Frank: The Voice (10 page)

So—surprise—Frankie got the job. Harold Arden could wax the tips of his mustache with
that
.

Frank fronting Bill Henri and His Headliners at the Rustic Cabin, early 1939. Harry James would discover Sinatra here in June.
(photo credit 5.1)

T
he universe, in Dolly Sinatra’s view, was a well-ordered place as long as she had anything to do with it. Within her realm, she could control the miracle of birth itself and all the machinations of the day-to-day world. But certain areas threatened her: Frankie’s temperament, for one. She possessed the same volcanic center, but she could keep a lid on it. The thought of living without that control perplexed and, at times, terrified her.

Sex was another matter, a dark force that had to be contained at
all costs. With Marty, the question had long since been put to rest, but poor Chit-U was another story. Poor Chit-U, slow-witted and gimpy, was forty, well past the age when a man should have a wife. Still, one day Chit-U found a woman: a poor little wounded duck who worked behind the counter at the greengrocer, so shy she herself could barely speak. Within a few weeks he was taking her out for beers on Friday nights.

Dolly saw where it was going.

The man lived under her roof, mopped her floors, dusted her vases, and put his salary from the docks into her pocket. If a piece of heavy equipment, a pallet, or a shipping crate, God forbid, fell on Chit-U’s head, the life-insurance money was hers.

Now he was using his money—which was her money—to buy drinks for this woman. Dolly knew meals and gifts would follow, and soon enough, a ring, and brats, and then his insurance would be signed over to
them
.

Dolly found out where the woman lived and went there one night, stood under her window, and shrieked abuse and obscenities at the top of her precinct captain’s voice. The whole neighborhood heard the racket, the cop on the beat came by—but one sharp look from Dolly took care of
him
. She continued her shrieking; the poor little wounded bird shivered in her rented room, making the only possible assumption:
Chit-U must have a wife
.

But Frankie’s stream of girls would not be stopped so easily.

A few years earlier, just before he dropped out of high school, he had gone out for a while with Marian Brush, a cute, smart Garden Street neighbor. One afternoon when the two of them came home from school, Dolly was there. Frankie, in all innocence, said he wanted to show Marian something amazing: his new radio that could pick up
Pittsburgh
.

Marian, glancing back over her shoulder as they went up the stairs, saw Dolly staring after them with an expression the girl would remember until she was an old lady:
She thought we were going up there to do it
. Just the look in Dolly’s eyes made Marian feel dirty.

But Frankie would always have girls pursuing him. And the Cabin
was an ideal base of operations: it was a sneak joint, a place where married men brought their girlfriends. The place oozed sex, and Frankie, showing the giggly couples to their booths in his waiter’s outfit, felt horny just being there. It showed in his voice.

The lyrics had begun to mean something.
Somebody wrote that for a reason—try to imagine what that reason might have been
. The better the song, the deeper the meaning.

Feeling the words, and remembering how Billie could tell you her whole life story in the glide of a note, Frank began to sing the lyrics as if he really meant them, and something happened.

The girls, dancing with their dates, began to stop mid-step and stare at him.

And Dolly knew. Which was why it was so important to push forward the Plan. She’d thought of it more than two years before, when he first brought the little mouse home: Frankie had to marry her.

She was from a good family, a family with money, with a big wooden house and five sisters who had married lawyers or accountants. Even if she wasn’t beautiful, she was pretty, with a quiet dignity about her: She would make good babies; she would take care of a household.

And Nancy Barbato would never threaten Dolly’s supremacy.

The Plan was accelerated when Frank met the older one. The truth of it was that there were many girls now, coming out of the cursed knotty-pine woodwork of the Rustic Cabin, bewitched by the sound of his voice. They were writing letters to him, mash notes in perfumed envelopes—Dolly stuffed them straight into the garbage, with the coffee grounds and grapefruit rinds. They were storming his front door, just as she had known they would. And the older one was the most dangerous of all: cheap trash from Lodi—her father was a rumrunner
or something. She was three years Frankie’s senior, Antoinette Della Penta, and pretty, but with a fucked-out look about her—she might as well have been a whore as far as Dolly was concerned. Mrs. M. Sinatra of upper Garden Street hadn’t pulled her little clan up from Guinea Town to have her only son grabbed by a gold-digging hussy.

There had been a dinner between the two families, Dolly and Marty generously making the trip to Lodi, but it had not gone well. Dolly—no surprise—had spoken her mind.

Still, Toni kept coming on strong even as Frankie continued to woo Nancy. For a while it was fun, Nancy and Toni coming alternate nights to the Cabin, Nancy the good girl sitting uneasily as the other women stared openmouthed at her Frankie. Nancy the good girl, with her sweet face and sweet hair and sweet kisses—and kissing was where it stopped.

Then, on the other nights, Toni the bad girl, or the girl with the promise of badness anyway. He couldn’t help himself; he was so desperate to have her that he gave her a ring, not a big stone, a cheap chip of diamond, but it did the trick. She let him take her to a hotel, and they registered as Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra. She teased him mercilessly as he lay there with his eyes rolled back in his head. Had anyone ever done that for him?

Certainly not Nancy. But then came the night after Thanksgiving, when Nancy and Frank were sitting in a booth between sets and Freddy the busboy brought the black telephone to the table. Freddy gave Frankie a funny look:
For you, kid
. Nancy, giving him her own look, a look of power and ownership, pushed Frank’s hand away from the phone and picked up the receiver.

He sat there with his hand over his eyes as she went at it pretty good. He was surprised at how tough she was. She’d pull Toni’s hair out by the roots if she ever caught her anywhere near her Frank.

His stomach warmed to hear that, but then, after she slammed down the receiver, he knew he was in for it. The bawling out, though, that was the easy part. The hard part was dealing with the other one.

Half an hour later, she stomped into the Cabin as he was about
to start singing and walked toward him, but Nancy stopped her. Then they were flailing at each other like two cats. The music stopped and everyone stared. Before Frank and the other waiters and the busboys could get between the women, Toni had ripped Nancy’s good white dress.

It was a long night, but he stuck to his story: The woman was nothing to him. It had been a flirtation, and it was over. The woman couldn’t face the facts.

The next night, Saturday, things got worse. After he’d sung “Night and Day,” there was a stirring on the dance floor, and two cops in motorcycle boots stomped in and arrested him right in front of everyone.

Frankie tried to bluff it out. Mistaken identity, he announced, as they led him to the door, to scattered applause (which began with the band).

They took him to the county clink, in Hackensack—it was two in the morning—and booked him.

Even in a mug shot it is an astonishing face. The extravagantly sensual lower lip. The intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes. The greasy hank of hair over the left eyebrow—he could have flicked it out of the way; he chose not to—is a rebellious 1930s touch worthy of a Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd. It is a sensitive face, but one of a man with full knowledge of his own importance.

Full-face he looked defiant, but in profile he looked weary. A night in jail had taken the starch out of Frank. Now he was allowed to make his single phone call. Dolly answered, and told him she would have him out in an hour.

It took a bit longer than that. The whole episode was an operetta in three acts, playing out over months, each part taking its own sweet time. The original arrest warrant stated that on November 2 and 9, 1938, Frank Sinatra, “
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 who was then and there a single female of good repute for chastity whereby she became pregnant.”
Then and there. Good repute for chastity. Old English language aside, the warrant had a couple of holes in it. The beginning of November sounds like very quick work if indeed she did become pregnant; some have speculated the affair actually began in the spring and was consummated during the summer, which sounds more plausible. And there was this small detail: The female was not single. She was legally separated, but still married.

The case fell apart like the house of cards it was, except that it fell in slow motion. First, Dolly sent Marty to call on Toni’s father. Marty had such a hangdog expression—“
He looked like a hobo at the door begging for something to eat,” Toni recalled many years later—that her father offered the poor old pug a shot of booze. The two men drank together—sacred bond—and finally Toni was persuaded to go spring Frankie herself.

According to Toni, Frankie sobbed when she confronted him in his cell. She withdrew the charges, but only after (she remembered) she made her lover promise that his mother would apologize for the mean things she’d said. Dolly apologize! Three weeks later, no apology having occurred, Toni went to Garden Street to confront Mrs. Sinatra. After a screaming fight that brought the neighbors out of their houses, the forty-two-year-old, four-foot-eleven Dolly somehow managed to throw the young woman into the basement. The police arrived. This being Dolly Sinatra’s turf, Toni was arrested and given a suspended sentence for disorderly conduct. She thereupon swore out a
second
warrant against Frank Sinatra: not having been able to make seduction stick, this time she owned up to her non-single status and went for adultery. Three days before Christmas, he was arrested once more—again at the Cabin, this time by court officers purporting to be bearing a Christmas gift from admirers. Dolly once more arrived with bail, and Frankie was once again released on his own recognizance. A headline in the next day’s
Jersey Observer
read: SONGBIRD HELD IN MORALS CHARGE.

It may have been North Jersey light opera, a tempest in a 1930s teapot, but Mike Barbato can’t have failed to notice that his prospective
son-in-law was neither a lawyer nor an accountant nor even a plasterer, but, well, a songbird and a perp. (Though Toni eventually dropped these charges as well because, she claimed, she’d found out about
Dolly’s
arrest record, for abortion.) Nancy Rose might have looked like a terrific match to Dolly, but things can’t have appeared quite so rosy from the Jersey City side. And what did Nancy herself think about all this? Her boyfriend’s stonewalling wasn’t helped by a second arrest, not to mention newspaper headlines.