by Kitty Kelley
“In her bedroom, she had a chaise longue, and next to it was a high pedestal that held a gold and white French phone. I was only fifteen years old at the time, but I thought that that was really something right out of the movies.”
Dolly Sinatra’s Garden Street home became her show-place, and she kept it scrupulously clean. In fact, cleanliness became an obsession with Dolly, who often hired neighborhood boys to sweep and dust and wash windows. She bequeathed this compulsion to her son, who in later years became just as fixated. He showered three times a day, constantly washed his hands, refused to handle dirty money, and carried nothing but new bills in his pocket. His intolerance of dirty ashtrays was reminiscent of his mother’s chasing his father with a washcloth whenever he smoked cigars in the house—and finally making him go outside to smoke them.
The house-proud Genoese immigrant of the first generation believed that cleanliness was next to godliness. By the second generation, psychiatrists interpreted this mania for cleaning, especially constant hand washing, as a person’s attempt to cleanse himself of real or imagined guilt, or to remove the mire of a sullied past. It would seem that Dolly cleaned to establish her position, while her son possibly wanted to purge himself of a past that made him feel dirty.
“He hid his face once when I got mad and called his mom an abortionist,” said Toni Francke. “He was mortified by her baby-killing.”
The shame that Frank carried over his mother’s abortion business intensified when he moved to Garden Street.
“That was where the real trouble started,” said Marion Brush Schreiber, Frank’s pretty, red-haired neighbor who became his Garden Street girlfriend. “Dolly did an abortion there in her basement on a girl who almost died. The girl had to be rushed to the hospital and was in critical condition when she arrived. She barely survived. Dolly was arrested and had to stand trial. She was put on probation for five years and had to go down to the probation office every week to sign in. I remember how mad she’d get every time she had to go. She’d say it was a ‘goddamn inconvenience’ and that she had better things to do. She wasn’t a bit embarrassed about it, but the Irish Catholic neighborhood we lived in was scandalized. What she did was considered worse than murder. It was awful hard on Frank.”
Despite probation, Dolly kept her table in the basement as she continued to perform her illegal operations for those who sought her out. She was arrested several other times. She had to go to court each time, but probably because of her political connections she was never sent to prison, despite being convicted of a felony.
“My mother was shocked by Dolly and her abortion business, but it didn’t bother me,” Marion said. “I was three years younger than Frank and still in high school when we met. He came to one of the Saturday night dances on the roof of Joseph Brandt Junior High and introduced himself as a neighbor. The next day he came to get me and said, ‘Come and meet my mother.’ We spent most of our time taking long walks together and necking or driving in his car. That was when gas cost thirteen cents a gallon.
“Sometimes we went to the Fabian Theater in Hoboken. Frank always wore a white hat with a gold anchor like a Navy captain’s hat. His whole life was music and singing, and he thought Bing Crosby was the greatest thing in the world.”
Dolly loved to sing and managed to do so at political beer parties every Saturday night. According to one of Frank’s Italian Hoboken friends, “We all sang. You can still stop any five guys here and get a harmony group going.”
But Frank seemed especially inspired by Bing Crosby movies. He decided he wanted to be a singer just like Bing, started smoking a pipe like Crosby’s and wearing the decorated Navy hat because Crosby always wore a hat. Dolly did not encourage him. In fact, when she saw Crosby’s picture on Frank’s bedroom wall, she threw a shoe at her son and called him a bum.
“After I met Dolly,” Marion said, “I would go over to see her every day after school and on the weekends too. She drank beer constantly and was always rushing the growler down to the gin mill. It was a big beer barrel can with a handle and lid that she would push to the corner bar to be filled with beer. She’d put butter on the edge of the rim so that she would not get so much foam, and then sip all day. She drank beer all the time but never seemed to get drunk.
“Before Frankie and I went out on Saturday nights, I would do Dolly’s hair for her parties. Saturday night was her time to howl. Marty would go off with the men and drink downtown in Little Italy, and Dolly would go out with her best friend, Rose Vaughn, all dressed up and wearing a spectacular hat with birds of paradise floating on gold shimmering roses that fell over the ear. She and Rose would hit every political meeting in town, drink beer, and sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” until their lungs almost burst. After three hours, Dolly’s birds of paradise would be flying around her knees, and she and Rose would have to take a cab home. Frank, who was a very quiet guy, sometimes got embarrassed by all her carryings-on.
“Frank wanted a college education desperately, but he couldn’t get through high school. University studies would have been too much for him. He couldn’t read very well. But he still wanted to be like those boys up on the hill from Stevens Tech, and so he dressed the role and looked like Joe College. If you didn’t know he was a high school dropout, you’d think he was Harvard or Yale from the great clothes he wore.
“He didn’t have a job at the time, but he loved hanging around musicians, so I suggested that he get an orchestra together for our Wednesday night school dances. He’d just started singing [in public] a little bit [at about age 17], and in exchange for hiring the musicians 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 that 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 so he usually said yes.
“Frank did such a great job for our school dances on Wednesdays that he wanted to take the orchestra to Our Lady of Grace for their Friday night dances, but the Irish Catholics wouldn’t let him in because of the scandals involving his mother. They would have nothing to do with him. When he found this out, he went into one of his terrible moods. He’d get real sullen and sour, and you couldn’t get a word out of him. There were no tantrums; just an ugly silence that could sometimes last for hours. He also got headaches all the time.”
Dolly felt so bad about the church’s refusing to let Frank arrange the orchestra because of her abortion business that she bought him a sixty-five-dollar portable public address system so that he would have an easier time booking musicians.
“That PA system had a mike and speakers and a case covered with sparkling stuff,” said Tony Mac. “Those things were rare in those days, so when Frankie would let a band use his PA, the leader would usually let him sing—for free, of course.”
Dolly also gave her son money to buy orchestrations, which helped him as much as the public address system. “I always liked to sing and I liked to be around bands and to have a part of the band glamour,” Frank said a few years later. “I couldn’t play an instrument and I didn’t care about learning to play one. So I tried to figure out a way in which I could be sure of being a part of a band. … I started collecting orchestrations. Bands needed them. I had them. If the local orchestras wanted to use my arrangements—and they always did, because I had a large and up-to-the-minute collection—they had to take Singer Sinatra too.
“Nobody was cheated. The bands needed what they rented from me, and I got what I wanted too. While I wasn’t the best singer in the world, they weren’t the best bands in the country either.”
He sang the songs of the time, ones he had heard on the radio. But people in Hoboken agreed with him that he wasn’t the best singer in the world. And his ukulele-playing—an instrument his uncle, Champ Sieger, gave him—was no better. Whenever he went to Cockeyed Henry’s and pestered the older men with his singing and playing, they threw him out. Even Frank�
��s friends were unimpressed. Adeline Yacenda refused to let him sing at her wedding. “He was that bad,” she said.
Tony Mac told him to get out of the business. “I heard him on WAAT and the next time I saw him, I said, ‘You’d better quit. Boy, you were terrible.’ ”
“Frank was always asking for work,” said Don Milo, who had his own orchestra. “He was a real pusher like his mom. He never let up. I lived across the street from him and he was always coming over and ringing the bell wanting me to hire him, but I used Ozzie Osborn instead because he was a much better singer than Frankie. I’d use Frankie only when Dolly told me to.”
By 1935, when Frank was twenty years old, still living at home and without a steady job, his mother finally acknowledged that singing was all he cared about. So she set out to find him work by calling Joseph Samperi, the owner of the Union Club at 600 Hudson Street in Hoboken.
“Why don’t you give Frankie a job?” she asked. “You’ve got a nice place here. You ought to have a boy like Frankie singing for you.”
No Italian in Hoboken was going to say no to Dolly Sinatra, so Frank was hired for a couple of months.
“We could afford to pay him forty dollars a week for a five-night week, but we couldn’t put in a radio wire,” said Samperi. “We weren’t big enough for that kind of thing.”
Following his Union Club gig, Frank began hustling one night stands at the Italian social clubs in Hoboken. He also drove a local trio called The Three Flashes to Englewood Cliffs and watched them perform with Harold Arden’s orchestra at the Rustic Cabin.
“Frank hung around us like we were gods or something,” recalled Fred Tamburro, the trio’s baritone. “We took him along for one simple reason. Frankie-boy had a car. He used to chauffeur us around. Then, one night, a guy came up to us and said he wanted us to make some movie shorts for Major Bowes. When Frank got wind of it, he begged us to let him in on the act.”
The Three Flashes had no intention of upgrading their driver, so they turned Frank down. He told his mother what had happened. The next day, she went to see Tamburro, known as “Tamby,” one of eight children living on Adams Street in the heart of Little Italy, where Dolly Sinatra was the immigrants’ lifeline to the new world. By that afternoon, Frank was part of the group.
“Sinatra’s mother, who was a big wheel in Hoboken, started pestering us to take him along,” said James “Skelly” Petrozelli, another of The Three Flashes.
“There was nothing I could do about it,” said Tamby many years later.
The movie shorts—The Night Club and The Minstrel—took seven days to film, and every day Frank drove Don Milo and his band, who were, as they frequently did, playing with The Three Flashes, to the Biograph Studios on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. “It was a minstrel show and Frank, who was twenty years old, was paid ten dollars a day to wear a top hat and make up in blackface with big, wide white lips,” said Don Milo. “He acted as a waiter in one of the shorts, and in the other The Three Flashes sang to him in blackface. Every morning at five A.M., before we left for a day of filming, Dolly got up and made us all a big breakfast. Then Frank drove us to the Bronx over the George Washington Bridge, which had just opened.”
“The way Frankie flipped about appearing in blackface, you’d think he was already a star,” said Tamby. “All he had was a walk-on. He kept haunting the theaters here asking when they were going to play his pictures—HIS pictures!”
The movie shorts, entitled Major Bowes Theater of the Air, were shown in Radio City Music Hall in October 1935, but before their release Major Bowes summoned the boys for an audition for his amateur hour, which was broadcast nationally every week.
Again Dolly made sure that Frank was included in the group, and The Three Flashes became The Hoboken Four. Don Milo told them to sing the Mills Brothers’ arrangement of “Shine.”
“I also told them to dress with class,” he said, which meant white suits, black ties, and black hankies.
The boys did as they were told, and Major Bowes was impressed enough to schedule them as contestants on his show, which was broadcast from the stage of the Capitol Theater in New York City on September 8, 1935.
That evening, Major Bowes introduced them as The Hoboken Four, “singing and dancing fools.” In response to an offstage question about his description, he said, “I don’t know. I guess ’cause they’re so happy.”
Tamby then introduced himself and Skelly and Pat Principe (Patty Prince), telling Major Bowes where each one worked. He ignored Sinatra.
“What about that one?” Bowes asked, pointing to Frank.
“Oh, he never worked a day in his life,” said Tamby, and the audience laughed.
The applause meter scored highest for the singing and dancing fools of Hoboken, who Major Bowes said had “walked right into the hearts of their audience.” He immediately signed them to contracts—fifty dollars a week, plus meals—with the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit to play the country. The boys were to sing at every stop along the way. Traveling by bus and by train, The Hoboken Four joined sixteen other acts, including mouth organists, bell ringers, jug players, yodelers, and tap dancers. Tamby later described them all as “hillbillies and cowboys.”
“We were sponsored by a coffee company [Chase and Sanborn],” said Skelly. “We used to have to play the grocery stores in all the cities where we stopped, and they made us sign our autographs on the company’s coffee cans.”
At first, the boys were thrilled by their new celebrity, but soon the novelty of performing on the road began to wear thin. In a letter to his mother from Vancouver, Frank wrote, “Still going strong on this tour, but there’s no place like Hoboken.” Dolly immediately called The Jersey Observer’s society page and told the editor what Frank had written. “Dolly was always calling the newspapers to get her name in for something,” said photographer Irv Wegen. “Then she’d call me to come and take a picture.” Inordinately proud of her son, Dolly made sure that news of The Hoboken Four was published regularly.
“We were the rowdies of the lot,” said Skelly. “Me and Prince were the clowns, Fred was the fighter, and Frank was the serious one. That’s the reason he got where he did.
“They tried to keep us like baseball players, making us go to bed before eleven o’clock, and all that. But we’d sneak out and get caught, or we were always late for the shows.”
“They wanted to fire us at least twenty times,” said Tamby.
One such time was in San Diego, when the group was singing “Shine” and Frank, Skelly, and Patty Prince started giggling. Tamby, the boss, slugged anyone who got out of line and threatened to kill him if they didn’t stop. Convulsed now and unable to sing, the trio ran offstage, leaving Tamby alone. He apologized to the audience as Major Bowes brought the curtain down. The four performers went into their dressing room and waited for the Major to come in and fire them. Tamby was furious and lunged at Frank, yelling, “Are you crazy?” Frank, still giggling, said, “I can’t help it. You can’t keep me from laughing onstage. That’s my sense of humor.”
“Well, here’s my sense of humor,” screamed Tamby, smashing his huge fist into Frank’s face and knocking him off a wardrobe trunk into a heap on the floor.
“After I hit him, it took us nearly an hour to wake him up,” said Tamby, “but when he came to, I said, ‘Frank, now you know my sense of humor.’ ”
Frank picked himself off the floor, glared at Tamby, and walked out of the room.
As the lead singer of The Hoboken Four, Frank stood out as the best in the group. He soon became the star of the entire traveling unit, getting a lot of attention from Major Bowes and the other executives running the tour. Every time he growled in a song or crooned a solo, the girls besieged him backstage, which made Tamby and Skelly extremely jealous.
“They would be asked to sign an autograph or two, but Frank was practically torn apart,” said Patty Prince many years later. “He’d have to fight off the nicest women you’ve ever seen.
“That’s when T
amby and Skelly started getting in the habit of beating Frank every once in a while, whenever they got mad at something and had to take it out on someone. It happened often enough so that you could call it abuse. They abused Frank, and it happened most often when Frank went off with some woman after the show and these two no-talents had to go to their rooms alone.
“Sometimes it got pretty bad for Frank. After all, he was a skinny little guy and the two picking on him were older and bigger, truck drivers back home, and Frank couldn’t fight back. Once, we were sitting in a diner, stretched in a line along the counter. Frank leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Why don’t you beat me, too, and make it unanimous?’ I shrugged him off. I felt real bad about it… but what could I have done back then?”
It was still only 1935 when, unwilling to take the beatings any longer, Frank left the tour in Columbus, Ohio, and returned to Hoboken, while Tamby, Skelly, and Patty Prince continued with Major Bowes as The Hoboken Trio. Dolly didn’t call the newspaper when Frank returned home, but she told her friends that he was coming back because he was homesick and missed Nancy Barbato, his new girlfriend from Jersey City.
The previous summer he had gone to Long Branch, New Jersey, to stay with his aunt, Josephine Monaco. During that time, Frank had worked as an occasional chauffeur for the Cardinale family of Hoboken, driving the car for the younger children.
“Frank used to drive us crazy playing the ukulele on the porch all the time,” said his aunt. “He would sit there and play, kind of lonesome. Then one day I noticed him talking to a pretty little dark-haired girl who was living across the street for the summer. She was Nancy Barbato, the daughter of Mike Barbato, a plasterer from Jersey City.”
When Dolly and Marty arrived for a weekend that summer, Josie told them that Frankie had a girlfriend. Marty was indifferent. Dolly, ever pragmatic, said, “He doesn’t have a penny.” But she asked whom her son was seeing.