by James Kaplan
As a Grand Old Man holding forth to the journalist Sidney Zion, on the occasion of the first Libby Zion Lecture at Yale Law School in 1986, Sinatra painted the perfect motion-picture ending to his brief foray into Manhattan: “On Christmas Eve I went home to visit my folks and there was the hugging and the make-up.”
Perhaps it really was a visit and not an abject (and probably famished) retreat. Perhaps it was a beautiful combination of the Return of the Prodigal and It’s a Wonderful Life—though it’s much easier to imagine Dolly giving him a sharp slap (now that he was too old for the billy club). Marty would have felt guilty about losing his temper with the boy; Dolly (after the slap) would have fixed him a hell of a meal.
Yet what seems certain is that both parents had come to a realization: they had a strange duck on their hands. The boy, God help him, really did want to sing. There would be no further trips to the docks or the publisher’s warehouse.
Some say he borrowed the $65 from Dolly; some say, more convincingly, that she simply gave it to him. In any case, $65 was a lot of money in 1934, the equivalent of over a thousand today, a very decent couple of weeks’ wages for anybody fortunate enough to be employed in that very unfortunate year. The money went for a sound system: a microphone connected by a cable to a small amplifier. The amplifier had vacuum tubes inside: after you clicked the on switch, the tubes took a minute or so to warm up, the tiny filaments gradually glowing bright orange. The speaker was covered with sparkly fabric—very classy-looking. At the height of his career, Sinatra liked to use a mike that was as unobtrusive as possible—black was the preferred color—to give the illusion that his hand was empty, that he was connecting directly with the audience. That was at the height of his career. This early microphone would have been neither black nor unobtrusive. But it was a microphone.
It meant so much more than not getting any more pennies thrown into his mouth. It meant power. Dressing like Bing was just the beginning of his transformation: what Frankie discovered, as he used the mike, was that it was his instrument, as surely as a pianist’s piano or a saxophonist’s sax. It carried his voice, which was still relatively thin and small, over the big sound of the band, straight to the kids in the back of the room—particularly the female kids in the back of the room.
For that was the power of the microphone: not just its symbolic force as an object, but the literal power it projected. Like a gun, it made the weak strong; it turned a runt with scars and a starved triangular face into … what?
Into a dream lover, was what. The quality of a man’s voice is one of the primal signals to a woman’s brain—it goes right in there and messes with the circuitry. It tells her stories, stories about all the wondrous things he’ll do for her … and to her. All at once, this dropout, this punk who was so going nowhere that Marie Roemer turned up her turned-up nose at him, had been alchemized into—well, into something else. Those blue eyes, formerly merely insolent, were suddenly compelling … And he was so thin! One night at a school dance, while he was trying to hold a note, his voice caught out of sheer nervousness, and—ever watchful—he got a load of what it did to the girls: they melted. This was a boy who clearly needed to be taken care of.
He filed away the memory.
Little Frankie wasn’t going nowhere anymore. Even though it was still far from clear just where he might be going.
When Marty wasn’t looking, Dolly slipped him a few more dollars for additional orchestrations. Now the musicians, hesitant at first, began to flock to him. He had charts, he had equipment, he had a car. He didn’t have much of a voice, but things being what they were, he played school dances and social halls and Democratic Party meetings and the Hoboken Sicilian Cultural League, singing mostly Crosby numbers: “Please” and “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store)” and “June in January” and “Love in Bloom.” And—in his head at least—he really did feel like Bing up there, the mike allowing his voice to glide smoothly over the horns and piano and drums …
That summer he took a vacation. Not that he was exactly working his fingers to the bone, but it was summertime, vacation time, so he went to the beach—down the shore, as they say in Jersey: to Long Branch, where Dolly’s sister Josie Monaco was renting a place. It was his nineteenth summer, and he was finally a young man, no longer a boy—broader in the shoulders, deeper voiced. With a dark tan (he loved the beach and the sun) setting off those eyes, his hair floppy on top and razor trimmed on the sides, he cut a striking figure.
Across the street was a girl.
“All life’s grandeur,” Robert Lowell wrote, “is something with a girl in summer.” She was a little thing, dark haired, tan, and cute.
Nanicia—Americanized to Nancy Rose. Just seventeen that summer.
The clingy tang of salt air, the pearly morning light, the faint sound of someone’s radio carrying on the breeze. Bing. Oh God, that voice of his. The feeling of the warm, pebbly asphalt on the bare soles of his feet. She sat on the porch of the big house, watching him.
Maybe he called to her; maybe she pretended not to notice.
Later in the day, after the beach, he stopped by again, and there she was again, same wicker rocking chair, same nail file.
He ducked into Josie’s house and returned holding something behind his back. Now he brought out the ukulele, strummed, and sang:
It was a lucky April shower,
It was a most convenient door.
It wasn’t a bad voice at all: boyish, yearning. It made her feel nice to listen to it. In a minute her sisters and cousins were staring out the windows.
Frankie had never had a steady girl before. This one came with a lot of strings attached: strict father; big, noisy family. Lots of people at the dinner table, lots of questions. Opera always playing somewhere. He loved it. He felt as if he’d finally come indoors from the cold, into a warm, crowded room. Home.
He would have whispered his most deeply held dream to her: he wanted to be a singer.
And she would have responded, instantly and sincerely, that she believed in him.
In September, back home, he had to keep seeing her. Her and that big household, five sisters and a brother, just a hop, skip, and a jump away, in a nice big house, with a front porch, on Arlington Avenue in Jersey City. The house and the girl: both pulled him equally. But with sisters giggling behind hands and furtive necking on the couch after the house was quiet—with all this came assessment, and rules.
Mike Barbato, a plastering contractor and self-made man, looked the world right in the eye, and he knew that ukulele strumming did not make the world go around. This Sinatra kid was cute, and respectful enough when he talked to Mike. But real respect would mean holding down a steady job—which, it looked like, the kid had absolutely no intention of doing. Mike popped the question one night after dinner, leaning back in his chair at the head of the big table, loosening his belt, and picking at his eyetooth, where the meat always caught.
So, Frankie (he’d certainly have asked). What are you doing for work these days?
A proud smile: he had a job singing at the Cat’s Meow Friday night, Mr. B.
Mike gave him that dark-eyed stare. And what about Monday morning?
This stopped him for a second. He didn’t like mornings. Or Mondays, for that matter.
The women were in the kitchen; for the moment it was just the two of them at the table. Mike leaned toward the kid with a regretful smile. No work, no Nancy.
And so, at an ungodly hour on Monday morning, Frankie reported for duty as a plasterer’s assistant on a repair job in Jersey City. Wearing a white hat and overalls, gamely laboring alongside Nancy’s brother, Bart. And Monday afternoon, he limped home, covered head to toe with the smelly white stuff and hurting in every part of his body.
He went through two weeks of it, doing work that Mike always had to do over. Then, one morning, he accidentally overslept. He decided to take the day off. The next one too.
It was the last day job he would ever have.
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br /> But now he was no longer welcome at Arlington Avenue. Now he and Nancy had to neck in his car, which was cramped and embarrassing—once a Jersey City cop rapped on the glass with his nightstick at the worst possible moment—or down in his basement, with Dolly clomping around upstairs.
In the meantime, he wasn’t letting the grass grow under his feet. He kept foisting himself on the attention of every musician in Hoboken. He entered an amateur contest at the State Theater in Jersey City, and won. He darkened the door of radio station WAAT, also in Jersey City, until, in April 1935, they vouchsafed him a precious (and unpaid) weekly fifteen minutes of airtime. He took along a pal, guitarist Matty Golizio, as an accompanist. (In a few years Golizio would be playing on Sinatra’s Columbia recordings.) We’ll never know just what he sang, but we do have the testimony of his oldest friend, Tony Macagnano, as to how he sounded. “You’d better quit,” Tony Mac told his pal. “Boy, you were terrible.”
Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t. His voice was thin and high, but he had nerve and a sense of style and—you’re born with it or you’re not—he could sing on key. He was unformed, but he wasn’t clueless. Maybe Tony Mac was just jealous.
And maybe if the right someone heard him on the air, big things would happen.
Dolly, touched by his initiative, leaned hard on Joseph Samperi, the owner of the Union Club, a big, classy nightspot on Hudson Street, to give her son a regular singing job. Samperi, owing her a favor or two, relented. For a while, Frankie crooned there five nights a week, but he was more impatient than grateful: The place lacked what the top clubs had then, a telephone-wire hookup to a New York radio station. None of the Jersey couples out on that dance floor was in a position to advance his career.
Three of the musicians Frankie pestered that spring had a much better gig. They were a singing trio, Italian boys known all too presciently as the Three Flashes: Fred Tamburro, James “Skelly” Petrozelli, and Pat Principe were their names. Lost to history except as Sinatra witnesses. For a minute and a half in the mid-1930s they were hot stuff. Warm, anyway. Every weekend the Flashes traveled up the road to Englewood Cliffs, just north of the spanking-new George Washington Bridge, to perform with Harold Arden and His Orchestra at a western-style nightclub on the Palisades called the Rustic Cabin. The Cabin didn’t pay much, but what it did have was a wire hookup to WNEW, which—with its live remote broadcasts from New York–area nightclubs, as well as Martin Block’s Make-Believe Ballroom—was, by its own admission, “The NEWest Thing in Radio!”6 For their gigs, the Flashes borrowed a car or, more frequently, hitched a ride with an indulgent musician. Still, indulgence had a way of wearing thin. Once or twice they’d had to take a cab all the way from Hoboken, eating up the evening’s profits. With what they were making, it would be a long time before any of them could afford wheels of his own.
Then came salvation, in the form of this pesky runt.
Little Frankie wanted in the worst way to become the fourth Flash. Sure—like that was about to happen. But when it turned out that Frankie Boy had a green Chrysler convertible, the Flashes got a lot more encouraging.
Watch and learn. Soak it all in for a little while.
He saw it and he wanted it: saw himself, so clearly, standing center stage in the Cabin, the mike beaming his voice to millions of people out in the night, including, of course, People Who Mattered.
Then a remarkable thing happened.
One Friday night while the Flashes were taking five, a sharply dressed fellow came up and handed them a business card. The card belonged to Major Bowes, who, with his Original Amateur Hour—the American Idol of the day—was the hottest thing on radio, all over the country, not just in New York. The Major was going to shoot some movie shorts, at the Biograph Studios in the Bronx, and he wanted the Flashes, who had cute, guinea-boy face appeal (not that he would have put it in precisely those terms to their faces7), to appear in one or two.
They slapped each other on the back in the parking lot. Frankie watched enviously, his pulse racing. This was It.
He piped up and asked them to give him a shot.
They looked at each other. Well, they needed a ride home, anyway. They’d think about it.
He knew how long they’d think about it.
He told Dolly the next morning that he wanted this more than anything he’d ever wanted before. Anything.
And what did the fucking no-good bastards tell him?
They told him they’d think about it.
Dolly marched. The Tamburros—eight kids and two exhausted, non-English-speaking parents—lived in a railroad flat on Adams Street in Little Italy. Freddie, with his crazy singing, was kicking a little money into the family till. Dolly paid Mr. and Mrs. T. a visit, to make sure they fully understood the value of her good works—translation, authoritative intercession with landlords, school officials, cops, and so on. Except that this time it wasn’t a Democratic vote she was seeking.
Frankie was in.
Every day for a week, grinning at the wheel of the Chrysler, he drove his fellow Flashes over the great shining bridge (just four years old; an architectural marvel) to Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, home of Biograph. The movie shorts in question—it was an unapologetic era—were a filmed minstrel show. Every day Frankie painted on blackface and big white lips and donned a top hat. He didn’t sing, but he acted (playing a waiter), and he was in the movies!
But that was only the beginning. After seeing the footage, the Major himself sent word up to the Bronx: he wanted to audition the Flashes for his nationally broadcast radio show.
Tamby, Skelly, and Pat talked among themselves, grumbled. They wanted in the worst way to shake this superfluous banana off the tree. Across the studio floor, Frankie got a gander at the confab, knew at once what was going on.
This time Dolly didn’t have to march. She sent word via drugstore telephone to a friend on Adams Street, who passed the word to the phone-less Tamburros, in Mezzogiorno dialect: Dolly Sinatra would be very disappointed if her son were not included in the audition for the great Major Bowes. No visit necessary this time; her absence as effective as her presence.
And so the four of them gathered, wearing budget-busting white suits with black silk pocket squares, in Major Bowes’s midtown office, in—of course—the Chrysler Building. As they cooled their heels nervously in the waiting room, the door popped open, startling them all. It was the Major himself, gray haired and dyspeptic, with a big red nose and a square jaw and a dark three-piece suit like a senator in the movies. Like W. C. Fields without a sense of humor. His eyes were old and watery; a faint distillery smell hung about him.
They jumped to their feet, shook his hand.
And what did the boys call themselves again?
The Thr——uh, Four Flashes.
Hmm.
They looked at each other while he stroked his chin. And shook his head. His personality, all business, was not what you’d call electric. But he was Major Bowes.
The Four Flashes sounded like the Hot Flashes. Or the Four-Flushers. Where were they from?
Thus the freshly christened Hoboken Four (though tiny Patty Principe was technically from West New York) filed into Bowes’s office and cleared their throats to sing. Their audition piece was “The Curse of an Aching Heart,” a syrupy, barbershop relic from 1913.8 The Major liked them but hated the song.
He’d put them on. But they’d need something more up-to-date. Something to lift the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. America.
When they reconvened, Frankie pulled out his ace in the hole, sheet music for “Shine,” a big hit for Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers a couple of years earlier. It was a minstrel song, all about curly hair and pearly teeth and shiny shoes and not much else, an ideal vehicle for the wildly talented, instrument-imitating (and African-American) Millses, who pumped along in close-harmony background while Bing led, then scatted his fool head off. A white man scatting!
Frankie told his fellow Flashes that he could do Bing’s part.
The o
ther three looked at each other. He had them over a barrel and they knew it. He had the sheet music and the car and he could sing. The worm had officially turned.
On September 8, 1935, a Sunday evening, Frankie stood in the wings of the Capitol Theater at Fifty-first and Broadway with the other former Flashes, literally unable to stop his knees from shaking. It was the second-largest theater in the entire world, at fifty-three hundred seats—five aisles in the orchestra, an ocean of faces out there. The fact that the Roxy, a block south, was a few hundred seats bigger was no consolation. Frankie’s nerves were like nothing he had ever felt before. Even the stolid Major, he’d noticed before the show, was giving off an extra-strong whiskey odor.
But once the show began, Major Edward Bowes strode out to the center of the stage as if he owned the place (which, in point of fact, he did), took his position beside the big gong,9 and—as the buzzing crowd obediently went dead silent—spoke firmly into the microphone. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Original Amateur Hour.” He sounded like a tired old insurance salesman, but—Frankie peeped out through a crack in the curtain—the audience gazed up at him as if he were Jesus Christ himself. It hit him: Every goddamn sound that went into that big square mike was emanating out to the whole goddamn country. And half the people in the goddamn country wanted to be where he was right now. When their turn came, Frankie’s stomach rose up and fluttered away like a little bird. He wanted to flee, but didn’t think his legs would carry him.
“… Hoboken Four, singing and dancing fools,” the Major announced.
A little wise guy they’d met before the show, his name lost to history, piped up from the wings: Why did the Major call them fools?