Chapter 6 - Ethical Culture Fieldston School

“Mr. Sinatra Gets Rejected”
do with music per se than drama, specifically his much‐celebrated ability to
convey emotion and conviction. In other words, Sinatra was a great actor with
music long before he became an occasionally convincing actor with a script.
And yet for that very reason it’s almost possible to believe that he wasn’t
really an artist but rather a celebrity pretending to be one. After all, anyone can
be a singer, and the difference between one who sings well and one who does not
very often has nothing to do with hard work or personal character but rather a
roll of the genetic dice. The many musicals in which young Sinatra appeared,
often as an ordinary loser who would periodically break into song, could almost
reinforce this belief that there was nothing to it. It’s almost as if his presence
there is random, and that you too could be in that spotlight, thrilling millions.
There’s nothing to it.
In fact, of course, Sinatra worked extremely hard. Indeed, even if you
factor out the elements in his personality that effectively disqualified him from
the mellow, Bing Crosby school of effortless poise – his almost compulsive work
ethic, that legendary temper – Sinatra’s cool public image could never wholly
disguise his energy, even his edge. As William Herndon said of his law partner
Abraham Lincoln, his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.
That ambition emerged from the mists of his childhood shortly after the
Crosby concert in 1935, when Sinatra made his first serious effort to break into
show business by trying out for the Major Bowes and his Original Amateur Hour, a
nationally broadcast radio show. (“Round and round she goes,” went Bowes’s
signature saying, referring to the wheel of fortune, “and where she stops nobody
knows.”) It’s not clear whether it was Bowes’ inspiration or Dolly’s machinations
that led him to join another auditioning group, The Three Flashes, which was
rechristened The Hoboken Four. The group took first place on the September 8
American History for Cynical Beginners
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