In New York, especially, his voice remains omnipresent. His "New York, New York" might as well be the city's official anthem. Many times when I've visited Manhattan I have walked past what was said to be Sinatra's favorite restaurant: an unprepossessing-enough-looking Italian place on West 56th Street called Patsy's. This, Sinatra legend has it, is the spot where he could relax, where he felt most at home.
I'd never gone inside. I had imagined it as a peak-of-the-mountain place, a restaurant where only the most savvy would congregate, men and women who were at the pinnacle of their games, who had long ago learned and mastered all the angles. After all, this was where Sinatra had his regular table, wasn't it? How could mere mortals have a shot at fitting in?
This trip, I came in for dinner. And learned a lesson.
Sinatra, in his chairman-of-the-board years, in his sell-out-every-seat-in-the-concert-hall decades, did, in fact, gravitate to this place. But it wasn't because he was the biggest name in entertainment. It was because at one point in his life, he feared that he might be finished.
"My grandfather was the first member of our family to know him," said Salvatore J. Scognamillo, the current chef and co-owner of Patsy's.
The grandfather -- Pasquale "Patsy" Scognamillo -- had co-owned a restaurant nearby called the Sorrento during the first years of the 1940s. The young Sinatra was brought in one day by his boss, bandleader Tommy Dorsey. "I've got this skinny kid from Hoboken," Dorsey reportedly told Patsy Scognamillo. "Fatten him up."
Sinatra swiftly became an international singing idol whose voice and face made women and girls scream and faint; riots broke out at his concerts. Patsy, meanwhile, left the Sorrento and opened Patsy's. Both men -- the crooner and the cook -- were doing well for themselves.
