Back in Hoboken, Frank continued his career as a solo singer at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse in nearby Englewood Cliffs, two miles north of the George Washington Bridge.
It was at about this time that Frank met an aggressive song promoter named Hank Sanicola. It wasn’t long before they became pals and Hank took on the unofficial job of “managing” Frank. Sanicola, also of Sicilian heritage, would be one of Sinatra’s right-hand men for years to come; later, he would even sometimes play piano for him.
“I was always the strong arm,” Sanicola, a former amateur boxer, once said. “I knew how to fight. I used to step in and hit for Frank when they started ganging up on him in bars.”
“Yeah, he’s a great dag,” Frank would say of Hank. (Frank used to call his buddies of Italian-American heritage the nickname “dag,” a shortened version of “dago,” a racial slur, but which to Frank meant paisano.)
Sanicola booked him a regular job at the Rustic Cabin, where he would make between fifteen and thirty dollars a week waiting tables and singing with the Harold Arden house band on WNEW in New York, broadcast throughout the Tri-State Area. “We had a blind piano player,” Frank once recalled. “Completely blind, with a shiny, bald head. Between dance sets, I would push his little half-piano around. We’d go from table to table, and he’d play and I’d sing. There was a dish out on the piano. People would put coins in the dish.”
Frank almost didn’t get the job, since, as it happened, Harold Arden didn’t much like him. Frank really wanted it, “but the bandleader doesn’t like me,” he complained to Dolly. His mother told him that that was just fine. She didn’t like the idea of his singing in a club all night anyway.
“Frank just looked at me,” she would recall in an interview many years later. “He took his dog, Girlie, in his arms and went up to his room. Then I heard him sobbing. I stood it for a couple of hours,” she remembered, “and I suppose I realized then, maybe for the first time, what singing really meant to Frankie. 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 sing 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.’”
Harry told Dolly that it was as good as a done deal. Frank got the job.
Helen Fiore Monteforte recalled that Dolly was so anxious that her son make a good impression at the Rustic Cabin, she “papered” the place with friends. She invited Helen’s entire family and paid for everyone’s tickets. “She was very generous, but also knew that the people present would benefit Frank at his shows.”
“I guess that’s when it started for Frankie,” said Joey D’Orazio, Sinatra’s friend from Hoboken. “He knew he was gonna be a star then. We all went to the Cabin to see him. I mean, he was good, you know? He was no Sinatra, though. Not yet. I told him, ‘Hey, Frankie, you ain’t bad, but you could use some work.’ And he was insulted. ‘Screw you and your whole family,’ he said. ‘If you can’t pay a guy a decent compliment, don’t be comin’ ’round here. Whatcha think, I need to hear you tearin’ me down?’ Either you were with him or you were against him; that was Frankie.”
Frank once remembered the night Cole Porter showed up in the audience at the Rustic Cabin. “I had been so infatuated with his music, I couldn’t believe he was sitting out there. I dedicated the next song, ‘Night and Day,’ to Mr. Porter. However, I proceeded to forget all the words. I kept singing ‘Night and Day’ for fifteen bars. Many, many years later, I got to know Mr. Porter quite well. We were doing a film [High Society], and he called me aside and said, ‘I don’t know if you remember meeting me at some nightclub you were working.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ And he said, ‘So do I. That was about the worst performance I ever heard.’”
As well as working at the Rustic Cabin, Frank would commute back and forth to New York just to keep his finger on the pulse of what was going on in that city’s nightlife. He would sneak into nightclubs to watch other popular entertainers perform, and learn all he could from their acts. He would get himself booked on every radio show whose producers would let him sing—anything he could think of to possibly get ahead in show business. He was so determined to make it, he actually spent some of his hard-earned money on a voice-and-diction coach whose job it was to help him lose his thick New Jersey accent.
Throughout this time, Frank continued dating Nancy Barbato, who was supportive and understanding of his goals. She continually encouraged him and spent many hours bolstering his self-confidence. “I know you can make it,” she told him, according to her own recollection.
“How do you know that?” Frank asked, holding her in his arms.
“Because you’re the most talented, most handsome man I’ve ever met,” she said, flattering him, and meaning it too.
“And just how many talented, handsome men have you met?” he asked with mock suspicion.
“Just one,” she demurred.
In early 1937, his cousin Ray helped Frank get a job on a fifteen-minute NBC radio program—which would turn out to be a regular spot for the young singer—for seventy cents a week. “He’d do anything he could,” said another cousin. “It didn’t matter where, when, or for how much. If he could sing, he’d sing. And you know what? By the time he was twenty-one, he was getting to be good. Damn good. In fact, I told him, ‘Frankie, man, you can sing.’ And he said, ‘No kiddin’, you idiot. That’s what I been tryin’ to tell ya.’”
For a while, Frank actually toyed with the idea of changing his name to Frankie Trent, in honor of his cousin John Tredy, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight. (Tredy was the first professional entertainer in the family; he played the banjo in a group and sang.) He thought it might be a good idea to lose the ethnicity attached to the name Sinatra, and had a few fliers printed up with the new name. (Imagine what they might be worth today!) However, Dolly warned him that Marty would “kick his ass” if he ever changed his name. Later, Frank said, “Changing my name, man, that was the best thing I ever didn’t do.”
Midwife
Throughout Frank’s youth, Dolly Sinatra had worked as a midwife, just another of the many duties she took upon herself to perform in Hoboken. This wasn’t unusual. At this time, most babies in the United States were delivered by women who were not licensed doctors but were trained to assist in childbirth. As a midwife, Dolly was also often asked to terminate pregnancies. Always the pragmatist, she simply felt she was doing a service to the community. If an unmarried Italian Catholic woman became pregnant, her life could be ruined due to social and religious conventions. Some families in the neighborhood had as many as seven mouths to feed. An addition to a family that large—even if it was a daughter having the child—was usually unwanted. Dolly would take care of it. Like everything else in her world, it could be handled.
It is true that Dolly, a Catholic, was breaking what was considered by most Italian Catholics to be “God’s law” by performing these sorts of surgeries. However, the Sinatras were not very religious; they rarely attended church. “I got my own religion,” Dolly used to say. “I know what I’m doing. God knows what I’m doing. And God wouldn’t have given me the idea to do it if he didn’t want me doin’ it.” (It should also be noted that Dolly assisted many more births than she did abortions.)
“There are things about organized religion which I resent,” Frank would say years later. “Christ has been revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in his name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion and I’ll show you a hundred retrogressions.”
“My mother was thirteen and pregnant,” remembered Debra Stradella, whose mom lived in Hoboken at the time. “She told me that she didn’t kno
w what to do; she was scared that she would be ostracized. My grandmother called Dolly to say that her daughter needed help, but that they could not afford to pay. I think it was twenty-five dollars. Dolly said they could pay three dollars a month until it was taken care of.
“My grandmother took my mother to Dolly’s home on Garden Street. She had a table set up in her cellar. She came downstairs with a little black bag, and she did the surgery herself. My mother told me the whole thing took maybe fifteen minutes. She used to tell us this story, and we would just cringe.
“But Dolly was kind to my mother,” Debra Stradella added. “She checked on her every week for a month, coming to her home and administering different medicines. She was like a savior, even though what she was doing was—well, I guess it was wrong.”
It’s safe to say that some in Hoboken didn’t approve of Dolly’s activities, which were quite illegal. “She was a criminal” is how one Hoboken resident puts it today. “Plain and simple. She performed abortions. You can’t glorify her.”
In 1937, Dolly found herself in trouble. There had been complications to a surgery she’d performed in her cellar. The patient had to be rushed to the hospital, was in critical condition when she arrived, and nearly died. Dolly was promptly arrested and charged with a felony. Eventually she was convicted and put on probation for five years. Undaunted, she continued performing her work, even while on probation. In fact, she was arrested several more times after that incident, but was never jailed, probably because of her political connections.1
“I know that Dolly was ashamed when she was arrested, but angry as hell,” said the daughter of a friend of hers still living in Hoboken. “She honestly didn’t think she was doing anything wrong. She told my aunt, ‘Jesus Christ, what is wrong with this town? What’s the big deal? What’s the problem?’ I know that she and Frankie had a row about this. I heard she slapped him hard. She was angry with him. She became passionate when talking about these operations. She thought she was doing the right thing, that there were too many hungry, unwanted kids in Hoboken as it was.”
That Dolly Sinatra was able to avoid jail after her arrest and still perform surgeries to terminate unwanted pregnancies in spite of her probation spoke of the power she wielded in her community. Today, Hoboken residents who remember her—and the offspring of those who are no longer around—speak of her with a sort of awed fascination. Not only was she able to successfully defy legal, religious, and social conventions by running a bar that sold liquor during Prohibition, but she also scoffed at the law by performing illegal abortions. She was nothing if not unique.
With her political clout, she was a force to be reckoned with in the neighborhood. By flouting legal and religious standards, she demonstrated to any of the seventy thousand Hobokenites who took notice that she was one of the most powerful women, indeed one of the most influential Italians, in the city. Just as her son would become years later, she was practically a padrone.
“People became scared to death of her,” said another former Hoboken resident. “How did she do it? they wondered. She began to change from a woman who was beloved in the neighborhood to one who was greatly feared. They would point at her and whisper. And to her, well, that was just fine. To her, that just meant they were paying attention, they were respecting her. ‘They think I’m a hero,’ she would say proudly. ‘Well, maybe I am. Maybe I am.’ It never occurred to her that some of them may have been pointing because they thought she was a criminal. It was astonishing, really, what she got away with. However, Frank sometimes suffered as a result.”
When one of Frank’s girlfriends at the time, Marion Brush Schreiber, tried to get him a job at a Friday night dance at Our Lady of Grace School, she remembered, “the Irish Catholics wouldn’t let him in because of the scandals involving his mother. They would have nothing to do with him. When he found this out, he went into one of his terrible moods,” Schreiber recalled. “He’d get real sullen and sour, and you couldn’t get a word out of him. There were no tantrums. Just an ugly silence that could sometimes last for hours.” Said the former Hoboken resident, “It was hard on Frankie, but he loved his mother, and that was the end of it. She could do no wrong in his eyes, no matter what she did.
“Once, a guy came up to him in a bar and made a crack about his mom. He was drunk, or he never would have said it. Few people ever actually spoke ill of Dolly in public,” she recalled, “just secretly amongst themselves in whispers. Frankie was all over that guy, punching and kicking him. They had to pull Frankie off him.
“There was blood all over the floor. ‘I don’t give a shit what you say about me,’ he said as they were throwing him out of the place, ‘but don’t eva, eva talk about my ma like that. Eva!”
“Let Frankie In”
In 1938, twenty-two-year-old Frank Sinatra was young, handsome, charming, and, as a result of his bravado, able to have sex with virtually any young woman he set his sights on. He had a girlfriend, but what he did on the side had nothing to do with Nancy, as far as he was concerned. He would always be good at compartmentalizing his life in that regard. Most of his dalliances were with women she’d never become aware of anyway, at least not at this stage of their relationship.
“He had more broads around than you ever saw,” said saxophonist Harry Schuchman, who helped Frank get his audition at the Rustic Cabin. “I used to sit there and watch the gals with Frank and think, ‘What do they see in him? He’s such a skinny little guy.’”
With a laugh, Joey D’Orazio added, “The older he got, he didn’t get any more good-looking, I’ll say that much for him. He was a skinny guy, ordinary-looking, gawky, his Adam’s apple protruded, and his ears stuck out. But he had more charisma and magnetism than anyone around. The broads—they swarmed all over him whenever he got offstage after a performance. He’d actually tie them to the bed and make love to them, man! They let him do that! No one did that kind of stuff in the thirties in Hoboken, no one I ever knew, anyway.”
“All I know is that he could get all the tail he wanted,” Fred Tamburro of the Hoboken Four once said. “Part of it had to do with him being a singer. The girls, they liked that. This guy had an appetite for sex like no one I ever knew. He would screw a snake if he could hold it still long enough.”
“Yes, you could say he had sex on the brain,” said Nancy Venturi, one woman who dated Frank at this time. “He would make love to any girl who came along, as I remember it. There was something intense about his lovemaking, at least it was with me. He was extremely erotic, sexy, an intense kisser. I’m an old woman now, but yes, I remember it, all of it.”
“Jesus, Frankie, you sure like having sex, don’t you?” Nancy recalled having asked him on their first date, just after he had finished pawing at her on her parents’ couch.
Frank was taken aback. “Sex is something I can do myself, baby,” he told her. “In fact, I do it every day, all by myself, you know, that kind of sex. But what I want is to make love to you in a way you’ll never forget. So c’mon, let Frankie in,” he said as he unzipped her dress. “Let me love you, baby. Let big Frankie in.”
“Well, that just took my breath away,” Nancy Venturi recalled. “Oh, my God, he had me. This was 1938; guys in our neighborhood didn’t talk like that. They didn’t know how to sweet-talk a girl, but Frankie did. He wasn’t a love-’em, leave-’em type, either. He’d stay the night, or at least slip out early in the morning, before my parents awakened. I felt loved. But I was thirteen, even though I looked maybe eighteen. So what the hell did I know about love?
“One night, when we had sex, just as he reached that moment, he whispered in my ear, ‘I love you, Nancy.’ I was thrilled. My heart was beating out of my little chest.
“The next day I told one of my girlfriends about it. She said, ‘You fool. His girlfriend’s name is also Nancy!’ I suddenly knew he meant her, not me. So I called him and said we could never see each other again. I was getting so hooked on him, I was afraid I would get hurt.”
Frank’s r
eaction to Nancy’s telephone call? “Okay, baby. If that’s the way you want it. See ya ‘round,” he said. “Think of me the next time you have that kind of sex.”
Three months later, Nancy Venturi thought she was pregnant. “I was upset,” she said. “I was just a kid, thirteen! Frankie was the only boy I’d ever let touch me. So I called him in tears and said, ‘Oh my God, Frankie, I think I’m pregnant.’ He said, ‘Oh no. That ain’t good.’ ”
“What are we gonna do?” Nancy asked, bewildered.
“I dunno. What do you want to do?” Frank asked.
“Pray, I guess,” she suggested. “Will you go to church with me?”
“Sure, if that’s what you want,” Frank agreed. “But I’m thinkin’ we should maybe think of something better.” Then, as a second thought, he added, “Okay, maybe you’re right. Maybe we should pray that Dolly doesn’t beat the crap outta me.”
Years later, Nancy recalled, “There was a church on Seventh and Jefferson. Frankie and I went there, and we knelt in front of the altar. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, and said, ‘God, you know what? If this girl here is pregnant, I’m in big trouble with Ma, and I don’t need no aggravation right now. So c’mon, God, gimme a break, will ya? Make her not be pregnant. Okay? So, uh . . . thanks a lot, God, and . . . uh. That’s it. So . . . uh . . . amen, all right?’
“I turned to him and said, ‘Frankie, what the heck kind of prayer is that?’
“And he got mad. He said, ‘What the hell you want outta me, Nancy? Jesus Christ! That’s the best prayer I can come up with on such short notice. You’re the one who dragged me down here, and now you expect me to be a priest? If you wanna add somethin’, go ’head.’ Then Frank motioned to the crucifix. ‘I’m sure he’s still listening Go ’head!’
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