Dolly and Marty had made a good life for themselves and their son despite their limited educations. Both were filled with pride and happiness knowing that they could probably afford to send Frank to college. Though it would be tight, they’d been planning it for years. Since Marty was illiterate, the idea of a son of his going to college was vitally important to him. So when Frank dropped out of high school and then announced that he had no intention of pursuing a higher education, Marty couldn’t believe his audacity and what he viewed as his sheer stupidity. Indeed, during these desperate times, when millions of unemployed Americans could only dream of a college education for their children, for young Frank to decline such an opportunity was, at least as far as Marty was concerned, unconscionable. He didn’t want his son to turn out the way he had; at least that’s what he said.
In truth, there was nothing wrong with the way Marty Sinatra had turned out. He couldn’t read or write English—and Frank said once that he would never embarrass his father by reminding him of it—but he was a hardworking, loving man. Like many parents, though, he wanted more for his kid than what he had achieved in his own life. Though one Sicilian proverb said, “Do not make your child better than you are,” Marty didn’t subscribe to that kind of thinking at all, believing it to be old-fashioned. “A son’s life should always make his father’s life look bad,” he would say.
Outraged at the prospect of his son turning out to be a “freeloader,” Marty called young Frank a “quitter.”
“I ain’t no quitter, Pop,” Frank would say in his defense, according to his memory.
“You ain’t goin’ to school, you don’t wanna work, you’re a quitter,” Marty would insist. “I don’t even want to talk about it no more, quitter!”
For years afterward, whenever Frank would change direction in his life, his old man would shout that demoralizing name out at him: “quitter.” Perhaps Marty hoped that the derisive term would somehow spur his son on to a greater sense of responsibility. However, it hurt Frank deeply; he would never forget it.
“I ain’t no quitter,” Frank would scream at Marty.
“Don’t raise your voice to your father,” Dolly would shout before smacking Frank hard on the back of the head with the palm of her hand.
“But he called me a quitter.”
“He’s your father,” Dolly would remind her son. “He can call you anything he wants to call you. Now, get outta here, you little son of a bitch quitter.”
Still, Marty’s use of the term likely had the desired effect: It motivated Frank. “I think it gave him incentive,” said one relative, “to prove his old man wrong. Not an unusual story, but Frank’s just the same.”
In early 1932, to placate his father, sixteen-year-old Frank got a job in the Tietjen and Lang shipyards. Then he worked for Lyons and Carnahan in New York City, unloading crates of books. (“Do you know what a thrill it is to get a hernia for $62.50 a week lifting six-hundred-pound crates with another little guy and a hand truck?” Frank used to joke.) Bored there, he took another job for the United Fruit Lines, working in the refrigeration units of cargo ships. When he quit that job, saying that he’d had it with manual labor, his father became disgusted again with the “quitter.”
“You don’t want to work,” he told him one morning over breakfast, “then get the hell out. You want to be a bum, go somewhere else and be a bum.” Marty told his son that his grandparents hadn’t immigrated all the way to the United States “from It-lee [Italy]” just so that Frank could be a freeloader.
“I was shocked,” Frank recalled. “I remember the moment. My father said to me, ‘Why don’t you get out of the house and go out on your own?’ What he really said was, ‘Get out.’ And I think the egg was stuck in there [in my throat] for about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t swallow it. My mother, of course, was nearly in tears, but we ‘agreed’ that it might be a good thing. So I packed up a small case I had and went to New York.”
Frank took a room in New York City, but his timing must have been wrong. He couldn’t get work as a singer, or as anything else. He returned to Hoboken.
“So, you ready to go to work now, Mr. Smarty Pants?” Dolly wanted to know. “Mr. Big-Shot Singer.” Then, after a beat, she would grin at him, smack him on the head, and ask, “So, you a star yet, or what?” Though they were opposed to their son’s aspirations to be a singer, deep down Dolly and Marty, like most devoted parents of their time and place, couldn’t resist encouraging him, at least a little. In fact, by the time Frank got back from New York, Dolly wanted him to sing almost as much as he did. She figured that if he was willing to leave home and go to New York, maybe he did have a goal, or at least some kind of idea of what he wanted to do with his life. However, this was Hoboken, not Hollywood. She didn’t know how to assist him.
“I had heard that it was on her mind, though,” said Doris Sevanto, who was raised in Hoboken and was a friend of the Sinatras. “My mother told me that Dolly started asking guys with clubs to maybe give her kid a job, and Frankie worked in one club in Hoboken for a while. But that fell through when he had a fight with the proprietor. Dolly would say, ‘You know, that little son of a bitch son of mine, he wants to sing. And he ain’t half bad. I think he might make it. But don’t tell him that. He’s already too big for his britches.’”
“The way most immigrant Italian parents were in Hoboken and in other cities at the time was that they supported their kids’ goals in life, even when their kids were doing something they didn’t like,” said singer Tony Martin. “Sure, you tried to talk the kid out of it, you hit him, you tried to knock reason into him, but then if he didn’t listen and you did your best, you finally said, ‘All right, fine. Now, what can I do to help?’”
Marty and Dolly were parents who well understood and could relate to the notion of rebellion. After all, it was that same sense of defiance that had spurred their own parents to immigrate to the United States.
“So how could they not support their kid’s dreams?” observed Tina Donato, who spent summers in Little Italy with her grandparents and knew the Sinatras well. “Anyone who says they didn’t, that’s a person who didn’t understand one of the most important things about the Italian-American way of life. You don’t knock your kid down, you build your kid up. Or, at the very least, you make them think you’re knocking him down when you’re actually building him up. That was the case with all the Italian parents in my family, and I know it was the case with Frankie’s too. Marty, yeah, well, he wanted something else for Frankie. But after he knew Frankie wanted to be a singer, he was in his corner too, even if only secretly.”
Dolly and Marty lent Frank the sixty-five dollars he needed to buy a portable public-address system and sheet-music arrangements so that he could work in local nightclubs. If he was going to do this “goddamned thing,” as Dolly called it—be a performer—then he would have a distinct edge over the other young men in the neighborhood who were attempting to do the same thing. Most of them didn’t have their own sound system and arrangements, did they? The Sinatra parents made certain their kid did, though.
“I started collecting orchestrations,” Frank once explained. “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 either.”
With his sound system and music, Frank—who was about seventeen by this time—started singing with small bands in clubs on weekends and evenings. His mother even helped him get bookings at Democratic Party meetings. He also performed at school dances. The more his parents and friends began to approve of his growing ambition, the more concrete Frank’s plans became, until finally the idea of becoming a successful entertainer was a goal he now admitted that he hoped to realize.
He continually listened to Bing Crosby and tried t
o emulate that crooner’s voice in the shower. However, he quickly decided that he wanted his own style, not Bing’s. Too many other young men at the time were attempting to mimic Crosby’s vocal stylings, or as Frank has said, “Boo-boo-booing like Bing,” on such hits as “Just One More Chance” and “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store).”
Sinatra, whose voice was in a higher register than Bing’s anyway, said later that he was determined to be “a different kind of singer.” He would remember, “Bing was on top, and a bunch of us—Dick Todd, Bob Eberly, Perry Como, Dean Martin—we were trying to break in. It occurred to me that maybe the world didn’t need another Crosby. I decided to experiment a little and come up with something different. What I finally hit on was more the bel canto Italian school of singing. It was more difficult than Crosby’s style, much more difficult.”
With Frank’s enthusiasm for singing contagious, Dolly and Marty began to marvel at his talent. “When he would sing around the house, he was good, and we were, I don’t know, surprised,” Dolly once admitted. They were relieved and heartened to see him finally focus on a goal.
Certainly many Italian-American young men from cities across the country had the same goal as Frank. The names are now legendary: Dean Martin, Perry Como, Frankie Laine, Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, and many others—all good Italian-American boys whose foulmouthed but loving mothers probably threw shoes at them or smacked them on the backs of their heads upon first learning of their improbable aspirations. None, however, would ever be as famous or as successful—or as wealthy—as the Italian American: Frank Sinatra.
Nancy
It was the summer of 1934 when eighteen-year-old Frank Sinatra met seventeen-year-old Nancy Carol Barbato, daughter of Mike Barbato, a plasterer from Jersey City. (Nancy has also been identified as Nancy Rose Barbato; however, her daughter Nancy says that her middle name is Carol.)
“My mother came from a poor family in Jersey City, New Jersey,” Frank Sinatra Jr. recalled. “When I once asked her, ‘Mom, how did you make it with eight sisters at home?’ she answered, ‘Frankie, sometimes we ate, sometimes we didn’t.’ They had no money. ‘So, you didn’t have the things you wanted as you were growing up?’ I asked. ‘No, I didn’t,’ my mother said. ‘I learned at an early age that if you want to get something—you want to go out and buy yourself a tape recorder or a bicycle? You have to go out and get a job. Go out and make some money and buy it, then it’s really yours. No one ever gave us anything, ever.’ My mother always worked at one thing or another. It was the only way. It’s how she raised me, too.”
During his youth, Frank would often spend his summers with a favorite aunt, Mrs. Josephine Garavente Monaco—Aunt Josie—who owned a beach house in Long Branch, on the Jersey shore. Josephine, Dolly’s sister, recalled, “He used to drive us crazy, playing the ukulele on the porch all the time. 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.”
Nancy was doing her nails on the front porch of the home in which she was living for the summer with her father, Mike, and her aunt and uncle and their families, when Frank approached her, ukulele in hand. “Yo. What about me?” he said with a wink. “I could use a manicure too.”
Frank couldn’t help himself; he was immediately attracted to this beautiful girl. “We had a wonderful summer together. When it was over, I figured, ‘Well, that’s it, it’s over.’” She was pretty, funny, had a great little figure, and thought he was handsome. What else did an eighteen-year-old need from a girl?
When the season ended, Frank and Nancy went back to their respective homes, he to Hoboken and she to Jersey City, just one town away. However, the romance would continue for the next four years. Frank would take the bus to visit and date her; Nancy would give him the fare if he didn’t have it. Once, when he was broke, Nancy sent him one of her gloves with a dollar bill stuffed in each finger.
These would actually be the most romantic years of their long, sometimes tortured relationship. He would write poetry for her, and they would spend long hours listening to opera on the Victrola. They would go to the beach, walk the boards, and eat Creamsicles until they were both sick to their stomachs. He would try to teach her how to play canasta, a complicated card game that involves melding sets of seven or more cards. But he wasn’t very good at it himself, so they would spend more time laughing than playing.
Of this time, Frank remembered, “I was singing for two dollars a night at club meetings. I sang at social clubs and at roadhouses, sometimes for nothing or for a sandwich or cigarettes—all night for three packs. But I worked on one basic theory,” he recalled. “Stay alive. Get as much practice as you can. Nancy was there for all that. She was right there at my side.”
Frank sensed that Nancy would be the kind of mate who would allow him to explore life as an entertainer. After discussing with her the reality that such a life offers few guarantees, he sensed that she understood. There was something about her that made him believe she would be loyal to him, no matter what. “I’m goin’ straight to the top,” he warned her. “And I don’t want no dame draggin’ on my neck.”
“I won’t get in your way,” she promised.
“I’m serious ’bout this, Nancy,” he said. “You wit me?
“I’m wit you, Frankie,” she responded. “I’ll always be wit you.”
Early Singing Days
On September 8, 1935, nineteen-year-old Frank Sinatra got his first big break when he auditioned to appear on the popular Major Bowes and His Original Amateur Hour. Bowes’s NBC radio show was broadcast live from the Capitol Theatre in New York. (It was launched on New York radio in 1934 and went national a year later.) Frank once recalled, laughing, “Bowes used to come on the air, and he used to say, ‘The wheel of fortune spins, ’round and ’round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.’ That was the dullest opening I ever heard on any radio show.”
“He was a pompous bum with a bulbous nose,” Sinatra said of Major Bowes years after the fact, in 1966, as part of his nightclub act. “He useta drink Green River [liquor]. He was a drunk, this guy. I don’t know if you ever heard of Green River, but it takes the paint off your deck if you got a boat. Fifty-nine cents a gallon, baby.”
At the time of Frank’s tryout, another act auditioned, a group calling themselves the Three Flashes—Fred “Tamby” Tamburro, Pat “Patty Prince” Principe, and James “Skelly” Petrozelli. It was either Bowes’s idea to team Frank with this other act from Hoboken and call them the Hoboken Four or it was Dolly’s, depending on which of the two accounts one wishes to believe. At any rate, when the quartet performed the Bing Crosby–Mills Brothers hit “Shine” on Bowes’s show, they were a success.
On what was the American Idol of its day, a host encouraged listeners to telephone a special number and vote for their favorites among the acts. The Hoboken Four generated a huge number of telephone votes with their performance. In retrospect, the most astonishing thing about Frank’s first appearance on the Amateur Hour is that his voice was already in place. He didn’t have the intelligence or feeling that would come later, but the voice was most definitely there. The group, with Frank on lead, would make several more appearances.
Frank had his first opportunity to tour as a singer at about sixty-five dollars a week when Bowes asked him and the Hoboken Four to tour with one of Bowes’s many amateur companies. This was a great opportunity for the young Sinatra, performing with sixteen other acts—tap dancers, jugglers, mouth organists, and more—in front of enthusiastic audiences in different cities, honing his talent as a singer as well as his ability as a performer.
Sinatra worked with the Hoboken Four for about three months, until the end of 1935, when the other three members began resenting all the attention he received from audiences. It was difficult for Frank to hold himself back and try to blend in with a group. He couldn’t help flirting with the women in the audience, winkin
g at them, showing a lot more personality than the other fellows during performances. It caused a great deal of dissension.
With so much infighting taking place within the group—some of it actually physical—Frank, who had never intended to be in a group in the first place, decided to leave the act. “I had been thinking solo, solo, solo,” he remembered. It had been a good experience, but he knew it was time to end it and move on. Besides, he missed his parents terribly (he’d been sending his mother letters and photographs from the road), as well as Nancy.
Upon his return, though, Frank was greeted by Marty’s strong disapproval of the decision he’d made to leave the Hoboken Four. As far as Marty was concerned, his son had just “quit” another job.
A loud argument ensued. Marty’s routine was the usual: His son would never amount to anything; he was a “quitter.” For his part, Frank sang the same refrain: His father didn’t understand his ambitions. Why couldn’t he be more supportive? Actually, Frank was more angry now than hurt by Marty’s attitude. In fact, he grew even more determined to prove his “old man” wrong.
Dolly just wanted a little peace and quiet. She was tired of the constant arguing between her husband and son. “The two of you are driving me nuts,” she would scream at them. “Frankie wants to sing, Marty. Jesus Christ Almighty, just let him sing, will ya?”
Dolly’s personal power had long ago influenced her private life with Marty. In a culture and at a time when the man was the head of the family, she always played that role in the Sinatra household, and everyone who knew the Sinatras understood as much. She and Marty never pretended that he was boss. “Fine, whatever you say, Dolly,” Marty would tell her. He would back down every time. “I don’t listen, and I don’t talk,” he would say with a soft smile.
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