Sinatra, paradigm of the jilted man

Strangers in the night

was one of the first

my parents bought with the record player, so Frank Sinatra's voice sounded almost like a Christmas carol to me when he sang at the Bernabéu in 1986.

As a radio girl that I was, with other music on my programs and in my heart, I saw that concert with an ironic generational distance.

I remember making a joke about the toupees that the singer bought in a store on Gran Vía. Fortunately,

, a virus that is contracted in youth, is cured over time.

This week I saw a documentary on 2,

, and although I thought I knew everything about this voice that has been accompanying us our entire lives, a series of little-known images and a narration on board in his own words offered me another dimension of the character, also something that this time has revealed to us about men and power.

Three thoughts crossed my mind as I retraced his life in this splendid work by Alex Gibney.

The first of these is that often, if not always, it is the heart (or gut) that rules those ideological tenets that we so passionately exhibit.

Sinatra embodies, almost as if it were a cliché, the Italian-American of humble origins, charming and angry, cocky and romantic, who wants to cross the river that separates him from Manhattan to succeed in that city where, as the song says, if you succeed you can succeed anywhere.

He touched glory and, holding the throne of the king of ballads, he rubbed shoulders with the underworld and with power, which often crossed paths.

He endorsed John F. Kennedy for president but was later expelled from Camelot when Robert Kennedy felt that his thinly veiled flirtation with the mob was doing them a disservice.

The singer then felt deeply hurt and that spite pushed him towards the opposite side, until he found the trick of supporting Ronald Reagan at the beginning of his term as governor of California.

Harry Belafonte thought, with great insight, that this drift did not respond to a political discourse but to the fury that had caused him to be removed from an environment to which he, naively, had believed he belonged.

I believe that Belafonte's explanation can not only be applied to a singer of the masses, such as Sinatra,

but to so many men of power that we know, here and now, who, when they do not get the position they coveted, feel cornered and seek refuge in the adversary.

Does this reaction respond to an ideology or spite?

The singer responded with the same anger to the irruption of

: fearful that his time had passed, he devoted himself to publicly hating the new music, as if rancor could cushion the blow, alleviate the furious feeling of exclusion that overwhelmed him. .

He did not have the patience to verify that, after that typical phase of delivery by the fans typical of all cultural changes, in the music paradise, that space where the living and the dead coexist, there ends up being room for everyone.

But Sinatra was not willing to share the conquered territory with anyone and that anger, aggressive and mean-spirited, defined him even more as an outdated and ungenerous man.

Was he fighting against music that seemed like shit to him or was it the spite he felt at losing the reign?

And here is the third thought I had.

It was when seeing the photos of Sinatra's wedding with Mia Farrow.

He, 49 and she, 21. He, hardened in a thousand battles and in a thousand bottles;

she, then, angelic.

It was not only about the age difference but also about the generational dissonance: they were separated by 30 years in which society underwent a brutal change in mentality.

A doomed romance.

And I wondered, did he really fall in love or did he need to prove to himself that he could hunt the sweetest game?

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