'OL RED EYES

None of the obituaries to Frank Sinatra that I read mentioned that he'd been accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee of being a communist. Maybe few are interested in the political aspect of Sinatra's complex and colourful life. But to ignore it entirely is to miss a salient dimension of the man.

In the middle period of his career Sinatra was (unfairly) associated in the public mind with the Mafia. But in his early days, he hung out with fellow-travellers of the US Communist Party, and was named as a communist 12 times in testimony given to McCarthy's witch-hunting committee.

There was nothing Bono-esque about Sinatra's early political interventions. He issued public statements against race attacks in Harlem in 1943 and against Spanish fascist leader Franco in 1946. The latter intervention earned him the enmity of the Catholic hierarchy which in the US, as in Ireland, was pro-fascist in the '30s and '40s.

He travelled to Gary, Indiana, in 1943, to speak and sing for students taking part in one of the first boycotts of a segregated college, and responded in forthright fashion to criticism that this was outside the remit of an actor and singer. "We've got a hell of a long way to go in this racial situation. I don't know why we can't grow up. Hell, actors have got to take a stand politically, even if they get hurt at the box-office".

Sinatra's political views were a factor in his relative isolation in the late '40s and early '50s: in 1949, at a time when he was the most famous singer in the US, he lost his radio show , was dropped by his film studio and dumped by his record company.

In the obits last month, accounts of Sinatra's association with the Kennedys cast him as a celebrity attached to the most glamorous political circle of the time. But he'd supported Kennedy before Kennedy won the Democratic Party nomination and was explicit that Kennedy's stand on civil rights had been the key consideration in securing his loyalty. He had also played concerts of Martin Luther King at a time when King was far from being fashionable.

By the late '60s, Sinatra's rekindled career had carried him to mega-stardom and a fabulous lifestyle cut off from the reality of workaday existence. There was a lot of truth in Jesse Jackson's complaint that: "Sinatra has sold his birthright for a pot of gold". When the Democrats ditched him, embittered and cynical he joined the Republican Party and became a crony of the Reagans.

Of course, none of this was as central to Sinatra's life as his singing and acting. But it isn't irrelevant either that once upon a time Old Blues Eyes was a bit of a Red. n