Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Fighting, temper, and braggadocio were to become lifelong characteristics that damaged Sinatra’s reputation again and again. “Anybody hits you, call me!” he would scrawl at the bottom of a letter to songwriter Sammy Cahn. It was just a jocular postscript, but he was also prone to real, inexcusable violence.

  Frank as a grown man would say that his “days of gang fights and petty thievery” led him to resent authority, especially in the shape of policemen. He described how one night “two big plainclothesmen” accosted him as he stood on a street corner and asked how he had come by his brand-new blue suit and black patent leather shoes. When he refused to answer, he said, the detectives “beat the stuffing out of me until I was a bleeding mess.”

  “Many of the kids I grew up with in Hoboken are serving time today,” Sinatra told the columnist Lloyd Shearer. “A few even went to the chair.” He told Anita Colby, then assistant to the movie producer David Selznick, “Everyone in my class either went to the electric chair or was hung.” In another press interview, he said something less dramatic and more credible—that “some” of his old buddies landed in reform school and that just “one” went to jail.

  Frank evidently invented much of his image as the abused wop with a violent childhood. “He was never picked on because of his heritage,” said Nick Sevano. “When he was growing up he was known as the little thin rich boy, and people in our town, who were poor, would pick on him. . . . He got a little bored with it, and that’s when he got into scraps.” Frank’s uncle Dominick said there were “no gang fights, just fighting, the way kids have always been fighting, and nobody ever really got hurt.” If there was really a run-in with two policemen, Dominick never heard of it. As for boxing, said Dominick’s son Buddy, Frank “never had a fight. He is excitable and he gets loaded and then thinks he can fight, but he couldn’t knock your hat off with a ball bat.” A major investigative article in Look magazine quoted a Hoboken resident as saying, “That stuff about him being a juvenile delinquent is a lot of baloney. He’s just trying to make himself sound tough.”

  DOLLY HAD NOT BEEN GREATLY CONCERNED when Frank’s school career ended ignominiously in 1932. “Her way of thinking,” her niece Rose remembered, “was that Italians didn’t need an education to get a job.” Marty was “terribly upset,” however, and for good reason. Frank had shown himself adept at drawing—he liked to sketch bridges and tunnels—and his father had hoped he would become an engineer. The Stevens Institute of Technology is in Hoboken, and Frank had encouraged his parents in the notion that he would study there. Now their hopes were dashed.

  “I didn’t want to go to college,” he recalled, but his father did want him to, as Sinatra put it, “in the worst way. He was a man who could never read or write his name and his big point was education.” Marty had laid it on the line: “Do you want to get a regular job?”—“reggala” was the way he actually said it—“or do you wanna be a bum?”

  “If I had the chance again,” Sinatra was to say, “I would have been a little more patient about getting out into the world . . . seen to it that I had a more formal education.” When his own boy came home with a high school diploma, the son remembered, he behaved as though “it was the greatest thing since cellophane. He thought I was Albert Einstein.” The mature Sinatra would discover literature and history, collect works of art. “He craved to better himself, to learn,” his actor friend Brad Dexter said. “He was hungry for knowledge.”

  In his mid-teens, though, Sinatra recalled feeling “that there was only one answer, to run away . . . more than once I hid out with an aunt for a week or two.” When not running away, he went through the motions of getting a job. Because one of his few distinctions at school had been to win a model airplane competition, he tried out as a trainee technician at the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics in nearby Newark. When that did not work out, he enrolled briefly at Drake Business School.

  An early Sinatra press spokesman would claim that Frank had been a sportswriter at the Jersey Observer newspaper. Not true. He had a menial job at the paper, obtained only thanks to Dolly’s intervention with circulation manager Frank Garrick, who happened to be her son’s godfather. “I remember Frank well,” the city editor’s widow said. “He worked at flinging bundles of newspapers onto the delivery trucks, but he was so frail that my husband gave him a job inside. He was an office boy.”

  Garrick later explained how the sportswriter myth started. The day after an actual sportswriter died in a car crash, he said, Frank “sat down at the dead boy’s desk and acted as if he had the job.” When someone inquired why Frank was there, he claimed falsely that it was on his godfather’s instructions. Exposed and told he was to be let go, he threw a horrendous tantrum. “The filthy names he called me!” Garrick remembered. “Like he was going to kill me. . . . The words he used were hateful, awful. He called me every terrible name in the book and then he stormed out. He never said another word to me until fifty years later, after his mother died. She wrote me off, too.”

  Marty and Dolly went up another rung on the economic and social ladder in 1932, buying a sizable house close to the most desirable part of town. Dolly now had a backyard of her own, a bulldog and a turtle—and a son who was failing at everything. Frank, for his part, had had it with Hoboken, had had it with the limited world in which he had grown up.

  “Be proud of your Italian lineage,” his father is said to have told him. The son would eventually take that to heart, but that was in the future. He resented and rejected Marty’s “old-fashioned ideas,” the ideas of la via vecchia, the old European way. He wanted to explore the universe of new possibilities that he sensed was out there in America, if only he could reach it.

  The Frank Sinatra who came out of Hoboken would be conflicted about his background. The day was not far off when, wishing to express contempt for men he despised, he would scornfully dismiss them as mere “shoemakers”—knowing well that his own grandfather and uncle had been cobblers. Far in the future, though, according to his friend Tony Oppedisano, he would express “an affinity for the working man, identify with people who break their back to keep a roof over the family’s head.”

  Personally, though, the young Sinatra had no time for “those little town blues” he was to share with the world one day in the song “New York, New York.” He wanted to leave behind Little Italy with its aging immigrants whose dreams had failed them, its old ladies in black clinging to the customs of a time gone by. The grown man would speak of Hoboken contemptuously, characterizing it as “a mudhole” and a “sewer.” He told Pete Hamill he had “just wanted to get the hell out.”

  All through his childhood Frank had watched the trains coming and going at the Hoboken railroad terminus, had gotten into trouble for climbing up onto them, had badgered his mother to buy him a wind-up toy engine and a freight truck. In his days of wealth, he would install a train room at his home in California complete with a replica of the Hoboken railroad yards. The trains, the young Sinatra had seen, went somewhere, somewhere else.

  So did the ferries, and the teenage Sinatra took the four-cent ride to Manhattan as often as possible. An evocative photograph, unearthed not long ago in a Hoboken basement, shows a gaunt teenage Sinatra sitting cross-legged on a Hoboken pier, staring out over the water. The figure in the picture looks solitary, but from the summer of 1931 the boy who would sing of loneliness was no longer entirely alone. There had been teenage flirtations before, a girl to show off at the junior high school dance, but this one would turn out to be special.

  The girl was Nancy Barbato, just fourteen when they met. Frank’s aunt Josie had a summer place near the ocean at Long Branch, an hour south of Hoboken, and he spent weekends there. Nancy’s parents had a house across the street. “The first time I saw her,” he remembered, “she was sitting on her porch steps manicuring her nails. When I whistled she slapped me down hard by ignoring me completely.”

  The rebuff was short-lived. Frank would wait for Nancy to complete her household chores, and they
would head off for long strolls on the beach. “That summer was the beginning,” he said. “I can still remember the way the moon shone on those little crimped wet rims on the sand where the waves had made a pattern, the salty smell of the sea when I’d leap down the wooden steps to meet her.” By winter, he was walking through deep snow just to say hello and go home again.

  Nancy was the fourth of seven children born to Michelangelo Barbato, a plasterer, and his wife, Giaraninna—Michael and Jenny in America. Her father was an Italian immigrant, her mother had been born in Hoboken. The Barbatos welcomed Frank to their home, and he enjoyed his visits greatly.

  Nancy’s household was very different from the one he had grown up in, without brothers and sisters, with his father’s long, moody silences and his mother’s interminable fussing. An evening at the Barbatos’ was a cheerful, noisy affair, with the babble of children talking over each other around the table, Jenny Barbato presiding in the kitchen, and Verdi or Caruso on the Victrola.

  There would be other girls in the seven years that were to pass before Frank married Nancy. Even so, she changed everything for him. “I was a poor, lonely and discouraged kid when I met her,” he was to say. “In Nancy I found beauty, warmth and understanding. Being with her was my only escape from what seemed to me a grim world.”

  Nancy not only had faith in Frank as her beau. She also thought he could sing.

  4

  “I’m Going to Be a Singer”

  FRANK SINATRA HIMSELF had trouble remembering how the singing began. “Sometimes I think I know,” he said forty years later, “but then I shake my head and wonder. Am I remembering what really happened or what other people think happened? Who the hell knows, after a certain point?”

  The idea of singing for a living, he thought, came to him when he was eleven, getting those nickels and dimes for singing in his parents’ bar. Music was in his blood, for his was a musical family. Dolly sang at weddings and political meetings and sometimes picked up a guitar. A cousin who played the banjo sang with his own group. Ray Sinatra, a distant relative who had been acclaimed a child prodigy as a classical pianist, would eventually head his own band in Las Vegas.

  By the time Frank sang in the family bar he was a regular in the choir at St. Francis’s church in Hoboken, and his treble tones were heard at summer picnics. He thought he first sang on his own in public “at some hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Late twenties. I had a hairline down to here. I probably sang ‘Am I Blue?’ and I probably got paid a couple of packs of cigarettes and maybe a sandwich.”

  While living with the Sinatras, after getting out of jail, Frank’s uncle Lawrence heard his nephew singing in the bathroom. He thought he would go far, but it was his uncle Dominick, who in 1931, when Frank was fifteen, gave him a ukulele. To the youngsters of the 1920s and 1930s, that four-stringed instrument was what the guitar was to be decades later. Those were the glory days of “Ukulele Ike” Cliff Edwards and “Wizard of Strings” Roy Smeck, and thousands of young imitators donned raccoon coats to plunk out tunes for their girls.

  “He was the only kid in the neighborhood with a musical instrument,” said his former baby-sitter Rose Carrier. “I remember very clearly how he used to sit on the curbstone under the lamppost on a summer night, strumming that uke and singing away. All the kids would be around him, fascinated by the idea that he was learning to play it.”

  Frank had his ukulele with him when he met Nancy Barbato, and he serenaded her with it. By fall, during the year he spent at Demarest High, he was confident enough to sing at halftime during a basketball game. “The cheers kept him singing,” recalled referee Gerald Molloy. “The kids would not let him stop.”

  At New Year’s 1933, when Dolly wanted to show off her new home, resplendent with baby grand and gold-painted telephone, she built Frank and his singing into the celebration. “A party was given at the home of Mr. and Mrs. M. Sinatra of upper Garden Street,” noted an item on the society page of the local newspaper, “in honor of their son Frank. Vocal selections were given by Miss Marie Roemer and Miss Mary Scott, accompanied by Frank Sinatra.”

  Her seventeen-year-old could do something, Dolly seemed to be saying, even if he had been expelled from school and showed no sign of getting a steady job. He worked briefly as a riveter’s laborer at the Teijent and Lang shipyards, as a loader for a book company, as a cleanerfitter on ships laid up in dock. Nancy’s father let him try his hand at plastering, but he was no good at that.

  Music, it was now clear, was what mattered to Frank. Marian Brush, a girl with whom he was having a dalliance, suggested he get a group together to play at school dances. “In exchange for hiring the musicians,” she said, “he’d get to sing a few numbers with the band. I’d take money at the door, and when we got enough we all went to the Village Inn in New York so Frank could sing with the orchestra there. We’d go in and ask the manager beforehand to let Frankie sing. We said that’s the only way we would come in, and he usually said yes.”

  Rehearsing at home was difficult, because Marty, who was irritated by his son’s failure to hold down a job, allowed it only in the basement. Frank’s aunt Josie, however, let the boys use a building on Madison Street, a former club that still boasted an old piano. Soon he was singing at social clubs—the Cat’s Meow, the Comedy, Azovs—and for women’s groups. Draped in the requisite raccoon coat and crooning into a megaphone like Rudy Vallee, he sang at parties. He sang for his mother at political meetings. “I performed anyplace,” he recalled, “that people would listen to me.” Told he was too young to perform at the local vaudeville theater, Fabian’s Follies, he somehow managed to get on stage anyway. According to legend, he sang “Someday Our Names Will Be in Lights on Broadway.”

  Few, then, would have believed that. So badly was Frank’s singing received at Cockeyed Henny’s, a local poolroom, that he was unceremoniously ejected. Nor was he welcome when he tried to perform at a hall on Monroe Street. “Frankie would sneak in and try to sing, and they would throw him out,” one of the owner’s relatives recalled. A burly trombone player chased him off the stage at the Catholic Union in Newark’s Little Italy when they could not make him stop singing.

  Some were more encouraging. “People began to say: ‘That’s not bad!’ ” Sinatra remembered. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know at all.” For a while, he said, he considered becoming “a monologist or a juggler.” Then came a turning point. “A short time after Frank started going out with Nancy,” said his aunt Josie, “he took her to see Bing Crosby. And after Crosby went off the stage Frank turned to Nancy and said: ‘I’m going to be a singer.’ When they got home that night he announced it, very seriously.”

  “Most people,” Frank reportedly said of Crosby, “think he’s just a crooner. But they’re wrong. He’s a troubadour. He tells a story in every song. . . . He makes you feel like he’s singing just for you. I bet I could sing like that.” “Someday,” Nancy remembered him saying on the way home from the Crosby show, “that’s gonna be me up there.”

  Family sources differ as to when and where Frank had this revelation, but it seems not to have been merely some publicist’s invention. Sinatra recalled the moment. “From the time I first heard Bing on the radio,” he said, “I thought he was in a class by himself. He was the greatest . . . the Will Rogers of song.”

  Radio, the most influential music vehicle of the day, played Crosby’s hits constantly. “The Groaner” would soon eclipse Rudy Vallee, and Russ Columbo would die in a shooting accident. Crosby became the reigning crooner, entrancing audiences with “Million Dollar Baby” and “Just One More Chance,” songs to which a generation made love.

  Crosby was “the biggest thing in the country,” Sinatra remembered. “On records. On the radio. In the movies. Everybody wanted to be Bing Crosby, including me. . . . Bing was my first singing idol.” Musician and Hoboken contemporary John Marotta recalled seeing Frank “standing on street corners wearing a blazer, a sailing cap and smoking a pipe”— aping Bing Crosby.

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bsp; “My father said that got him disliked by the kids, walking around like Bing,” said another contemporary’s son, James Petrozelli. Frank remained undeterred. The pipe, a Crosby trademark, can be seen jammed in the corner of his mouth in his first publicity photograph. Even in the first days of his own fame, years later, he would turn up for rehearsals sporting pipe and cap and a Crosby-style floral sports shirt.

  Sinatra recalled thinking that Crosby “sang so easily it couldn’t be very tough. . . . He was so relaxed, so casual. If he thought the words were getting too stupid or something, he just went buh-ba, buh-ba, booo. He even walked like it was no effort. . . . It was like Fred Astaire. Fred made you think you could dance, too. I don’t mean just me. I mean millions and millions of people. Some people, they danced and sang right through the fucking Depression. Every time Bing sang, it was a duet, and you were the other singer.”

  Frank’s determination to become a singer became evident at the very nadir of the Depression, when 13 million Americans were out of work. His parents despaired. Dolly found a picture of Crosby on the wall of Frank’s room and “threw a shoe at me when I repeated my ambition.” Marty thought him “obsessed,” and lost patience.

  “I remember the moment,” Sinatra said. “We were having breakfast, and I was supposed to have gotten up that morning to go out and look for a job. . . . He said: ‘Why don’t you just get out of the house and go out on your own?’ You know, ‘Get out!’ And I think the egg was stuck [in my throat] for about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t swallow it or get rid of it. . . . We agreed it might be a good thing, and I packed up the small case that I had and I came to New York. My mother of course was nearly in tears. . . . He didn’t speak to me for a year . . . one whole year.”