Archives for April 2015

“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

Rare are the dreams of childhood that come true at last, but one of mine, much to my surprise and delight, has actually realized itself, more or less, now that I’m on the brink of late middle age: I have a passably attractive speaking voice. No, it isn’t the dark-brown, gorgeously fine-grained James Mason-type voice for which I always longed in vain, nor do I have the floor-shaking chest resonance that I envy whenever I hear it. But as I listened to myself on the soundtrack of HBO’s Sinatra: All or Nothing at All the other night, I was reminded that I really do sound good when speaking into a microphone. Time has transposed me down a major third, and what was once a light baritone is now a smooth, slightly heavier bass-baritone, one that by all accounts is pleasing to the ear, especially when it’s electronically amplified.

This midlife transformation reminds me of the one experienced by the fictional narrator of Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, who to his utter amazement became famous throughout Canada as a radio news commentator:

I’m not a man with much self-confidence and when I was young took it for granted that nobody respected me or paid me any attention. When I was young I was just another of those people who are around, for I had, and still have, a clumsy body of which I was never proud and when I was young I was timid. But living with Catherine had matured me a little and my work on the radio had taught me how to control my voice. I realized now—for I have learned to listen to my own voice as though it came from somebody else, I have learned what it sounds like from listening to play-backs in the studio—I realized now that it was resonant and steady.

Had I been born three-quarters of a century earlier, I, too, might have done well in radio. But I missed that boat long, long ago, and even if I’d tried to board it, the gelded voices that are favored on what is left of network radio are infinitely different from the ones that dominated the medium in the forgotten days of Ed Murrow and Eric Sevareid. We now prefer snarky pseudo-irony to calm authority. So instead of earning a living by talking into a microphone, I do it by sitting on the aisle and writing about what I see there, and save on rare occasions, the only people who hear my voice are the ones sitting next to me.

I hope you don’t think I’m dissatisfied with my lot. Far from it! I am, however, perpetually puzzled by the yawning gap between what I am and what I expected to become. Here’s something I wrote a decade ago:

I was talking the other evening to a fellow critic seated behind me on the aisle of a Broadway theater. He’s eighty, and doesn’t look it, nor does he feel it. “I don’t feel a day over sixty-five,” he told me. “I keep waiting for all that wisdom that’s supposed to come with old age—but it hasn’t come yet.”

As for me, all I know is that nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I’m not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure. Nor am I the person I expected to be, calm and detached and philosophical: I still cry without warning, laugh too loud, lose my head and heart too easily, the same way I did a quarter-century ago. The person I was is the person I am, only older. Might that be wisdom of a sort?

Ten years later, my fellow critic is a reasonably spritely ninety years old, while I’m closing in fast on sixty. Like him, I wait in vain for wisdom and content. But I can claim for myself a deeply satisfying marriage and a life that continues to be full of happily unexpected developments, not the least of which is the pleasant fact that at long last, I have the voice I always wanted. It may not sound like James Mason, or even Claude Rains, but it’ll do.

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James Mason and Jane Fonda appear as the celebrity contestants on a 1962 episode of Password, hosted by Allen Ludden:

Edward R. Murrow introduces the first episode of This I Believe, a CBS radio series that aired from 1951 to 1955:

(To read Walker Percy’s description of This I Believe in The Moviegoer, go here.)

From a 1964 performance of Beyond the Fringe, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore perform their “One Leg Too Few” sketch:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.”

Evelyn Waugh (quoted in the London Observer, Apr. 15, 1962)

I watched both parts of Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, Alex Gibney’s four-hour-long documentary about the life and art of Frank Sinatra, last night. Entirely aside from the fact that I figured prominently in it, I thought it extraordinarily good, perhaps the best TV documentary about a musician made to date. To be sure, Gibney mostly showed us Sinatra from the singer’s own point of view and that of his family members—in particular his son, who has long fascinated me, and his first wife, who describes their failed marriage with arresting candor—but given that fact, All or Nothing at All still struck me as unusually balanced and forthright.

When the producers reached out to me last year, they assured me that they intended to concentrate on Sinatra the artist. They kept that promise: I was impressed by how clearly his absolute musical professionalism came across on screen. (I would have given a great deal to interview Sinatra, by the way, for nobody who knew anything about music seems ever to have done so at length, and the rare moments in All or Nothing at All when he speaks in specific terms about his craft are like flashbulbs going off in the dark.) At the same time, though, I was no less impressed with Gibney’s treatment of Sinatra’s private life, which I found to be honest but never salacious.

Needless to say, I was already well aware of the sharp difference between Sinatra’s cultivated singing voice and tough-guy speaking voice, but All or Nothing at All, which makes extensive use of revealing material drawn from private interview tapes, underlines it. That difference was and is a startlingly vivid symbol of the deep cleft in his personality, which was on view whenever he performed in public. I now feel even more strongly than before that the Sinatra of the recording studio was his best and truest self, whereas the presence of an audience too often tempted him to a vulgarity unworthy of his art. (This is something about which Mia Farrow speaks interestingly in All or Nothing at All.) On occasion, though, he succeeded in controlling that tendency, above all in the never-before-seen film of his 1971 “farewell” concert, which is the spine around which All or Nothing at All is built. It is the most revealing document in existence of Sinatra the performer. Even if the rest of the show weren’t as good as it is, it would have been worth seeing for that footage alone.

Incidentally, it was startling to hear Sinatra use four-letter words in All or Nothing at All. Of course I knew he talked that way, but it’s far different to hear him do it than merely to imagine him doing it. (I tried to give the audience a similar shock of recognition when I put the same kind of language in Louis Armstrong’s mouth in Satchmo at the Waldorf.)

Here are some other thoughts that occurred to me as I watched:

• I’m glad that Sinatra made movies—he could act fabulously well whenever it suited him—but most of them were an obvious waste of his time and talent. We would think the same of him today if he’d never made any of them, even From Here to Eternity, fine though it is. Moreover, Sinatra was hopeless as a TV host, for he was much too hot (in Marshall McLuhan’s sense) for the medium.

• Of all the Sinatra albums that never got recorded, I most regret the one that he wanted to make with the Oscar Peterson Trio. It might not have worked—he was never a true jazz singer—but I would have loved to hear it anyway. (If I’d been his producer, I would have put him in the studio with Jim Hall. That would have worked.)

• Why did no one ever tell Sinatra how awful-looking his toupees were? I suppose they simply couldn’t get up the nerve.

• Two people whom I wish had been mentioned, however briefly, in All or Nothing at All are Billie Holiday (who, like Sinatra, was born a hundred years ago) and Mabel Mercer. He gave them both credit for inspiring his own art.

• It felt disorientingly strange to hear myself on the soundtrack of All or Nothing at All. Of course I knew who was talking, but I couldn’t quite grasp that it was me. (I felt the same sense of dissociation when I sat in the audience for the opening nights of Satchmo at the Waldorf and The Letter.) For what it’s worth, though, I liked what I had to say, and I’m proud to have been a part of this superlative show.

It happens that I’ve only written about Frank Sinatra at length twice, in 1995 and 1997, and I never thought seriously about writing a book about him. Now that I’ve seen All or Nothing at All, I almost wish I could.

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Frank Sinatra sings “Angel Eyes” on The Frank Sinatra Timex Show in 1959. He closed his 1971 “farewell” concert with the same song, and made the same exit:

From 2005:

Art isn’t religion, but it has something important in common with religion: it’s a form of soulcraft. Souls can only be changed one by one, and each one is as supremely important as the next. Hence there are no small audiences, only small-souled artists. Blessed are the arts that can be experienced by a mere handful of people at a time, for theirs is the kingdom of beauty at its most intense and precious….

Read the whole thing here.

“For his sake, who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

Evelyn Waugh, Helena