Although most of the Irish were poor and had a reputation for being rowdy, they banded together and elected their own, controlling politics and police and governmental jobs and contracts.
The Italians were considered third on the rung of the social ladder. While the Germans and Irish lived in well-appointed homes, the Italians resided in broken-down tenements. Snubbed and ridiculed, they were looked upon as intellectually inferior. The downtown neighborhood in which they lived, Little Italy, was considered a ghetto by outsiders. But, like all races and ethnic groups, these Italian immigrants were proud people, working to attain a better life for themselves and their families. Their heritage defined who they were and informed them with certain principles. They maintained their self-respect in spite of the class structure and in turn reared their children in Little Italy so that their personalities too were imbued with self-esteem and dignity.
Generally, the children were well behaved in Little Italy. Any parent could discipline any child; if a youngster misbehaved, he could easily get whacked on the side of the head by a neighbor or even a stranger. It was completely acceptable. Some books about Sinatra have given readers the impression that Hoboken was a living hell. However, to its residents it was home, and no matter how bad it may have been, it was a better place than the old country, because it was a place where children could have dreams. They didn’t have money, but they had more: They had liberty; they had hope.
While Italian-American youngsters were taught to respect themselves and their elders, they were also fighters. It was in their blood. Their tenacity came naturally.
A confident, assertive, and sometimes even combative nature seemed to be ingrained in just about every kid whose parents or grandparents had ever immigrated to Hoboken. And as in many impoverished areas, there were warring street gangs.
“It was a tough neighborhood,” said Tina Donato, whose grandparents lived in Hoboken. “You had to have your wits about you. You had to walk around with eyes in the back of your head. But it had heart. So yes, appropriately enough, Frank Sinatra would be born into a place with great heart, a place of passion.”
Marty and Dolly
Frank Sinatra’s parents, Marty and Dolly, were raised in a town of dissimilar personalities and cultures, so it is no surprise that they too were a study in contrasts.
As a young man, blue-eyed, ruddy, and tattooed Marty Sinatra—born Antonino Martino Sinatra on May 4, 1892, in Lercara Friddi, province of Palermo, Sicily—suffered from asthma and other breathing problems stemming from his work at the American Pencil Company. “Inhaling the dust wrecked his lungs,” Frank once explained. “He couldn’t do any better because he had nobody to teach him English.” Marty ended up distinguishing himself as a prizefighter, boxing under the name Marty O’Brien. He and his parents believed that his life in Hoboken, dominated and controlled largely by the Irish and by Irish politicians, would be easier if he adopted an Irish name for professional bouts. O’Brien was the name of his manager. Later, when he quit boxing in 1926 after breaking his wrist, Sinatra would work as a boilermaker in a shipyard.
“He was a very quiet man,” Frank would recall of his mild-mannered father. “A lonely man. And shy. You could hear him wheezing. If he had an attack, a coughing spell, he’d disappear—find a hole in the wall somewhere and be outside before you knew it. I adored him.”
Marty fell in love with the blonde, blue-eyed Natalie Catherine “Dolly” Garavente, daughter of Italian immigrants from Genoa. Dolly, born on December 26, 1896, accompanied her parents to America when she was two years old. She was a fair-skinned woman who was often mistaken for Irish (and who as an adult would not be above using her non-Italian appearance to her advantage when doing business in the neighborhood or when “being Irish” suited her purposes).
Their romance blossomed quickly, despite their dissimilarity. Whereas he was quiet, reflective, and brooding, she tended to be loud, impulsive, and fiery. A strong-minded and spirited woman, Dolly usually prevailed in any heated discussion between them. Marty was ambitious—if he weren’t, he would not have been in her life, because she detested lazy men—but he was clearly much more easygoing than Dolly.
There were other differences as well. Marty’s family were grape growers in the old country, while Dolly’s were educated lithographers. Whereas Marty was illiterate, Dolly had an elementary education. Marty’s parents were less than enthusiastic about the relationship. They didn’t like Genoans, felt that they were elitists. Their wish was for Marty to marry a Sicilian girl, someone “of your own kind.” Of course, Dolly’s parents were also not pleased about the romance. They, in turn, believed that Sicilians were of a lower class than Genoans. Surely, they insisted, Dolly could find a more suitable mate.
The disapproval of the Sinatras and Garaventes shadowed the relationship between Marty and Dolly in its early days, and it seemed that they would have no future together at all if they listened to their parents. Why should they suppress their affection for one another? Why should they focus on their differences when they had so much in common? They were young, they had fun . . . they were in love. They also shared a core belief that life was what you make it, and they both wanted better lives.
Still, Marty was uncertain about how to proceed with Dolly. He wanted to wait, see if his parents could perhaps be swayed, give it some time. However, Dolly vehemently disagreed. “Now is the time,” she said. “Why wait? Life is short. I want to get married now.”
Dolly was the type of person who became more determined to accomplish something when she was told she couldn’t or shouldn’t do it. For instance, in 1919 she would chain herself to city hall as a protest on behalf of woman suffrage; that’s the kind of independent-thinking woman she was. The mere fact that her parents disapproved of the relationship was an added incentive for her. In her mind, it made her attraction to Marty all the more exciting and romantic. Therefore she convinced Marty that the two of them should elope.
For Marty—a good son who wanted to please his parents, not defy them—eloping was asking a lot. Dolly felt the same way about her own parents. However, she was more determined not to allow others to impose their prejudices on her, and if she couldn’t please her family she would just proceed with her life and hope they’d one day see things her way.
Dolly and Marty eloped on February 14, Valentine’s Day, in 1913. They were married at city hall in Jersey City.
To the senior Garaventes’ and Sinatras’ credit, though extremely put out after hearing of the elopement, they soon changed their views. A year later, by the time Dolly was pregnant with Frank, both families had come to terms with the marriage and had pulled together. Rather than torment her own parents, who felt strongly that she was “living in sin,” especially after she was pregnant, Dolly agreed to a church ceremony that would be performed before family members.
After their wedding, Marty and Dolly moved into a dilapidated four-story building in the heart of Little Italy, at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, that was shared by eight other families.
Frank Is Born
On December 1, 1915, the forty-seventh annual convention of the Woman Suffrage Association of New York State met at the Astor Hotel in the hope that 1916 would be the year when women would finally get the vote. (It would not happen until 1920.) Meanwhile, The Magic Flute was playing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and Ethel Barrymore was starring in Our Mrs. McChesney at the Lyceum. The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s epic film, was advertised as the “Most Stupendous Dramatic Spectacle the Brain of Man Has Yet Visioned and Revealed.” Also, for five dollars down and a promised payment of five dollars a month, a person could take home a Victrola and a stack of records, just in time for Christmas.
On December 12, 1915, in the middle of an East Coast snowstorm, Frank Sinatra was born to Dolly Sinatra in her bedroom on Monroe Street.
The building where Frank was born was torn down many years ago. Today, a brick arch and gold-and-blue star on the sidewalk mark a hallowed spot in an
otherwise battered and neglected part of town. Engraved within the star are the words “Francis Albert Sinatra. The Voice. Born here at 415 Monroe Street. December 12, 1915.”
It was a difficult breech birth; the doctors used forceps to deliver the thirteen-and-a-half-pound baby from the ninety-two-pound woman. The infant nearly died during the delivery; in fact, the panicked doctor was taken aback by the child’s survival. The baby was scarred on his ear, neck, and cheek, and his eardrum pierced, all by the clumsy use of forceps. Unfortunately, because of the troublesome birth and the damage it caused her own body, Dolly would never be able to bear another child.
In order to assist the infant in breathing, Dolly’s mother, who was a capable midwife, held him under cold running water until his tiny, fragile lungs began to draw air. Kicking and screaming its way into the world, the baby would live. “They had set me aside in order to save my mother’s life,” Frank once explained. “And my grandmother had more sense than anyone in the room, as far as I was concerned. I have blessed that moment in her honor ever since because otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
Dolly was just nineteen when Frank was born, Marty twenty-three. They named the child Francis Sinatra. (Though his middle name is Albert, it does not appear on the official birth certificate.) Frank was baptized on April 2, 1916, at St. Francis Holy Roman Catholic Church. According to an account from the historical records at the Hoboken library, he was given his name by accident. Apparently Dolly and Marty had selected Frank Garrick, who worked for the Jersey Observer, to be the baby’s godfather and Anna Gatto as godmother. Before the baptism, the story goes, the priest asked Garrick his name. He answered, “Frank.” When the child was baptized, the priest absentmindedly christened the baby Francis instead of Martin, the name he was supposed to be given.
Dolly was not present at the christening; she was still home recovering from the birth, so she couldn’t do anything about the error. Marty didn’t bother to correct the priest. Thus the boy ended up being named Francis Sinatra. In the end, Dolly didn’t object because she felt that her son’s name would be a good link to his Irish—and potentially powerful—godfather.
It’s a good story and has long been the accepted account. However, it doesn’t appear to be true, because on the birth certificate that was filled out five days after Frank’s birth (months prior to the baptism), it clearly says “Francis Senestro.” In fact, the name Francis is practically the only thing the apparently non-Italian clerk who filled out the form got right. He misspelled “Sinatra” as well as “Garavente” and listed Frank’s father’s country of birth as the United States rather than Italy.
Marty and Dolly unofficially gave their son the middle name Albert. Therefore, on a corrected birth certificate filed twenty-three years after the original, Frank’s name was recorded as “Francis A. Sinastre.” Again, it was wrong.
Young Frank
The United States officially entered World War I on April 6, 1917. Shortly thereafter, American troops began arriving in Hoboken to board ships bound for France. Along with Newport News, Virginia, Hoboken was the center of shipping for the duration of the conflict. The city would be under full military control until the armistice. Soldiers guarded the piers and patrolled the streets looking for German sympathizers.
Meanwhile, President Woodrow Wilson shut down the city’s 237 waterfront bars and introduced federal Prohibition to Hoboken, making it the first city in the country to experience it. However, it was difficult for the government to enforce Prohibition laws; local authorities simply wouldn’t cooperate. People wanted to drink alcohol, and a great deal of money was generated by selling mixed drinks and beer. Thus northern New Jersey became a virtual haven for anti-Prohibition activity. Soon, uomini rispettati (men of respect) began infiltrating the neighborhood, manufacturing and distributing alcoholic beverages while officials, many of whom received hefty kickbacks in the form of cash or favors, looked the other way. These so-called men of respect were actually powerful gangsters who thought of themselves as above the law and had the connections and persuasive power to get away with all sorts of criminal activity, not only in Hoboken but up and down the eastern seaboard.
An enterprising couple, Marty and Dolly Sinatra took full advantage of this laissez-faire climate and opened their own saloon at Fourth and Jefferson Streets in Hoboken, “Marty O’Brien’s.” (The bar was registered in Dolly’s name because Marty was now a fireman working for the Hoboken Fire Department and was not permitted to own such establishments.) At around this time, as Frank once remembered, his father was known to occasionally aid bootleggers. “He was one of the tough guys,” Sinatra said in a lecture at Yale Law School in the spring of 1986. “His job was to follow trucks with booze so that they weren’t hijacked. I was only three or four, but I remember in the middle of the night I heard sounds, crying and wailing. I think my old man was a little slow, and he got hit on the head. Somebody opened up his head, and he came home and was bleeding all over the kitchen floor. My mother was hysterical. After that, he got out of that kind of business. That’s when they opened a 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 Macagnano, another boyhood friend of Frank’s. “Us kids didn’t go around there a lot. We were a little afraid of Marty. He was a grouchy kind of 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 much. Just grunted a lot.”
Because she owned a bar, Dolly befriended a number of uomini rispettati, including Sicilian-born Waxey Gordon, a prominent underworld figure in the neighborhood. “They had a lot of shady friends because of the bar they ran,” said one close friend of the Sinatras. “Face it. They owned a bar during Prohibition. If you think they didn’t have friends in the right places, you’re kidding yourself. Dolly could talk shit with the best of them. She was a real character; nobody intimidated her.”
As the establishment’s barmaid, Dolly was the wisecracking, tough mother figure whom many people in the neighborhood came to for honest advice. Also, if a person needed a job, he would appeal to Dolly. She was the one with connections. She knew everyone in town and could solve pretty much anyone’s problem by calling in favors.
Helen Fiore Monteforte, who lived at 414 Monroe Street, across the street from the Sinatras, recalled Dolly: “She was a vivacious, beautiful, blue-eyed woman with light skin and strawberry blonde hair. A real go-getter, she was constantly pushing to get her family ahead. She was a hell-raiser who would sing gaily and dance joyously right on the table at the famous Clam Broth House in Hoboken. She loved life, had tremendous charm, did a great deal of public service work for the community without being paid a dime. One thing that was always true of her, she could light the fire under anyone when she needed something accomplished.”
Enterprising, ambitious, and politically conscious, Dolly would in years to come become a Democratic committeewoman. Using her gregarious, self-assured personality to her best advantage, she soon developed considerable political influence in Hoboken. For instance, she was often called upon by Irish politicians who needed Italian votes in Little Italy; she could be counted on to deliver at least six hundred votes from her neighborhood, which gave her the kind of influence most people in the neighborhood simply did not possess. She had power, everyone knew it—and she basked in it.
Well-spoken in the English language as well as in many Italian dialects, Dolly was an unusual woman, given the time and circumstances of her world. However, she was not easy to get along with; she could be extremely judgmental, was known to have deep-seated prejudices against the other “classes,” and held firm to her beliefs. When she considered running for mayor, Marty was opposed to it; he felt that the position would make her more intolerable, that she would wield too much power and he wasn’t sure how she would handle it. (Ultimately, she did not throw her hat into the ring.)
> Steve Capiello of Hoboken, who knew Dolly well, recalled, “She was ahead of her time. Unlike some women of today, who speak of women’s rights but do nothing about them, she was a woman of action. She supported me during the onset of my political career, and ultimately I was elected mayor of Hoboken. She could speak with a longshoreman’s vocabulary if necessary, or be eloquent if she had to impress the political hierarchy in order to make a point.”
Hoboken was a tough place, and the women who immigrated there from Italy were equal to the challenge. Indeed, a woman had to have a toughness about her as well as a sense of enterprise and imagination to embark on the journey to a new life in America. Women who were dainty by nature would remain behind in Italy and enjoy safe, limited lives. Tough, ambitious women like Dolly’s mother, Rosa Garavente, and Dolly herself hungered for more. They felt they deserved more. In turn, they usually attracted men who were equally ambitious.
“Dolly had the bluest language of any female I’d ever known,” Doris Corrado, a former Hoboken librarian, said. “One time she walked into a party from pouring-down rain and the first thing she said when she got in the door was, ‘Holy Jesus! It’s raining sweet peas and horseshit out there.’ Her mouth dripped with honey one minute, and the next it was ‘Fuck this’ and ‘Fuck that.’”
Certainly Italian-American women like Dolly could seem crude to the outside world as they hollered at their kids while trying to get “them little bastards” into the kitchen to eat homemade manicotti and meatballs before the sauce (which Dolly called “gravy”) got cold. But that was just the way they were, the way they expressed affection, the way they lived their lives—tough, bold, maybe even sometimes profane, but still capable of great love. Dolly Sinatra didn’t have time to be cordial; she had things to do. Her friends and family loved her, and she loved them in return, which was enough for her. She was a formidable woman in every way, and by far the greatest influence on Frank Sinatra’s life. She certainly dominated everyone around her, just as Frank would when he became her age. An Italian-American son couldn’t help but be influenced by such a mother.
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