Okay, so I’m listening to Sinatra and Count Basie circa 1965 around the time Sinatra turned 50 – Now, I love listening to him Singing – LOVE LOVE LOVE to hear him sing, but outside of that thought he was pretty weird (or drunk or both).
Some of the gems that are on this CD:
They’re gonna remodle such and such and in fact they’re gonna close the whole place down for four weeks and bring Sammy Davis Jr. in just to clean (much laughter).
So, I packed my straw suitcase and headed for New York I even had to bum a ride on a ferry. >pause< laughter. >pause< You people aren’t paying attention tonight. (is this a gay sex joke?
I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Martin has been stoned more than US Embassies. (laughter)
He also spends a lot of time using a put on step n’ fethit kind of accent . “I do dat dere” I do mean he" yet he is very gracious to Basie and Quincy Jones and their artistry.
WAG, he was a product of his time and that sort of casual racism was accepted then? I’d be willing to wager that Frank thought he was being affectionate in his comments.
Frank helped establish the concept of cool. In those days, in spite of his humor to the contrary, Frank was influential in breaking down racial barriers for entertainers. True, Sammy took a fair amount of heat from Frank and Dean, but he didn’t seem to mind all that much.
Frank’s basic attitude was “fuck you.” If you got on his good side there was virtually nobody any more loyal. That got him in bad with the feds because he was loyal to folks you aren’t supposed to be loyal to: the mob.
Since the word “humor” is in the title, and since this “humor” applies to Frank, and assuming you haven’t heard it before, here’s one told on Frank by comic associate and Las Vegas star Shecky Green.
Shecky had this bit where he said, "Of course I love Frank. Frank saved my life. Yeah. These two big guys were beating me within an inch of my life out in the parking lot at the Sands when Frank comes up and says, “That’s enough.”
I can’t recommend strongly enough the biographies on Frank, including the unauthorized ones, for some heavy duty entertainment. There’s only been one Frank, and, for me at least, no better singer.
It shoud also be pointed out that Sinatra was joking about his very close friends, the other “Rat Pack” members. And his audience was very familiar with them, because they were pretty much the same audience. He would not have gotten away with substituting Martin Luther King for Sammy Davis Jr.
Pretty much everybody in show business and in real life told such jokes. And then people wonder why there was such a movement as political correctness. ("Well, it’s funny when Frank does it. :rolleyes: )
Not everybody gave Sinatra a pass, then or now.
My favorite was Don Rickles spotting Sinatra in the audience during his act. He said, “Make yourself at home, Frank. Hit somebody.”
Like an overwhelming majority of the people with the egos to make it big in show business, something that is difficult to impossible to accomplish without utter singlemindedness and ruthlessness, Sinatra was an obnoxious asshole. Not always, of course, and that didn’t preclude him from having close friends or doing good deeds. But an asshole, nonetheless. You either have to accept this not just for him but for all of them, or not. And if not, you’ll run out of entertainment to watch real fast.
I’m for mostly accepting and understanding, while reserving the right to criticize the worst excesses. Some of Hollywood’s “heroes” are best scraped off the bottom of shoes. Some were truly good people. The majority were somewhere in between. Perhaps it’s best not to know too much about any of them.
I agree that this “humor” was common in that era…they thought politically correct was a description of Dwight Eisenhower.
I am old enough to remember being taken as a little kid to see a high school class put on a minstrel show, with black-face, during an assembly to much merriment. I can remember asking my mother why I couldn’t drink from one of the faucets at the train station, “that one is for the colored people” she told me.
Look at the original film, “Ocean’s Eleven” and watch how the Rat Pack interact. There are a few comments in there about women that probably wouldn’t fly well today. Frank treated “broads” like disposable sex toys…but that was considered “cool” and just the way things were back then.
We sometimes forget how much things have changed in a relatively short period of time. I am sure there is a huge group of men (and probably some women) who would love to go back to that “simpler” era of booze, broads and bigotry. Las Vegas is filled with 20somethings all trying to recapture those hedonistic times. And I suppose if you are a white, male heterosexual, those certainly were “the good old days.”
It’s probably a good topic for a new thread, so I’ll try to contain myself to just an add-on comment: Playboy did as much as any other single source to direct traffic during those years. The lifestyle that The Rat Pack and other “swingers” (in the old sense before wife-swapping usurped the term) espoused was totally endorsed, supported, praised and advertised in Playboy’s pages, and none other than John Fitzgerald Kennedy was seen as a major poster child for the concept.
IMHO, the battle between the Ike faction and the JFK faction has been behind the “red state” and “blue state” war since at least that far back.
If you’re interested in Sinatra the singer/musician as opposed to the Mobbed-up figure of controversy, I can recommend this book. I bought it as a Christmas present for my dad, and he (a veteran clarinet and sax man who plays the kind of tunes Frank performed) enjoyed it.
I agree 100%. This is the book I was trying to think of when I checked the library’s catalog and came up with the Taraborrelli title. (I’m pretty sure I read both, but the Friedwald book is a jewel for the details of the music.)
I’m just curious, Sternvogel, if your dad’s familiarity with the actual music makes (made?) him as fascinated with the skill Frank had. A chess buddy of mine played trumpet in the Opryland orchestra back when I Hear America Singing was a show to see (early 70’s). He said that every time they had a Henry Mancini chart to play that it was head and shoulders above the other tunes in terms of craft and logic. I suspect Frank’s charts were that way, too, especially the Nelson Riddle ones.
I’m just old enough to remember the Mike Royko cloumn in which he stated flatly that racist insults were the only true path to racial harmony. He followed it up with a column where he complained that there wasn’t an epithet for Norwegians, and had a contest inviting readers to come up with one. Yes, different times.
Squarehead was disqualified as being primarily a Swedish epithet, and he didn’t want to have to do the same thing all over again for them. Norski was disqualified as not offensive enough. No one suggested Lutefisk Licker (or Lefske Lover for that matter), and Herring Choker finished second to Noogin. I don’t remember who it was that called Norwegians Noogins, but they must have really meant it to beat out Herring Choker.
I would heartily recommend Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra, by Sinatra’s valet for over 13 years, George Jacobs. It’s a superb and authentic behind-the-scenes account of life in Sinatraland during Sinatra’s most powerful and accomplished years. Liz Smith called it a “loving poison-pen letter”, and it really is. Jacobs loved Sinatra tremendously and that’s obvious with every page, but he pulls no punches about what went on in Sinatra’s life.
“Lutefisk Licker” is one I thought up myself and, IMHO, is a much worse epithet than “Lefske (or Lefse) Lover.” For one thing, lefse/lefske–a soft flat tortilla-type flat-bread made with mashed potatoes–is quite tasty but lutefisk, on the other hand, is NASTY. Also, the term “licker” is a lot cruder and has more obscene connotations to it than the term “lover.”
As for “Noogins”–come on! That’s too close to “noogie.” Call me a “Half-Noogin” and I’ll be too busy thinking of Bill Murray tapping the top of Gilda Radner’s dome with his knuckles to be offended.
Sorry, I was making the Lefse thing up. An ex-girlfriend of mine had a t-shirt that said “Love, lutefisk and lefse.” You are right, though. There is no good reason to cure fish with lye.
I remember that one too. And it’s likely you already realize this from your Royko-familiarity, but for those who didn’t read he stuff, he was being ironic. He wasn’t really advocating racist insults, and wasn’t really annoyed that there wasn’t an insulting term for Norwegians.
Mike often used a voice that said the opposite (or sometimes 90 degrees sideways), of what he truely meant to convey.