A Visit to sinatrapalooza

...I don't think Frank ever cried in public," he said, "but that night, he actually had tears...

...They celebrate not only his triumphs, but his embarrassments: his disco version of "Night and Day," the remake of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and anything having to do with Frank Sinatra Jr...

...Not only do I go to retrieve some of the best esoterica the nation's Sinatra collectors can offer before Frank expires and jacks the prices to hell—the real mission is to separate the chaff from the wheat, the true Sinatra crazies from the nou-veaux swingers and cigar-and-marti-ni chicks who ape Frank's Rat Pack Era fabulosity with all of his tics and none of his soul...

...Then there's Stanley Palter, the 66-year-old furniture salesman, who forgot to pack his dress pants for the dinner and dance, but who showed up anyway in coat and tie, tassled loafers, gray nylon dress socks—and shorts, because he "wanted to look sharp," like Frank...

...But the smart money says that at 81, he's Matt Labash is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...

...That's all I'm gonna say...

...And in a way they do...

...Take it uptown, baby," Frank Sinatra prodded one of the karaoke boys...

...I don't drive, I'm driven," he deadpanned...

...But it's a little simpler than that, says Harold Klein, a 68-year-old Baltimore builder who sells Sinatra clocks and watches: "He's got the most charisma...

...To be a real singer is to stand bare-a— naked in front of 10,000 people, and to bare your heart, and to touch those people and make them say, 'I remember when I was in love—there's nothin' like it, man...

...Keeping in mind that Sinatra was, or is, a marginally irreverent guy: driving golf carts through windows, throwing a glass pitcher at Buddy Rich's head, ripping phones out of the wall at the Sands for being the wrong color, ripping pages out of scripts when shooting interfered with "'tini time," hanging out with monikers like "the Crusher" and "the Weasel," and eating ham and eggs off a hooker's chest with the good silver...

...And if you lay down one night in the dark, and put on the headphones, and listen to him sing 'Only the Lonely' or 'I'm a Fool To Want You,' you hear a man open up his heart...

...These days, Frank Sinatra has much more than a cold...

...So I sit enraptured, watching Klein bite the head off a French fry as spittle collects in the corners of his mouth and he perfectly distills what the technocrats and the detractors and the hipster arrivistes often miss about what makes Sinatra Sinatra: "He projected an air of danger, as if to say, 'Darling, I'm gonna sing to you, or I'm gonna break both your f—in' legs.' But it was beautifully dangerous...

...People in the audience would start cheering and finishing his songs—like, 'Frank, you're there, the rest isn't important...

...They scarf up the artifacts with their Sinatra MasterCards: eight-track versions of his last solo album, "L.A...

...He has a phone card that reads "Frank Sinatra," even...

...Almost unanimously thought of as a blowhard and a bully at Sinatra-palooza, Klein brings to mind what Sinatra friend George Schlatter, the producer, once said: "Frank is just like you...

...So there is a tinge of finality and high purpose when my Frankophile editor dispatches me to the second annual "Sinatrapalooza" convention in Atlantic City...

...Like 21-year-old Joseph Mizzi, who wears a black suit with an open butterfly collar and keeps all his money in a roll, the bills arranged from high to low, with the presidents facing the same way...

...You're there for us—and we're here for you.'" It is usually at this point in a Sinatra article that scholars will tell you his six-decades staying power is due to his long-breath techniques, his intonation and dynamics, his sustained legato, his vocal color...

...You can see it, too, in the karaoke session, where a club singer from Brooklyn who sounded as silken as Johnny Hartman, but who wore the tux of a discount magician, dangled his long ash over the kelly-green carpet, yelling encouragement to the atrophied old dolls and socks'n'san-daled wheezers who suddenly seemed ennobled by "Witchcraft" and "The Best is Yet to Come...

...They know his birth address in Hoboken, and that his favorite color is orange, and that his smokes were Lucky's, and that his drink was Jack Daniels, and that "Summer Wind" is the most perfect hybrid of swinging melancholia ever vinylized, and that "In the Wee Small Hours Of the Morning" is the best friend you'll ever have if your wife leaves you...

...This was not a wake, but a mildly ribald, coarse homage, appropriate to the subject...

...They don't call him 'Bread' for nuttin'," Johnny said of Johnny...

...Klein, in his white pants and blue denim shirt with epaulets, can relate to Sinatra...

...The true fans embrace all facets of Sinatra...

...Is My Lady," old TV Guide covers, expired coupons for his pasta sauces, even video of him testifying at the Nevada Gaming Commission hearings...

...They've internalized his vim and exude his style...

...The good news is, the irony buses don't run 20 miles outside Atlantic City to the low-roller Sheraton hotel (decorated in the conch-shell pastels of a Sarasota retirement center) that is home to Sinatrapalooza...

...And it is easy to go drippy, as do so many slumming intellectuals and shotglass sentimentalists from the Pete Hamill school of ooze...

...No, not that Frank Sinatra— another one, who seems to have renamed himself in tribute to the Chairman of the Board...

...Like Frank, he had an entourage, two guys named Johnny Schiano and Johnny Bread...

...Brad Lorrico, a 56-year-old who "loads trucks" and who has seen Sinatra perform live about 110 times, was there when Frank told the same jokes three times and introduced Frank Jr...

...But when somebody asked him to prove it with a driver's license, Sinatra looked insulted...

...These 100 or so devotees love him more than his fourth wife, Barbara, does, and last weekend's assemblage was a three-day vigil of karaoke and elegiac commerce, with no hope of Frank's making a cameo...

...And here he slipped into clipped Hobokenese, in imitation of The Man: "Hit the ball, ya fat bastahd...

...There were moments when I heard the voices of grown men— strong men, who lift things for a living—crack a little when describing Sinatra's last shows in 1994...

...As Rick attempted to get serious, telling me how his dad died when he was young and Sinatra became a father figure, Nicky's Dewar's nearly escaped through his nose...

...He's in bad shape," says conference organizer and alpha-fan Rick Apt (manager of the Sinatra Web site, www.blue-eyes.com...

...Frank isn't talking—he always regarded the press as a bunch of "buck-and-a-half whores...

...He ain't goin' anywhere...

...Just like me...

...There's the two recent heart attacks, the Alzheimer's rumors, and now, the tabloids are certain he has bladder cancer...

...Only bigger...

...about two hands shy of the big casino...

...Though many already speak of him in the past tense, they all call him "Frank" as if they know him...

...his bandleader) four times and couldn't get through a song even with the TelePrompTers he had taken to using in the late 1980s...

...He could walk out on the stage and fart, and they would applaud...

...But whoever the guy is who keeps getting photographed in wrinkled pajama tops with Abe Lincoln growth and his rug sagging left doesn't look like a serenely aging version of the snap-brimmed, elegantly haberdashed Sinatra of the Capitol years, or even the last-legs penguin-suit-and-party-heels Sinatra of the mid-'90s...

...I had after-dinner drinks with Rick Apt and Nicky Russo, an Atlantic City liquor-store owner with apple-butter coloring and cufflinks the size of hubcaps...

...He too has a charismatic bent, sometimes to detrimental effect, like when he's insulting our mistake-prone waiter ("He should come with an eraser on his head") or fighting with other perfectly likable vendors ("I wanna tear his eyeballs out" he said of one) or excusing Sinatra's beastly appetites ("He's had more women in bed than Johns Hopkins Hospital...

...My wife doesn't own as much jewelry as he was wearing in one shot: twin pinky rings, four bracelets per wrist, a gold chain that contained a crucifix, a "Boss" charm, an Italian horn, and a gold Sinatra head with blue sapphires for eyes...

...His family says he's fine...

...Yeah," he said, "Frank used to take him down to Little League...

...We watched the DJ clear the dance floor with "Send In the Clowns," and Nicky offered amicable threats: "If you play that Snoop Doggy Dogg, it'll be your last song...