The Chairman Emeritus

No middle-aged American woman will ever forget the February of her years, when an undernourished kid with a big bow tie and an Adam's apple was the idol of all the bobby-socked, sad-dle-shoed groupies. Of course, they weren't called groupies then, and all they did was swoon. In the years since the 1940s, the kid put on weight--and threw it around like no other performer before or since. He was the Chairman of the Board of all show business. But last week Frank Sinatra, at 55, announced "effective immediately, my retirement from the entertainment world and public life."

Was it possible--within two months, farewells from both Rolls-Royce and the stud Marlene Dietrich called "the Mercedes-Benz of men"? Or was the master phraser of pop singing just teasing with another eloquent pause? He had been up and down before, but never out. Born in Hoboken, N.J., the son of an Italian immigrant fireman. Winning on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour. Singing with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Becoming "the Voice," playing the Paramount and the Hit Parade to the tune of $1,000,000 a year.

Then in the 1950s, his vocal cords abruptly hemorrhaged. MCA, the giant talent agency, dropped him. Eventually he sold himself (though some say the mob helped) to Columbia for an insulting $8,000 to play Maggio in From Here to Eternity. That won him the Oscar for best supporting actor of 1953. The top again: $4,000,000 to $7,000,000 a year. By then he had left his first wife, the former Nancy Barbato, and had chased, married and been divorced by Ava Gardner. "I like broads," he said, and not a few photographers got punched out trying to keep track of them all.

Abdication Announcement. He became the superstar of films, records, TV and the casinos of Las Vegas. He took over the Rat Pack. It is said that at a Democratic conclave once, he was affectionately greeted by Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, whom he told to "take your hands off the threads, creep." He was wanted both at Kennedy campaign rallies and rackets-commission hearings. He was into the airline business, missile parts, and had a personal staff of 75. Briefly he was married again, this time to Mia Farrow, who was less than half his age. Perhaps most surprising of all, after campaigning faithfully for almost every California and national Democrat since Harry Truman, he suddenly shifted his support last fall to Republican Governor Ronald Reagan.

How was Sinatra going to follow all that? His abdication announcement last week said he looked forward to contemplation, "writing a bit" and "perhaps even to teaching." The rest of the six-paragraph statement, released to Suzy, a syndicated gossip columnist and sometime Sinatra girl friend, was an apologia pro vita sua. After sermonizing on the brotherhood of man, he summed up his three-decade career: "Fruitful, busy, uptight, loose, sometimes boisterous, occasionally sad, but always exciting." Why did he want out? Because "there has been little room or opportunity for reflection, reading, self-examination and that need which every thinking man has for a fallow period, a long phase in which to seek a better understanding of the vast transforming changes now taking place everywhere in the world." Was the Chairman of the Board about to be greened?

Lonely Path. There was no obvious reason for him to drop out. The failure of his recent movies--Tony Rome and Dirty Dingus Magee--did not seem to rattle him. The voice was going but not gone. Intimates insisted that illness was not a factor. He did quit his latest film in November because of a painful constriction in his hand, but surgery supposedly has corrected that. He is back on the golf course and still moves with the old deliberate cock-of-the-walk swagger. With his hair transplant and added poundage, he looks healthier--but worse --than the peaked kid with the caved-in cheeks who played the Paramount.

There was no elaboration on Sinatra's pedagogical plans. Pressagent Jim Mahoney said: "I don't know of any professorship, but he may be open for one." It is questionable how long a mercurial and sleepless man like Sinatra can be happy as a professional dropout, ruminating and writing. The penultimate paragraph of his statement refers to a "breather" rather than complete retirement. As Bob Regehr, an executive of Sinatra's recording company, said last week: "I have yet to recall an entertainer who stayed in retirement. A great artist is a great artist. How many times did Judy Garland retire? And each time she came back. Singers retire, actors retire, bullfighters retire, but they all come back. Who knows?" Sinatra, who rarely failed to follow a lonely path that attracted him, could also be the one who does not come back.

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