The Weekly Screed (#801)

… or the Highway
by David Benjamin

"He didn't like it. That song stuck and he couldn't get it off his shoe. He always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent.”
                     — Tina Sinatra, on her father’s opinion of “My Way”

MADISON, Wis. — I was impressed, perhaps awestruck, by Rachel Maddow’s restraint on Inauguration night. She didn’t flinch, didn’t curl a lip, didn’t roll her eyes as “president” Trump took to the dance floor and tripped the leaden fantastic to his favorite tune, “My Way.”

Really?

I grew up to the voice of Frank Sinatra. He was everywhere on radio, TV, in the movies. And he deserved all the glory he got. My favorite Sinatra cover was his wistful rendition of the Kingston Trio song, “It Was a Very Good Year.” His talent was eclectic and extraordinary. He proved he could dance with Gene Kelly in On the Town and Anchors Aweigh. He showed that he could hold his own with actors like Laurence Harvey (The Manchurian Candidate) and Burt Lancaster (From Here to Eternity), even Grace Kelly! He maintained a standard of excellence for decades, despite a notoriously unhealthy lifestyle. When Sinatra finally slipped into a late-career decline, I tried to look away.

But he was hard to avoid.

Although he had mostly lost his voice, he kept recording. He could still fill a ballpark with adoring septuagenarian bobby-soxers, all paying triple figures to hear Frank croak out “New York, New York.” He wasn’t proud of what he was doing then, for the money. You can hear it. But he kept stroking.

Listen to Sinatra on his last few pop hits, “Strangers in the Night” and the vaguely incestuous duet of “Something Stupid” with his talentless daughter, Nancy. There’s contempt in his voice for the shmaltz and bathos in these fifth-rate ditties. Still, I forgave Frank for these sides because, after all, he’s the jazzman whose phrasing and insight turned “One for My Baby” into the perfect lament to lost love. Nobody ever sang “Chicago” quite so infectiously or “I Cover the Waterfront” so hauntingly.

So, okay, Frank. I grant you “Strangers in the Night.”

But I had draw the line when Paul Anka stole the melody of a rinky-dink French pop song, wrote new lyrics and then offered it to Sinatra. Frank should have known better. He should have said, “This low I will not stoop. Give this turkey to Frankie Laine. Or sing it yourself.” But Sinatra gave in and recorded “My Way” — a self-congratulatory snatch of doggerel that begins as a paean to rugged individualism but sinks, by its last verse, into the desolate sneer of a dying shut-in. It became, of course, one of Frank’s biggest hits.

And this I cannot forgive.

Of course, Sinatra paid his penance. The fact that millions of fans revere “My Way” as Frank’s last testament is a crowning indignity. He couldn’t get through a concert, in his final years, without having to drone this self-piteous dirge.

Sinatra came to deplore the song, which is easy to understand if you listen dispassionately: “… when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out…” Yecch. Lines like this bespeak neither Paul Anka nor Sinatra. Songwriter Anka, probably while drunk, conceived a a black romance, its protagonist a bitter recluse isolated by a sourceless anger, irreconcilable to the thousand compromises we all make in life, else we are crushed. The result: an ill-rhymed elegy to macho fantasy, the testimony of a loser who thinks he won by never backing down, never checking his impulses, and never diverted — by love, leisure or laughter — from his dogged plod.

True to the lyric, Sinatra had regrets, especially about having to sing “My Way” over and over again to a million starstruck geezers. The song diminished him, made him common. Listen to his other work, especially in those elegant mid-career albums after his celebrity had faded and he grasped so much better the lyrics — both sad and joyful — into which he was breathing life. Watch him, exuberant and athletic in High Society, or tortured by mortal frailty in The Man with Golden Arm, and you see an intricate, thoughtful actor who had studied and pierced the depths of his characters. By all accounts, Frank Sinatra was both selfish and gregarious, often impetuous, sometimes needy, frequently arrogant but equally tender and generous, and — ultimately — inscrutable. He was both larger than life and humbler than his cynical Rat Pack persona. He was a cat with nine lives and a hundred mythical faces. He bore no resemblance to the deathbed whiner depicted in the lyrics of “My Way.”

Sinatra, remember, was a street kid who savored the company of the rich and profligate. I doubt that he ever aspired to epitomize the “forgotten man,” whoever that is. And he absolutely did not want “My Way” as his epitaph. Given his druthers, I think he might have chosen “Come Fly With Me.” But “Autumn in New York” would be just as good. There’s also this sparkling version of “You Make Me Feel So Young” on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Or, well… so many choices.

Anything but “My Way.”

Which brings me to Donald Trump, who sincerely loves the song. Which figures. The man’s inclination toward self-congratulatory shlock hardly comes as a shock. But think about it. What if Trump had, for once, confounded our expectations, swept Melania onto the dancefloor and cued the bandleader to play “It Was a Very Good Year,” or perhaps the Sinatra cover I’m listening to at this moment, “Maybe You’ll Be There”? You should hear it!

If Trump had revealed momentarily that he has, at least, please, just a hint of good taste in music (or something!), well, some of us — perhaps even me — might have entertained one (fleeting) hope that we might yet be spared the “American carnage” of doing it his way.
 
And if he had, what about Rachel?

She’s a softie. She would’ve smiled.