Sublime

There, among Hubert Humphrey, Vladimir Nabokov, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, Senator George McGovern, William Safire, Isaac Asimov, Timothy Leary, Muhammad Ali, Bob Hope, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, W. H. Auden, Marshall McLuhan, Justice William O. Douglas, Ed Koch, Gwendolyn Brooks,

Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Teddy Hill, Chick Webb, Lionel Hampton, Tiny Bradshaw, Louis Armstrong, Henry Red Allen, and Jay McShann, mostly—then

Jimmy Van Heusen was a decadent womanizer, an Olympian boozer, a war hero, a daredevil pilot, and one of America’s best songwriters. Bogart may have been Sinatra’s role model for style, but for lifestyle, it was Van Heusen “All the Way,” the Oscar-winning song Van Heusen wrote with his lyricist Sammy Cahn. Sinatra called Van Heusen “Chester,” after

Don Michael, a one-armed pianist who played and recorded with Erskine Hawkins in the mid-1940s.