Friday, May 15, 1998 | 3:24 a.m.
It is not easy to organize a scholarly conference on Frank Sinatra.
As soon as Hofstra University announced last year that it was planning one titled "Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Music, the Legend," calls poured in from autographed-cocktail-napkin collectors, Sinatra impersonators, singing-plate manufacturers, a ventriloquist with a Sinatra puppet.
Fortunately for Hofstra, scholars responded, too: professors with arcane specialities like the neo-Latin poetry of Colonial and Revolutionary America, offering papers on everything from the iconography of Sinatra to Sinatra and masculinity, Sinatra and politics, Sinatra and Generation X.
An art historian at the University of Chicago proposed a paper on Descartes and Sinatra. An expert in the collective unconscious wanted to examine Sinatra from a Jungian point of view. Other topics included Sinatra and Italian-American culture, and Sinatra and civil rights.
"We can approach Sinatra from many levels," said Krin Gabbard, a professor of comparative literature at the State University at Stony Brook on Long Island. "Those involve so many things that are so important to us on a daily basis: models of masculinity, upward mobility, crossing ethnic boundaries while maintaining loyalty to your origins.
"If you really want to understand how this country works, look at Sinatra."
Well before his death Thursday evening, Sinatra had become not only one of the best-known pop culture icons of the 20th century but also the focal point of a small but thriving cottage industry at colleges and universities in the United States and other countries.
Over the last few years, professors have been writing books on Sinatra, editing collections of scholarly essays on Sinatra, publishing articles in academic journals and organizing panel discussions on Sinatra at the annual conferences of scholarly groups, including the Modern Language Association.
It just so happens that many of the scholars involved are Italian-American men themselves. They listened to Sinatra as children, because their parents did. Many rediscovered him in adulthood. (At least one was driven back to him by disco.) Without hesitation, they call themselves fans.
As a result, some admit to ambivalence about transforming Sinatra into a subject for study. Those feelings surfaced when Hofstra shipped off 30,000 copies of a request for papers for the first full-scale conference devoted entirely to Sinatra, scheduled for Nov. 12-14.
"My first reaction was: 'Why don't they leave him alone? He's mine,"' said Rocco Marinaccio, a professor of English at Manhattan College in the Bronx. " 'Do we have to muck Sinatra up with all of the appropriation that goes on when academics start to write about pop culture?"'
(Then Marinaccio sent in his proposal on Sinatra and the politics of cool.)
Popular culture has been a hot field for scholars and students on certain campuses for years, since the rise of cultural studies. But while Madonna and Elvis Presley captured the imagination of many professors, the subject of Sinatra languished, relatively untouched.
Maybe he was not cool enough, marginal enough, working class enough, scholars say; maybe he seemed too much a part of bourgeois culture. As Thomas Ferraro, who teaches cultural studies at Duke University, put it, the Sinatra discussion remained "a conversation between music critics."
Then Sinatra turned 80 in December 1995. Amid a revival of interest in jazz, swing and the '50s, he suddenly became visible again. Popular books and articles on Sinatra and the Rat Pack came pouring out.
"I think a lot of us who were devoted to Sinatra's music felt it was time to make a case for him as an important artist," said Roger Gilbert, an associate professor of English at Cornell. "We felt if people can write about Madonna and Elvis in an academic context, why shouldn't we?"
One of the first academics to organize a Sinatra panel was Paula Marantz Cohen, a professor of humanities and director of the literature program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who in early 1996 put out a call for papers on "the semiotics of Sinatra" in the Modern Language Association newsletter.
Ms. Cohen says she expected proposals informed by a critical view of Sinatra as what she calls "a symptom of our culture." But the 15 scholars who responded loved Sinatra. Gilbert, who was one of them, told Ms. Cohen he had waited all his life for a Sinatra panel at the MLA meeting.
"I won't say it was hagiography," Ms. Cohen said of the panel that resulted at the conference in Washington in December 1996. "But there was a sense of appreciation which doesn't enter in as much to even the study of literature at literary conferences."
In his paper, "The Swinger and the Loser: Sinatra, Masculinity and '50s Culture," Gilbert argued that Sinatra became the classic embodiment of '50s culture not because he was its idealized male image but because "he fully articulated its contradictions, anxieties and ambivalences."
Masculinity, in particular, was fraught with tension, Gilbert wrote. And the decade's most representative male artists and artifacts "manifest a nearly pathological melancholia, often disguised by exaggerated sexual drive and willed nonchalance, that points to a genuine crisis of male identity."
Sinatra not only embodied cliches of maleness, he also parodied them "to allow a contrasting sense of the self's interior spaces to emerge," Gilbert said. In his film roles and his singing, he displayed a "startling capacity for showing pain."
Another English professor, Gilbert Gigliotti of Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, presented a paper at a Popular Culture Association conference in 1996 in which he analyzed liner notes written by Stan Cornyn for Sinatra's albums in the '60s, examining the creation of the Sinatra image.
"What I did with the liner notes was take my literary training and say 'Let's look at this character who Cornyn has created,"' Gigliotti said in an interview. "In elegant and witty essays on the backs of albums, he creates this interesting character, all this iconography that jumps off the page."
As for Sinatra's politics, Jon Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is interested in Sinatra as an example of the connection between popular culture and politics. Wiener has traced the transformation of Sinatra's political views over nearly half a century.
A supporter of Henry Wallace for the presidency in 1948, Sinatra was to the left of the Democrats in the 1940s, Wiener says. His short film, "The House I Live In," was a statement against racism centered on a song that held up the working class as true Americans. It won an Academy Award in 1945.
Over the next few decades, as Wiener tells it, Sinatra was "red-baited out of the industry," re-emerged in the 1950s as a "regular Democrat" campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, then for John F. Kennedy, then began to drift right, ending up a supporter of Richard Nixon in 1972.
"In our day, most singers don't have this kind of continuing engagement with politics," Wiener said in an interview. "They will endorse causes, but mostly safe causes. Sinatra recalls a time when there was a much closer and intense engagement between popular artists and the political issues of the day."
More than 100 scholars and others have submitted proposals for papers they would like to present at the Hofstra conference, which is being organized by the Hofstra Cultural Center and Eric Schmertz, a law professor and former dean of the Hofstra School of Law.
Among those who have proposed papers, MaryAnne Janosik, a historian at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, intends to examine Sinatra's screen image to see, as she explained in an interview, "how this Italian guy from New Jersey became sort of the prototype for a lot of our contemporary ethnic antiheros, like De Niro and Pacino."
Harvey Kaplan, a Manhattan psychoanalyst, hopes to speak on the ways in which Sinatra epitomized the psychological concept of "the second self," which Kaplan describes as "a self that's not normally exposed in our everyday life but that we make use of in artistic endeavors."
Philip Furia, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington and the author of a book on the poetry of Ezra Pound, intends to speak on his examination of the lyrics of the songs from Broadway shows in the 1920s and 1930s that Sinatra recorded in the 1950s.
"They're almost all written for women performers," Furia pointed out. "That whole character that Sinatra establishes in songs that is very vulnerable, very tender - a lot of that comes from the fact that he took songs that were really written for women characters."
Meanwhile, Leonard Mustazza, a professor of English and American Studies at Penn State University, Abington, and the co-editor of "The Frank Sinatra Reader" (Oxford, 1995) expects to have out shortly "Ol' Blue Eyes: A Frank Sinatra Encyclopedia" (Greenwood Publishing Group).
Mustazza is also editing "Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture: Essays on an American Icon," a collection of essays by scholars, which he said would be published in time for the Hofstra conference.
"This conference may be a little bit ahead of the Sinatra curve," said Douglas Brinkley, a Cold War historian at the University of New Orleans, who is to speak on "Frank Sinatra and the American Century" at Hofstra. "But 50 years from now, they'll be teaching him at Harvard."
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