So devoted was Dolly to her many pursuits outside the home that from the ages of six to twelve, Frank was often in the care of his maternal grandmother, and his aunts. He has also said that he spent a great deal of time with “a kindly old Jewish woman,” who has only been identified by the name of Mrs. Golden, a woman he continued to visit until her death in the early 1950s.
Recalled his cousin John Tredy, “[Dolly and Marty] didn’t have too much time for Frankie when he was young. I think they felt he was always underfoot. Frank was left to his own devices; he rarely did homework, for instance. He was rambunctious as a student; I think he skipped one entire year without his parents being any the wiser.”
Other accounts of Frank’s childhood have painted him as soft-spoken and extremely sensitive, a quiet child. It was said that his personality as a youngster more resembled his father’s than his mother’s. John Tredy has said, “He was a soft kind of boy. Like his father, Marty. Frankie was the quietest little boy.”
His childhood friend Helen Fiore Monteforte described young Sinatra as “impeccably dressed, never disheveled. A fedora on. As a young boy, a fedora on. Even in the summertime.”
Thoughtful and sensitive, he was sometimes taunted by other youngsters in the neighborhood. “Prejudice is nothing new to me,” Frank once said. “When I was a kid, I lived in a tough neighborhood. When somebody called me ‘a dirty little guinea,’ there was only one thing to do—break his head.”
Not only was he sometimes ridiculed because of his ancestry, but Frank was also singled out because of his appearance. They called him “Scarface,” referring to the scars that had been left from his difficult birth. They often beat and bullied him. In some respects, Frank seemed like a misfit to the other boys by the time he enrolled at David E. Rue Junior High in 1928, and his mother only made matters worse by dressing him in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, handmade by her own mother. He had such a wide array of “outfits,” so many pants, in fact, that some people in the neighborhood called him “Slacksey O’Brien.”
“We were walking down the street,” one of his friends remembered, “and someone said, ‘Hey, you little wop,’ to Frank as he passed by. I said, ‘Frank, just keep on walkin’.’ And Frank said, ‘I’m gonna walk all over his face, that’s where I’m gonna walk.’ And that was that, the fight was on. Frank got beat real bad. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but not for lack of trying. Afterward, I said to him, ‘Frankie, was it worth it? C’mon!’ And he said, ‘Hell yeah, it was worth it. He’ll never call me a wop again.’ Two days later, same thing, same guy. ‘Hey, you little wop.’ And the fight was on again . . . and Frank got beat up again.”
“I’ll never forget how it hurt when the kids called me a dago when I was a boy,” he later said. “It’s a scar that lasted a long time and which I have never quite forgotten. It isn’t the kids’ fault,” he noted. “It’s their parents. They would never learn to make racial and religious discriminations if they didn’t hear that junk at home.” Likely because of what he saw during his childhood, Frank would always be outspoken when he or his friends—no matter their race, ethnic background, or appearance—were slurred or insulted in any way. He would go on to often speak out publicly for racial tolerance, especially at times when it was unpopular to do so.
It was Frank’s father, Marty, who contributed to the often unexpected side of his son’s character: his brooding pensiveness, his kindness, and his loyalty to his friends. But his near obsession with cleanliness, his unyielding stubbornness, and his legendary temper can clearly be traced to his mother. Sometimes young Frank would become so angry that he lost control of himself. For instance, he became so unhappy about the scars of his birth that he managed to track down the doctor who had delivered him. Angry eleven-year-old Sinatra went to the doctor’s home, determined to beat him up for having disfigured him. Luckily, the doctor wasn’t in.
“Hell, he was as scrappy as they come,” said Joey D’Orazio, two years younger than Frank, who once lived in what he proudly called “Dolly’s neighborhood.”
“What’s with this ‘poor little Frankie’ crap I read about all the time? He was tough as nails. He was a wisecracking kid who talked back to his mother but had the greatest respect for her, as we all did for our mothers. She popped him upside his head and called him terrible names—‘you little son of a bitch’ was her favorite phrase—but you didn’t get offended by anything, not if you lived in Hoboken, that’s for sure.
“Yeah, he got beat up by some of the kids. I beat him up myself once, over what I don’t even remember,” said D’Orazio with a chuckle. “I just remember hitting him and knocking him to the ground, out cold. But he beat other kids up in return, the kids he could take on. They called him names, he called other kids names.
“He was a little dago—and I say that with love because I’m an old dago myself now—and like all the other little dagos in the neighborhood, he had a terrible temper. You could be shootin’ marbles with him and he’d go off on you if he lost and take all your damn marbles from you anyway. ‘I never lose,’ he would say. ‘That day I lose, that’s gonna be some day, ‘cause it ain’t ever gonna happen.’”
Frank grew up in a competitive culture. Not only was each ethnic group battling for territorial control, but in a manufacturing town like Hoboken, whenever there was a dip in the economy, everyone was affected. There was always competition for work; whom one knew was extremely important, especially for lucrative jobs controlled by politicians. A rivalry among most of the young men in Hoboken started with a competition for girls: who got the most prized ones and who got them fastest. Frank took this particular competition quite seriously.
“He had a fight with my dad over a girl once, and he yelled at my old man—scared the hell out of him, I was told—used words my old man had never even heard before, and he lived in the same neighborhood!” exclaimed Tom Gianetti, the son of another childhood friend of Sinatra’s, Rocky Gianetti.
Gianetti said that his father told him that when Frank was about thirteen, he would take girls “into the back alley” and have sex with them. A sweet-talker, he could have pretty much any girl he wanted. If he had his way with her, though, she was his forever—at least as far as he was concerned. Indeed, Sinatra always seemed to have a confidence that he could have any girl he wanted, especially as he grew older. In many ways, as we shall see, he certainly had his share of deep insecurities. However, he rarely questioned his power over the opposite sex and his ability to sweep a woman off her feet. Especially as a famous adult, he would take full advantage of it. He would also be extremely territorial of the women with whom he became involved. Certainly his true friends would know better than to go anywhere near any woman considered a conquest by Frank Sinatra, no matter how many years had passed.
From an early age—long before he was famous—Frank also had a petulant, self-entitled bent that dictated that if he didn’t get his way, he not only did not want to be in the game, he didn’t even want to know the other players. He was an only child in an Italian-American culture and at a time when most people had large families. Children who have siblings usually learn about cooperation and sharing, about having to be reasonable. Not Frank. As an adult, he would always want—and usually manage to get—everything his way. If that wasn’t possible, if he was crossed, he would simply disappear from the offender’s life.
“My old man [Rocky Gianetti] made the mistake of dating one of Frankie’s girls about two years after [Sinatra] had sex with her, and that’s when they had the fight,” said Tom Gianetti. “Frank said, ‘You broke my one rule. Don’t go after any girl I had sex with.’ He said terrible, terrible things to my father. What a mouth, what a temper. My old man said he was scared. Frankie was in his face like he was going to kill him, and he hadn’t even seen this girl in two years. ‘Think you’re better than I am?’ he was screaming at my old man. ‘Think she liked it better? Well, think again. Think again!’ After that, it was never the same between them.
“My old man wo
uld see Frankie walking down the street, and he’d say, ‘Frankie boy, whatcha doing?’ and Frankie would just stare straight ahead like he wasn’t even there. Like he didn’t even exist. My father would always say, ‘Oh, c’mon, Frank, don’t be an idiot. It was just a broad.’ Nothing. Just silence. He got that [kind of behavior] from Dolly,” said Gianetti. “Dolly could write you off like you didn’t exist if you pissed her off. I saw it happen plenty of times. She would walk down the street, someone would say hello, and she would just walk by as if she hadn’t heard or seen a thing.” Indeed, Frank never spoke to Rocky Gianetti again.
With the passing of the years, as we shall see, Frank would customarily cut from his life people he believe had slighted him. While it may be easy to blame some of this callous behavior on his celebrity and the entitlement that often comes with being famous, the truth is that Frank never had what most people would consider a normal sense of proportion about what constituted an insult worth banishing someone from his life. Like Dolly, he seemed always able to turn off all affection for a friend and completely break all communication with him if he felt in any way betrayed. “My son is just like me,” Dolly Sinatra once said. “You cross me, I never forget. You cross him, he never forgets.”
Hoboken Days
The desire to sing professionally came upon Frank Sinatra as a teenager. By 1930, when he enrolled in A. J. Demarest High School at Fourth and Garden, he had become addicted to the radio, which, as the primary source of American entertainment since 1922, introduced America to big-band music and to vocalists like Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo. The fifteen-year-old liked the way he sounded when he sang along with the popular singers during their live broadcasts. Young Frankie thought that perhaps he might want to sing for a living too—unless something better presented itself. To that end, he joined the school glee club. He sang at parties, for his friends, in school talent shows, and at other functions; in doing so, he received a warm response from his fellow students, which he enjoyed.
“He was singing here and there,” said one relative. “But it wasn’t like he had a burning desire. He was really just exploring his options. ‘You wanna hear me sing?’ he’d ask. And we’d say, ‘Hell, no, Frankie. Let’s play ball.’ He’d say, ‘Fine,’ and that was that.”
By 1930, the family had moved to a bigger, three-bedroom apartment in a much better neighborhood, at 703 Park Avenue in Hoboken. The new home was less than a half mile away from the Sinatras’ former residence on Monroe and Garden, but in Hoboken at that time, a few yards could make a big difference in how one lived. The house was—and still is today—the biggest on the block. Whereas all the other row houses have three floors, this one, which sits near the end of the block, has five. Thirty-six glass panes, in two vertical columns of bow windows), face the street. It seems to tower over everything, impressive even today; back in 1930 it must have been a real showplace.
“They were always moving up,” said Steve Capiello. “These weren’t your regular Hoboken folk. They were doing exciting things, making money, looking good, having a good life. When Frankie became a star, his press agent was always trying to give the impression that he was a slum kid. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Hey, if he was a slum kid, then what the hell was I?’ My family had no money at all and we had twelve kids under one roof, in three rooms. We were having it hard, but not the Sinatras.”
Another childhood friend, Joe Lissa, remembered, “Being an only kid made all the difference in the world. Frank had more because he didn’t have to share with brothers and sisters. He even had his own bedroom. None of the rest of us had half of what he had. I don’t think I knew one other kid that was an only child, not one other one! He always wore brand-new black-and-whites [shoes] that his mother bought him. He even had his own charge account at Geismer’s department store! Come on!”
The Sinatras and their neighbors always had good times in Hoboken. There were block parties during hot summer evenings when Dolly would show off her braciola. Young Frank liked to play the popular ball games of the day with his pals—chink ball and penny ball—and no one could shoot marbles or flip baseball cards like Frankie. If things became dull, he and his pals would take a train into “Fill-uff-e-ah” (Philadelphia) and eat hoagies, even though they could just as easily be bought in Hoboken. “Gimmeya hoagie, hold da onions,” Frank would say, always concerned about how his breath would affect his influence on the girls. Headed back home on the train, Frank and his buddies would stuff themselves full of Tastykakes, cupcakes that were at the time only made and sold in Philadelphia.
Sometimes Frank and his buddies would borrow his dad’s bright red Chrysler—when he was a teenager, he was the only one among his friends who had access to a car—and drive “down da shore” (the resort area of the eastern coastline) to “walk da boards” (the boardwalk) of “Lanic Cidy” (Atlantic City).
While some accounts of Frank’s life have painted these years as sad and lonely, that really wasn’t the case. It is true that Frank was not happy in high school; a poor and distracted student, he often found himself in trouble. It’s been reported that he quit after just forty-seven days in high school, though that seems unlikely. Frank said he lasted a little longer than that, but records at the school are unclear. (Nancy Sinatra says that her father quit in his senior year.) At any rate, he did in fact leave high school one day, never to return. His parents were inconsolable about his decision, but he was as resolved about his life as they were about theirs. “My father was called into the principal’s office for about the seven hundredth time,” Frank used to joke. “And he said, ‘Here’s the diploma, now get him the hell out of this school.’ ”
Frank took a few business classes at the Drake Business School for one semester and mulled over the idea of enrolling in the Stevens Institute of Technology, the oldest college of mechanical engineering in the country, which happened to be in Hoboken. However, the urge to sing professionally was beginning to take hold. When his mother found pictures of Bing Crosby on his bedroom walls and questioned him about them, she learned that her only son was considering becoming an entertainer, not an engineer.
Dolly must have remembered that as a much younger child he had sung in the bar that she and Marty owned. But that was all in fun, to amuse the patrons—an extension of Dolly’s humor. She never imagined that her son would be serious about singing, even though she had heard about, but never attended, some of his glee club performances. When she realized that Frank was really mulling over the possibility of singing for a living, she did what any other Italian-American mother in Hoboken would when informed that her dreams of a college education, or at least a steady job, for her son would probably not materialize: She threw a shoe at him.
“You ain’t gonna be no singer,” Dolly told Frank, according to his memory.
“But, Ma! Maybe it’s what I do best,” Frank protested.
“How do you know what you do best? You little son of a bitch,” she shot back, raising her voice. “I’ll tell you what you do best. You get a job, big shot. That’s what you do best. I don’t wanna hear another word about it, either.”
Marty Sinatra proved to be just as challenging an opponent to Frank’s ambitions. Frank’s father was a hardworking immigrant who held fast to la terra promessa—the Promised Land—and to the upward mobility, the good life, that the American dream had to offer. As a fireman for the Hoboken Fire Department, he didn’t make a fortune, but he was satisfied. In fact, it was the Sicilian way—as his own father had once explained—to have just a taste of the good life and then to build from there. Fari vagnari u puzzi—wet their beaks—is what Sicilians called it. Certainly they could do just that in this free country.
In 1932, because of the success of Dolly’s bar and her determination to put aside for a rainy day any extra money it had been able to generate over the years, she and Marty were able to again raise their standard of living by purchasing a three-story (plus cellar), four-bedroom house at 841 Garden Street in Hoboken for $13,400—quite a sum f
or the times. (Back then, these structures were called “Father, Son, Holy Ghost” homes, to denote the three floors.) It was one of the most expensive properties in the county. All of the homes on the street were pretty much the same: seven to ten cement steps leading from the sidewalk to the front door, another entrance, at street level, to what is known as the cellar, where wine was often kept and where a second kitchen usually existed, and a “coal bin.” Across the street is the Joseph F. Brandt Middle School.
Early Aspirations
Jeet yet?” Frank would ask any visitor to the Sinatra home. Translation: “Did you eat yet?”
The answer coming back from anyone who knew his mother’s reputation as a cook would be, “No, jue?” “No, did you?”
“Ma will make you something. Whaddya want?”
Dolly Sinatra almost always had food cooking on the stove or baking in the oven of her new kitchen, though no one could quite understand when she had the time to prepare it.
“You’d walk in the door and sitting on the kitchen table would be a huge antipasto,” remembered one relative, “with pepperoncini, olives, giardiniera, anchovies, and prosciutto. Or she would have hot escarole soup [chicken broth with escarole greens, vegetables, eggs, and small meatballs], which was something you never made except maybe on holidays, or for holidays. You’d say, ‘Dolly, when the hell did you have time to do all this?’ and she’d always say, ‘Whaddya talkin’ about? Time? You make the time. Now eat.’”
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