That's Mel Torme narrating the documentary.
Sinatra
The strawberries are waiting for Frank Sinatra.
He sings of moons, nights and years.
His head tilted like a blue eye sky.
What would it be like to touch his fedora?
Tough guys listen and wonder.
-- Miho Kinnas & E. Ethelbert Miller
Playboy: All right, let's start with the most basic question there is: Are you a religious man? Do you believe in God?
Sinatra: Well, that'll do for openers. I think I can sum up my religious feelings in a couple of paragraphs. First: I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life — in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice. I'm not unmindful of man's seeming need for faith; I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel's. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle. The witch doctor tries to convince us that we have to ask God for help, to spell out to him what we need, even to bribe him with prayer or cash on the line. Well, I believe that God knows what each of us wants and needs. It's not necessary for us to make it to church on Sunday to reach Him. You can find Him anyplace. And if that sounds heretical, my source is pretty good: Matthew, Five to Seven, The Sermon on the Mount.
Playboy: You haven't found any answers for yourself in organized religion?
Sinatra: There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in His name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion and I'll show you a hundred retrogressions. Remember, they were men of God who destroyed the educational treasures at Alexandria, who perpetrated the Inquisition in Spain, who burned the witches at Salem. Over 25,000 organized religions flourish on this planet, but the followers of each think all the others are miserably misguided and probably evil as well. In India they worship white cows, monkeys and a dip in the Ganges. The Moslems accept slavery and prepare for Allah, who promises wine and revirginated women. And witch doctors aren't just in Africa. If you look in the L.A. papers of a Sunday morning, you'll see the local variety advertising their wares like suits with two pairs of pants.
Playboy: Hasn't religious faith just as often served as a civilizing influence?
Sinatra: Remember that leering, cursing lynch mob in Little Rock reviling a meek, innocent little 12-year-old Negro girl as she tried to enroll in public school? Weren't they — or most of them — devout churchgoers? I detest the two-faced who pretend liberality but are practiced bigots in their own mean little spheres. I didn't tell my daughter whom to marry, but I'd have broken her back if she had had big eyes for a bigot. As I see it, man is a product of his conditioning, and the social forces which mold his morality and conduct — including racial prejudice — are influenced more by material things like food and economic necessities than by the fear and awe and bigotry generated by the high priests of commercialized superstition. Now don't get me wrong. I'm for decency — period. I'm for anything and everything that bodes love and consideration for my fellow man. But when lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday — cash me out.
Playboy: But aren't such spiritual hypocrites in a minority? Aren't most Americans fairly consistent in their conduct within the precepts of religious doctrine?
Sinatra: I've got no quarrel with men of decency at any level. But I can't believe that decency stems only from religion. And I can't help wondering how many public figures make avowals of religious faith to maintain an aura of respectability. Our civilization, such as it is, was shaped by religion, and the men who aspire to public office anyplace in the free world must make obeisance to God or risk immediate opprobrium. Our press accurately reflects the religious nature of our society, but you'll notice that it also carries the articles and advertisements of astrology and hokey Elmer Gantry revivalists. We in America pride ourselves on freedom of the press, but every day I see, and so do you, this kind of dishonesty and distortion not only in this area but in reporting — about guys like me, for instance, which is of minor importance except to me; but also in reporting world news. How can a free people make decisions without facts? If the press reports world news as they report about me, we're in trouble.
Playboy: Are you saying that . . .
Sinatra: No, wait, let me finish. Have you thought of the chance I'm taking by speaking out this way? Can you imagine the deluge of crank letters, curses, threats and obscenities I'll receive after these remarks gain general circulation? Worse, the boycott of my records, my films, maybe a picket line at my opening at the Sands. Why? Because I've dared to say that love and decency are not necessarily concomitants of religious fervor.
Playboy: If you think you're stepping over the line, offending your public or perhaps risking economic suicide, shall we cut this off now, erase the tape and start over along more antiseptic lines?
Sinatra: No, let's let it run. I've thought this way for years, ached to say these things. Whom have I harmed by what I've said? What moral defection have I suggested? No, I don't want to chicken out now. Come on, pal, the clock's running.
[And later:]
Sinatra: “I’ve always had a theory that whenever guys and gals start swinging, they begin to lose interest in conquering the world . . . . [T]heir thoughts turn to the good things of life — not to war. They loosen up, they live and they’re more apt to let live. Dig?”
and a bottle of wine. . .
But I've been lucky this week. . . DL
<<<
David Lehman’s “Sinatra’s Century” is a much shorter but more intimate portrait [than James Kaplan's biography]. Many of the same anecdotes used by Kaplan can be found here, too, but Lehman, an established poet, widens the frame of reference, thereby expanding the emotional resonance of the songs. He compares Sinatra’s version of “One for My Baby” to both Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca” and to Ernest Hemingway’s famous story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Whereas Kaplan accumulates facts, Lehman tells us what those facts mean. For example:
“There are two reasons that male resistance to Sinatra turned completely around. . . . His voice deepened . . . and he was able to sing so convincingly of loss, failure, and despair unto death.” But when a fact is needed, Lehman comes through: In a 2014 commercial for Jack Daniels, a voiceover tells us what Sinatra’s recipe was: “three rocks, two fingers, and a splash.”
There it is, a Sinatra haiku, and, boy, what a splash he made.
>>>
-- Sibbie O’Sullivan is a writer on the arts who lives in Wheaton.
(from the review in the Washington Post, October 28, 2015)
l
<<<
Mr. Lehman appears to have listened to cuts from each of Sinatra’s nearly 600 recording sessions, watched most of his 50-odd movies and his countless TV shows and specials, and read deeply in the bibliography. A fan, Mr. Lehman pronounces Sinatra “the greatest of all popular American singers,” his work “an aesthetic experience of intense pleasure,” and the star no less than “the most interesting man in the world.” He compares Sinatra’s 1958 recording of the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer lament “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” to Hemingway’s pitch-perfect story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” about a forlorn, tipsy old man reluctant to leave a Madrid cafe. Sinatra’s ballad, Hemingway’s nihilistic tale and the sight of Humphrey Bogart stood up in the rain by Ingrid Bergman at the Gare de Lyon in “Casablanca,” he writes, are “what American existentialism, as a mood or an aesthetic condition, is all about.”
Happily, most of Mr. Lehman’s Sinatra appreciation is on a less cerebral plane. He ticks all the familiar biographical boxes: mother-ridden boyhood in Hoboken, N.J., bobby-sox mania, career eclipse, Ava Gardner, movie stardom, Rat Pack shenanigans, mob and Kennedy connections, master of sex, sad decline. But, like a good rewrite man, Mr. Lehman holds the reader by ferreting out of the voluminous files lots of choice quotes and anecdotes that reanimate Sinatra’s gamy lost world.
Here is Ava Gardner proclaiming, “He weighs 120, but 110 of those pounds are pure c—k.” Here is movie mogul Louis B. Mayer sobbing as he watches young Sinatra belt out “Ol’ Man River” in 1943 at the Hollywood Bowl. And there’s Sinatra’s first glimpse of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s smash comedy act: “The Dago’s lousy, but the little Jew is great!” Or screaming in a Hollywood restaurant at Mario Puzo, the author of “The Godfather,” with its portrayal of a mobbed-up crooner many thought was based on Sinatra: “Choke. Go ahead and choke, you pimp.” In his final days, Sinatra watches the 1955 movie version of “Guys and Dolls,” in which Marlon Brando got the role he coveted of the suave gambler Sky Masterson, and complains to his daughter, “He still can’t sing.” Like a pharaoh, he is buried with provisions for the next world: a flask of Jack Daniel’s.
>>>
-- Edward Kosner. Mr. Kosner is the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the New York Daily News and the author of a memoir, It’s News to Me.
from the review in the Wall Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/getting-under-his-skin-1446236562
<<<
Sheckey Greene always used to like telling his Las Vegas lounge audiences about the time Frank Sinatra saved his life. Here’s how poet David Lehman quotes him in “Sinatra’s Century.” Sheckey was “standing out in front of Caesar’s Palace one night and three big tough guys began to kick the hell out of me. They were giving me a terrible beating but finally Frank came up and said ‘okay, that’s enough.’ ”
....
No one is ever likely more trustworthy about Sinatra than Kaplan has now been in his behemoth two-volume biography.
I must confess, nevertheless, that poet and anthologist David Lehman’s “Sinatra’s Century” is more to my liking because his 100 glowing and gleaming fragments on Sinatra’s life and meaning are filled with wildly entertaining quotation, anecdote and insightful critical judgment.
>>>
-- Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News (October 25, 2015)
from the archive; first posted December 2015
On Sinatra's birthday: from a review in 2015
https://www.thefranksinatra.com/books/sinatras-century-david-lehman-book
<<< Sinatra’s Century is a recently published book, written by David Lehman. The full title of the book is: “Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World”. As you know, this year marks the 100th birthday of the legendary singer Frank Sinatra. The importance of this year brings many new books, events, products and unreleased music to us, and Sinatra’s Century is one of the additions to remember his legacy.
Sinatra’s Century consists of 100 notes, and the book is about 290 pages long. These are very short notes, each with its own theme. A typical note is 3-4 pages long and can be about Sinatra’s birth, his big band years, Ava Gardner, Rat Pack, Bing Crosby, Kennedy, Frank Sinatra’s death, movie career, Marilyn Monroe, mafia connections, saloon songs, David Lehman’s opinions, or anything else. The topics cover almost anything you may want to learn about Frank Sinatra, and are shortly kept with the most important parts. The notes also include many quotes of Frank Sinatra or people who knew Frank Sinatra. For the most part, these quotes are very interesting and sometimes quite funny.
Having described Sinatra’s Century and what it is about, I will now move to my personal opinions. The book is a good read. Sinatra’s life is distributed to 100 chapters quite fairly, so you get a taste of everything. And most importantly, you don’t get a chance to get bored thanks to the dynamic structure of the content. Different content at every chapter and the shortness of the chapters keeps you fresh and your interest high; and you don’t get tired while reading since every line doesn’t have factual information that you have to keep in mind.
A “personal” book on Frank Sinatra is a bold move. The trend among Sinatra books is that if you are from the Sinatra family, you write a memoir, and if you are not, you write a well structured, informative biography. Sinatra’s Century is a combination of both. It gives you biographical information about Frank Sinatra, but with a personal touch and feeling. Like “Why Sinatra Matters”, but more extensive.
In one chapter, David Lehman talks about how Frank Sinatra changes the lyrics and I really like that observation. I had made a list for “The Lady Is A Tramp” 3 years ago, and was glad to find similar content in the book. I liked that he devoted 1 of the 100 chapters to it, as it is definitely worth mentioning, but mostly ignored by many book writers. I think one reason for that is that most book writers don’t really dive into live performances of Frank Sinatra, and stick to the studio recordings instead.
Here is one paragraph from Sinatra’s Century to show what David Lehman thinks of Frank Sinatra:
When a poet with a good vocabulary explains Frank Sinatra, the result is highly satisfactory.>>>
Sinatra at the Stork Club, 1944
"If You Are But a Dream"
"Sunday, Monday and Always" as "Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como."
"Why should it get their goat, each time I bend a note, Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como?"
"The fact that girlies scream they say will bring me grief / but if they ever stop I'll find that I'm back on relief"
"Every time I sing, I'm compared with Bing, by Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como?"
"Brahms's Lullaby"
Recorded for Columbia February 2, 1946.
Sang at the Waldorf-Astoria's Wedgwood Room, 1945.
<<<
Sinatra Takes Over Wedgewood Room and Wins Crowd Despite His Illness
The quality of laryngitis is strained these nights at the Waldorf-Astoria's Wedgwood Room where Frank Sinatra is making a belated start on a short engagement. 
It is painfully obvious that he shouldn't be singing until he has had proper rest yet he sang 14 numbers Wednesday night, the concluding one "Old Man River."
Ordinarily the slim technician of modern song-phrasing is in his element with a large band behind him-wasn't he once a swing band vocalist? And Dick Stable's 22-piece band, featuring numerous violins and a harp, lends splendid support, but the voice that has hypnotized millions was like a butterfly in a whirlpool.
It was a masterful performance, nevertheless. . .
*
After rendering "My Romance," from the still-remembered "Jumbo," and "When I Marry Sweet Lorraine," he pulled the first surprise of the evening with "Bess, Where Is My Bess." A haunting, lovely tune, he sanit very well. >> f
rom Tips on Tables, by Robert W. Dana, Nov. 30, 1945.
The announcer for the opposition
is so one-sided in his commentary
so unabashedly partisan
that I dash off a pissed-off post
likening him to the Yankees’s Phil Rizzuto
but without Phil’s endearing traits
that made him perfect for the role
of Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity.
But I do not post the pissed-off post
when I learn the guy went through
an infernal medical ordeal.
Instead, I decide to develop the conceit
that Frank Sinatra played shortstop
for the World Champion Yankees.
from the Harvard Review (Published on October 28, 2022) See, too: https://harvardreview.org/content/the-end/
"So laugh and sing, make love the thing, / Be happy while you may. / There's always one, beneath the sun / Who's bound to make you feel that way. / The moon is shining, and that's a good sign, / Cling to me closer and say you'll be mine. / Remember, darling, we won't see it shine / A hundred years from today." [Song: "A Hundred Years from Today"; photo credit: Star Black (c) 2011]
Sinatra at the Stork Club, 1944
"If You Are But a Dream"
"Sunday, Monday and Always" as "Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como."
"Why should it get their goat, each time I bend a note, Dick Haymes, Dick Todd and Como?"
"The fact that girlies scream they say will bring me grief / but if they ever stop I'll find that I'm back on relief"
"Every time I sing, I'm compared with Bing, by Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como?"
Brahms's Lullaby
"I couldn't feel any better or I'd be sick
Tell me quick ain't love a kick in the head. . ."
Two excerpts from "The Man Who (Re)made Sinatra: The Riddle of Nelson" by Terry Teachout (February 6, 1956 - January 13, 2022) in Commentary (July / August 2021)
<<Nelson Riddle was, perhaps, the greatest of all the arrangers who worked on the Great American Songbook, primarily because of the work he did in the 1950s with Frank Sinatra. The two men were brought together by Capitol Records in 1953 in the hope of updating Sinatra’s singing style, which still recalled his youthful crooning of sentimental ballads. Within a matter of years, Sinatra had recorded his two finest albums, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956) and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), on which he emerged decisively as a mature artist, in part because of Riddle’s sympathetic backing. Riddle also wrote arrangements of like quality for Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Peggy Lee, and Dean Martin. Riddle’s innovative work defined the predominant postwar style of arranging, which may be the defining sound of the American century. Such an artistic force is deserving of a first-class full-length biography. Alas, Peter Levinson’s September in the Rain (2001), though full of illuminating detail about his life, is musically uninformed, while Geoffrey Littlefield’s newly published Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, nominally co-written with Riddle’s son Christopher, is a vanity-press disaster, besmirched by factual errors and even more musically ignorant than Levinson’s book. Still, September in the Rain does let us see how Riddle developed as an artist, in the process enriching our understanding of the life of the chronically melancholy man and his uncomfortable relationship with the greatest popular singer of the 20th century.
>>>
<<< Today, Riddle’s style, especially as documented in the albums he recorded with Sinatra, is universally acknowledged as the high-water mark of postwar vocal arranging. Their making was a nerve-racking process for Riddle, who confessed to finding Sinatra terrifyingly mercurial: “Frank contributed a lot to the orchestral part of his own records, just by leveling a hostile stare at the musicians, with those magnetic blue eyes! The point of this action was to make me, or any other conductor, feel at that exact moment as if he had two left feet, three ears, and one eye.”
But the resulting tension, he admitted, was “a positive factor that found its way into the record,” and it brought out the best in Riddle. More than a half-century later, their albums sound as vital as ever—and his ability to overcome his fear of Sinatra and rise to the occasion is a large part of what has kept them so. >>>
For the entire article, click here. For the record, many Frankophiles consider "In the Wee Small Hoirs" an even better album of ballads than the great "Only the Lonely." Teachout is absolutely correct when he says that song arrangers are underpaid, underappreciated, and sometimes unacknowledged. Other Sinatra arrangers worth more than a mention include Billy May, George Siravo, Gordon Jenkins, Don Costa, Axel Stordahl, Quincy Jones, Neil Hefti, and Johnny Mandel. >>>
Ed. note: Jack Daniel's produced a limited-batch sour-mash whiskey called "Sinatra Century" to mark the singer's 100th birthday, December 12, 2015. Lehman's book Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World was published by HarperCollins at the same time. An editor at The Wall Street Journal noted the coincidence and commissioned Lehman, who likes good bourbon, to review the new whiskey, which came in a gift box including a thumb drive containing the recording of a Sinatra show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966.
1. The Background
Frank Sinatra discovered Jack Daniel’s one sleepless night in the early 1940s. “It’s been the oil to my engine ever since,” he later said. He famously praised “anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or Jack Daniel’s.” Frank always kept a bottle nearby, offstage, and he was buried with a flask of JD in his casket.
In her autobiography, Judith Campbell Exner —the moll who was mistress to both John F. Kennedy and the head of the Chicago mob—recalled a day spent with Sinatra. He “acknowledged the comings and goings of an endless string of visitors, growled at flunkies, drank martinis, ate lunch, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate hors d’oeuvres, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate dinner, and drank more Jack Daniel’s.”
By the mid-1960s, Sinatra could drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and still go on stage.
2) The Anticipation
Like any respectable Sinatra aficionado, I have imbibed my share of Tennessee’s trademark sour mash whiskey. And as the author of a new book on Sinatra, I had an extra incentive to try the latest ultra-premium Jack Daniel’s bottle sent to me by my editor at The Wall Street Journal: a limited-edition 100-proof whiskey aged in 100 “alligator-charred” oak barrels (so called for the scaly interior surface left by the fire, the deepest of all the chars whiskey producers use to impart flavor and color to the liquor). It hit shelves in October—in plenty of time for toasts to Frank Sinatra on his 100th birthday, December 12, 2015.
The whiskey is called Sinatra Century. By serendipitous coincidence, my new book is called “Sinatra’s Century.” I wrote it, quite simply, because I have loved the singer’s voice, his musical savvy, his definitive versions of great standards ever since I heard “All the Way” and “Witchcraft” on the radio when I was eight or nine and grasped the essence of swing from Sinatra albums a few years later. Timing it to coincide with the centennial, I wrote the book in 100 parts, because Sinatra’s career exists in exquisite counterpoint with what Henry Luce called the “American century” and because the century is the perfect form for a subject with so many facets.
Jack Daniel’s already has a top-shelf whiskey with Sinatra’s name on it – 90 proof Sinatra Select, which is selling well, at twice the price of single-barrel bourbons that are just as good. So there was a part of me that wondered whether the same would be true with “Sinatra Century” – whether JD is selling a name, an event, and a future souvenir rather than a whiskey that can go head to head with A. H. Hirsch Reserve or the best of Buffalo Trace’s Antique Collection.
3) The Presentation
The presentation of Sinatra Century is as lavish as it should be, priced at $379 or more per one-liter bottle. It arrives in a deep blue-indigo lacquered carrying case with an engraved brass handle on top. Pop open the case, and the bottle sits in a custom groove, like a dark liquid jewel set against black velvet. Each bottle is numbered—mine is FAS 23095, the initials standing for Francis Albert Sinatra. Also in their own made-to-size grooves are a hardbound booklet devoted to Sinatra’s relationship with Jack Daniel’s and a tie clip that doubles as a thumb drive.
That last item comes loaded with a previously unreleased album of a live Sinatra performance: thirteen songs, two monologues and a coda, all recorded at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966. Frank had just turned fifty and was teaming up with the brilliant arranger Quincy Jones backed by the Count Basie Orchestra, and what better way to return to that evening than with a rocks glass in hand?
4) The Proof
Isn’t “proof” a lovely word? It stands in one context for the potency of a potable, and in another it means verification: a geometrical proof, say, or the proof of the pudding. Both senses come into play here. Would Sinatra Century prove potent enough to provide the perfect accompaniment to belters like “Luck Be a Lady” and “Fly Me to the Moon”? At 100 proof, it had better. (The standard “Old No. 7” Jack Daniel’s bottle clocks in at a mere 80.)
As to color, I said amber, my wife said topaz. I said tongue of flame, my wife said Stradivarius. She described the taste as “warm orange afterglow.” I took another sip and said, “Cognac.” She sipped and said, “The Cognac of bourbons.” Goes well with dark chocolate. Warms the soul “in a drear-nighted December” (to quote Keats).
The whiskey is the best I’ve ever had from Jack Daniel’s.
How to drink it? Neat or with a few ice cubes. We stuck to Sinatra’s own recipe: “three rocks, two fingers, and a splash”–a Sinatra haiku, when you think about it. We omitted the splash.
5. The Playlist
Sinatra Century promises not merely a whiskey but an experience. So you’re sitting in your favorite reclining armchair sipping and playing the recording of that Sands appearance of January 1966. It opens with a trusty icebreaker, “Come Fly with Me,” then turns to a ballad he’s sung since his crooner days, the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Self-consciousness spoils the verse intro. The skinny singer can scarcely keep a straight face when obliged to sing “I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo.”
He’s on safer ground with Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Perhaps the most celebrated of all Sinatra’s up-tempo finger-snappers, it brings out his swinging best. In adapting Nelson Riddle’s 1956 arrangement, Quincy Jones makes miraculous use of reeds and muted horns to compensate for the lack of a string section.
Sinatra always maintained he was at heart a saloon singer and he proves it anew in “Street of Dreams” and Matt Dennis’s great, haunting “Angel Eyes.” As you savor another swallow, the pace changes with “Fly Me to the Moon,” a highlight of the night. Sinatra reinvented Bart Howard’s 1954 song: It wasn’t a sad wistful plea, after all, but an assertive proclamation of love. It was also a nod to NASA’s great decade, the conquest of space as a seduction song. Killer arrangement. Love that flute.
The timeless “You Make Me Feel So Young” shows Sinatra at his most buoyant, and then he turns up the warmth in Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning “Shadow of Your Smile.” Sinatra is dating Mia Farrow and Mia likes the song.
Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady” comes from the musical “Guys and Dolls.” In the movie version, Sinatra played Nathan Detroit, but it was Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson who got to sing this ode to gambling that marks the show’s heroic climax. Now, to correct the injustice, Sinatra demonstrates how the song should be sung. One of Sinatra’s anthems in the 1960s, a hymn to Las Vegas, here it’s as electric as “Fly Me to the Moon,” with a tail like that of “My Kind of Town.”
Time for another round.
The audience is hushed when Frank sings “It Was a Very Good Year,” where again the reeds do the work of strings, and then the Rodgers and Hart standard “Where or When,” not only a marvelous love song but also the greatest ever on the subject of déjà vu: “Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.”
The nightclub act ends with a song Sinatra owns: “My Kind of Town,” the terrific tribute to Chicago that Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote for their boss to sing in “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” his last movie musical.
By now you’ve made a dent in the bottle and you’re robustly singing along.
-- from "Author David Lehman Takes On Jack Daniel's Sinatra Century," in The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2016
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
