SINATRA at THE ALDWYCH THEATRE, LONDON UK: The Man Behind the Voice
A new musical opened in London this month. Sinatra arrived at the Aldwych Theatre on 3 June, with its press night on 24 June, and audiences will hear the songs they came for: “New York, New York,” “Come Fly With Me,” “My Way.” The show, made with the cooperation of the Sinatra family, tells the story of the rise, the fall and the comeback. It is, by design, a story about a voice.
But there is another Sinatra, and the West End is unlikely to dwell on him. He is the one who, on a winter night in 1948, carried a paper bag full of cash out the back door of a Manhattan nightclub and into the founding of the State of Israel.
The story comes from Teddy Kollek, who told it in his own memoir and who would later become the longest serving mayor of Jerusalem. In March 1948, weeks before independence was declared, Kollek was in New York on David Ben-Gurion’s orders, running the Haganah’s illegal arms procurement over an American embargo. An Irish ship captain sat in the harbour with a hold full of munitions bound for the Yishuv. He would sail, but only once he had been paid, roughly a million dollars in cash. Kollek had the money. What he did not have was a way to move it, because federal agents were watching his every step.
He was at the bar of the Copacabana, which sat in the same building as the hotel the Haganah used as its makeshift headquarters, when he fell into conversation with the singer headlining downstairs. The two had met before. Out of frustration as much as anything, Kollek told him the problem. Sinatra listened.
In the early hours, Kollek walked out the front of the building with a satchel, and the agents followed. Out the back went Frank Sinatra, the money in a paper bag, down to the pier, where he handed it to the captain and watched the ship leave. The arms reached their destination. The Haganah was folded into the army of a state that won its independence. Years later his daughter asked him why he had done it. “It was the beginning of the young nation,” he said. “I wanted to help.”
It would be easy to treat this as a single colourful episode, a piece of celebrity trivia to set beside the songs. It was not. It was of a piece with a whole life.
The roots ran back to a Hoboken childhood. One of the neighbours who cared for him while his mother worked was a woman he called Mrs Golden, who spoke to him only in Yiddish and gave him a small Jewish pendant that he wore for decades. He grew up understanding, in the way the children of immigrants understand, what it was to be despised for an accident of birth, and the understanding did not stay private. In 1943 he joined “We Will Never Die,” the travelling pageant that tried to force American attention onto what was being done to the Jews of Europe. In 1945 he made “The House I Live In,” a ten minute film against antisemitism that won an honorary Oscar and now sits in the Library of Congress. In September 1947, as the United Nations weighed the partition plan, he sang to a crowd of twenty thousand at the Hollywood Bowl who had come out in support of a Jewish state.
After 1948 the commitment only deepened. He raised money for Israel Bonds, for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He helped build two intercultural centres in Israel that carry his name. He first came to the country in 1962 and gave seven concerts, one of them for the soldiers. None of this was costless. The Arab League and Lebanon banned his records and his films. He paid, in markets closed to him, for the side he had taken, and he did not change sides.
There is a final chapter, and it is the one that ought to give an audience pause as the curtain comes down on the comeback. In 1978 Sinatra travelled to Jerusalem for the dedication of the Frank Sinatra International Student Center at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. The building housed a cafeteria, an ordinary place where Israeli and Arab and foreign students sat together over lunch, which is to say a place that embodied the thing he had spent his life arguing for: that people of different faiths could share a house.
On 31 July 2002 a Hamas bomb tore through that cafeteria. Nine people were killed, five of them American students, and about a hundred were injured. The room where coexistence had been an unremarkable daily fact became, in an instant, a room emptied of it. The university’s answer was not to abandon the idea but to rededicate itself to it, to pluralism and to open inquiry, which is the only answer that honours the dead without surrendering to those who made them dead.
That is the Sinatra the songs cannot quite hold. The voice is the easy part, and the West End will sell it beautifully. The harder thing, the thing worth remembering while the band plays, is that the man behind it understood early and never forgot that a people can be hated for existing, and that the decent response to such hatred is not sentiment but help, delivered if necessary in a paper bag, out the back door, into the dark. He did it his way, and his way ran straight through the founding of Israel.