by Kitty Kelley
After his last song, Frank thanked his audience profusely, saying, “I always dreamed of working at the Waldorf-Astoria—it’s sort of the top.”
Later that evening at a party given by Waldorf owner George Boomer, Frank, who had been coached by Evans, approached Elsa Maxwell. “You disapprove of me,” he said, “and my mother agrees with you. She said, ‘You tell that Miss Maxwell she is right!’ ”
“I disapprove of you, Frankie, only because I think it a pity for anyone with your naturally lovely voice to resort to such cheap tactics.”
“My press agent, George Evans, thought up the squealing girls and the way I hold the mike,” said Frank. “I do not like any part of it. But it all has made the headlines. And the headlines have made me, I guess.”
Miss Maxwell mellowed. The next day she wrote up Frank’s opening night, telling her readers, “He has found a setting to show off the sweetness of his voice.”
A few weeks later, eager to please the society columnist, Frank agreed to sing at a benefit at the Hotel Pierre for a child-adoption center. The night of the benefit, he won the door prize.
“Driving home in my car, he held on his lap the little white fur jacket he had won and, again and again, picked it up to examine it, to admire it,” said Elsa Maxwell, who had introduced Frank at the benefit. “ ‘Nancy’s never had a fur,’ he said. ‘Is this real ermine?’ ” Elsa Maxwell laughed and said that rabbit paws were a reasonable facsimile. (He gave the jacket to Nancy, and for Christmas he gave her a white mink coat, which he considered the height of sophistication. When she said that she wanted to dye it brown, he blew up.)
Now that Frank was a high-society success in New York, his mother’s political stock soared in New Jersey. After his engagement at the Wedgwood Room, she asked him to sing at a rally for the Democratic mayor of Newark, Vincent J. Murphy, who was running for governor, and to say a few nice words about Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, boss of Dolly’s Democratic machine. More than fifty thousand people turned out, and policemen and firemen worked overtime marshaling the crowds that poured into Lincoln High School to hear Hudson County’s hometown boy.
No one enjoyed Frank’s success more than Dolly Sinatra. As the mother of the most famous singer in the country, she now reigned supreme in Hoboken. Her husband was promoted to captain in the fire department, and she became the biggest celebrity in town. Every time a ribbon had to be cut to open a new music store, Dolly was there, swathed in the silver fox furs that Frank had given her. Hoboken Night at Yankee Stadium saw Dolly sitting in the best boxes drinking beer and eating hot dogs that somebody else always paid for.
“Everybody fussed over her once Frank made it big,” said Minnie Cardinale, who had dipped chocolates with Mrs. Sinatra in Hoboken.
“It got so that she never paid her bills anymore,” said Connie Cappadona, an interior designer Dolly hired to decorate her house.
Even the Catholics who had once shunned her because of her abortion business now came around and made her head of the Rosary Society at St. Ann’s.
Dolly kept a supply of Frank’s autographed photos on hand, and every time the delivery boy from the drugstore rang the doorbell, she poked her head out and said, “Do you want a lousy tip or a beautiful picture of my son?” The youngster always took the picture of Frank.
In addition to the silver fox furs and Miami Beach vacations that Frank paid for, Dolly and Marty Sinatra received money from their son on a regular basis. Firemen in Hoboken still remember the one-hundred-dollar check that arrived every Monday from Sinatra Enterprises.
In the tumultuous years since leaving Tommy Dorsey, Frank had become the most exciting entertainer in the country and swamped Bob Eberly, Dick Haymes, Perry Como, and Bing Crosby in Downbeats 1943 year-end poll of the most popular singers. No other singer had the battalions of devoted fans that Frank had. His teenage jumpers and screamers sent him hundreds of hand-knit sweaters, wrote hate letters to critical reviewers, and plastered lipstick kisses on his home in Hasbrouck Heights. They even wrote poetry to his three-year-old daughter, Nancy Sandra:
You’d probably laugh as little girls do,
And smile and act rather shy,
If you knew that the man whom you call Dad,
Is the one making us sigh.
Frank had touched the innocent sexual buddings of adolescent America as no one else before him. The shrewd machinations of George Evans gave the young girls license to express themselves by moaning and swooning and yelling. He made it a fad to scream hysterically and to faint in the aisles, and by doing so the bobby-soxers became part of the show. He capitalized on the boy-crazy stage that all young girls go through and gave them Frankie as their romantic idol, their Prince Charming who would kiss them and caress them with his songs.
All their girlish yearnings became centered on this fragile young singer who talked to them as if they were equals, sharing details of his family, and telling them about Big Nancy and Little Nancy and the baby who was expected soon. (“I want a boy so we can name him Frankie,” he said, “but if it’s a girl, we’ll name her Frances.”) They listened raptly to the words of his songs and responded when he seemed vulnerable.
When he sang about nobody loving him, the little girls shrieked with anguish, “Are you kiddin’, Frankie?” “We love you. We love you.” When he closed his eyes and sang sadly, “I’ll Never Walk Alone,” a youngster, nearly moved to tears, shouted, “I’ll walk wid ya, Frankie. Honest. I’ll walk wid ya.” They wanted to hug and kiss this man who became the personification of their fathers, uncles, brothers, and the kind of man they dreamed of marrying. They fought for the chance to touch him, but they also wanted to take care of him.
Frank returned their ardor in full. “I love all those girls the same as they love me,” he said. “I get thousands of letters a week from girls who love me, but not in a sex way. There is nothing degenerate about it. They wear Frankie Sinatra bow ties just like I do and form Frankie Sinatra fan clubs named after my songs. Every time I sing a song, I make love to them. I’m a boudoir singer.”
Most psychologists explained the Swoonatra craze as the result of frustrated love induced by the pressures of war in America in the 1940s—working mothers, absent fathers, and the awful sense of impermanence. But there was something deeper that made these youngsters identify with Frank Sinatra and idolize him.
“Most of his fans are plain, lonely girls from lower-middle class homes,” said E. J. Kahn, Jr., in The New Yorker. “They are dazzled by the life Sinatra leads and wish they could share in it. They insist that they love him, but they do not use the verb in its ordinary sense. As they apply it to him, it is synonymous with ‘worship’ or ‘idealize.’ ”
“Nearly all the bobby-soxers whom I saw at the Paramount gave every appearance of being children of the poor,” wrote Bruce Bliven in The New Republic. “I would guess that these children found in him, for all his youthfulness, something of a father image. And beyond that, he represents a dream of what they themselves might conceivably do or become. He earns a million a year, and yet he talks their language; he is just a kid from Hoboken who got the breaks. In everything he says and does, he aligns himself with the youngsters and against the adult world. It is always ‘we’ and never ‘you.’ ”
Years later, Sinatra talked about his bobby-soxer period and its effect on him: “I was—I was everything. Happy, I don’t know. I wasn’t unhappy, let’s put it that way. I never had it so good. Sometimes I wonder whether anybody ever had it like I had it, before or since. It was the darndest thing, wasn’t it? But I was too busy ever to know whether I was happy, or even to ask myself. I can’t remember for a long time even taking time out to think.”
Although Frank’s appeal was primarily to women, there were a few male fans, but none so devoted as teenager Joey “GiGi” Lissa of Hoboken, who had idolized Frank ever since he saw him walking into the Cat’s Meow poolroom in 1938 wearing a white trench coat.
Lissa’s job was to clean Dolly Sinatra’s house—a job
it would seem every kid in Hoboken had at some time or other.
“When he was singing in New York, he always stopped at his mother’s place before he went home to his wife, and one time I was cleaning Dolly’s house when Frank walked in,” Lissa said. “I was only fourteen years old, but he gave me his tie. It was maroon with yellow flowers. He used to let me walk with him up to the Crystal Ballroom and hold his glass. When I was in the service on Guam I robbed the USO of all its Frank Sinatra records and then when I had the midnight watch on my gunboat, I would be the mystery midnight disc jockey, and open all the phones to play Sinatra’s music. All the ships in the fleet heard it and sometimes the officers came in and looked, but they always left me alone. Even Tokyo Rose mentioned it over the radio. ‘We know who the mystery midnight disc jockey is playing all those Sinatra records,’ she said.”
Sinatra’s female fans followed him like the Pied Piper to his performances and radio sessions for Your Hit Parade. They visited his white clapboard house on Lawrence Avenue in Hasbrouck Heights, sometimes standing for hours simply to stare at the windows. Other times, they rang the doorbell, knowing that Big Nancy would invite them in for Coke and cookies, and patiently answer all their questions about Frankie’s favorite foods, favorite colors, favorite hobbies. They begged her for the clothespins that held his laundry on the line in the backyard, and they were thrilled when she allowed them to walk her to the store and to help decide what to feed Frankie for dinner. They seemed to know everything about him, including his fondness for giving friends nicknames. They had heard him call Bing Crosby “The King,” Jimmy Van Heusen “Chester” (his real name), and Axel Stordahl “Sibelius.” Now they wanted to know what he called his wife. “He calls me Mommy,” Big Nancy said.
As far as they knew, the god they worshiped was a loving family man who cherished his wife and sang lullabies to his daughter. He seemed extremely boyish, wearing floppy bow ties and eating banana splits every day. He was friendly and so patient about signing autographs. He never got in a bad mood and never ever lost his temper. He seemed so vulnerable, so shy, so nice, so sincere. George Evans knew that the worshipful young fans needed to believe this myth to continue their adoration, and he nearly lost his mind trying to keep their shining image of Frankie intact.
8
Frank had not been present for the birth of his first child, Nancy Sandra, in 1940. Nor was he with his wife when their son was born on January 10, 1944, in the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was in Hollywood filming Step Lively and starring in a weekly radio show sponsored by Vimms Vitamins. But the ever-faithful George Evans was by Nancy’s bedside to take care of everything.
Evans called Frank to give him the news and told reporters that the singer was very happy. “He wanted a boy very much,” said the press agent. Then he headed for the florist and had three dozen red roses sent to Nancy from her husband with a card that read, “Congratulations to you, darling, and to the little guy for picking himself such a wonderful mom. All my love.”
The next day, Evans arrived at the hospital early and helped get Nancy ready to meet the press in a pale blue quilted bed jacket that he had selected for the occasion. He propped a framed photograph of Frank next to her bed, fluffed the pillows, and told her to hold up the eight-pound-thirteen-ounce baby boy to admire the picture of his father, which would give photographers their best shot of the day. Then he called in the reporters and cameramen.
“I’m glad he’s a boy because that’s what Frank always wanted—a junior,” said Nancy. “When he was told by telephone last night, he was so excited he couldn’t even talk.”
Seeing the wirephoto of his wife and newborn son the next day, Frank said, “Fine-looking lad and no bobby socks, either.” He told reporters that he didn’t care what Frank, Jr., did when he grew up as long as he never became a singer. “No following in Dad’s footsteps, that’s for sure,” he said.
The next day on his CBS radio show, Frank talked to his wife and baby over the air, saying, “I’d like to sing one of my favorite songs to my little son in New Jersey. So pull up a chair, Nancy, and bring the baby with you. I want him really to hear this.”
Later Frank would admit that having the baby was an attempt to save a bad marriage. “I thought that another child would cement our marriage,” he said, “and we had Frankie, Jr. But endless tours, nightclub work, and a hundred other business activities kept me away from home most of the time. Little by little, we [Nancy and I] drifted apart.”
The radio show that starred Frank featured a line-up of beautiful female stars like Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Ann Sheridan, Joan Blondell, and Joan Bennett. It was one of the reasons he was in no hurry to return home. Despite his wife, his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and his newborn son, he stayed on the West Coast for two and a half months basking in the glow of being a movie star.
Higher and Higher had been advertised by RKO as Frank Sinatra’s first film, which guaranteed record-breaking attendance by the nation’s bobby-soxers. But not all the New York critics were enthusiastic. Dismissing Higher and Higher as Lower and Lower, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote that “Frankie is no Gable or Barrymore,” and the movie was nothing more than “a slapdash setting for the incredibly unctuous renderings of the Voice.”
The New York Herald-Tribune was more respectful, saying that Frank “does his stint remarkably well for a comparative novice. His ugly, bony face photographs well; his voice registers agreeably enough on the microphone, and he handles himself easily, with occasional hints of comic authority.”
The New Yorker faulted the movie as “not a particularly engaging film,” but said Frank, as the star, “comes out fine. He has some acting to do, and he does it.”
In Hollywood, however, the critics swooned. The Los Angeles Examiner said, “It’s hard to dislike a guy who seems so friendly, simple, and natural … and Frankie seems that way on the screen because that’s the way he is.”
The Hollywood Reporter agreed: “The cinema captures an innate shyness in the singer who has uniquely become an idol of the airlanes and the bobby-sox trade.… People who have never understood his appeal to swooning fans, have even resented him, will have no trouble in buying the guy they meet on the screen here.”
The Los Angeles Times said, “The crooner certainly doesn’t fulfill the cinema’s traditional idea of a romantic figure, which may be a break for him eventually. He plays himself in Higher and Higher, appears more at ease than we expected, and should find a place as a film personality with careful choice of subjects. Crosby did, didn’t he?”
Frank stayed in Hollywood with his entourage and celebrated his new stardom. Most of them were without their wives and were gamboling like kids away from home for the first time—going to the fights, to the track, to Palm Springs, to Las Vegas, and to all of Frank’s performances. On the weekend, they headed for Beverly Hills High School, where they had formed a Softball team called The Swooners. Regulars included Frank, Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne, Hank Sanicola, actors Anthony Quinn and Barry Sullivan, and comedy writer Harry Crane. The cheerleaders were Virginia Mayo, Marilyn Maxwell, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner, all wearing Swooner T-shirts.
Frank went home in March but stayed only a few weeks before returning to Hollywood to start work on Anchors Aweigh with Gene Kelly at MGM. He had told Nancy that he no longer wanted to live in Hasbrouck Heights; he loved the California sunshine, and after his good reviews he felt that his life was now in Hollywood. He wanted to be a movie star like Bing Crosby. He wanted to move to the West Coast and so did Nancy, but she was afraid to leave her family in New Jersey. Frank easily persuaded her with the promise of driving lessons and a new Cadillac. A few weeks later he bought Mary Astor’s rambling estate in the Toluca Lake area of the San Fernando Valley, sight unseen.
Frank was a movie star now. But Nancy was still a little Italian housewife who was incredulous that her husband would be making more than one million dollars by the end of the year. “I couldn’t
believe it,” she said. “Only millionaires made millions. All I could think of was the time six years ago when I had spaghetti without meat sauce because meat sauce was more expensive. And now Frank has made a million in a year!”
Nancy moved with the children to California and took her five married sisters with her. She even moved her sister, Tina, into the new house to act as her secretary and answer fan mail. Frank’s mother was furious about all the Barbato girls going to California, but Nancy no longer cared what Dolly thought. The two women had long ceased to be allies. Nancy was delighted to be putting twenty-five hundred miles between herself and her mother-in-law.
“Nancy never liked Hoboken people,” said Marion Brush Schreiber, “and when she came back from California for a visit, she acted real hoity-toity, saying, “Oh, we’re very close to Lana’ and ‘We see Lana all the time.’ That kind of thing. It made Dolly want to kill her. You’d write a letter to Frank, and one of Nancy’s sisters, Julie or Tina, would send you a reply. A nice letter, but it wasn’t from Frank. That drove all of us crazy.”
But Nancy was not to blame. Her life had changed so radically that she couldn’t adjust to the glory and glamour of her husband. He regularly flew back and forth across the country for singing engagements on both coasts, leaving little time for his family in California. Frank was rarely home, but Nancy was there with the children. There were no governesses, only a weekly cleaning woman. Nancy remained a full-time housewife.
Spinning at the top of his fame now, Frank Sinatra’s star was in the stratosphere, where there were no black storm clouds, only the limitless reaches of success. His name was known throughout the nation; his fans numbered in the hundreds of thousands; his voice echoed around the world on phonographs and radio; his friends were celebrated. His influence even reached to the White House.