The indications are that, once Frank was given his start at the Rustic Cabin, Mafia fish bigger than De Carlo took an interest. Luciano, in prison at Dannemora in upstate New York, maintained a keen interest in his many “investments,” which included saloons and gambling venues in New Jersey. Word now filtered through to him about the progress of a young singer named Frank Sinatra.
“When I was in Dannemora,” he recalled years later, “the fellas who come to see me told me about him. They said he was a skinny kid from around Hoboken with a terrific voice—and one hundred percent Italian. He used to sing around the joints there, and all the guys liked him.”
One of Luciano’s visitors, a longtime friend from New Jersey named Mike Lascari, was especially knowledgeable about the music industry. Lascari, a kingpin of the burgeoning jukebox racket, was constantly on the lookout for fresh talent. Luciano’s visitors also included Willie Moretti and, on a regular basis, Frank Costello. Reports in law enforcement files suggest the three of them played a role at the start of Sinatra’s career.
A 1951 Bureau of Narcotics document on the Mafia states flatly that Frank was “ ‘discovered’ by Willie Moretti after pressure from Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano.” An FBI document quoted an informant as saying Sinatra “was originally ‘brought up’ by Frank Costello of New York.” And a 1944 report on crime in New Jersey noted that Moretti “had a financial interest in Frank Sinatra.” Later, engaged in conversation by agents on a pretext, the gangster “admitted his association” with Sinatra.
The son of the senior policeman who wrote the 1944 report, himself a former New Jersey investigator, recalled his father discussing the Sinatra-Moretti matter. As Matthew Donohue Jr. remembered it: “Willie Moretti and big guys like Joe Adonis1 used to go into the Rustic Cabin. People like that were often there. And Willie took a liking to Sinatra.”
CHICO SCIMONE, a Boston-born pianist of Sicilian parentage, has confirmed Sinatra’s early connections to the Mafia. Scimone had moved to New York on the advice of Rosario Vitaliti, an older Sicilian who had known him since childhood. Vitaliti had a butcher’s shop in Brooklyn but, Scimone soon realized, “he was actually mixed up in the Cosa Nostra.” Vitaliti was a lifelong friend of Lucky Luciano. At the butcher’s shop, Scimone had been introduced to Luciano’s brother Bartolo and to Luciano himself. He also met Costello, Moretti, and others, mobsters who hired him as a musician, not just in clubs but for their personal entertainment.
“Anytime they had meetings, secret meetings, they had fun afterwards,” Scimone said. “They would have singers and dancers, and if there wasn’t a piano I’d bring my accordion. Sometimes they would want me to go to their homes for family occasions, christenings and the like. Carlo Gambino had a grand piano, and he would have me go to his home once a month. He loved ‘Come Back to Sorrento.’ ”
Scimone long stayed silent about his experiences with mobsters, innocent though they were. “They trusted me,” he said. “I would never talk. Now the last of them has died—Joe Bonanno—and I can talk.” In 1938 or 1939—Scimone could not date it more closely than that— Frank Costello made an unusual request. “The amici from New Jersey had contacted him about a young fellow. They said he had a good voice and they wanted to test him—a sort of audition—and asked me to play the piano.”
Moretti was present at this audition, and the young fellow in question was Sinatra. “He was in his early twenties,” Scimone remembered. “He had some sheet music. I asked him: ‘What key are you gonna sing in?’ . . . He did a couple of songs. I don’t remember what now—one may have been ‘Night and Day.’ Someone had brought Sinatra there, and afterwards he left. They had been listening while he sang, and when they asked me my opinion of him I said, ‘It’s fine.’ He had a nice voice. It was just a little audition.”
Looking back, it seemed normal enough to Scimone that the mob bosses wanted to test Sinatra. “The Mafia controlled everything then,” he said. “They could make somebody or they could destroy them.” He learned, he said, that at some stage Sinatra and Luciano “had some friendship.”
“THE BOYS GOT ON TO FRANK in part because he was a saloon singer, and they loved saloon songs, and they liked his cockiness,” Sonny King said. “He was a young punk kid when he met them. They liked to think of him as their kid, or son. He was respectful, which was the right thing to do.”
Frank maintained in testimony to the Nevada State Gaming Control Board in the 1980s that Willie Moretti “had absolutely nothing to do with my career at any time.” The transcript of a much earlier closed session with U.S. Senate investigators, however, shows on that occasion Frank made a crucial admission:
ATTORNEY: “I will ask you specifically. Have you ever, at any time, been associated in business with Moretti?”
SINATRA: “Well, Moretti made some band dates for me when I first got started.”
6
All, or Nothing at All
HOWEVER HE GOT THERE, working at the Rustic Cabin was less than glamorous. “Frank hated the place,” said Fred Travalena, who worked there as a singing waiter. “But he said he knew how to put a plate in front of somebody, and he’d do anything to be able to sing. Some of the food orders weighed more than he did. If you got the orders messed up or spilled anything and the customer complained, they’d take it out of your check.”
Sinatra remembered having to sweep the floor, show people to their tables, and “bow to the boss.” It was worth it, though, because he got to sing. The tips rolled in, he recalled, when he and the pianist pushed a little “half piano” around and sang at individual tables. By the time a young girl singer arrived, a few months later, Frank “was the boy singer,” said Lucille Kirk, who later married the resident trumpeter. “One of the best I ever heard. Every time he opened his mouth the audience went quiet. He could take control of an audience just by looking at them. There was a magic quality about him.”
In a photograph Kirk kept, a white-tuxedoed Frank stands diffidently in front of a band playing the Cabin. In another picture he looks straight into the camera, shiny-haired, very youthful, intense.
Kirk remembered Frank as an incorrigible flirt. He dared to run his hand up and down her spine when she was wearing a backless dress, even in front of her husband-to-be. And “Oh, the women!” she said of Frank and the female customers. “There were a lot of women.”
Sinatra rarely shared his thoughts about women and sex. But a Hoboken contemporary, Joey D’Orazio, remembered something Frank said at the Rustic Cabin. “We’re animals,” he said, “fuckin’ animals, each and every one of us, that’s what we are, and we’re damn proud of it, too. . . . There’s more to life than just Nancy, and I gotta have it.” “I’m just looking to make it with as many women as I can,” he told another friend, Tom Raskin.
Seven years into his relationship with Nancy Barbato, Frank’s world was suddenly full of sexual opportunity. “He was a skinny guy, ordinary looking, his Adam’s apple protruded, his ears stuck out,” said D’Orazio, “but he had more charisma and magnetism than anyone. . . . The broads, they swarmed over him whenever he got off stage.”
Frank discussed his good luck with Harry Schuchman, the regular saxophonist at the Cabin. “You got something, boy,” shrugged Schuchman, “you look mattress oriented.” Schuchman’s wife watched the women in the audience as Frank sang. “His voice and little-boy charm got them,” she said. “They were sent.”
Nancy Venturi, barely into her teens, was one of those who fell. “He had sex on the brain,” she recalled. “He would make love to anyone who came along. . . . There was something unusually intensive about his lovemaking, at least it was with me.” She remembered Frank’s seduction technique, his sexually direct lines. Other guys, she thought, “didn’t talk like that back then.”
Venturi contributed to the legend that Sinatra was hugely well endowed sexually. “There’s only ten pounds of Frank, but there’s a hundred and ten pounds of cock,” Ava Gardner famously told Britain’s colonial governor of Kenya years late
r, at a social occasion.
D’Orazio said Frank bragged about the size of his penis. Venturi, with a laugh, said he “would swing it around and call it ‘Big Frankie.’ . . . It sounds ridiculous now but back then—well, it was ridiculous back then, too.”
Another lover said she went to bed with Frank in part to discover “what a bundle of bones like that could do. It wasn’t very much in those days. I imagine he got better.” He was a “cuddler,” Venturi said. “I felt loved, completely loved . . . what did I know?”
At one point Venturi thought she was carrying Frank’s baby. At a loss for anything else to do, she persuaded him to go to church with her and pray. “C’mon, God,” she remembered him saying as they knelt in front of the altar. “Gimme a break, will ya? Make her not be pregnant. Okay? So, uh, thanks a lot, God. . . . That’s it. So, amen, all right?” The deity apparently listened.
In the late spring of 1938, Frank danced at the Rustic Cabin with a twenty-seven-year-old Italian-American, Toni Della Penta. She was the daughter of a man involved in illegal alcohol rackets, separated from her husband and highly temperamental. According to Della Penta, she and Frank dated for months. Dolly, whom she met early on, called her “cheap trash” and tried to keep the couple apart. One summer night, however, Frank gave her a ring and asked her to marry him. She had not slept with him up to that point, but the proposal did the trick. They began going to hotels together, checking in as “Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra.”
Della Penta said she became pregnant. For a while, in spite of Dolly’s objections, Frank continued to say he would marry her. Then, she said, she miscarried and Frank “didn’t come around anymore.” She felt spurned and embittered.
At the time, Frank was still very much involved with Nancy Barbato. Now twenty-one, she would come into the roadhouse to hear Frank sing. “He was promising both women that he’d marry them,” Travalena remembered. “It really got to be a mess.”
Della Penta called the Cabin one night to speak to Frank, and Nancy picked up the phone. They had angry words, and then Della Penta arrived in a rage. She lashed out at Nancy, tearing her dress. Then she had a stand-up argument with Frank—who was trying to slip away— before storming out.
Della Penta filed a complaint, and on November 26, 1938, Frank was arrested at work and taken to the county jail. He found himself facing the outdated charge of “Seduction”—which he had allegedly committed twice that month—“under the promise of marriage” to “a single female of good repute for chastity, whereby she became pregnant.” The mug shot taken the next day, showing Sinatra as prisoner No. 42799, later vanished from police files—only to reappear years later and go on sale as a poster.
Dolly swung into action once again, according to Della Penta, sending Marty Sinatra to see Toni’s father. The two men tried to persuade Della Penta to back off. Frank was released on $1,500 bail, and then the complaint was withdrawn when it emerged that Della Penta was still legally married. When she in turn was arrested, after a fracas with Dolly at the Sinatras’ home, she responded by filing a second complaint. The charge this time was for another arcane offense still on the statute book at the time—“Adultery.”
Just before Christmas Frank was arrested again and again released on bail. The nonsense came to an end only when Della Penta withdrew the second complaint. Though ridiculous, the case provided early evidence of three traits in Frank’s character: promiscuity, rage over press coverage of his private life, and a propensity to make violent threats.
The local press had reported both arrests, the second one under the headline “Songbird Held on Morals Charge.” Frank “called up someone at the newspaper,” a friend recalled, “and said: ‘I’m coming down there and I’m gonna beat your brains out, you hear me? I’m gonna kill you and anyone else who had anything to do with that article. And I ain’t no fucking songbird.’ ”
Meanwhile, there was music of another kind to face. “What Nancy don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her,” Frank had told D’Orazio a few months earlier. Now she did know, and it hurt. “Nancy was crushed by the whole damn thing,” a Sinatra acquaintance said. “There was a lot of screaming and hollering over that, let me tell you.” Nancy asked whether the affair with Della Penta was the first time Frank had strayed. He confessed that it was not, but swore it would never happen again.
Early in January 1939, formal invitations were sent out inviting family and friends to the marriage of Nancy Rose Barbato to “Mr. Francis A. Sinatra.” “I was quite taken aback,” said Adeline Yacenda, who had long known the young couple. “I knew they hadn’t planned on getting married so soon at all. That wedding was all very, very sudden.” The invitation was for February 4, 1939, less than two weeks after Della Penta withdrew her charges.
Dolly hosted a shower for the bride-to-be and produced one of her own rings for Frank to give Nancy during the ceremony. Frank borrowed some cash from a friend and obtained a black tailcoat and striped pants. Nancy settled for a traditional white wedding dress that had previously been worn by one of her sisters.
She remembered the ceremony, at Our Lady of Sorrows church in Jersey City, as not large “but awfully nice.” Nancy walked down the aisle on her father’s arm, tears streaming down her face. The bridegroom had on his face what Nancy described as his “completely ‘gone’ expression. . . . I don’t think I’d ever seen Frank so happy in his whole life.” An old girlfriend, Marian Brush, who spent a few moments alone with Frank at the end of the reception, thought otherwise. To her, “He looked like the saddest man I’d ever seen.”
The couple went straight from the wedding supper to their first home, which Nancy described as a “cheerful little apartment in Jersey City.” Frank was “too busy,” she said, to take a honeymoon. He turned out to be handy around the house, however, picked out curtains for the kitchen—yellow and brown—and hung them himself.
“Frank,” Nancy told the press a few years later, “doesn’t believe a wife—not his anyway—should have a separate career or her own independent income. As for me, I don’t want my husband helping with the housework or darning his own socks.” Yet Nancy did work in the first months of their marriage, as a secretary. Even with Frank’s raise at the Rustic Cabin, to $25 a week, money was short.
“Our marriage started off with one strike against us,” Sinatra recalled. “I was working most of the nights, and Nancy worked all day. We couldn’t even have Sundays together.” When they moved on to another apartment, moreover, Nick Sevano regularly stayed overnight. Frank spent much of his spare time out with Sevano and Hank Sanicola.
Before the wedding, a Sinatra family member had reportedly overheard Frank telling Nancy: “I’m going to the top, and I don’t want anyone dragging on my neck.” Nancy had responded meekly, promising not to get in his way. She was more worried about her husband’s roving eye. Sevano, who thought Nancy was “a great lady,” said Frank “spent very little time at home, and we spent more time with him than she did. She was very, very nervous about Frank and women he might meet.” Frank realized within eighteen months that he should not have gotten married after all. “What I had mistaken for love,” he admitted later, “was only the warm friendship Nancy had brought me.”
When Sanicola had first heard about Frank’s wedding plans, he had ruefully responded, “Poor Nancy . . .”
THE WORLD WAS IN TUMULT as Frank and Nancy began married life. Hitler grabbed Czechoslovakia and forged an alliance with Mussolini. Those for and against the Nazis demonstrated in New York. President Franklin Roosevelt hinted that America would not stand aloof from the war that now loomed. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization prevented the black singer Marian Anderson from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington. In New Jersey, the popular right-wing radical priest Father Coughlin continued to blame the rise of communism on the Jews.
Orson Welles’s radio program about Martians landing in New Jersey caused nationwide panic. Hollywood boomed with movies starring Spencer Tracy,
Errol Flynn, Mickey Rooney, and Bette Davis. Judy Garland was flying over the rainbow. Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney had cornered the market on gangster pictures. The best-selling record of the moment was “Deep Purple,” sung by Hildegarde.
At the Rustic Cabin, after a year of doubling as waiter and singer, Frank was becoming impatient. He took other singing jobs when he could, not just for the money but to get his name known. “I was running around doing every sustaining [unsponsored] radio show I could,” he recalled. Six weeks after his wedding he was in that studio on West Forty-sixth Street in New York, when bandleader Frank Mane let him make his very first recording, “Our Love.”
Frank’s goal was to get where the action was, with the big bands. “I was segueing between Jersey and New York,” he recalled, “trying to make a buck here and there. . . .” He managed to buttonhole Glenn Miller, who was just coming into his own. “I walked up to him,” Sinatra remembered, “and I said, ‘Glenn, I want a job!’ I really did! . . . He said to me, in essence, ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ ” The hugely popular Tommy Dorsey, whom Frank considered “a god,” was persuaded to go hear him at “a club,” perhaps the Rustic Cabin, but was not impressed. When he got up to leave, Frank got his attention by holding up a sign reading: “We need the money!” Dorsey just laughed, and left.
Then Frank attended a rehearsal at the Nola Studios in New York at the invitation of another bandleader, Bob Chester, who himself had heard him at the Rustic Cabin. Dorsey happened by while he was singing. “When he saw us he got a little flustered,” Dorsey remembered. “Right in the middle of the song, he forgot the lyrics.” Even so, what the bandleader heard this time made him think “the kid’s voice was appealing, real good. . . .”
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