by Kitty Kelley
“One of the crowd, Jimmy ‘Doo Doo’ Shannon, didn’t have any clothes for the party, so Frank bought him an outfit,” said Tony Mac. “For himself, Frankie was sharp. But this was ridiculous. He bought Jimmy loud, checkered pants and black-and-white shoes that were so pointed, the kid had to take them off and walk to the party in his bare feet.”
“I’ll never forget seeing those two come down the street,” said Dan Hannigan, a Hoboken pal who later married Agnes Carney. “By the time they reached Sixth and Washington, those pinching shoes had become unbearable. So there was Frankie, looking miserable and embarrassed, and our other friend in those silly checkerboard pants, was limping along, carrying his shiny new shoes. You never saw two sadder guys.”
“Frank would have dressed his dog in high heels if it would’ve made Marie happy,” said one of his friends.
“It’s true,” said Agnes Hannigan. “Frank gave Marie everything. He was just crazy about her, but she wasn’t all that interested in him because he didn’t seem to be going anyplace. He wasn’t very smart in school, and he never worked any jobs like the other guys, so we didn’t think that he would ever amount to much.”
3
In Hudson County, Prohibition was a law to be flouted. Jersey City’s Mayor Frank Hague pleased his hard-drinking constituents by refusing to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages. “It’s a matter of giving the people what they want,” he said.
Dolly Sinatra saw at once that the illicit liquor trade promised great profit, and she wasted no time getting involved. Convinced that a saloon would make her rich, she borrowed money from her mother so that she and Marty could open a tavern at Fourth and Jefferson. They called it “Marty O’Brien’s,” but it was in Dolly’s name because firemen could not own or operate saloons.
The ethnic caste system ruled the children as strongly as the parents.
“If you were Irish, you had no friends in Guinea Town, which is what we called the area west of Willow Avenue where the Italians lived,” said Agnes Carney Hannigan. “Our Lady of Grace Church would not even take them, and my father would have killed me if I had ever brought home an Italian boyfriend. Tony Mac and Ross Esposito and Frank Sinatra were the only Italians ever allowed in our home, and they were acceptable only because they came from Park Avenue and not down there on Madison or Monroe. They would never have gotten in our house if they’d lived down there. In those days we treated the Italians like we treat the Puerto Ricans today.”
Dolly had gotten her family onto Park Avenue, and now she dreamed of owning her own home and having an uptown address. She was also determined to send her boy to the Stevens Institute to study engineering. With enough money she could make Frankie the first college graduate in the family. And the money would come from the profits of the saloon.
“Anytime we saw a drunk in the streets, we’d say that he was part of the MOB, meaning Marty O’Brien’s pub,” said Tony Mac. “Us kids didn’t go around there a lot. We were a little afraid of Marty. He was a grouchy guy with a mad kisser on him. But he never said anything to hurt us. Dolly would have knocked him dead if he did. She was great, always laughing and joking and hollering, but Marty never said very much. Just grunted a lot.”
Even as youngsters, Tony Mac and the rest of Frank’s Italian friends understood that Dolly dominated the Sinatra family. That made the Sinatras very different from their own families, where the fathers were feared and respected and the mothers automatically assumed secondary roles.
“Marty was just a mouse,” said Doris Corrado. “Just a mouse.”
“He was a weak man,” said former mayor Steve Capiello. “Not physically weak but weak in the sense that he could never stand up to Dolly. Never.”
Fortunately, Marty Sinatra seemed perfectly content to let his wife be the boss. “He’s a quiet man,” said his brother-in-law, Frank Monaco. “Dolly was always the brains of the family. She was the go-getter. There never was any conflict, though. Marty just agreed with Dolly.”
Ignoring the local law that women could not be in a bar, Dolly became Marty’s barmaid. She also disregarded the statute prohibiting minors from the premises and frequently entertained Frank and his friends. Many years later, Frank would entertain people with stories of how he used to sit on top of the piano in his father’s saloon and sing.
“I still remember Dolly yelling at me from the saloon when I was on my way home from school one day,” recalled Nick Sevano, who was born and raised in Hoboken, and who knew Dolly from the time he was a little boy, because, as he said, “Everybody in Hoboken knew Dolly Sinatra.”
“Dolly poked her head out the door and hollered, ‘Come over here, you little son of a bitch. I want you to take some of these sausages home for your family’s dinner.’ I came from a lot of kids, and we didn’t have much. Dolly knew that and helped out once in a while. Anytime we were in trouble or needed something, we always went to her. We looked to her for confidence and leadership. She was so powerful that she could march into City Hall and demand jobs for us. One summer, she stomped in with a bunch of us kids and said, ‘Give these little bastards a job,’ and, by God, we were put to work. Our own fathers couldn’t do that, but Dolly Sinatra could. She was tougher than most men.”
Unquestionably, Dolly had become the one person in Hoboken to turn to when in trouble, and at times that meant more than simply providing food and jobs for people. As the local midwife, she was also called upon to perform abortions.
“If an Italian girl got pregnant, her family would disown her,” said Tony Mac. “Completely disown her. There was no forgiveness in the family if that happened. It was the worst dishonor that could befall an Italian Catholic family in those days. Dolly saved a girl’s family embarrassment by doing an abortion. By doing her operations, she saw to it that many of these young girls could go on with their lives and not be disowned by their families.”
Not everyone looked as kindly on Dolly for her illegal operations, especially in a community of churchgoing immigrants who considered abortion murder. Not only was it against the law of the land but, in their eyes, it was a sacrilege, for it violated God’s law as well.
Still, once the word circulated that Dolly Sinatra would perform an abortion for twenty-five to fifty dollars, she soon found herself with a steady business. Doctors afraid of losing their licenses by performing the illegal operation themselves frequently referred patients to her, and she traveled regularly to Jersey City, Lodi, Weehawken, Union City, and Paterson with her little black bag.
“She even set up a table in her house,” said Anna Spatolla Sinatra, who married Frank’s first cousin. “I had to go to her three times. She had me come to the house and lie down on that table in the basement. Then she brought out a long wire—not a coat hanger—with special medication on the end of it. Afterwards, she told me to take Lysol douches three times a day and quinine pills. Lord, those quinine pills made my ears ring. They were the worst part.”
For many years, Dolly performed these operations secretly, but when she was arrested in 1937, her abortion business became public knowledge. The abortion business, along with her running a saloon during Prohibition and dealing with bootleggers, did not enhance Dolly’s respectability in certain circles, and some of the churchgoing people in Hoboken took it out on her son by refusing to let their children play with him.
“Frank felt it too,” said Tony Mac. “He never talked about it, but he heard people calling his mother a rabbit-catcher and a baby-killer. I think that’s the reason that once he finally got out of Hoboken, he never came back.”
Ignoring the scandal she created, Dolly was unconcerned by the talk behind her back. She continued to do all she could to help her son make friends by giving him money daily for treats and allowing him to buy whatever he wanted at any store. Although she always went out to political parties on Saturday nights, she let Frank bring his friends in for dancing and always left them plenty of cake and cream soda.
“The Sinatras were
always open-handed and hospitable,” said Lee Bartletta. “We knew that anytime we asked, Dolly would let us gather in their home for an evening.”
After Rosa Garavante died, Frank’s grandfather came to live with them and would act as the chaperon for these parties. “We’d sit and listen to the radio,” Lee said. “Rudy Vallee, Russ Columbo, and Bing Crosby were our idols. And we’d dance—the Charleston, the black bottom, the lindy hop. Frankie’s radio was something special. It looked like a small grand piano.”
The invitation to an Italian wedding was too tantalizing for Frank’s Irish friends to resist, so when his cousin, Frank Anthony Sinatra, married Anna Spatolla, Frank was the best man, Marie Roemer was a bridesmaid, and the gang from Park Avenue was invited to the festivities.
“The wedding was in an Italian house downtown,” said Agnes Hannigan. “It was so unusual for us to be going down there, and to be going to an Italian wedding was unheard of. We had never seen one before. There was so much noise you couldn’t hear, and so much dancing and thumping, you would have thought the floors would sink into the ground.”
Dolly provided their most memorable party in the summer of 1931, when she gave Frankie and his gang tickets to a political rally at Rye Beach for Lee’s father, Frank Bartletta, who was running for mayor of Hoboken. As part of the Hague machine, Dolly owed her allegiance to the Irish incumbent, Bernard McFeeley, but when her good friend Bartletta decided to run, she supported him secretly despite the fact that he was a Republican. He was an Italian, and that was more important to Dolly than his political affiliation.
Since she and Marty could not publicly endorse Bartletta, they bought tickets to his rally and gave them to Frankie to give to his friends.
“It was a political party, and firemen could not go because McFeeley would have fired them on the spot,” said Agnes Hannigan. “Dolly gave the tickets to Frankie and then sent a taxi to pick all of us up. She also sent along a huge picnic basket and a big bottle of wine. She even provided a porter to carry it all for us. It was really something.”
Dolly tried to help Frankie in his courtship of Marie Roemer, whom he took to his junior high school graduation dance after buying both of them splendid new outfits. For that occasion, Frank had his own Tin Lizzie, a green 1929 Chrysler without a top that he and his gang had bought for twenty dollars. Still, Marie was not too impressed.
“She was so much more sophisticated than Frankie that she finally dropped him and started going with an older man who had a big black Cadillac and took her into New York City a lot,” said Agnes Hannigan. “She later married him, and on her wedding day she wore a white lace dress with a black orchid and a black lace hat. That’s how sophisticated Marie was! She was just too mature for Frankie. She was more a companion for Dolly. Besides, Frank didn’t seem to be going anyplace. He didn’t have a job and he wasn’t doing well in school.”
Frank was graduated from David E. Rue Junior High in 1931 and entered A. J. Demarest High School, where he lasted only forty-seven days. He later admitted being expelled for “general rowdiness.”
“Frankie showed no real talent for anything,” said Arthur Stover, the high school principal. “It was possible for a student to leave school before sixteen in those days, provided he had permission from an authorized person. I had that authority.”
“He was a lazy boy,” said Macy Hagerty, Frank’s math teacher. “He had absolutely no ambition at all when it came to school … and he was so thin!”
Frank’s expulsion from school put an end to his formal education as well as to his mother’s dream of his becoming a civil engineer or a doctor. With no education and no skills, he now seemed destined for a lifetime of menial labor in odd jobs. Dolly was enraged when she found out about all the classes that Frank had cut, but he didn’t care. He told her that he would rather play pool all day in the Cat’s Meow than sit in a boring classroom.
Dolly screamed at him. “If you think you’re going to be a goddamned loafer, you’re crazy.” She insisted that he get a job, but Frank said that he didn’t know where to look.
“Call your godfather,” Dolly said. “Make him give you a job on The Jersey Observer.”
The next day Dolly phoned Frank Garrick herself, saying, “Can you help Frankie?”
Garrick, the circulation manager, hired his godson to work on the delivery truck, bundling the newspapers before they were dropped off for paper boys to distribute. “I think he got paid twelve dollars a week,” recalled Garrick, who soon regretted ever making the gesture.
“A few weeks after Frankie started work, one of the boys who was a sportswriter was killed in an auto crash and Dolly heard about it. You know Dolly. Push, push, push. She was always aiming to go higher and higher. She told Frankie to go see his godfather, that I’d get him that job. So he came in the day after the boy was killed, but I wasn’t in the office. Frank went on into Editorial anyway and sat down at the dead boy’s desk and acted as if he had the job. He filled the glue pots and sharpened pencils and started looking through the guy’s notebooks. When the editor asked him what he was doing in there, Frank said he was the new sportswriter who had come to take the dead boy’s place. He said that I had sent him in.
“When I got in later, the editor called me and said, ‘Did you send that young Italian kid in here?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about until I looked into Editorial and saw Frankie sitting at the guy’s desk all dressed up. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t send him in.’
“ ‘Well, he says you did,’ said the editor. ‘I think it’s pretty bold of him to just barge in here like this on the day of the guy’s funeral and try to take his job. You’d better let him go.’
“So, I had no choice,” said Frank Garrick. “I went over to Frankie and said, ‘Why’d you do this, Frankie? This isn’t right. If you’d come to me in the first place, I could have gotten you the job. Now my hands are tied. I have to let you go.’
“Oh, the temper and the words and the filthy names he called me,” said Frank Garrick. “You have no idea of what that temper was like in those days. Murderous. Like he was going to kill me. He flared up something terrible, cursing and swearing and so vulgar. 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, and even though we lived in the same town, she never said another word to me for the rest of her life.”
When Frank ran home to tell Dolly what his godfather had done to him, his mother took his side because she saw no impropriety in what he had done. After all, he was simply trying to get ahead, which is what one is supposed to do in life. Instead of asking Frank to apologize to his godfather, she took up the cudgel herself and sustained the feud for a lifetime. As she said many years later, “My son is like me. You cross him and he never forgets.”
4
The 1930s were hungry years for most of America; the Great Depression crippled the country and the people. Cities and towns alike became bloated with the luckless, the jobless, the homeless. Men sold apples on street corners while women holding babies with swollen bellies waited in long lines for dry bread and watery soup.
In 1932 desperate voters swept the Republicans out of office and made Franklin D. Roosevelt president in hopes that he would do something to get the country moving again. But they had to wait until the new year and the inauguration to find out about the New Deal. In the meantime, there was a sad Christmas for the more than forty million people who had fallen into poverty.
Insulated by a father with a steady job and a mother with several, Frank Sinatra escaped the ravages of the worst economic disaster the country had ever known. His Christmas in Hoboken that year was merry indeed. To the amazement of their poor friends and neighbors, the Sinatras were moving into their first home at 841 Garden Street, a four-story wooden house that cost $13,400—an astronomical sum in the middle of the Depression, when the price of a modern six-room bungalow in Detroit with
a two-car garage was only $2,800, and a Spanish stucco with seven rooms in Beverly Hills cost $5,000. The only comparable price was for a twelve-room Italian villa in Westchester County, which cost $17,000 in 1932.
The house on Garden Street was a multiple-family unit, and Dolly intended to take in tenants, including her brother, Babe, when he got out of prison. With Marty’s salary as a fireman, the profits they had received when they decided to sell the saloon, Chit-U’s salary, Dolly’s political job, and her thriving midwife and abortion business, they were able to make a sizable down payment and move in time for Frank to throw a New Year’s Eve party, which Dolly reported to the newspaper’s society page.
“[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,” the item read.
Frank’s friends, most of whom lived in small, rented apartments, were wide-eyed to be partying in a house that not only had central heating but a bathroom as well. “And not just a toilet, but a bathtub too,” said Tony Mac. “Everybody else we knew had to wash in a tub in the middle of the floor.”
The girls were dazzled by Dolly’s decor, especially the gold bird bath with the gold gilded angels holding red plastic roses that graced the entranceway.
“The house was full of what our parents called Guinea furniture, but we thought it was all wonderful,” said Agnes Hannigan. “Dolly had the best of everything, let me tell you. I remember her massive dining room set that looked like a banquet table, and the glass on top of that table, which was at least four inches thick. The same on the buffet. I had never seen that before and thought it was quite glamorous. She also had a small baby grand piano, and on it was draped a Spanish shawl. On top of that she had her radio, and on top of the radio was a baby picture of Frankie, nude on a rug with his bottom up in the air.