by Kitty Kelley
Josie pointed to the attractive young girl sitting on the porch across the street. “Well, she seems like a nice child,” said Dolly, dismissing the eighteen-year-old girl as harmless.
That summer, Frank wrote to Marion Brush, his Garden Street girlfriend, and sent her a picture of himself, but by then both of them knew their relationship had no future.
“Frankie was the one with the crush, not me,” said Marion. “After the boyfriend-girlfriend business wore off, we became very good friends. I never even thought of marrying him or getting seriously involved because I knew that he didn’t have any money, and as a singer he would be on the road and have a loaf of bread one day and be starving the next. Besides, my mother was the type to instill in me the need for a college education, and I was leaving that fall for Jersey City State Teachers College.
“When Frank came home at the end of that summer, he brought Nancy Barbato to Hoboken and introduced me. She was a nice little Italian girl from Jersey City, but the way Dolly was carrying on, you’d have thought she was a duchess or something. She was not your typical poor little Italian girl. Her dad was a plasterer and her five sisters were married to accountants and lawyers, which Dolly just lapped up. Marrying up like that was so important to her. Nancy certainly was not rich, but she was well off in comparison to Frank, which is why Dolly fussed all over her so.”
Not only had Nancy Barbato’s sisters married well, but her family lived in a freestanding wooden house with a porch. That porch signified a comfortable life-style to Dolly, and certainly one far removed from Hoboken’s Little Italy. The Barbatos did not have to take in tenants as Dolly did. Within one generation, Nancy’s father, Mike, had made enough money to move his family of six daughters and one son into a house with a front porch, which was the kind of worldly success that Dolly respected.
Still, girlfriends worried her. Very much aware of the trouble that adolescent boys could cause, Dolly had been on the alert ever since Frank was fourteen years old. One night, he had stayed out too late with Marie Roemer, and Dolly had sent her husband in a cab to Marie’s house to bring Frankie home after instructing Marty to smack his son a few times so that he’d get the message.
When Frank was still seeing Marion Brush, he had grabbed her by the hand one night to lead her upstairs to his bedroom to show her something. Dolly would not let the youngsters out of her sight.
“She was dirty-minded,” said Marion. “She stood at the bottom of the stairs glaring at us as if we were going to do something terrible in Frank’s room. She didn’t trust him at all. She didn’t say anything, but she looked scared to death when we walked up those stairs. She stood at the bottom, watching to see if we were going to go in his room and close the door. God only knows what she would have done then.”
And it wasn’t only Frank Dolly was watching.
“I still remember what happened to Chit-U when he met a woman in the neighborhood and took her out for a few drinks, wanting to get to know her better,” Marion said. “Dolly found out about it and stormed up to the rooming house where the poor soul lived and started screaming at her to stay away from Chit-U. I thought that rooming house would come down brick by brick. That was the end of Chit-U’s relationship with the woman, but it was more that he was spending his money on her for drinks rather than doing anything sexually with her. After all, Dolly wouldn’t have Chit-U drinking money away with some woman when he could be giving it to her. She was very grasping that way, and in the end Chit-U never married. He lived with Dolly all his life and did her cleaning.”
Though Dolly still didn’t take Frank’s singing seriously, she didn’t want anything to stand in his way, especially a hurried marriage or an unnecessary baby. She had seen some of the women whom Frankie had met since he had started singing and she didn’t like them, especially the ones she called “cheap trash,” who wrote him love notes.
“She showed me a few of the letters,” said Marion Brush, “but Frank never knew because Dolly threw them away.”
When Frank had begun seeing Nancy Barbato, Dolly was naturally suspicious. But after scrutiny, she had decided that this quiet little girl who came from a devout Catholic family and was so devoted to her son would not pose any problems. Nancy understood how much singing meant to Frankie.
Since leaving The Hoboken Four, Frank had been singing at every Italian wedding and Irish political rally in town. He sang at the ladies’ auxiliaries and at Elks Club meetings for two dollars a night. He sang in Hoboken social clubs like The Cat’s Meow and The Comedy Club and on local radio stations like WAAT in Jersey City at no charge. He haunted music companies in New York trying to get auditions. He badgered song pluggers for professional copies of sheet music. He hounded radio stations for air time. He followed musicians and begged to carry their instruments so he could get into the hall free and, once inside, sing with the orchestra.
At one point, he thought he might have a better chance for success if he changed his name when he sang outside of Hoboken, so he appeared as Frankie Trent. The name change lasted as long as it took Dolly to find out about it. If he was going to accomplish anything in life and bring honor to his parents, he had better, by God, do it with the family name—either O’Brien or Sinatra, preferably Sinatra.
Around this time, Frank went to a New York vocal coach, John Quinlan, for forty-five-minute voice lessons costing one dollar, but the lessons seemed to be as much diction as music. “He talked different,” Tamby said. “He didn’t talk Hoboken anymore. He sounded like some Englishman or something. I asked him about it, and he told me he took lessons from some professor or something.”
Impressed with Frank’s range, the vocal coach said: “He has far more voice than people think he has. He can vocalize to a B flat on top in full voice, and he doesn’t need a mike either. Frank is over-particular and fussy about his work. But he has a great brain—for what he is doing. He has his faults. We all have.” The relationship ended a few years later when Quinlan suffered a heart attack and could not accompany Sinatra to California. “I guess Frank didn’t understand,” he said. “He hasn’t spoken to me since.”
Years later Sinatra said, “I never had a vocal lesson—a real one—except to work with a coach a few times on vocal calisthenics to help the throat grow and add a couple of notes on the top and spread the bottom.”
In 1938, Frank heard about an opening at the Rustic Cabin, a small-time roadhouse along Route 9W above the Jersey Palisades. The owner, Harry Nichols, was looking for a singing waiter who would act as master of ceremonies and introduce the dance selections of Harold Arden’s band. The pay was only fifteen dollars a week, but the roadhouse had a wire—direct radio line—to WNEW in New York City, and once a week the band and the singer were heard on the Saturday Dance Parade broadcast. What better way to be heard by a big-time band leader? Frank immediately arranged for an audition. The problem was Harold Arden, who remembered Frank from the days he chauffeured The Three Flashes. He hadn’t liked him then, and he didn’t like him any better after his audition.
Dejected, Frank went home and told his mother about the opening.
“But the bandleader doesn’t like me,” he said.
“That’s just fine,” said Dolly. “I won’t have you staying out until all hours, singing in one of those night clubs.”
“Frankie just looked at me,” Dolly told a reporter a few years later, “and he didn’t say a word. He took his dog, Girlie, in his arms and he went up to his room. Then I heard him sobbing.”
To have her son in tears was too much for Mama Sinatra.
“I stood it for a couple of hours, and I suppose I realized then, for the first time, what singing really meant to Frankie,” she said. “So I got on the phone and I called Harry Steeper, who was mayor of North Bergen, president of the New Jersey musicians’ union, and an assistant to James ‘Little Caesar’ Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians. As fellow politicians, we used to do favors for one another. I said, ‘What can we do? Frankie wants to si
ng at the Rustic Cabin and the bandleader doesn’t like him.’ I told him what happened and I asked him to see to it that Frankie got another tryout, and this time, I said, see to it that he gets the job.
“Well, Harry had heard Frankie sing, and he must have noticed the start of that quality which Frankie later learned to bring out so effectively. So Harry said he’d fix that—that I was to tell Frankie he was as good as hired. That’s how it happened. So many people claim to have started Frankie professionally, but the truth is it was actually Harry Steeper.”
From the minute Frank started at the Rustic Cabin, he felt that he was destined for success.
“He told me and my brother that he was going to be so big that no one could ever touch him,” said Fran Capone Ciriello of Hoboken. “ ‘Yeah, sure, Frankie. Sure you are,’ we’d say. No one thought he’d ever make it, except for him, that is.”
Even Dolly was dubious. “His salary was only fifteen dollars a week, and I used to give him practically twice that so he could pick up the tabs for his friends when they dropped in,” she said. “When he got a five-dollar raise, I told him, ‘This isn’t getting me anywhere. It would be cheaper for me to keep you at home.’ ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘it’s going to roll in someday. I’m going to be big time.’ He always believed that. But I said, ‘Yeah, it’s going to roll in and you’re going to roll out.’ ”
“I worked a lot of club dates with Frank,” said Sam Lefaso, a Jersey City musician. “He was such a nuisance, hogging the mike all the time and singing every chorus when he was only supposed to do an occasional vocal. Finally, we started taking the mike away from him. We ridiculed him because he just wasn’t that good. Even though he was singing at the Rustic Cabin, he didn’t seem to have any talent. No style whatsoever. Until he started going to a vocal coach, he was singing in a tight, high voice and sounded awful.
“But when we’d tell him how bad he was, he’d get furious and start cursing and swearing at us. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he’d yell. ‘You bastards wait. You just wait. One of these days, you’re going to pay to hear me sing. You just wait.’ ”
While Frank yelled at the musicians, Dolly yelled even louder at Frank when he started dating Toni Francke.
After Toni dropped her charges against Frank, Dolly decided that he should marry Nancy Barbato as soon as possible. Despite the newspaper publicity about his arrests, Dolly knew that Nancy was very much in love with him and wanted to marry Frank as much as Dolly now wanted her to. She felt that her son was too vulnerable to women like Toni. She wanted him to be married and settled down.
Frank was not enthusiastic about getting married. After the uproar with Toni, he had told Nancy that he didn’t want any woman getting in the way of his ambition. “I’m going to the top,” he said, “and I don’t want anyone dragging on my neck.”
Nancy promised never to get in his way, and the wedding was set for February 4, 1939.
Dolly asked him what he was going to give Nancy for an engagement present inasmuch as he had no money. It had cost fifteen hundred dollars to get him out of jail after the first arrest and five hundred after the second arrest. Frank said that maybe he could save up for something. Dolly said that would take years. “Well,” he said, “maybe I could give her your diamond ring.” Dolly sputtered for a few moments about how she had just finished making payments on the ring and that it was so expensive, but in the end she handed it over.
“The only reason Frank married Nancy is because Dolly made him do it,” said Marion Brush Schreiber. “She really pushed him into that one fast.”
Toni Francke was convinced that they were forced to marry. After all, Frank had told her Nancy was pregnant. Some of Nancy’s friends suspected as much when they received the abrupt announcement in January of the February wedding. And so they were quite surprised when Nancy did not give birth to her first child until sixteen months after the wedding. They did not know how hard Dolly was pushing to get her son married before another Toni Francke came along.
“When Nancy told me she was getting married in February. I was quite taken aback,” said Adeline Yacenda. “She and Frankie had been sweetheart kids together and he used to pick Nancy and me up from school in Jersey City. We were good friends then and I knew they hadn’t planned on getting married so soon at all. That wedding was very, very sudden. I guess it was on account of Frank getting caught going out of a lady’s bedroom window. Poor Nancy. It was a nice wedding, though, but not big. It was so sudden, I don’t know how they got it planned as quickly as they did.”
Dolly insisted on giving her future daughter-in-law a bridal shower in her home in Hoboken.
“None of Dolly’s Hoboken friends was invited except for me, and I didn’t know a soul in the place,” said Marion Brush Schreiber. “It was just Nancy and her friends and family. All her sisters and their successful husbands were there, and all the husbands were big, strapping guys at least six-two. Poor Frank looked like a baby around those guys. He had just turned twenty-three, but he seemed like a pathetic kid.”
“I remember Dolly’s shower for Nancy because Frank showed us his nice clothes afterwards,” said Adeline Yacenda. “He opened his closet for everyone.
“He had a terrific personality in those days and could win anyone over. Nancy was very much in love with him. But he did not have an education, which meant a lot at that time. I did not know anyone who didn’t go to school. We knew that he didn’t even go to high school and that he was not educated. As I said, education was important to all of us. But… Frank dressed very well.”
Because the Barbatos were such devout Catholics, the wedding took place at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City with Monsignor Monteleone presiding over a nuptial mass and a double-ring ceremony. The bride wore a long white dress, which was made at home, and walked down the aisle on the arm of her father. “I still remember Nancy coming down that aisle and crying her eyes out,” said Adeline Yacenda. “I always wondered why.”
“It was a small wedding. After all, most of us didn’t have two nickels to make a dime back then,” said Nancy’s friend Andrea Gizza. “But it was nice.… The reception was in Nancy’s family’s house over on Arlington Avenue. There must have been about fifty people at the reception. There was wine and sandwiches and Italian cookie trays. Frank was nervous. I think it was the first wedding he didn’t sing at.”
Noticeably absent among the wedding guests were any of the Sinatras’ Hoboken friends, with the exception of Marion Brush Schreiber. None of Frank’s childhood friends from Little Italy or Park Avenue was there. Nor was his godfather, Frank Garrick, invited. That feud was not to be forgotten even to celebrate a godson’s married future.
“I don’t think Nancy wanted to have much to do with people from Hoboken,” said Marion Brush Schreiber. “When I was leaving the reception at her house, I went up to the bedroom to get my coat, and Frank followed me. We had become such good friends by then. I wished him all the luck and happiness in the world and he kissed me. I’ll never forget him that day. He looked like the saddest man I’d ever seen.”
5
After a four-day honeymoon that was spent mostly driving to and from North Carolina, Frank and Nancy moved into a three-room Jersey City apartment, which they rented for forty-two dollars a month. Their combined monthly income at the time was two hundred dollars: Nancy earned twenty-Five dollars a week as a secretary for American Type Founders in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Frank, who had received a raise at the Rustic Cabin, was making twenty-five dollars a week as a singing waiter. Together they earned more than Marty Sinatra brought home as a fireman.
With 9.4 million Americans unemployed that year, Frank’s and Nancy’s combined salaries could buy a lot, and Nancy stretched the money as far as she could. She scrubbed her own floors, and she shopped carefully for food every week, always looking for bargains. Grocery prices ranged from five cents for a one-pound can of pork and beans, and seven cents for a package of Pillsbury pancake flour, to thirty-three cents for a dozen eggs and thir
ty-four cents for a pound of butter. A bottle of Pepsi-Cola cost five cents; a fifth of Scotch three dollars and twenty-nine cents.
After food and rent, most of their money supported Frank’s mania for clothes so he would always be well-dressed when he performed. He needed to dress rich to feel important, and admitted that new clothes bolstered his ego.
“Every time I felt insecure I used to go out and get ten more suits,” he said. In 1939, his clothes addiction ran to $35 Woodside suits, $12.50 Johnston & Murphy shoes, and $2.50 broadcloth shirts. He insisted on all-silk bow ties for $2.50 and silk hose for sixty-five cents a pair. Frank spent whatever he wanted on clothes, charging them when he was broke. He once bounced a check to his tailor, Louis Stoll, who lived in their apartment building, but made good the next month.
Still, his excessive spending terrified Nancy, who was so frugal she deprived herself of any extravagances. She sewed her own dresses and suits, and bought only an occasional jabot blouse for $3.50. Everything else she put toward Frank’s wardrobe.
“She used to sew a lot for Frank so he’d look nice when he went on auditions and jobs,” said her friend Andrea Gizza. “She’d make him things like scarves and socks. Once, when he needed a new tie to match an outfit he was wearing on a job, she even cut up a dress of hers and made him a tie out of the material. Another time—it was his birthday—she didn’t have much to give him so she took an old glove of his and stuffed a quarter into each of the fingers. She said he cried when he opened the gift and said, ‘Honey, someday we’re going to be rich, you’ll see.’
“But Nancy didn’t care about being rich. She wanted nice things, sure. But above all she wanted to have a nice family and settle down to a nice normal life. Or at least near-normal, since she was married to a singer.”
But Frank continued to spend money whether he had it or not.
“I remember visiting Nancy on Audubon Avenue after she and Frank got married,” said Adeline Yacenda. “Frank was away a lot. One day Nancy brought out this beautiful bag that Frank had bought her for thirty-five dollars. You have no idea of how expensive that was in those days. Nancy held the purse like a sacred relic, and I was absolutely wide-eyed. ‘You better tell him to hang on to his money,’ I said. ‘That kind of money won’t come along that often.’ ”