FRANKIE - The Life and Loves of Frank Sinatra

By Don Dwiggins

• How much influence does Sinatra have in Washington? • Is Sinatra involved in the rackets? • What’s the lowdown on his break-up with Ava? • What happens when a member of the Clan proves disloyal? • How great a lover is he?
These are but a few of the questions answered in this definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, one of the most controversial men of our time. (1961 - Don Dwiggins)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Savine
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9788899914004

Book preview

XXVIII

PREFACE

•    How much influence does Sinatra have in Washington?

•    Is Sinatra involved in the rackets?

•    What’s the lowdown on his break-up with Ava?

•    What happens when a member of the Clan proves disloyal?

•    How great a lover is he?

These are but a few of the questions answered in this definitive biography of Frank Sinatra, one of the most controversial men of our time.

In 25 years as a Hollywood newspaperman, author Don Dwiggins, now with the Los Angeles Mirror, has covered a kaleidoscope of stories from the Black Dahlia murder case (unsolved) to the execution of Caryl Chessman.

Like Sinatra, Dwiggins has been married and divorced twice. Instead of a Clan, Dwiggins is President of a unique organization known as the San Fernando Valley Widows Association.

A happy bachelor, he says, never goes to work twice from the same direction.

He first worked the Sinatra beat at 4:30 one dreary Saturday morning when he reported at the Mirror office for first edition rewrite.

It was a dull day and the editors were looking for a headline story, he recalls. "Sinatra had been in a beef at the Moulin Rouge with a parking lot attendant. They decided to give it a ride.

"Later, I looked into the story to get all the facts and the more I checked the more I was convinced Sinatra had gotten a bum deal by the press.

More investigation proved that while there was much to criticize Frank for, there was also quite a lot to be said in his defense—stories which the press never reported. The result was this book about the most popular man in town—and why he’s so lonely.

CHAPTER I

On a blustery winter day in November, 1945, a slight, angry-eyed Italian night club singer named Frank Sinatra stepped into the steam-heated municipal auditorium at Gary, Indiana, brushed wet snow from his top coat and strode onstage.

Six thousand teenagers greeted him with whistles and cheers and cries of Oh, Frankie! but Sinatra had not come to Gary to sing. He had come to get a load off his chest and to shock the town.

He gripped the microphone stand tightly and glowered over the audience. Behind him on the stage, Gary’s Mayor Joseph Finnerty shifted his feet uneasily.

There was race trouble in Gary. Tension filled the big hall. A group of white students had struck Froebel High School, refusing to attend classes because Principal R. A. Nuzum had given Negro students equal rights in classrooms, library and cafeteria.

Worried civic officials, spurred by a parent group called Youth Builders of America, had invited Sinatra to come to Gary, in a desperate effort to relieve the mounting tensions. Their choice was dictated by the fact Sinatra seemed to have a hypnotic influence on America’s youngsters.

The slight young man on stage ran his fingers through his black, curly hair, pushing a wisp back from his forehead. Several girls sighed audibly, dreaming their own dreams of this curiously handsome man of 30. Sinatra raised one hand. The audience fell silent.

I have been asked to come here to help end this strike at Froebel, he began in a hurried voice. But I have investigated, asked a lot of questions, and I have found some pretty strange answers. Kids, I’m going to talk straight, and I want you to listen.

Behind him, Sinatra heard worried coughing from the town fathers and the Parent Teachers Association members and the Y.B.A.

It isn’t you kids who want this strike, Sinatra suddenly shouted. People who have absolutely nothing to do with your strike have taken charge of it! What are you going to do about it? Are you going to get the situation back in your own hands?

In the brief, shocked silence that followed, the image of Frankie Boy, the swoon-crooner, vanished. In its place, a lean, wiry, raging man with electric vitality gripped the audience and held it firmly.

There is only a handful of Froebel students here tonight, he went on, his voice suddenly low, confidential. The rest of you are from the other high schools. This strike has threatened to spread to your schools. The reason no more students are here from Froebel is because they have been threatened with bodily harm if they came!

Sinatra stepped back, his eyes flashing. There was a sudden roar from the thousands of boys and girls.

Go on, Frank! they yelled. Go on!

Since when do Americans yield to threats? Sinatra demanded. His voice strong now, he was building angrily toward a climax. The audience was building with him. Over the yells and handclapping, Sinatra heard a hoarse whisper behind him: Mister Sinatra! Please watch what you are saying!

He was hurrying, his voice once more low, soft, ironic.

What a lot I didn’t know when I was in school, he said bitterly. "I was getting a pushing around and didn’t even know why! Me—the Brain! I know why now—when I was going to school over in Jersey, a bunch of guys threw rocks at me and called me a little Dago! I know a lot of things now! It took me a long time to find out.

"They used to call Jewish kids, Kykes and Sheenies, and colored kids were Niggers! That was wrong!

"Kids don’t draw color lines! Kids don’t discriminate! If they don’t do these things naturally when they are very young, then somewhere along the line somebody teaches them—in their homes or on the streets, at the hands of their parents or professional haters and baiters.

You can fight hatred and discrimination in the street, in the classroom, and even in your own home if you know what is fair and right and speak out!

There was a sudden commotion backstage, and as the Gary students leaped from their seats and cheered, the big velvet curtain suddenly came down.

The mayor gripped Sinatra’s arm. I’m sorry, Mr. Sinatra, but you had no right— he began.

Sinatra brushed away the man’s hand, grabbed his coat and headed for the side exit, followed by George Evans, his publicity manager, who had flown to Gary with him.

Jesus, that’s telling ’em, Frank! Evans said as they climbed into their waiting car. You may never play Gary again, but it was worth it!

For the first time that afternoon Sinatra’s face softened. He grinned.

I kinda gave ’em hell, didn’t I?

On the plane ride back to New York, Sinatra closed his eyes and tried to nap, but he was still churning inside. His mind went back to his boyhood days in Hoboken, when the other kids had called him a little Dago.

In 1915, as today, Hoboken was a mongrelized waterfront town with some 50,000 people of a dozen nationalities. Situated just across the Hudson River from lower New York City, most of these people worked at manufacturing ship propellers, steel pipe, corrugated paper boxes and automatic machinery.

Hoboken’s mile-long waterfront was a seething area of unrest, dominated by pier bosses who handled the loading and unloading of cargo ships that smelled of strange, exotic places. Back from the waterfront and the smoking chimneys of its industry stretched the residential area, its tree-lined streets somberly respectable in the summer time— clogged with slush, dirt and coal dust throughout most of the bitter winter.

The Erie, the Lehigh Valley, the Pennsy and the West Shore railroads slashed across Hoboken, a drab city of industry peculiarly free from the rule of mobsters in preprohibition years. Instead, ethnic groups ran things to their own advantage in the lowlands below Castle Point, where Stevens Institute of Technology gives Hoboken a claim to culture.

Jews, Italians, Poles, Negroes clung together in groups, like swarming bees, for protection, for communication, for identification.

Frank Sinatra’s mother and father made their home in an Italian neighborhood on Hoboken’s Monroe Street. There on December 12, 1915, Albert Francis Sinatra was painfully born, in the presence of an aunt, Mrs. Josephine Monaco. The doctor put him aside to take care of his mother first.

On that day Frank Sinatra got his first scars from an inhospitable world. The doctor’s forceps almost tore off an ear. Frank was a large baby, weighing 13 ½ pounds. And tough, with a strong will to live, a nervous vitality that was to cause him much anguish in later life, a restless energy that still drives him relentlessly toward unknown goals.

Most of that life force Frank got from his mother, Natalie Sinatra, a driving woman everyone called Dolly. Mrs. Sinatra had always worked to help her easy-going husband, Anthony Martin Sinatra, meet the monthly household bills. She had worked as a barmaid in a tavern her husband owned. She had held a job as a candy-maker, but it was as a practical nurse that Dolly hit her stride. This employment brought her in contact with many people who poured their troubles into her sympathetic ears.

Let’s go up to city hall and see about that! she’d tell a neighbor who complained about the way the Hoboken city government ran things. Quickly she became a political wheel, a Democratic Party district leader for Boss Hague, political overlord of the New Jersey waterfront.

Sinatra’s father seems to have done little to shape his son’s life. A cocky bantamweight who boxed under the name of Marty O’Brien, he did teach Frank how to handle himself in street fights. So did Frank’s uncle, a flyweight boxer known in the ring as Babe Sieger. Marty had held a number of jobs— boilermaker, mechanic and longshoreman. Then Dolly pulled strings with Mayor Bernard L. McFeeley and he was appointed to the Hoboken Fire Department, where, eventually, he rose to the rank of captain.

There was little in Frank Sinatra’s boyhood to set him apart from millions of other youngsters who grew up in American small towns between the two world wars. In greater or lesser degree they all had dreams of success. The one difference about Frank Sinatra was his restless energy. It took the form of resentment against the authority of the women who ran his life.

While Dolly was too busy with politics to pay much attention to her only son, she did adore him. In fact, legend has it that she tried to make a Little Lord Fauntleroy out of Frankie.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Frank put up with the female world around him because there was no escape.

As a toddler, Frank was frequently left with a baby-sitter named Rose, who took him to the neighborhood theater on Friday nights and ate candy while Frank watched the movies wide-eyed beside her. Most of the time he was left in the care of Dolly’s mother, Mrs. Rosa Garaventi, who ran a grocery store and lived in a two-family house on Madison Street.

On that plane ride back from Gary, Indiana, where he had sounded off about race problems, Sinatra’s memory went back to the winter day in 1925 when he left his grandmother’s store with a sack of hard candy. He remembered crossing a vacant lot and suddenly being jumped from behind by a half dozen older boys.

Gimme that! one boy cried.

Frank, small for his age but wiry, struggled to hold onto the sack.

Suddenly one of the other boys rushed him, grabbed the candy and ran off across the lot. Frank clawed the ground, trying to get up. His fingers closed on something hard, a rock. He grabbed it, got to his feet and hurled it at the fleeing youngster.

With a shock Sinatra watched the boy stumble, fall, and start crying. Afraid that he’d hurt him badly, Frank ran to help. He bent over to see if he was dead or alive. The boy sprang up, clutching a broken milk bottle. He jammed it at Frank’s face. Frank felt a stinging pain. He touched his cheek with his hand. It was sticky with blood.

Sudden anger flooded over him. He lit into the boy with both fists. For a long time they fought over the snow-covered lot. Then his enemy’s friends came to his rescue.

You goddam skinny Guinea! the boy screamed as he ran off. Breathing heavily, Frank picked up his candy and walked home. He went to the medicine chest and put iodine on the cut. The scar never did go away.

When he was 14, Frank moved with his family to Park Avenue, a step up Hoboken’s social ladder. There he met Mrs. Golden, a kindly woman who made him feel less lonely by baking cookies and singing Jewish folk songs. Mrs. Golden gave him the warmth of honest love he had not seemed able to find elsewhere. He still carries a Jewish mezuzah she gave him.

For two decades, Dolly Sinatra’s dedication to the Democratic Party in the Third Ward, Ninth District, occupied a good part of her time. She had been chosen ward leader in 1909 because of her intimate knowledge of the Hoboken neighborhoods gleaned from her gregariousness as a practical nurse. The Sinatras were childless. When Frank came along, in the sixth year of her political career, his appearance, while not unwanted, was unexpected.

Mr. Sinatra and I were married a long time. We didn’t think we were going to have any babies, she once said. Then Frank came along. I wanted a girl and bought a lot of pink clothes. When Frank was born I didn’t care; I dressed him in pink anyway.

Even though she left Frank’s upbringing to her own mother, Dolly compensated by providing him with good clothes and an allowance sufficient to keep him from resorting to petty theft for luxuries like movies and sodas. In a spirit of camaraderie Frank nevertheless joined the bigger neighborhood kids on occasional forays into locked warehouses.

There were many other things, however, to fill his loneliness—trips to the waterfront to watch the ugly tugboats, moving like awkward ghosts through the river mists, fog horns bleating warnings that gave him goose pimples— hooking sled rides behind the milk wagons in the winter— making a crystal set in his room, and listening to mysterious radio voices singing thrilling songs when he touched the galena just right with the cat whisker.

On Station WOR, he listened to the Happiness Boys, Amos and Andy, and best of all, vocalists like Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallee. With headphones clamped over his ears, Frank would stretch out on the floor, eyes closed, and sing along with them, imagining himself on the bandstand singing love songs to the world.

At teenage parties, Frank put on an act with his mother’s raccoon coat and a megaphone, crooning like Rudy Vallee. He got a lot of laughs. The magic of the Sinatra voice was still in the future. At this time of his life Frank used his allowance to buy acceptance. Alfred G. Aronowitz, a New York Post writer, talked with a former Sinatra chum who remembered:

"He had a charge account at Geismer’s, the big store in town. He was always a sharp dresser. Sometimes he used to buy clothes for his friends. Once, when he was dating Marie Roemer—she was the sister of his best friend—we were going to give a Sweet Sixteen party for her. Well, one of the crowd didn’t have any clothes for the party, so Frank bought him an outfit.

For himself, Frank was sharp. But this was ridiculous. He bought loud, checkered pants and black and white shoes so pointed the kid had to take them off and walked to the party in his bare feet.

Sinatra apparently spent his money wisely and well, for when Miss Roemer opened her package from Frank she gasped and blushed. It contained a slinky, black negligee.

Other Sinatra boyhood friends