Frank: The Voice (3 page)

When Dolly was with her son, she alternately coddled him—beautiful clothes continued to be a theme—and abused him. In those days it was known as discipline. The child was spirited, and so was the mother. It’s a miracle the child kept his spirit. Dolly once pushed her son down a flight of stairs, knocking him unconscious. She playfully ducked his head under the ocean waves, terrifying him (remarkably, he became an expert swimmer). And most regularly, she hit him with a stick. It was a small bat, actually, something like a policeman’s nightstick: it was kept behind the bar at Marty O’Brien’s.

“
When I would get out of hand,” Sinatra told Pete Hamill, “she
would give me a rap with that little club; then she’d hug me to her breast.”

“
She was a pisser,” he recollected to Shirley MacLaine. “She scared the shit outta me. Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do.”

If the primary intimacy was up for grabs, so was every subsequent relationship: Sinatra would feel ambivalent about women until the end of his days. He would show every lover something of what Dolly had shown him.

It seems straight out of a textbook: an only child, both spoiled and neglected, praised to the skies and viciously cut down when he fails to please, grows up suffering an infinite neediness, an inability to be alone, and cycles of grandiosity and bottomless depression.

“
I think my dad desperately wanted to do the best he could for the people he loved,” Tina Sinatra writes, “but ultimately he would do what he needed to do for
himself
. (In that, he was his mother’s son.)”

Yet that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Yes, Frank Sinatra was born with a character (inevitably) similar to Dolly’s, but nature is only half the equation. Frank Sinatra did what he needed to do for himself because he had learned from earliest childhood to trust no one—even the one in whom he should have been able to place ultimate trust.

And then there is the larger environment in which Sinatra grew up, those knockabout streets of Hoboken during Prohibition and the Depression.

By some accounts, the Square Mile City was a pretty mobbed-up place in those days. Some say even Marty O’Brien’s little tavern was a hotbed of crime. We hear about big Mob names like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Joe Adonis and Johnny Torrio and the Fischetti brothers and Longy Zwillman and Willie Moretti and Dutch Schultz and Frank Costello and—of course—Lucky Luciano, who, as fate would have it, was born in the same Sicilian village as Frank Sinatra’s grandfather, Lercara Friddi.

What business could all these big cheeses of organized crime possibly have had with the small-time Sinatras of Hoboken? It all had to
do (we’re told) with liquor. The Mob made millions from rum-running; Dolly and Marty Sinatra bought illegal booze from their lieutenants, or the lieutenants’ lieutenants. Poor Marty, it seems, once got hit, knocked unconscious, when he tried to make some pin money riding shotgun for a liquor shipment. The big-time bootlegger Waxey Gordon (identified in Nancy Sinatra’s book as “Sicilian-born,” which must mean a very odd neighborhood in Sicily, for he was born Irving Wexler) was said to be a regular at Marty O’Brien’s.

Meanwhile, by his own later account, little Frankie also hung out at the bar, doing his homework and, now and then at the urging of the clientele, climbing up on top of the player piano to sing a song of the day for nickels and quarters:
Honest and truly, I’m in love with you …

It appears that Dolly’s brothers Dominick and Lawrence were both involved in shady activity. Both had criminal records; Lawrence, a welterweight boxer under the name Babe Sieger, dabbled in crime, sort of. “
He was a hijacker with Dutch Schultz with the whiskey and stuff,” Dolly’s sister’s son recalled, somewhat vaguely. And, of course, Dutch Schultz did business with Lucky Luciano, and we can fill in the blanks from there.

But to understand the effect of organized crime on the evolving psyche of young Frank, we need look no further than Dolly herself—at least if we consider the writings of Mario Puzo.

In 1964, Puzo published his second novel, the highly autobiographical
The Fortunate Pilgrim
. Critics hailed it as a minor classic—much as they had hailed his first book, a World War II novel called
The Dark Arena
. After those two books, Puzo, unable to make a living from his writing, decided he was tired of creating minor classics. And so he wrote
The Godfather
.

The Fortunate Pilgrim
is a beautiful, harrowing story, depicting the travails of an Italian-American family living in Hell’s Kitchen in the depths of the Depression. When the father, the family’s breadwinner, has a breakdown and is institutionalized, the mother, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, takes matters into her own hands, deciding she will
not let her six children go hungry or be farmed out to other households. She learns how to earn a living; she holds the family together by the sheer force of her will.

The book was based on Puzo’s own childhood, and he would later make an amazing admission: he had based the character of Vito Corleone, the Godfather, on the very same person who had been the model for Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo—his own mother. Just like Lucia Santa and Don Corleone, Mother Puzo had been benevolent but calculating, slow to anger but quick to decide: the ultimate strategist.

Like Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, Dolly Sinatra managed, by sheer force of will, to make a life for her little family in the years leading up to, and into the teeth of, the Depression. It wasn’t easy.

She was a politician and a master strategist: endlessly ambitious, fiercely determined, utterly pragmatic. She was also abusive, violent, and vengeful. It was quite a different version of the godfather from Mario Puzo’s. But it was a cogent version nonetheless. Frank Sinatra
may have grown up with Fischettis down the street, Dutch Schultz around the corner, Waxey Gordon on the next bar stool at Marty O’Brien’s, but he had his own model for a Mafia chief right inside his house. Small wonder that when he eventually met the real thing, he felt a shot of recognition, an instant pull. And small wonder that when the real mafiosi met Sinatra, they smiled as they shook his hand. It wasn’t just his celebrity; celebrities were a dime a dozen. It was that part of Dolly that her son always carried with him: his own inner godfather. He both wanted to be one of them and—in spirit and in part—really was.
¹

A heavy hand. “She scared the shit outta me,” Sinatra recollected to Shirley MacLaine. “Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do.” Frank and Dolly on a trip to the Catskills, circa 1926.
(photo credit 1.2)

First Communion, 1924.
(photo credit 2.1)

E
ven with Dolly’s Napoleonic drive, moving up from Guinea Town was no simple matter. She and Marty endured 415 Monroe Street for fourteen years, Frankie, almost twelve. A long time.

Toward the end of their tenure there, another joined them.

It was a strange little ménage, the precise sleeping arrangements lost to history: Dolly and Marty in one bed, Frankie in another, and somewhere Marty’s cousin from the Old Country, one Vincent Mazzola. In her memoir, Tina Sinatra remembers “
Uncle Vincent, a tiny,
darling man with a severe limp from World War I, where he’d earned a Purple Heart. With no family of his own, he’d lived with my grandparents since the late thirties.”

In fact, according to a family friend, it was a dozen years earlier, around 1926, when Vincent Mazzola moved into the little flat with Dolly and Marty and Frankie. Mazzola’s mysterious nickname was Chit-U. Nobody seems to know what it meant, but one wonders if it was in any way related to
citrullo
, an Italian word for simpleton, or fool. (Or a crude joke—shit-you-pants?) In any event, Chit-U seems not to have had much going on upstairs. In all likelihood he was shell-shocked.

His arrival at Monroe Street came at a particularly inopportune moment for the family: Marty could no longer box, having broken both wrists in the ring,
¹
and had lost his job as a boilermaker because of his asthma. Between the fees she earned from midwifery and abortion and a weekend job dipping chocolates in a candy store, Dolly was holding the Sinatras’ fortunes together. Imagine her delight at having to take in a slow-witted cripple.

But she pulled up her socks and put Chit-U to work, using her political influence in the Third Ward to get him a job on the docks. Every week, he meekly handed his paycheck to her. She also took out a life-insurance policy on the little man, listing herself as the beneficiary.

And not long after setting Cousin Vincent to work, she got busy with Marty, marching to city hall and calling in some Democratic Party chits to demand for her husband a coveted spot in the Hoboken Fire Department. Since the HFD (a) was predominantly Irish and (b) required a written test of all applicants, and since Marty Sinatra was (a) Irish in nickname only and (b) illiterate, one would imagine his chances to have been slim. But
no
, to Dolly Sinatra, was an inaudible syllable. Presto, Marty was a fireman! And now, with her husband established in a rock-solid and well-paying (and as a bonus, not excessively labor-intensive) position, and Chit-U’s income from the docks added to Marty’s pay and Dolly’s own, escape from Guinea Town was at long last possible.

He was a lonely boy, by turns timid and overassertive. He desperately wanted to be “in”—part of a gang or group of any sort. Pampered and overprivileged, he used the money Dolly gave him to try to buy friendship with gifts, with treats. Still, as in the early Hal Roach
Our Gang
films in which the prissily dressed stock character of the rich boy is pushed into mud puddles, he was mocked: for his outfits, his oddity.

And his emotionalism. He would never be one of the cool kids—he was hot, and his anger and laughter and tears came too easily.

Yet this was not the rich boy in
Our Gang
. The damaged left ear was clearly visible, as was a scar at the top of the philtrum. This was a face to be reckoned with—a startling face, not least because of the similarity to what it would become; but also in itself: serene, mischievous, beautiful. Late in life Sinatra told a friend that as a child he had heard the music of the spheres.