Frank Sinatra, did life ‘his way’. Kitty Kelley’s ‘Unauthorized Biography’ describes how, early in his career, his publicity agent, George Evans, hired twelve long-haired, round-faced girls and paid them five dollars each to jump and scream and yell ‘Oh, Frankie. Oh, Frankie’ when Sinatra started to sing one of his slow, soft ballads. To ensure theatres were packed, hundreds of tickets were given away to kids on school vacation. An ambulance was hired to sit outside, and ushers had bottles of ammonia ‘in case a patron felt like swooning’.

Next day’s newspapers showed pictures of young girls being carried out ‘in a swoon’… Twelve were hired but thirty fainted! It caught on. Soon ticket lines stretched around the block. Later the head of the New York Police Department’s missing persons bureau blamed Sinatra for the problem of runaway girls and recommended that he be exiled to New Guinea! Next year (1943) George Evans was awarded a scroll for the ‘Most Effective Promotion of a Single Personality’. ‘Frankie is a product of crowd psychology’, he told the Chicago Tribune News.

What would Evans have done with Jesus? The mind boggles. One thing is certain: he wouldn’t have put the items ‘itinerant preacher’, ‘homeless’, ‘friend of down-andouts’ on his agenda. Or ‘Gethsemane’, ‘Trial before Pontius Pilate’ or ‘Golgotha’.

Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from this present evil world. Amen.