Chapter 6 - Ethical Culture Fieldston School

“Mr. Sinatra Gets Rejected”
quantities, in a civilization that is so busy making things and selling
things as ours. Whatever else you may say of the adoration of The
Voice, it is a strictly non‐commercial enterprise, a selfless idolatry
which pays its 75 cents at the box office and asks in return only the
privilege of being allowed to ruin its vocal chords. Perhaps Frankie
is more important a symbol than most of us are aware. 22
In retrospect, of course, most of us are aware that Frankie was an
important symbol, but we’re no more able to fix exactly what he was a symbol of
than Bliven was. As he suggests, it has something to do with the longing
engendered by the very promise of American life, the incalculable price dreams
exact by the mere fact of their (often ill‐formed) existence. “It was the war years,
and there was a great loneliness,” Sinatra has said in explanation of his own
appeal,” but while that sounds poetic and true in as far as it goes, it’s too clichéd
and incomplete to really be a satisfying answer. Yes, as Sinatra explained, he
surely was “the boy in every corner drugstore, the boy who’d gone off to war.” 23
But even so, why did that loneliness persist for so many even after the boys had
come home (hadn’t it long preceded their departure)? And even if that loneliness
had come and gone, why was Sinatra the voice of it?
My own guess is that Sinatra had an unusually clear understanding of this
loneliness, which has something to do with the sense of isolation that results
when you have high hopes in a land where you’re is told anything is possible,
and where, no matter what you do, the perception of plenty always seems most
vividly in view somewhere else. Sinatra was literally the voice of these hopes, and
Times, October 13, 1974, sec. 2, p. 12. (Reader, p. 48).
22 Bruce Bliven, “The Voice and the Kids,” The New Republic, 6 November 1944, p. 593.
23 Quoted in Taraborelli, p. 55.
American History for Cynical Beginners
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