Have any of us in Northern Ireland done it Sinatra's way?

Daily Features

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

I think if I were to be asked what was the self-image of Northern Ireland, I'd reply (with my Protestant hat on), dour, self-reliant, practical, dependable, God-fearing, respectable, loyal, hard-working, and so on.

How true any of this is, I won't say. But it wouldn't matter if I did, because self-image, by definition, is what people think of themselves, not what others think.

The other night, at the American Airlines Theater on Broadway, I got an authentic whiff of an affectionate, and dated, self-image of the English. The play was The 39 Steps, adapted by Patrick Barclay, not from the novel by John Buchan but from the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name, from 1935.

A clever and intensely theatrical farce, with a cast of just four, The 39 Steps made me laugh out loud. It had the same effect on most of the Americans in the audience. At the interval, it is true, one young out-of-towner, wearing a backpack, proclaimed scornfully to her doppelganger friend that the show was "pathetic ... a load of snooty English garbage" . But from what I could see, she was alone in her opinion.

The plot will be familiar to most of you. Richard Hannay, a lantern-jawed young colonial, stumbles into a pre-war Nazi plot to steal something of great value from the Brits. What the something is doesn't really matter. Hannay is framed for murder, flees to Scotland to solve the riddle and ends up exposing the villain, saving his country and getting the girl into the bargain.

This Whitehall Farce version of the story is a little gem. The jokes come 13 to the dozen.

But the point I am making is that it reflects exactly the way the English saw themselves back in the 1930s — a bit fatigued and out of sorts, but stalwart, courageous and true.

When Charles Edwards, playing Hannay, stopped from time to time to project his chiseled profile into the spotlight, we saw in his gesture the determination of the Bulldog breed to survive whatever was thrown at them and still coming out laughing.

Did they really laugh and joke their way through Dunkirk and the Blitz and the Battle of Britain? Well, not all of them and not all of the time. But there was enough truth in the self-image to construct a genuine myth — one which has stood the test of time and is now the mirror into which Londoners and others gaze when they see what has become of their country.

Similar thoughts occurred to me last night when I watched an old TV special of Frank Sinatra that went out in 1965, when the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan were at their height.

What surprised me — surprisingly — was the sheer quality of the music, the poignancy of the performance and the sense of an era that was passing caught at the moment of its highest achievement.

Francis Albert Sinatra — Old Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the leader of the Rat Pack — grew up on the New Jersey shore in the 1920s.

He went on to be the greatest crooner in America, bar none. In this show, recorded just as he turned 50, he took his audience down memory lane and proved that they were the same back alleys in which most Americans — certainly most white Americans — still lived in the Swinging Sixties.

Sat on his bar stool, or standing up in front of the Nelson Riddle orchestra, he worked his way through a succession of ballads that took his listeners back to their adolescence, their early working years, the war and the boom that followed, when they believed with perfect conviction that the American Dream was alive and well and everybody got a shot at the title. One song sequence was framed around a rendition of It Was a Very Good Year, for which Sinatra himself wrote the lyrics. As the song took the singer through his life, from 17, to 21, to 35 and on to middle age, there wasn't, I'm sure, a dry eye in the house. This was Sinatra the master, spinning the Dream, reminding all those who had once been young that he had provided the soundtrack of their lives.

Oh, he wasn't much of a husband, and maybe not that much of a father. And he was a hard-nosed b*****d when it came to dealing with friends who crossed him or failed to deliver. He was a snob and a social climber and almost certainly in hock to the Mafia. Whatever the whole ball of wax was, he was it. But, boy, could he ever sing! And, wow, didn't they love him for it!

Self-image. Catch it and you're made. So who was Ulster's Sinatra? Not Ruby Murray — please! James Young would be closer to the mark. Better, though, not to look for comparisons. Sometimes, I think, we should just salute the incomparable.