The Postal Service unveiled a Frank Sinatra stamp last week on what would have been his 92nd birthday. It was, of course, first-class.
For better and occasionally for worse, Sinatra provided the sound track for our romantic lives as the Greatest Generation went to war, morphing from a scrawny crooner mobbed by teen-age girls to middle-aged sophisticate specializing in wised-up ballads of wounded rue to mellow old lover recalling the joys of yesteryear with swinging optimism (“The Best Is Yet to Come” is inscribed on his tombstone).
My own tastes ran more to Ella, Billie and Louis, but Frank Sinatra was a mesmerizing figure who held the 20th century stage with what Benjamin Schwarz in the Atlantic recently called “the most spectacular second act in American cultural history.”
Washed up before 40, he came back to win an Academy Award by playing Maggio in “From Here to Eternity,” an event celebrated by Mario Puzo in the “Godfather” scene of a Hollywood producer waking up with his horse’s head under the covers to persuade him to cast Don Corleone’s crooner.
Fictionalized as that may have been, Sinatra’s mob ties were real, culminating in introducing a Mafia boss’ girl friend to JFK during his White House years.
Sinatra was politically liberal back then but ended up by giving $4 million to the election campaign of his fellow actor Ronald Reagan in 1980.