Frank
Page 70
And, it does not go without saying, effusive thanks to the great team at Doubleday, from copy editing to design to marketing to production.
If I have inadvertently omitted anyone from the list, I ask them to forgive me and know that they reside in my heart, if not my short-term memory.
PHOTO CREDITS
Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following for permission to reprint:
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Frontispiece: Bill Dudas/MPTV
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NOTES AND SOURCES
CHAPTER 1
1. The filial proxies for Mrs. Sinatra and Mrs. Puzo (also in a sense representing the two visions of godfatherhood) would have a memorable encounter in a Santa Monica restaurant in the 1970s, not long after the release of the movie version of The Godfather. In the film, of course (as in the novel), a down-on-his-luck Sinatra-like singer wins a crucial movie role through the vivid intercession of Don Corleone. Horse’s head and all, it made for a terrific story—one that, naturally enough, Sinatra resented. The worlds-colliding confrontation between the singer and the novelist/screenwriter was colorful enough that Puzo recounted it afterward in a letter to his close friend the novelist Bruce Jay Friedman. “As told to me by Mario,” Friedman recalled, “he was having dinner with a female acquaintance—and spotted Sinatra at a distant table. Thinking he might impress his friend, he decided to walk over and introduce himself. ‘The second I got to my feet, I saw that I had made a mistake. Sinatra was surrounded by “necks.” For insurance, I stuck a fork in my pocket.’ Thus fortified, he walked over, introduced himself to Sinatra, who cursed him out for five minutes straight. ‘I accepted this calmly,’ said Puzo, ‘and noted that he never once looked me in the eye. And what amused me was the preposterous notion of a skinny Northern Italian daring to curse out an Italian from the South.’ ” (Friedman to author, e-mail, Jan. 15, 2007).
SOURCE NOTES
2 “The only two”: Peter Bogdanovich, in discussion with the author, Feb. 2009.
3 “I really don’t think”: Peggy Connelly, in discussion with the author, May 2006.
4 “Sometimes I’d be”: Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p. 83.
5 “When I would get”: Ibid., p. 84.
6 “She was a pisser”: MacLaine, My Lucky Stars, p. 82.
7 “I think my dad”: Tina Sinatra, My Father’s Daughter, p. 14.
8 “Honest and truly”: Lyrics from “Honest and Truly,” words and music by Fred Rose (New York: Leo Feist, 1924).
9 “He was a hijacker”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 21.
CHAPTER 2
1. Or maybe just having seen the writing on the wall: Marty O’Brien, “a tough battler from Hoboken,” according to boxrec.com, nevertheless compiled an unspectacular 1–6 lifetime record, losing his last fight, on June 6, 1921, to Johnny Dohan, by a knockout in the fifth round. In all, Marty was knocked out in three of his seven prizefights.
2. One must understand the succession of immigrations to appreciate the true power of the ethnic pecking order in early-twentieth-century America. Mario Puzo used the German-Irishness of Don Corleone’s adoptive son Tom Hagen to signal that he was one classy consigliere. Likewise, the German-Irishness of Hoboken’s Park Avenue was a sign that the Sinatras had, at last, well and truly Arrived.
3. In his monumental biography Mozart: A Life, Maynard Solomon tells us how “[i]n several of Mozart’s most characteristic adagios and andantes a calm, contemplative, or ecstatic condition gives way to a troubled state—is penetrated by hints of storm, dissonance, anguish, anxiety, danger—and this in turn is succeeded by a restoration of the status quo ante, now suffused with and transformed by the memory of the turbulent interlude … The felicitous states that frame Mozart’s excursions into anxiety may [psychologically] represent a variety of utopian modalities, and the impinging, disturbing materials may be taken to represent a variety of fearful things—the hidden layers of the unconscious, the terrors of the external world, a principle of evil, the pain of loss, or the irrevocability of death. An argument can be made, however, that in the last analysis we bring to the entire continuum of such states derivatives of feelings having their origin in early stages of our lives, and in particular the preverbal state of symbiotic fusion of infant and mother, a matrix that constitutes an infancy-Eden of unsurpassable beauty but also a state completely vulnerable to terrors of separation, loss, and even fears of potential annihilation … Not without good reason, the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described a baby as ‘an immature being who is all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxiety,’ an anxiety that is kept at bay only through a mother’s ongoing, mirroring validation of the infant’s existence. It may be such a precarious moment where inexpressible ecstasy collides with unthinkable anxiety that we sense in the Andante of Mozart’s A-minor Sonata, which, reduced to its simplest essence, tells a story about trouble in paradise” (p. 187).
If ever there was a story about trouble in paradise, it is the sixty-two-year story of Frankie and Dolly.
4. The story of Sinatra’s naming is, with
mythological aptness, clouded. Sinatra family history would have it that he was Francis Albert at birth, period. The truth doesn’t seem to be so simple. By some accounts, the big baby was purposely named for his godfather, Frank Garrick, who was triply qualified, being (a) Marty’s close friend; (b) Irish-American, and therefore classy; and (c) (best of all) the nephew of a Hoboken police captain. According to other accounts, Dolly and Marty meant to name their son for Marty, but at the christening (poor Dolly, still recuperating, was absent) the priest, mistaking Garrick for the dad, asked his name, and Marty, staring at his tattoos, or just too flummoxed to speak up, left himself uncommemorated for the ages. (And a good thing, too: “Marty Sinatra” wouldn’t have looked nearly as good on all those great Capitol albums.) The name on the birth certificate was rendered, by some ethnically clueless clerk, as “Frank Sinestro” (Clarke, All or Nothing At All, p. 6).
Frank, not Francis.
An equally careless census clerk in 1920 listed the family name as “Sonatri,” and the three residents of the cold-water flat on Monroe Street as twenty-five-year-old Tony (occupation: boilermaker), twenty-three-year-old Della (occupation: none), and four-year-old just plain Frank. (Interestingly, another “Sonatri” family also resided at 415 Monroe, also with a son—aged seven—named Frank.) The 1930 census lists the inhabitants of 705 Park Avenue, Hoboken, as Anthony (not Martin), Natalie (not Dolly), and Frank (not Francis) Sinatra (not Sonatri).
5. Rosebud alert: in his adult years, Sinatra’s favorite color scheme was … orange and black.
6. “There are singers in my family but not any professionals,” he told the Los Angeles Times’s music columnist in 1943. “I’ve been so busy singing since I left off being a sports reporter on a little New Jersey paper … that I haven’t had time to study.”
SOURCE NOTES
7 “Uncle Vincent”: Tina Sinatra, My Father’s Daughter, p. 162.
8 “a small grand piano”: Kelley, His Way, p. 26.
9 “The thing you have”: Giddins, Bing Crosby, p. 259.
10 “Bing Crosby is the only”: Ibid., p. 56.
11 “I’ve learned the meaning”: Lyrics from “Just One More Chance,” words and music by Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnson (New York: Famous Music, 1931).
12 “I think it was at some”: Thomas Thompson, “Frank Sinatra’s Swan Song,” Life, June 25, 1971.
13 “If you think you’re going”: Kelley, His Way, p. 28.
14 “Her way of thinking”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 25.
15 “Like Dolly”: Tina Sinatra, My Father’s Daughter, p. 16.
16 “Frank, sporting the T-shirt”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 20.
CHAPTER 3
1. Frank had pursued Marie, the younger sister of his close friend Billy Roemer, but since he wasn’t doing very well in school and didn’t seem to be going anywhere generally, Marie had spurned his attentions. Whatever he sang at the joint recital appears not to have changed her mind.
2. But not for the same reason. Crosby started wearing hats in publicity stills, and then in the movies, to cover up his premature baldness—a little preview of the future for Sinatra, whose hairline at this point was still lush and low.
3. Yet Frank went a good deal further: he had a lifelong obsession with cleanliness and neatness—many friends and acquaintances have mentioned his need to clean ashtrays, line up bottles of liquor on a bar, and so forth—that verged on the pathological.
4. They could also be unkind. A cousin of a friend of the author, a man who had a lively dance-band business in Hoboken in the 1930s, recalled telling young Sinatra to beat it.
5. Picasso, who falsely claimed to have been able to draw like Raphael from the moment he first picked up a pencil, was guilty of the same peccadillo.
6. Earlier in 1935, during breaks in the Lindbergh-baby-kidnapping trial of Bruno Hauptmann, WNEW’s announcer Block had begun the revolutionary practice of playing records on the air—an idea that caught on and became The Make-Believe Ballroom. The station would become increasingly important in Frank Sinatra’s career, culminating in the arrival in the early 1960s of William B. Williams, the disc jockey who dubbed Sinatra “the Chairman of the Board.”
7. Although he well might have. In a clip from a Hollywood musical that came out a couple of years later (1937’s Manhattan Merry-Go-Round), the moviemakers have one of their characters refer unashamedly—and in a complimentary context!—to the new Yankee phenom Joe DiMaggio, who appears briefly, as a guinea (www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgrCCc12sFc).
8. Sinatra actually wound up recording the thing in 1961, in a blisteringly up-tempo Billy May chart—an exercise in redemptive revisionism—on Swing Along with Me.
9. The big and dreaded gong, which—when the Major gave the high sign to the gong striker—tolled like John Donne’s church bell right in the middle of a failed act, sending the aspirant not just off the show (that would have been bad enough) but in many cases back to destitution on America’s hard Depression streets. Major Bowes, fearful of physical attack by disappointed contestants, had a large bodyguard on hand to hustle off the losers before they said or did anything unfortunate.
SOURCE NOTES
10 “[A] New Year’s Eve party”: Kelley, His Way, p. 31.
11 “When she saw Crosby’s”: Ibid., p. 33.
12 “I remember the moment”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Bill Boggs, Midday Live with Bill Boggs, Sept. 22, 1975 (broadcast Nov. 30, 1975).
13 “It was when I left”: Douglas-Home, Sinatra, p. 21.
14 “On Christmas Eve”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
15 “All life’s grandeur”: Lowell, Near the Ocean, p. 19.
16 “It was a lucky”: Lyrics from “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby,” words by Billy Rose and Mort Dixon, music by Harry Warren (New York: Remick Music, 1931).
17 “You’d better quit”: Kelley, His Way, p. 34.
18 “The NEWest Thing”: Jaker, Sulek, and Kanze, Airwaves of New York, p. 134.
19 “Oh, he never worked”: Kelley, His Way, p. 36.
CHAPTER 4
1. The draconian terms of the Bowes contract dictated that the name of the show not be used to promote any professional appearances on the part of former Amateur Hour contestants. In addition, former contestants were to pay 15 percent of subsequent professional fees straight to the Major. Frank Sinatra did not lose sleep about hewing to the letter of the agreement.
2. And also, apparently, of the Hoboken mobster Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo’s. DeCarlo, an underling of the North Jersey boss Willie Moretti, was an avuncular executioner with a soft spot for sponsoring young Italian-American singers. In later years he would keep a large portrait of Sinatra in the barnlike structure in Mountainside he used as his headquarters. Just like The Sopranos.
SOURCE NOTES
3 “Just because”: Lyrics from “Shine,” words by Lew Brown and Cecil Mack, music by Ford T. Dabney (New York: Shapiro, Bernstein, 1924).
4 “walked right into”: Kelley, His Way, p. 36.
5 “There’s only ten”: Higham, Ava, p. 133.
6 “I hate your husband”: Kelley, His Way, p. 131.
7 “panic period”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
8 “I don’t want you”: Lyrics from “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” words by Ted Koehler, music by Harold Arlen (New York: Mills Music, 1931).
CHAPTER 5
SOURCE NOTES
1 “being then and there”: Kelley, His Way, p. 6.
2 “He looked like”: Ibid., p. 7.
3 “On a Sunday evening”: Frank Sinatra, interview with Sidney Zion, Yale University, April 15, 1986.
4 “Cheech, could I go”: Kevin Coyne, “Sinatra’s First, Freed at Last,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 2006.
5 “Our love, I feel it”: Lyrics from “Our Love,” words and music by Larry Clinton, Buddy Bernier, and Bob Emmerich (New York: Chappell, 1939).
6 “So, I woke Harry”: Levinson, Trumpet Blues, p. 67.
CHAPTER 6
1. The record wouldn’t be released until the following June—when it would sell a disappointing eight thousand copies—but the song, performed live by the Music Makers with Sinatra, was broadcast several times that fall, and heard (as we’ll soon discover) by some very important people.
SOURCE NOTES
2 “Hey, Connie Haines”: Connie Haines, in discussion with the author, Jan. 2006.
3 “bedlam. Gene Krupa”: Jenkins, Goodbye, p. 3.
4 “We don’t have a singer”: Levinson, Trumpet Blues, p. 67.
5 “It’s an interesting thing”: Michael Feinstein, in discussion with the author, April 2007.
6 “Frank told Harry”: Haines, discussion.
7 “The Irish Kids”: Gay Talese, in discussion with the author, May 2007.
8 “Can you imagine?”: Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p. 71.
9 “After the first show”: Levinson, Trumpet Blues, p. 69.
10 “Please give the new boy”: Kelley, His Way, p. 49.
11 “sensational, intense style”: Ibid.