Frank Read online

  Still, Crosby’s influence on him cannot be underestimated. The period of Bing’s explosion into the American consciousness, propelled by radio’s beginnings as a truly mass phenomenon, precisely coincided with Frank Sinatra’s emergence as a sexual being. There he was alone in his room, just him and his radio—with that voice coming out of it. (Talk about masculine role models: poor grunting Marty couldn’t have compared well.) Anyone who came of age in the early 1960s, hearing Dylan and the Beatles for the first time, can remember the feeling: There you are with your hormones aboil, and someone is speaking, really speaking, to you … And if that someone who’s speaking happens to possess genius, interesting things percolate in your mind.

  Even in early adolescence, Frank Sinatra’s mind was an exceedingly interesting one. He was already aware of something that set him apart from others his age: an inner riot of constantly flowing emotions, happy to sad to miserable to ecstatic to bored, sometimes all within the space of a minute, each shift hanging on the precise character of the daylight, the look of the clouds, a sharp sound in the street, the smell of the page of a comic book … He might have been ashamed of his inner chaos at times—weren’t these kinds of feelings for girls?—or he might’ve been proud. In any case, he kept this part of himself to himself.3

  As—for now—he kept secret the thrill he felt at the sound of Crosby’s voice, couched in the certainty that Bing was speaking to him. In fact, in the case of Crosby and Sinatra, genius was speaking to genius—though in Sinatra’s case, the genius was very much nascent. Frank Sinatra was a slow bloomer. With his feet rooted firmly in the soil of New Jersey. When a Life magazine writer asked him, in the early 1970s, if he could recall the first time he ever sang in public, Sinatra said, “I think it was at some hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Late 20s … I probably sang ‘Am I Blue?’ and I probably got paid a couple of packs of cigarettes and maybe a sandwich.”

  Which begs the question of those piano-top performances at Marty O’Brien’s, but still—he was singing. Unlike school, this was something he could do.

  In June 1931, he graduated from Hoboken’s David E. Rue Junior High School; around that same time—perhaps as a graduation present—his mother, always looking to boost his popularity, bought him a used Chrysler convertible for $35. That fall, she had reason to regret her generosity: after a mere forty-seven days’ attendance at A. J. Demarest High, Frankie either dropped out or, as he later claimed—probably in another attempt to bolster his bad-boy credentials—was expelled, “for general rowdiness.” He was not quite sixteen.

  According to some sources, Dolly, who’d dreamed of Frankie’s becoming a doctor or a civil engineer, was furious. “If you think you’re going to be a goddamned loafer, you’re crazy!” she is said to have screamed. According to other accounts, however, Dolly was unperturbed (“Her way of thinking,” a niece recalled, “was that Italians didn’t need an education to get a job”), even if Marty’s plans for his son to attend Stevens Institute had hit a rough patch. In any case, somebody was disappointed.

  If Frank Sinatra’s boyhood were a movie, a continuing visual theme would have to be Dolly marching around Hoboken, her firm jaw set, bent on accomplishing for the powerless males around her what they seemed unable to accomplish for themselves. This time she marched straight over to the offices of the Jersey Observer and buttonholed Frankie’s godfather and namesake, the Observer’s circulation manager, Frank Garrick, refusing to leave the premises until she had secured for her son a job bundling newspapers on a delivery truck.4

  A famous story ensues: Frankie, restless and smart and intellectually ambitious, though also possessing a strong streak of intellectual laziness, didn’t like bundling newspapers on a delivery truck. Instead, he got it into his head that he would prefer to be a sportswriter. Not become a sportswriter—be a sportswriter. And so one day, after some poor cub reporter on the Observer’s sports desk got himself killed in a car wreck, Dolly ordered her thoroughly unqualified son to march into Garrick’s office and demand the job. Not finding Garrick present, Frankie went over to the dead boy’s desk and simply sat down, doing things he imagined an actual sportswriter might do: sharpening pencils, filling the glue pot—everything, in short, but writing about sports.

  When the Observer’s editor saw Frankie at the dead kid’s desk, he quite reasonably asked him what he was doing there. Frankie responded that Mr. Garrick had given him the job. The editor asked Mr. Garrick if this was the case. Garrick said it was not. The editor told Frank Garrick to let Sinatra go. More likely—with what one knows of editors, and the time and the territory—he told him to let the lying little son of a bitch go.

  Garrick regretfully informed his godson that he, Frankie, had put him in an untenable position, and that it would be impossible for him, Frankie, to stay in the Observer’s employ.

  Whereupon Frankie lost it.

  Screaming, red faced, veins pounding, he cursed out his godfather, dredging up every scrap of gutter talk he’d learned on the sidewalks of Hoboken. A sixteen-year-old high-school dropout cursing out a grown man, a figure of benevolence and authority: the man who had given him his name.

  “Like Dolly, he resented authority in any guise—especially when he knew he was wrong,” Sinatra’s daughter Tina wrote. “The more you yanked him by the neck, the less he liked it, and the more he’d dig in his heels.”

  The Garrick episode has a whiff of sulfur about it. It speaks of the Old World spirit—the true, violent spirit—of vendetta. But even worse: if true—and there’s no reason to suppose it isn’t, since both Garrick and, later, his widow recalled the incident—it says not-so-good things about the teenage Sinatra. Does this make him a tougher customer than we’d first suspected?

  Probably not. For all Sinatra’s claims that he’d run with a rough crowd, carried around a length of lead pipe, and so on—not to mention his stories about Marty teaching him to fight—there are too many accounts from Hoboken contemporaries that portray him as a natty little weakling who couldn’t punch his way out of a paper bag, who tried desperately to bribe bigger, tougher boys to be his friends. An old photograph in Nancy Sinatra’s second book about her father, Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, shows Frankie, aged about twelve, looking rather timid as he stands on the sidewalk with his big, expensive bicycle. He’s wearing a newsboy cap, beautifully pressed trousers, and a jacket marked “TURKS.” “Frank, sporting the T-shirt of his street gang, the Turks,” Ms. S.’s caption reads. “Just like they do today, street gangs protected their territory.”

  But it turns out the gang wasn’t a gang at all: it was an after-school club called the Turk’s Palace. The Turks had secret handshakes, they played a little baseball, they wore flashy orange and black jackets with a half-moon and dagger on the back.5 And Dolly was the one who bought the jackets, thus ensuring that Frank would be the club’s manager and the baseball team’s pitcher. Which makes it hard to credit the idea that the Fauntleroy of Park Avenue had suddenly turned into a hard guy as he entered adolescence.

  Instead, what we see is a type: the overaggressive, loud-talking bantamweight who snarls to hide his terrors. Sinatra’s explosion shows a ferocious sense of entitlement, built on a foundation of sand. (It also shows a deep fear of his mother, and how she might feel about his losing his job.) Frankie had to have known that he was in the wrong, and the resulting self-dislike would have stoked his tantrum. He then would have felt furious at himself for losing his temper, and further furious at Frank Garrick for making him lose his temper. A nuclear chain reaction.

  There would be many such exhibitions in Sinatra’s life.

  (In later years—perhaps abetted by his publicist George Evans—he liked to let it slip that he had once worked as a sportswriter for the Jersey Observer.6 The assertion found its way, unchallenged, into many later accounts of his life. Once he was famous, he found a way to have been a sportswriter.)

  We are told that after Frankie recounted the Garrick incident to Dolly (no doubt carefully spinning it in
his favor), she never spoke to the man again. For his part, Sinatra didn’t talk to his godfather for close to five decades. He failed to invite Garrick to his first wedding, to the baptisms of any of his children, or to Dolly and Marty’s fiftieth-anniversary party.

  Then, out of the blue, not long after Dolly died (in 1977), Sinatra phoned Garrick, asking if he could come by to visit. Generously, Garrick told him that would be fine. Sinatra didn’t show up.

  He called several more times, but each time failed to appear.

  Finally, in 1982, the sixty-six-year-old Sinatra went to see the eighty-five-year-old Garrick and his wife in their three-room apartment in a senior citizens’ building in Hoboken. Not alone—he brought along his secretary, Dorothy Uhlemann, and his best friend, Jilly Rizzo, as insulation. Picture the commotion in the tiny apartment as, amid cooking smells and a barking television, the tanned and bewigged superstar and his retinue enter. Sinatra surprisingly timid at first, Dorothy’s sweetness and Jilly’s gruff bonhomie covering the initial awkward silences. Frank then presents the elderly couple with an elaborate fruit basket and an envelope containing five $100 bills. Much more is to come, he promises. Finally, all material gestures having been exhausted, Sinatra and Garrick embrace, and both men weep. Sinatra tells his godfather he has never gotten in touch because he was scared.

  But now Dolly Sinatra is in the grave, and it’s safe.

  3

  Even then he could wear a hat. Frankie had a charge account at Geismar’s, a Hoboken department store, and a wardrobe so fabulous that he acquired a new nickname: “Slacksey O’Brien.” Circa 1929. (photo credit 3.1)

  On the sheer strength of her chutzpah, young Dolly moved her little family ever farther from Guinea Town and toward the plusher districts closer to the Hudson. In December 1931, as former business executives stood on breadlines and sold apples, the Sinatras (and ever-present Uncle Vincent) relocated again, this time to an honest-to-God four-story house at 841 Garden Street (a very nice address), replete with central heating, several bathrooms, a gold birdbath at the entrance, a mahogany dining-room set, a baby grand piano, and—like something out of Dinner at Eight—a chaise longue and gold and white French telephone (number: HOboken 3–0985) in the master bedroom.

  True, Dolly would need to scrape every nickel and dime, not to mention take in boarders, to pay the substantial mortgage (the house cost over $13,000, a bloody fortune in those days), but that was part of her master plan. She had already lifted the Sinatras out of the lower middle class. And she announced as much in the society pages of the Jersey Observer: “[A] New Year’s Eve party was given at the home of Mr. and Mrs. M. Sinatra of upper Garden Street in honor of their son, Frank. Dancing was enjoyed. Vocal selections were given by Miss Marie Roemer and Miss Mary Scott, accompanied by Frank Sinatra.”1

  Upper Garden Street.

  Accompanied by Frank Sinatra.

  It isn’t so hard to imagine that the musical portion of the festivities had initially been planned for the two young ladies alone, and that headstrong Frankie had shoehorned himself in, to Marty’s displeasure and Dolly’s ambivalent approval. That she commemorated his participation afterward doubtless had more to do with wanting to wring every possible drop of family glory out of the event than with a sudden acceptance of his boyish dream. He was still a dropout and a ne’er-do-well, drawing free room and board under the expensive roof of 841 Garden Street.

  Since there was a depression on and no loafing was countenanced in Dolly’s house, he was put to work. His mother got him jobs and he took them—briefly, and with maximum reluctance. He caught hot rivets at the Tietjen and Lang shipyards in Hoboken, swinging terrified (he was afraid of heights) on a harness over a four-story shaft. That lasted three days. He unloaded crates of books at a Manhattan publisher’s office until the futility of it all got to him—and he wound up back on the Hoboken docks. This time, at least, tedium replaced terror. Here was a foretaste of a dropout’s future: In United Fruit’s freighter holds, on the night shift and in the dead of winter, Frank removed parts of condenser units, cleaned and replaced them. Over and over again. For anyone who’s ever done physical labor for hourly pay, Sisyphus is no myth. Did he gaze across the river at the brilliant towers, lit from beneath in Art Deco fashion, dreaming of the justice that would be his when he was rich and powerful? Did he hear Bing’s golden voice in his head as he unscrewed and re-screwed the condenser tubes?

  Of course he did. He was frequently seen, in those days, not only smoking a pipe like his idol but also wearing a white yachting cap with gold filigree.2 In addition, according to a female friend of the time, Frankie, in his nonworking hours, dressed in much the same style as, and every bit as well as, the college boys at Stevens Institute, up on the hill. (One of the more unpleasant features of manual labor, for him, must have been the dirt. Like Dolly, who had Chit-U on tap to mop and dust, Frank was a neat freak.3 One good reason for a large wardrobe was that he always had something clean to wear.)

  In his mind he was a Personage. He had wheels, he had threads, he had a dream. In his mind, all that business on the docks, the drudgery, was just an illusion, like some dingy version of the veil of Maya.

  He didn’t last long at any of the jobs, but he wasn’t idle. Even if he was only a singer by his own nomination, a singer had to sing. It was an era of live music, and Hoboken was full of bands: at school dances, political clubs, taverns. Frankie idolized real musicians, sought their company constantly. Sometimes they brushed him off; sometimes they indulged him. He had a way of insinuating himself; Dolly helped him out. She could never help spoiling him. He knew instrumentalists were always hungry for orchestrations, and so he hit her up for them. A dollar here, a dollar there—soon he had a sheaf of arrangements. And if he provided the charts, occasionally the bands were kind enough to let him sing along.4 Just like Rudy Vallée (and like Crosby in his early days), Frankie vocalized through a megaphone, microphones being an expensive rarity then. The neighborhood boys used to try to pitch pennies into his mouth through the megaphone—a fat target.

  His pretensions didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Who the hell did he think he was, strutting around Hoboken in fancy duds and a yachting cap? (He also used to loll around on the stoop plunking on the ukulele that an uncle had given him.) When he brought home musicians to jam, Marty made them play in the basement. Even Dolly got fed up. “When she saw Crosby’s picture on Frank’s bedroom wall,” a relative recalled, “she threw a shoe at her son and called him a bum.”

  Marty went her one further. One morning at breakfast, he looked coolly at his son and told him to get out of the house. “I remember the moment,” Sinatra told Bill Boggs in a 1975 television interview. “He got a little bit fed up with me, because I just wasn’t going out looking for work. [Instead] at night, I [was], you know, singing with the bands—for nothing, so I could get the experience. And he, on this particular morning, said to me, ‘Why don’t you just get out of the house and go out on your own.’ That’s really what he said. ‘Get out.’ I think the egg was stuck in here for about twenty minutes … My mother, of course, was nearly in tears. But we agreed that it might be a good thing. Then I packed up the small suitcase that I had and I came to New York.”

  My mother, of course, was nearly in tears. We agreed that it might be a good thing. I packed up the small suitcase that I had … Here is a scene from an old family melodrama: the mother dabbing her eyes with her apron; the implacable father, an arm thrown out to one side, index finger pointed at the door; the shamefaced son standing with his head bowed. (That small suitcase is the real killer.) The actual scene was probably slightly less genteel: more likely, Dolly’s mouth fell open with surprise at the sound of Marty speaking up. Those two words, however—“Get out”—ring absolutely true.

  Where, exactly, Frankie went after he stepped off the Hoboken Ferry (fare, four cents) at Twenty-third Street and what, precisely, he did during his mini-exile—not to mention just how long he was gone—remain a mystery. It seems
certain he crossed the river to the Emerald City for a short spell, that he made some sort of stab at singing there, and that he failed miserably. He returned home with his tail between his legs. In 1962, Sinatra laid down a considerably more glamorous-sounding official version for the starry-eyed English writer Robin Douglas-Home. “It was when I left home for New York that I started singing seriously,” he said—perhaps giving Douglas-Home a piercing glance with those laser-blues to make sure he was getting it all down. “I was seventeen then, and I went around New York singing with little groups in road-houses. The word would get around that there was a kid in the neighborhood who could sing. Many’s the time I worked all night for nothing. Or maybe I’d sing for a sandwich or cigarettes—all night for three packets. But I worked on one basic theory—stay active, get as much practice as you can. I got to know a song-plugger called Hank Sanicola … and he used to give me fifty cents or a dollar some weeks to buy some food. For some reason he always had terrific faith in me.”

  Looking beyond the improbability of roadhouses in New York (at least after the nineteenth century) and the self-aggrandizement of the word’s supposedly getting around, what seems most clear from this slightly jumbled account is that Sinatra was rewriting his past to make himself look more precocious than he actually was.5 The little groups, the roadhouses, meeting Sanicola—all this would happen, but not for a couple more years, when Sinatra was closer to twenty. At seventeen, he may have been cocky, but he couldn’t have been very confident; on his own in the big city, he wouldn’t have had the emotional wherewithal or the professional smarts to figure out how to get much practice. The Apple was the toughest of tough towns, especially in the Depression, and he would have to go at it several times before he made any inroads.