Sinatra: everyone's piece of the American Dream

Frank Sinatra was buried in a bronze-lined vault in the California desert on Wednesday. It occurred to me that he will have a strange kind of afterlife. As big stars do, of course, he'll live on in beautifully boxed CDs and in the endless re-runs of old films, but he'll survive, too, in a much more indirect, yet much more intimate, form.

Whenever most people of my generation look at our parents' family photograph albums, we always see Sinatra. He's there between the battered cardboard and cellophane that hold our collective memories. He's present in the way our fathers and uncles slicked their hair, in the cut of their best suits, in the angle at which they held their cigarettes.

You can tell that if the black-and-white photos of young men crossing O'Connell Bridge in the early 1950s were moving pictures, the sound track would be Sinatra singing some old standard arranged by Nelson Riddle, Young at Heart, perhaps, or High Hopes.

In his early days in America, when he was trying to make a living as a journeyman boxer, Sinatra's father briefly changed his name to O'Brien. Back then, in the world of entertainment, Irish was the thing to be. By the 1950s, I suspect that many O'Briens would gladly have changed their names to Sinatra.

The American writer Calvin Trillin once pointed out that the difference between the Irish and the Italians was summed up by the fact that when the St Patrick's Parade in New York was being led by a fellow who was a member of the New York State Gas Board, the Italian equivalent, the Columbus Day parade, was led by Sinatra. What the comparison neglects, though, is that even 50 years ago, many Irish would have been glad to swap. Ol' Blue Eyes was probably as accurate an image of Irish desires as of Italian achievements.

For Ireland, as for much of Europe until well into the 1960s, Sinatra was America. He was the offspring of poor European immigrants, sea-changed by the New World into something rich and strange. To older, rural people that transformation was mostly deplorable, living evidence of American vulgarity.

This skinny, strutting street kid, all angles and attitude, was a creature from the black lagoon of modern urban insolence. What had happened to deference and tradition and refinement when a punk like this could become an idol of the masses? For the young, though, stuck in the drab austerity of post-war Europe, Sinatra was almost unbearably alluring. For those in Ireland who didn't emigrate, America came wafting over the Atlantic in his records and movies.

What made him so potent, I suppose, is that he seemed to bridge an impossible gap between the ordinary and the marvellous. He was handsome, but not a perfect he-man. He had glamour, but not of the distant, mythic kind that most movie stars possessed. Hoboken hung around him like a haze of cheap cigarette smoke, shading the bright light of celebrity, making it possible to look without being dazzled.

More than anyone else, though, Sinatra proved that commercial mass entertainment could be art. It's not that he was the first genuinely sophisticated artist to emerge from the new mass media - Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, Duke Ellington, Buster Keaton and others had done it before him - but no one had done it quite so self-consciously.

Art wasn't an added bonus, an extra topping on a dish of cheap thrills, it was what you bought Sinatra for. He was an artist, but not of the apparently obscure, elitist sort that most people feared. His singing was rich and complex, ornate and original, yet also immediate and accessible. It had the kind of absolute mastery that great writing or painting does, delivered in a form that did not imply that you had to be a cultivated connoisseur in order to appreciate it.

For my parents' generation in Ireland, that mattered a great deal. It seemed that someone far away had paid them the compliment of assuming that they recognised sheer class when they heard it. It seemed that there was, after all, something to the American promise that only the best would be good enough for the common herd.

Most people in post-war Europe, and certainly in 1950s Ireland, couldn't afford the tangible luxuries of American consumer society. The frigidaires and televisions, the cars and clothes, in the pictures their relatives sent home from America were, as yet, tantalisingly beyond their reach. However - especially if they were single and earning a wage - they could afford to buy the odd Sinatra record, to watch him in the movies, or at least to listen to him on the radio.

He was a quality item, beautiful, durable and perfectly made, that was actually within reach. He was the little bit of the American Dream that everyone could own.

It mattered too that Sinatra was sexy in a way that was not too direct for conservative and restrictive societies. His slow, late-night, heavy-eyed appeal eased its way around the protective barriers of official disapproval.

Remember Frankie Byrne's sponsored show on the radio, presented by a woman whose very name was a tribute to Sinatra? One of my abiding memories of childhood is of eating sausages and mash during the lunch break from school while listening to Frankie, the nation's agony aunt, doling out advice that would seem unbelievably tame today, but that was back then the nearest thing to a public acknowledgement that men and women had problems with sex and love.

She got away with it, partly by being both sly and coy, but partly, too, because she never, ever played a song by anyone but Sinatra. Week in, week out, year after year, she read her letters from lovesick farmers, frustrated shop assistants, shy civil servants and lonely typists, while one Sinatra number or another faded in and out of the background.

To this day, I still can't hear Strangers in the Night without imagining an old spinster and old bachelor in some remote corner of rural Ireland exchanging glances full of a yearning that would never be expressed. I can't hear My Way without picturing some timid grocer's assistant in the midlands agonising over a first date. New York, New York always reminds me of Frankie Byrne advising a student nurse from Roscommon how to tell her boyfriend that nylon shirts caused B.O. without hurting his feelings.

For somehow, the songs when Sinatra sang them seemed to elevate everyday unhappiness and awkwardness to a heroic level, to make mere loneliness into some kind of existential style. The sound of mundane misery became, for a while, gorgeous and confident and pure. That sound echoes as strongly in Boyle and New Ross as in Beverly Hills and New York.