BEING PERFECTLY FRANK

HE WAS MORE THAN A GREAT SINGER -- SINATRA EMBODIED THE SOUND OF AN AGE

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 4, 1998

Page: D1

Section: Books

Sinatra's performance career ended with a concert in Japan in 1994, when he had just passed his 79th birthday. Nevertheless, more than 200 CDs remain in print, presumably because they continue to sell, and these two volumes have lengthened the groaning shelf of Sinatra books. Neither of them aspires to add anything new either to the facts or to the legend, but each makes an additional attractive souvenir of a career that had its unattractive aspects.

John Lahr's essay on Sinatra, ``The King of Ring-a-Ding-Ding!'' first appeared in The New Yorker; now it prefaces a handsome selection of 100 moody, black-and-white photographs in ``Sinatra: The Artist and the Man,'' a beautifully designed volume that is a pleasure both to hold and to behold.

Lahr's essay is professionally expert, and the writer enjoyed the benefit of insightful conversations with at least one of Sinatra's three children (Tina), Lauren Bacall, Pete Hamill, and several others who played a part in the story. He is an elegant writer, accomplished at collage -- an amusing paragraph twirls through a corps of journalistic inventions on Sinatra's name (``Sinatrance, Swoonheart, Sinatritis, Swoonology, Sinatralating, Swoonatra, Sinatraceptive, Swoonatrance . . .''). He has an eye for the amusing and revelatory detail in the work of his predecessors. ``Arnold Shaw wrote in his 1968 biography, `When it snowed, girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.' ''

Lahr does a better job on Sinatra the man, however, than on Sinatra the singer. Economically he tells the story of Francis Albert Sinestro's rise from Hoboken, N.J., to the bandstands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, the breakaway into the solo spotlight, the career collapse, the tempestuous affair with Ava Gardner, the film comeback with ``From Here to Eternity,'' and the corresponding comeback in the Capitol Records recording studio with arranger Nelson Riddle, the mobsters, the presidents, the women (``I loved them all, I really did''), the tantrums, the petulance, the violence, the vulgarity, the elegance, the generosity. Lahr isn't a scandalmonger, like his notorious predecessor Kitty Kelley, but he tells some gamy anecdotes that involve language that still can't be reprinted in a family newspaper. He doesn't try to excuse the inexcusable, but he does try to understand it, and his attitude is basically sympathetic. Dolly Sinatra, midwife, abortionist, ward boss, and one of the monster-mothers of all time, takes her share of the blame for her son's flaws of character, but she gets some credit for his success, too.

Lahr's best criticism, and his books about his father Bert Lahr and the British comedian Dame Edna Everege (Barry Humphries), depend not only on shrewd observation but also on personal involvement. In this respect, he is disappointing on Sinatra -- only one paragraph turns personal:

``. . . While the fifties were stalled in normalcy, Sinatra had about him a whiff of the libertine. His style -- the thin, sensitive line of his look and of his singing -- had the immanence of the hip combined with the articulateness of the traditional, to which all of us preppy white boys could relate. We dressed Sinatra, doing up our paisley Brooks Brothers ties into Windsor knots. We talked Sinatra: `Charlies' for breasts, `gas' for fun . . . the suffix `-ville' added to as many words as we could work into our new patter. We wanted to go to the party and it seemed that Sinatra had always been there.''

Sinatra once said, ``When I sing, I believe I'm honest. An audience is like a broad. If you're indifferent, endsville.'' Lahr quotes that remark, but doesn't really manage to get much further. Lahr does quote alert listeners who analyze and praise Sinatra's mastery of the microphone, breath control, phrasing, rhythm and diction, and the ways in which his voice and style changed, and didn't, over the years. Sinatra himself was often generous in praising those he had learned from -- Billie Holiday, Mabel Mercer, Dorsey and other jazz instrumentalists, as well as performers from the classical world, like Jascha Heifetz. Met soprano Dorothy Kirsten was a regular on one of his radio shows, and she always spoke of how much she had learned from him about how to phrase a ballad; he obviously learned a thing or two from her, and from other classically-trained singers, about the kind of diaphragmatic breathing that made ballad-phrasing, Sinatra-style, possible.

Lahr has one of the best eyes in the critical fraternity, but he doesn't seem to have much of an ear, and there is almost no evidence in his book that he has tried to listen to Sinatra analytically himself, and he doesn't make many attempts to describe how Sinatra sounds when he sings. Lahr cites Sinatra's collaboration with Riddle on ``I've Got You Under My Skin'' as a cornerstone, and he manages to say quite a lot about the arrangement -- but writes nothing about Sinatra. This is particularly disappointing because in his other books Lahr revels in the opportunity to describe, quite precisely and evocatively, ``indescribable'' theatrical phenomena.

The biographical part of Donald Clarke's ``All Or Nothing at All'' is also an exercise in assimilating the work of previous biographers and autobiographers, and sharp-eyed scrutiny of the press-clips. Clarke, an American who lives in Wales, has written a previous book on Holiday; he has an engaging, wisecracking style that sometimes topples over into sloppiness, especially when he attempts to supply political and sociological context (``After Spiro Agnew left the scene, Sinatra's steady woman friend had been Barbara Marx''). The book has not been very carefully edited, and sometimes the reader has to sort out chronology that ought to have been Clarke's responsibility to clarify.

Like Lahr, Clarke knows a good quote when he sees one -- ``as Gene Lees put it, Sinatra made things difficult for other singers; after Sinatra, if you sounded like him, you were imitating, but if you didn't, you sounded like you were doing it wrong.'' Clarke is no more interested in Sinatra's movies than Lahr, but he does write better about them, and he's also more interested in the phenomenal statistics. He points out, for example, that Sinatra, who virtually invented the ``album'' -- had 74 of them on the charts, the first in 1945, the last in 1995.

Best of all, one has the feeling that Clarke enjoyed writing this book; in the preface, he calls it an ``excuse to listen to all of Frank Sinatra's records.'' Most of those records he seems merely to have played, but some of them he really did listen to, and occasionally he even makes the effort to try to write down what he has heard. In ``Night and Day,'' ``Sinatra's diction is incredibly good, as always; at the very beginning you can hear two separate letter `d' sounds in `and' and `day.' '' Clarke feels no need to defend some of Sinatra's weaker efforts, early, middle, and late; it is useful to be reminded that Sinatra remained effective in concert far longer than he did in the recording studio. (Sometimes, he would be recorded in the dark, with a single spotlight, just as if he were appearing onstage.)

But the most eloquent tribute comes from neither of these writers, although it appears in Lahr's essay. At Sinatra's 80th birthday tribute in Los Angeles, the Boss addressed the Chairman of the Board, and Bruce Springsteen said, ``My first recollection of Frank's voice was coming out of a jukebox in a dark bar on a Sunday afternoon, when my mother and I went searching for my father. And I remember she said, `Listen to that, that's Frank Sinatra. He's from New Jersey.' It was a voice filled with bad attitude, life, beauty, excitement, a nasty sense of freedom, sex, and a sad knowledge of the ways of the world. Every song seemed to have as its postscript, `And if you don't like it, here's a punch in the kisser.' But it was the deep blueness of Frank's voice that affected me the most, and while his music became synonymous with black tie, good life, the best booze, women, sophistication, his blues voice was always the sound of hard luck and men late at night with the last ten dollars in their pockets trying to figure a way out. On behalf of all New Jersey, Frank, I want to say, `Hail brother, you sang out our soul.' ''