“I thought a lightning bolt was going to strike us both down before we even got out of that church, the way he talked. I said, ‘Oh my God! Let’s just get outta here. Quick.’”
While Frank’s prayer may not have been the most eloquent, it appeared to have done the trick, because the next morning Nancy Venturi had what she called her “monthly.”
“I called Frankie and said, ‘It worked! I ain’t pregnant,’” she remembered. “And he said, ‘Well, there you go, Nancy. Next time, don’t be questioning my prayers.’ We were about to hang up when he said, ‘If you need me to perform any other miracles, just call me.’”
Toni
In 1938, Frank turned twenty-three and Nancy twenty-one. They were engaged and enjoying what Nancy thought was a committed relationship. He was keeping his flings well hidden, but then he met an attractive older brunette named Toni Francke (Antoinette Della Penta Francke), from Lodi, New Jersey. Like the others, it was supposed to just be physical, but Toni got swept away by it. She felt more strongly about Frank than he did about her, and she made sure he knew it. “I love you, Frankie. I think we should get married,” she told him one day.
“Whad’ya, crazy?” Frank asked. “That ain’t part of the deal at all!”
Frank went a little further with Toni than he had his other girls, bringing his parents to Lodi for a macaroni dinner with her family. This was new. From the outset, Dolly didn’t like Toni, mostly because she lived in Lodi, where, as far as Dolly was concerned, only the lowly resided. After the Sinatras got back to Hoboken, Dolly called Toni “cheap trash.” However, Frank was never one to make distinctions about social class, and it was a subject about which he and Dolly constantly argued. “But this girl is trouble, mark my words,” Dolly told him. “Something’s not right about her. She’s got a crazy look in her eye. She’s too serious about you, too. What are you gonna do about Nancy?”
“Nothin’,” Frank said. “This don’t got nothin’ to do with her.”
Dolly couldn’t even finish the conversation, she was so appalled. She stormed from the room. Frank was somewhat influenced by his mother’s concern, because soon after, he stopped calling Toni. Though she pestered him for weeks, even telling him that she was pregnant, he was finished with her. Duly rejected, Toni took the “scorned woman” routine to new and novel heights: She actually had Frank arrested! The cops came and cuffed him after his midnight performance at the Rustic Cabin on December 22, 1938. The curious charge: “breach of promise.”
In her complaint, Toni claimed that Frank, “being then and there a single man over the age of eighteen years, under the promise of marriage, did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant [on November 2 and 9] who was then and there a single female of good repute of chastity whereby she became pregnant.”
Most of what Francke charged in her complaint was either suspect or fabricated. For instance, she claimed that Frank gave her a diamond ring, which was unlikely, given the state of his finances at the time. Toni also insisted that she and Nancy Barbato had a brawl at the Rustic Cabin over Frank, yet she and Nancy had never met. Furthermore, she claimed that Frank told her he had to marry Nancy “or her father will kill me because she’s pregnant.” Nancy was not pregnant; she did not give birth to their first child until 1940. Of course, it’s always possible that Frank might have told Toni that Nancy was expecting.
The problem, though, was that Toni Francke was pregnant, and this time Frank wasn’t able to perform one of his little “miracles.” He wasn’t sure it was his baby, claiming that Francke had been with many other men. But he still had to spend sixteen hours in the Bergen County jail; the mug shot survives.
“He was plenty pissed off,” said Joey D’Orazio. “He called me up the next day and said, ‘That broad is crazy. We went out for pasta fagioli, had a good time, went back to her place, and hit the sheets. So what? Next thing I know, this dame is tellin’ me she’s pregnant and I’m in the slammer. Like I’m the only guy she ever did it with. I didn’t even have a good time with her!’”
The charges against Sinatra were dropped when it was learned that Francke was actually married at the time of her rendezvous with Frank. Undaunted, Francke then filed a new complaint on December 22 charging Frank with having committed adultery. “She’s got some nerve, that one,” Frank said. “She was the one committing adultery! I didn’t even know she was married!” That complaint also was eventually dismissed.
“It was a big mess, Frank and this girl, Toni,” said Salvatore Donato, an acquaintance of the Sinatra family’s at the time. “She ended up having a miscarriage in her third month. There was a lot of screaming and hollering in the Sinatra household over that nut job, believe you me.”
Shortly after the complaint was dismissed, Toni went to the Sinatra home and got into a dispute with Dolly when Dolly refused to apologize for Frank’s behavior. Dolly tricked Toni into going down to the cellar with her—“We can talk about this down there so Marty don’t hear”—then quickly ran back up the stairs and locked the door. “Call the police,” she told Marty. “I just locked that crazy broad in the cellar!” When the authorities arrived, they arrested Toni and charged her with disorderly conduct. She was eventually given a suspended sentence.
For twenty-three-year-old Frank, the local publicity he received was unwelcome. “Songbird Held in Morals Charge” read the headline in the Hudson Dispatch on December 23, 1938. This would be his first introduction to the intrusion of the media into his private life, and he didn’t much like it. Joey D’Orazio recalled, “He called up someone at the newspaper and said, ‘I’m comin’ down there and I’m gonna beat your brains out, you hear me? I’m gonna kill you and anyone else who had anything to do with that article. And by the way, I ain’t no songbird, you idiot. A dame, that’s a songbird.’”
Frank and Nancy Marry
Of course, Toni Francke wasn’t the only woman with whom the young Frank Sinatra was cavorting in 1938—she just happened to come forward. It worried Nancy. “I don’t know that he can be true to me,” she told Dolly at the time. Dolly liked Nancy and wanted to encourage her relationship with Frank because she thought marriage might tame him. She told her to be patient with her son and assured her that when she was his wife she wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of behavior. “She told my mother, ‘Frankie found a girl I like,’” said the daughter of a friend of Dolly’s. “‘She’s no whore, at least. So that’s a good thing. Frankie’s had too many whores. But this girl, Nancy, she’d better watch him. My little son of a bitch son is gonna give her trouble.’”
Dolly and Nancy knew in their hearts he would never be faithful. Most of the married Italian men they had known believed that what they did on their own time was their own business. It’s not known if Marty had ever been unfaithful to Dolly, but it probably wouldn’t have surprised her if he had. For Nancy’s part, she knew her father cheated on her mother—for women in their world, that was just the way things were.
Nancy had no idea Frank was being unfaithful to her until the night he was arrested. By this time they’d been intimate, and for Nancy, a Catholic, it was a major step in a relationship. She assumed that their lovemaking meant that she belonged to Frank and vice versa. That’s why she agreed to marry him. However, his actions with Toni suggested otherwise.
Having so completely trusted him, when Nancy learned of the affair with Toni she was not only deeply hurt but disillusioned. Her mother had looked the other way, but Nancy was determined that this kind of behavior would not mar her own marriage. She and Frank had a number of emotional scenes regarding Toni, until finally she made him “swear to God” that he would never be unfaithful to her again.
“Was she the first woman you’ve been with since we’ve been together?” Nancy finally asked Frank through her tears.
“No,” Frank said. “But she’s the last.”
Frank didn’t want to lose Nancy. She was someone on whom he could depend completely; she was very supportive of his as
pirations even when it looked as though he would never make money as a singer and even when his parents had lost patience with his choice of career. While he felt bad about the Toni Francke incident, he still convinced himself it had nothing to do with Nancy. But he assured her that such a thing would never again occur.
Frank was so sweet and gentle with her, and he seemed so genuinely contrite about what had happened with Toni, that she agreed to go through with the wedding plans.
Frank and Nancy were married on February 4, 1939, at Our Lady of Sorrow Church in Jersey City. Monsignor Monteleon performed the ceremony. Twenty-one-year-old Nancy wore a simple, full-length white taffeta gown with a deep neckline and short train. On her head she placed a coronet of white fabric trimmed with pearls, with a three-quarter-length veil. She wore white satin open-toed shoes. Twenty-three-year-old Frank appeared in a cutaway tuxedo with black-and-gray pinstriped pants and a matching silk tie. He wore a white flower in his lapel.
Nancy once remarked, “Frank gave me his own sentimental wedding present—a bag of jelly beans with a diamond watch inside. When the big day finally came, there were maybe fifty members of the family on each side of the aisle. They had all given us furniture for our new apartment. I was wearing my sister’s wedding dress, and the ring—a gold band with a cluster of diamonds—had been his mother’s. I don’t think I’d ever seen Frank so happy in his whole life.”
“Yous have a long life,” Dolly said in a wine toast later at her home during a small reception for a few friends and family members. For a first course, Dolly served pasta fagioli, the same meal Frank said got him into trouble with Toni Francke. He decided not to have any of it. Instead, he sat and waited for the homemade gnocchi. “Nobody makes gnocchi like Ma,” he boasted. “I just hope she gives Nancy the recipe.” There was also a reception at Nancy’s family’s home on Arlington Avenue in Jersey City; wine and sandwiches were served.
Because the newlyweds couldn’t afford a honeymoon, they immediately moved into a small apartment in Jersey City, which they rented for forty-two dollars a month. It would be completely furnished with wedding presents from relatives. Frank then resumed his fledgling career, and Nancy went to work as a secretary at American Type Founders in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Part Two
FIRST BLUSH OF SUCCESS
Harry James
Without Nancy’s support, it would have been difficult for Frank to continue in the entertainment business. If he got lucky, he might have made it without her—he was talented and determined—but with a supportive wife at his side, he had the kind of morale booster he needed to face the rejection and disappointment that often come before success.
Frank felt certain that if he could get a job with Harry James’s band as a vocalist, his struggles would be over. (He had spent a short time with the Bob Chester band in early 1939, but not even his closest followers can remember for how long, so it must not have made much of an impression on anyone. It was probably just a few performances at the New Yorker Hotel.) Nancy took a fifteen-dollar advance on her salary so that Frank could have publicity photos taken in order to give them to trumpeter James, who had recently left the Benny Goodman band to front his own ensemble.
At this time, the big-band sound was an art form completely unique to America. Lasting roughly from the end of the Great Depression until the end of World War II, this exciting era in popular music generated some of the most memorable music in the country’s history. Fronting such a band was every struggling vocalist’s great ambition.
Frank had a friend give the new photos to Harry James, and soon after, James went to the Rustic Cabin to see him perform. As he later defined it, Harry was impressed with “Frank’s way of talking a lyric.”
As it happened, James was auditioning vocalists at the Lincoln Hotel in New York. While all of the other singers were weighed down with stacks of arrangements, Frank showed up with nothing but a cocky grin on his face. He sauntered over to the piano player, told him what he wanted to sing and in what key . . . and then he sang. “They were auditioning a lot of people that day,” said musician Arthur “Skeets” Herfurt, “but the musicians said that when they heard Sinatra, that was it. There was no doubt about it.”
On June 30, 1939, Frank made his debut with the Harry James Band (also billed as Harry James and His Music Makers)—which itself was just three months old—at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore performing “Wishing” and “My Love for You.” For the rest of the summer and into the fall, the band toured to enthusiastic audiences. Frank would remember those days fondly.
“The kid’s name is Sinatra,” Harry James told one inquiring reporter. (Harry reportedly wanted to change Frank’s name to Frankie Satin. Sinatra refused.) “He considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business. Get that! No one’s ever heard of him. He’s never had a hit record. He looks like a wet rag. But he says he is the greatest. If he hears you compliment him,” James said, perhaps only half joking, “he’ll demand a raise tonight.”
Arranger Billy May, who would go on to work on many of Frank’s most memorable songs, met him at this time. He said, “I thought he was a good singer. But the musicians in Harry’s band had the opinion that he was a smart-ass Italian kid.”
“I was young and full of zip, zap, and zing,” Frank remembered in 1965, “and I was also full of myself.”
Night after night on the road—on trains, by automobile caravan, via buses—performing in small, dingy clubs or large halls with terrible acoustics, Frank, with his hair in a floppy pompadour, was never happier—he was singing and being paid for it. Nancy went along on this early tour and the two were together around the clock, blissful in their new marriage. Nancy would one day reflect on those years as being the happiest in their relationship. As her husband performed his love songs onstage in his dapper suit, she would watch dreamily from the wings, almost as if she were falling more in love with him with each performance. “He’s so wonderful,” she would say. “How did I get so lucky?”
Young women would wait for Frank after the show, hoping he would pay attention to them. “I’m married,” he would say. “My wife’ll kill me if I even look at yous.”
There was little money. Sometimes nightclub owners didn’t pay the full amount that had been promised. Band and crew ate fried onion sandwiches much of the time. Nancy would prepare an entire meal of hamburger, spinach, and mashed potatoes for four people (herself, Frank, and the band’s arranger and drummer) with a dollar. If they could find some capicola at a local butcher shop for “sangwiches,” their day was made. They redeemed soda bottles for the return of cash deposits. It was a difficult time in many respects, but Frank and Nancy were happy just the same. When they learned that Nancy was pregnant, they were elated.
That same year, Frank recorded his earliest songs with the Harry James Band. The very first was on July 13 in New York, where they were appearing at the time at the Roseland Ballroom. The 78 rpm record, “From the Bottom of My Heart,” backed by “Melancholy Mood,” was issued on the Brunswick label. Then, on August 31, the James band recorded “All or Nothing at All,” with a vocal refrain by Frank Sinatra. Sinatra would go on to record the song three more times over the years, but the original version is the most effective rendition. After recording a few more memorable songs with Harry James, on November 8, Frank recorded his last two: “Ciribiribin,” which was James’s theme song, and “Every Day of My Life.”
Artistically, Frank’s association with the Harry James Band was an unqualified success. He benefited tremendously from James’s example of showmanship and artistry, but commercially he wanted more. Business at the box office was sluggish. During one gig at Victor Hugo’s in Beverly Hills, the band was interrupted by the owner, who stopped the show in the middle of one of Frank’s numbers. He was frustrated because so few people had shown up in the audience. The performers didn’t even get paid for that particular engagement.
Frank was ready to move on.
While playing the Hotel Sherman in
Chicago, the James band appeared in a benefit show for the musicians’ union with other popular groups at the time, including the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, one of the most popular in the country. Dorsey, known at the time as “the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,” had his eye on Frank and wanted to hire him to replace his vocalist, Jack Leonard. It would pay about seventy-five dollars a weekend and it would be a long-term contract. Frank was thunderstruck, mostly because he had once auditioned for Dorsey with disastrous results. He had been so awed by Dorsey’s presence at that tryout, he couldn’t even sing. “I could only mouth air,” he remembered. “Not a sound came out. It was terrible.”
But that was then. Now Sinatra was more polished and experienced. He had proved himself with Harry James and he wanted the job. And with Nancy pregnant and the James band not doing very well commercially, Frank knew he had to leave Harry.
Luckily for Frank, Harry James was understanding, telling him that if he truly believed that the Dorsey band provided a better opportunity for him, then he should take advantage of it. Technically, he didn’t have to let Frank go; he still had seventeen months on his contract. James later told radio interviewer Fred Hall, “Nancy was pregnant and we weren’t even making enough money to pay Frank the seventy-five dollars he was supposed to get. So he wanted to go with Tommy Dorsey, and I said, ‘Well, if we don’t do any better in the next six months or so, try to get me a job too!’”
Harry James always believed that Frank Sinatra would be a star; there was never any question in his mind about it. He was gracious enough to let Frank go without a fuss, and for that Frank would always be grateful. (Frank was replaced in James’s band by Dick Haymes.)
Still, it was difficult for the loyalist in Frank to leave the man who had given him his first big break. He felt a strong allegiance to James, who had become like a brother to him. He once recalled the final night with James’s band, after their show at the Shea Theatre in Buffalo in January 1940: “The bus pulled out with the rest of the boys [on their way to the next tour stop, Hartford, Connecticut] at about half past midnight. I’d said goodbye to them all, and it was snowing, I remember. There was nobody around, and I stood alone with my suitcase in the snow and watched the taillights disappear. Then the tears started, and I tried to run after the bus. I figured to myself, I ain’t never gonna make it . . . There was such spirit and enthusiasm in that band. I hated leaving it.”
Sinatra Page 6