unsmudged. He never seems to lose his dignity, never lets his guard completely down, no matter how much he is drunk or how long he's been up.

He never sways when he walks like Dean Martin, nor does he dance in the aisles or jump up on the tables like Sammy Davis. A part of Sinatra, no matter where he is, is never there. There's always a part of him, though sometimes a small part, that remains Il Padrone. The crowd that had gathered around him now opened to let him through.

But a woman stopped in front of him, handing him a piece of paper. He signed it, and then he said, Thank you. In the rear of the Sands' large dining room was a long table reserved for Sinatra. The dining room was fairly empty at this hour, with perhaps two dozen other people in the room, including a table of four unescorted young ladies sitting near Sinatra.

On the other side of the room, a long table sat seven men shoulder to shoulder against the wall, two of them wearing dark glasses, all of them eating quietly, speaking hardly a word, just sitting and eating and missing nothing. The Sinatra party, after getting settled and having a few more drinks, ordered something to eat. The table was about the same size as the one reserved for Sinatra whenever he's at Jilly's in New York. And the people seated around this table in Las Vegas are mainly the same people who are often seen with Sinatra at Jilly's restaurant in New York, or at a restaurant in California, or in Italy, or in New Jersey, wherever Sinatra happens to be.

When Sinatra sits to dine, his trusted friends are close. And no matter where he is, no matter how elegant the place may be, there's something of the neighborhood showing because Sinatra, no matter how far he has come, is still something of the boy from the neighborhood. Only now, he can take his neighborhood with him. In some ways, the quasi-family affair at the reserved table in a public place is the closest thing Sinatra now has to home life.

This American Life is produced today by Peter Connie and myself, with Louise Spiegel and Nancy Updike, contributing editor Sarah Vowell, Paul Topczak, and Margie Rockland. Special thanks today to Billy May, the Sinatra Society of America, Bob Carlson, Randy Sparks, Charles Pinon, Christina Stevens, and Salon Magazine, where a version of Sarah Vowell's essay first appeared. To buy a cassette of this program, call 312-832-3380 or visit our website, where you can also listen to our shows for free, www.thislife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

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Back next week with more stories of This American Life. So make it one for my baby and one more for the road. The long, that long, it's long. PRI, Public Radio International.