All The Way: A Biography of Frank Sinatra 1915-1998

PROLOGUE

There never was anyone like Sinatra.

Certainly, there have been other entertainers who have made love to their audiences and earned their adoration in return. There have been other performers who literally bruised their way into the public attention but were so magnetic, so articulate, that any misdemeanours were soon forgiven. There have been showmen who so lived for the spotlight that they then tried to find ways of bottling it all up and taking it away with them. There have been other vocalists whose singing faded along with the colour of their hair and yet who still kept going as though their voices were cut from the same old velvet that had long gone threadbare – simply because paying customers were still being mesmerised.

Only Sinatra was all of those things. Frank Sinatra? The first name has been superfluous ever since they stopped calling him Frankie, which is an immortality of sorts. Francis Albert? That’s there to be used by fawning near-celebrities who are afraid of the consequences of addressing him as Ol’ Blue Eyes.

So is Sinatra a collection of clichés? Yes, except that he created them – and all of them about himself.

There has to be some secret for a man to sell records by the million, fill the biggest concert venues in the world, make more than a handful of movies which were memorable, and yet still have the reputation and manners of a prizefighter. There had to be an audience out there who defined Sinatra’s unique kind of megastardom. Was it simply a question of love? It wasn’t a marriage between public and performer, more a sixty-year-old affair – with every episode, from foreplay to the final consummation, performed in front of a microphone.

Everyone in Sinatra’s life has been a participant in that affair.

— 1 —

YESTERDAY

Hoboken isn’t exactly paradise, even if now they are trying to gentrify it, a word that would have been unknown and totally inexplicable to the people living in this grimy little New Jersey city eight decades ago.

Today, there are flowers in tiny front gardens where once there had only been trashcans. There are pictures on walls where once the sole colour had come from the blood of kids and much older men – the ones who daily had been forced up against the brickwork in the course of being made offers they couldn’t possibly refuse.

The ferries still ply the Hudson River to and from Manhattan. These days, you can also take a train and get there in ten minutes. The journey isn’t so pleasant in summer, but in the winter when the cold is so bitter that you find yourself envying a hibernating tortoise, those ten minutes are to treasure. This is not a town helped by its climate. Today when virtually every house and apartment has enough radiators to provide warmth in winter and air conditioners to cool the heat of summer, the weather plays less of a part in Hoboken life than once it did. But in the first three decades of the century, existence could be hard in a place where snow comes in November and lasts till March, and the only refuge from the stifling heat of July and August was to dance in the spray of a fire hydrant by day and sleep on a fire escape by night.

Hoboken has always been an insular sort of place. There are still people who have never been further than across the Hudson to New York and at least one man who has never even left New Jersey. Although an urban village, the inhabitants know each other as well as if Hoboken were a farming community in the middle of a Kansas plain; it is a place where, at one time, a couple living in sin would have caused as much of a stir as a country-town librarian taking a secret lover.

Familiarity is bred by size – or at least by the lack of it. From the ferry stop or the train station, take a taxi to anywhere in town and it is always four dollars. Hoboken is still only a mile square, just as it was when Francis Albert Sinatra – all thirteen-and-a-half pounds of him – fought his way into the world and confounded the doctor, the midwife and, not least of all, his twenty-year-old mother, Dolly.

Dolly, born Natalie Catherine Garavente, didn’t look big enough to carry a sack of potatoes that heavy. She weighed no more than ninety pounds. No one in the room that day in December 1915 expected her to survive. Everyone thought that the baby with the lacerated earlobe and cheeks – along with a punctured eardrum, the result of being wrenched out of the birth canal with all the finesse of a plumber’s mate using a pair of pliers – was dead. In fact, he would have been, had Dolly’s mother Rosa, who ran a grocery store, not also been a part-time midwife. She held the baby under the cold-water tap until he screamed.

This was Hoboken in 1915, and the city has changed little over the years, even if today’s gentrified population of 30,000, boosted as it is by the commuters taking those ferry trips and train rides, is only half the number it was. The legacy of the past fingers among the few families who still remember the Sinatras – along with the dirt and the squalor and the fights.

Not for nothing was this town the setting for On the Waterfront, the 1950s Marlon Brando film of union wars and corruption among the stevedores and longshoremen, a movie which almost might have been remembered as the Frank Sinatra film, a story to come later in this tale of the man who is regarded as Hoboken’s favourite son – at least by some. Others have not forgiven him and doubtless never will. For what? For slighting the town of his birth during his greatest years? Or just for being the most successful entertainment figure American ever knew?

Let us begin with his name. Like almost every Frank Sinatra story, there is more than one version. A birth certificate records the arrival on 12 December 1915 of ‘Frank Sinestro’. The surname could only have been a misprint. When a new copy was issued more than twenty years later, the name was changed to ‘Francis A. Sinatra’. There is no doubt that Sinatra was the family name; but did his parents later wonder whether Francis didn’t sound a little nicer than Frank? And the ‘A’? Was his middle name always ‘Albert’? Or did he copy Harry Truman and later find something to fit an initial? (In 1976 the matter was made official. The Officer of the Registrar of Vital Statistics issued yet another birth certificate – this time, the name was given as Francis Albert Sinatra.)

The notion that ‘Frank’ came before ‘Francis’ is supported by the fact that although the family proudly spoke about naming the child after the saint, his father Marty’s dear friend and fellow amateur baseball player Frank Garrick always said the name was in honour of himself. Not only that; Garrick was chosen as the baby’s godfather at the christening on 2 April 1916 – appropriately at St Francis’s Church in Hoboken.

In these facts, too, there are no more certainties than in anything else concerning Sinatra’s early years. According to legend, he was to have been named Martin after his father, Anthony Martin Sinatra – but the priest, having asked for the name of the godfather, got confused and called him Frank. However, it is hard to imagine the Sinatra parents, especially powerful Dolly, allowing something like this to occur. If she had really wanted to call her son Martin, she would surely have corrected the priest.

Opinions also vary about the links between Frank Sinatra and the town of Hoboken. In the City Hall, the local authority has put on a Sinatra tribute exhibition – old photographs, record labels and sleeves and a dozen or more posters recalling the days when Frankie wowed the crowds at the Paramount Theater over the water and only one or two of him performing in Hoboken because Frank didn’t come back to his home town once that reputation as Frankie was made.

Upstairs at City Hall, there are other photographs – of Hoboken when the great ocean liners docked there instead of at the more crowded piers of New York itself, of baseball teams, wholly appropriate because this was the nursery of baseball, the first place where the words ‘pitcher’, ‘first base’, and ‘home run’ were ever heard. Today, though, you have to be a local historian to appreciate those things. To know that Hoboken is Frank Sinatra’s birthplace is something else. Children are taught about the great entertainer who put their town on the map along with the dates of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Those with grandparents and great-grandparents with long memories may hear slightly jaundiced tales.

The Mayor, Anthony Russo, certainly finds no cause for anything but tribute to the man he has never met. ‘Frank Sinatra,’ he told me, ‘has a place in this town which is a microcosm of his place in the world.’ And you can take that any way you wish. Russo went on, ‘There may have been some conflict with some of the people here at the time when his career was blossoming. I think that people may have felt jealousies and that he was perhaps justified in staying away for a while.’ Unquestionably, Sinatra had given Hoboken a sense of pride and they rejoiced in his talent. ‘But for material things – the things that people do or have given to people or to a city – maybe he hasn’t done that. But he didn’t need to do it – because he has done so much as an artist.’

On the whole, the older folk in Hoboken remember Dolly Sinatra and her husband Martin a lot better than they remember Frank – and in that order because Dolly wore the trousers in the Sinatra home, while her blue-eyed husband Marty, as everyone knew him, was an inoffensive man who had worked on the docks as a labourer before becoming the local fire-station cook, and, in the early 1930s, was to open a tavern called Marty O’Brien’s. The Irish name sounded right but because firemen were not allowed to operate such establishments, the licence was held in Dolly’s name. In fact, Marty never seemed to exert much influence at all and it was Dolly who had got him the job as a fireman in the first place. She was a force in the local Democratic Party and her influence with the Fire Department was as strong as it was with the other ward leaders. When she put the idea to one of the local politicians his response was unenthusiastic: ‘But Dolly, we don’t have an opening.’

‘Make an opening,’ she replied – and they did. That was Dolly Sinatra. So her husband became one of the few Italians in Hoboken ever to get near to a fire engine. It was not the first time Marty realised that things might have been easier had he been Irish. As a bantamweight fighter, he boxed under the name he used for his liquor business: Marty O’Brien. His choice of name, then, had been deliberate – and, in the context of Hoboken, wholly appropriate.

It was not easy being Italian, even in Hoboken, a town where a third of the population was made up of the Sinatras’ fellow countrymen and which boasted that it provided the best Italian food in America, with its macaroni in particular superior to anything on offer elsewhere. Marty came from Agrigento in Sicily, arriving as a small child with his parents, John and Rosa Sinatra. At least, that is what Nancy Sinatra, Jr., says in her book Frank Sinatra: An American Legend. But was that, too, a rewriting of history, like the birth certificates? Every other reference to the early Sinatra lineage says that John (Giovanni?) and Rosa were the names of Dolly’s parents and came from outside Genoa. Nancy doesn’t name their surname, Garaventes, at all. Why?

Could there be some resentment of the fact that when Dolly and Marty were married at a civil ceremony at the City Hall in Jersey City on St Valentine’s Day in 1913, the Garaventes refused to attend? (They were later to relent and a church ceremony was held with both bride and bridegroom dressed suitably for the occasion, she wearing a chic short wedding dress, he a tuxedo and white tie.)

The couple had first met when Dolly’s brother Dominic, known always as ‘Champ Seger’, fought Marty in the boxing ring – in an open-ended contest that would be completed only when one of the participants hit the canvas. Women were not allowed into New Jersey boxing crowds in those days, so Dolly borrowed a pair of Dominic’s trousers and an old jacket and nobody was any the wiser. Her voice may have been higher than most men’s, but what came out of her mouth wouldn’t have let her down. Her language was always choice, to say the least. The evening Dolly met her future husband for the first time was a memorable one. Today, her granddaughter says that the two men fought over the event again and again for years afterwards – both claiming victory that night.

Why the Garaventes were not keen on their daughter linking up with the Sinatras can be traced to the traditions of the Old Country, and a desire, straight out of folklore, to move on once they had seen the Statue of Liberty. Marty’s father had worked in a pencil factory and never learned to speak English. The Garaventes were a family of educated craftsmen – Dolly’s father was a lithographer – and wanted nothing of any match. In this and in everything else, Dolly won.

She and Marty – he gave his occupation on the marriage certificate as ‘athlete’ – set up their home in the heart of Hoboken’s Little Italy. The five-floor, ten-apartment, cold-water tenement at 415 Monroe Street was about as miserable a spot (but conveniently close to the fire station) as could be imagined, although later press stories made it even more miserable. These described it as so crowded that the family had to go out into the street to gasp for air – air that was polluted by fumes and noise from the docks and the Erie-Lackawanna railroad tracks. The problem with those stories is that the apartment was too far from the docks for a steamboat’s horns to be heard, and the railway is more than half a mile away too. But it was bad enough.

In the years following the Sinatra marriage, things began to change in Hoboken. Those piers which saw the luxury liners arrive and depart would, in 1917, be used by GIs going off to France to fight in the First World War. Two years earlier, when Frank was born, the Europe from which most of the city’s inhabitants came was already in the midst of the conflict and nothing would ever be the same again.

In 1913 those changes hadn’t yet come to affect the ethnic divisions, and to live peaceably in the town, it was important to emphasise them. A few streets away from where the Sinatras lived was Irish territory, the third of a mile famous for providing New York with its policemen. The notion of the Irish cop in his tight blue tunic and distinctive brown helmet, so famous in those early Technicolor Hollywood musicals, was no whim of a screenwriter’s imagination; these were the immigrants who not only administered the laws, but made them – because they were the ones who spoke English. Young, strong Irishmen were fitted up with a uniform, given a gun and a ‘billy club’ and told that they were policemen. They controlled the politics of New York as openly as they did the traffic.

The German third of the population were the wealthy ones. They lived in uptown Hoboken and were concentrated around Hudson Street in particular. These were the people who kept the beer gardens, who were the local merchants, and who ran the vaudeville theatre, the Empire, as well as nearby movie theatres such as the Fabian, the US, the Eureka and the Europa. The fame of the German quarter extended well beyond the square mile. Jerome Kern set his musical Sweet Adeline in a Hoboken beer garden.

Even after the world had begun its somersault, each ethnic group kept to its own part of town as surely as if they were second-class citizens confined to ghettos. You didn’t venture from Italian Hoboken into the German or Irish sections any more than you would allow your daughter to marry out into another community. ‘The Italians were the greenhorns,’ restaurateur Joseph Spaccavento, known by everyone in town as ‘Sparky’, now recalls. ‘At one time we couldn’t pass through Willow Avenue. The Irish would chase us out.

With the strength of the ethnic divisions came the insults. To every ‘Mick’ of an Irishman, an Italian was a ‘wop’, a Jew was a ‘kike’ or a ‘sheeny’. The blacks were ‘Niggers’ and the other Latins, ‘Dagos’. The adult Sinatra would say that even as a child he felt offended by the tag of ‘wop’. It was an offence that would rankle forever after. And forever after, he would make the connection with the place where he first heard it – Hoboken.

‘There was real hated there,’ says another Sinatra contemporary, John Marotta. ‘If we went further than Willow Avenue, they’d say, Get down to Guinea Town where you belong. That’s what they called the Italian part of town. It was hatred I couldn’t understand.’

On one occasion that hatred hit Frank directly. Ten years old, he was attacked by an Irish gang and added a few more scars to the face already damaged at birth. One story has it that he went to the rescue of a Jewish boy in the neighbourhood, in response to the kindness of a Mrs Goldberg, a friend of his grandmother, who rewarded him with a Star of David medallion which he later backed with a St Christopher. If so, it was the first of many similar attacks by Sinatra on anti-Semitism and other examples of racial prejudice.

‘Scarface’, other kids called him, not a pleasant way for a child to be introduced to the wider world. But it was to stand him in good stead. When he made what was to become the most important movie of his life, From Here to Eternity, he would say of Maggio, the character he played: ‘I knew him. I was beaten up with him in Hoboken.’

Not that ethnic mixing didn’t occasionally happen and, when it did, Romeo and Juliet could have been set in Hoboken and West Side Story removed to west of the Hudson River. Ethnic conflict was always the best excuse for fists to be made and then used. And, sometimes, more than just fists.

The gangs were divided strictly by race – with the best fights between the Italian mobs and the Irish. Ask any of their descendants today who won and the Irish will tell you that they were hands-down victors and the Italians will say they had the winning ways all the time. Over the years, Frank has both spoken of the violence of those days and declared the aggression overplayed. In one of the former moods he said: ‘Everyone carried a twelve-inch pipe – and they weren’t all studying to be plumbers.’

Despite the glamour that the idea of the street fights lent to later publicity campaigns, this was not in fact Frank Sinatra’s way. ‘He was a loner,’ says Spaccavento, who likes to think that his restaurant, Piccolo’s, with its main room devoted to Sinatra posters and pictures, serves the best Italian food in the square mile. ‘He had his own ideas, but he didn’t go fighting the boys in those days, even though it was a tough neighbourhood. People now like to say they went to school with Frankie and that they went robbing with him. It’s all bullshit.’

Others will say they went to church with him. If they did, they, too, will have to have been Italian. For above all else in Hoboken, each ethnic group had its own place of worship. The idea of praying together was no more acceptable than was the notion of fighting on the same side. St Francis’s, St Ann’s and St Joseph’s were where the poor Italian congregations put no more than a nickel in the plate. Our Lady of Grace – forever known as OLG – on the corner of Fourth and Willow – did a little better. Its Irish worshippers, thanks to those regular jobs in the police and local government, were able to be more generous. The Catholic church of the Germans, St Peter and St Paul, like the beer gardens and the theatre on Hudson Street, never had any financial problems.

The part of Monroe Street where the Sinatras lived is still dominated by shrines to the Virgin Mary in front gardens. The Sinatras were good Catholics, but not so good, unlike some of their neighbours, that it dominated their lives. But young Frank was not allowed to escape the customary role of altar boy at the church of the saint after whom he was told he had been named, and throughout his childhood the local priest was as much a feature of his life as in anyone else’s family. Congregants listening to the church choir would later be able to say they were the first to hear Frank Sinatra singing in public.

Legends about the life of the young Sinatra have grown over the years, as have the stories about his family, as told both by that family and by other contemporaries. According to your own attitude – or how your own crowd was treated by the Sinatras – you judge Frank and you pronounce verdicts on his family, and always with Dolly in the forefront.

Early on, it was clear that the love Dolly felt for Frank was only matched by his for her. He returned every kiss, every loving gesture, every inclination. They read each other’s minds. One of the things he knew while still a child was Dolly’s reputation. He may not have known that she was an abortionist – it is extremely unlikely that he did – but he knew about that power, Dolly style. Years later, he would deny that his mother was tough. ‘It was the neighbourhood that was tough,’ he would say – and he probably meant it.

In the kitchen at Piccolo’s restaurant, between rolling the meatballs and checking on the spaghetti stock, Joe Spaccavento and his son Patty – Patleo – still discuss the Dolly Sinatra they remember. Sparky knew Dolly well because, for a tip of 50 cents or a quarter, he used to deliver groceries to her home when she had begun to move up in the world in the late 1930s and lived in the neighbouring town of Weehawken.

By then, she was a well-upholstered woman who walked through what they call the ‘main drag’ of town, Washington Street, as though she were its queen, and in a way she was – at least in ward three, where she had become the local Democratic Party boss. This was Italian territory – wards one and four were Irish, the second ward was German – so inevitably the ward chief would have to be Italian, too. It would take thirty years for things to change and it was not until 1946 that the Democrats and Republicans formed a ‘fusion’ party under an Italian Mayor, Fred Di Sappio, with Dolly in its train.

Most women in Hoboken, at the end of the First World War, had jobs of one kind or another – the brighter ones in offices, the others mainly in factories over the river, more than a few simply relying on cleaning and washing for a few cents an hour. Dolly worked as a dipper in a chocolate factory. In other words, she knew how to douse the creams or the hard centres in chocolate and because she was Dolly she knew how to do it better than anyone else. The company were so impressed that, soon after the war, they offered to send her to Paris so that she could train workers there to do the job with equal proficiency. But although she liked the work and would not at all have minded going to France, she didn’t want to leave baby Frank totally in the care of her mother. And she had political ambitions, too.

By then, things were changing in Hoboken politics as well. In the 1920s, the idea that an Italian could replace an Irishman as head of the Hoboken equivalent of Tammany Hall was impossible to contemplate. But virtually from when Bernard ‘Barney’ McFeeley came to power at the beginning of his thirty-year reign as Mayor, at around the time of Frank’s birth, Dolly Sinatra was his faithful lieutenant, almost his Italian ambassador. She was a woman of power, never more so than in her own ward.

And, so the stories say, young Frank would come to get his first leg up into show business, through being the son of a power-crazed matriarch, the woman who had worked for years delivering babies as well as votes, who was never crossed – until the day in 1937 when she was convicted of being an abortionist in Hudson County, of which Hoboken was part. Nobody denies that she ended pregnancies as surely as she did the careers of people in Hoboken who dared to risk upsetting her. ‘Look,’ says Sparky, ‘she was a midwife – and sometimes when attending to people accidents happened. She was a powerful woman, but she was a good woman.’

The accidents were undoubtedly frequently on purpose. Nevertheless, a surprising number of Hoboken people share that memory of her. Spaccavento is determined not to blemish Dolly’s memory, or at least to bandage over the blemishes uncovered by other people. ‘She did wonderful things for a lot of poor people,’ he told me. ‘When a member of our community got into trouble and had to go to court, who went to speak for him? Dolly. When he couldn’t speak English – and these were the days of the immigrants who knew only Italian – who was it who interpreted his case before the judge? Dolly. There weren’t any official interpreters in those days.

Her help wasn’t simply that of a court official, even an unofficial one. ‘When she knew that people didn’t have enough money to allow them to eat properly, she got them welfare cheques. She knew how to get them.’ People would come to her when they needed coal for their fires or advice on how to deal with a sick child. She sent them baskets of fruit. Dolly didn’t actually ask for people’s votes, but she knew she could get them.

‘And who was it who fixed things when an Italian longshoreman got into trouble with his boss and was out of work? Dolly.’ The longshoremen on the dock were nearly all Italians. So were the railroad workers, a number from the town of Bari, the part of southern Italy from which so many of today’s Hoboken residents hail that it is as though a piece of the ‘boot’ was sliced off and carried by ship across the Atlantic.

The Sinatras thought of themselves as strictly Italian, but very much as Americans, too – which was why, as Sparky says: ‘People misconstrue things about Dolly. If people weren’t Italians or even if they weren’t in her ward, she’d help them, too.’ By all accounts, Marty just let this all happen around him and didn’t complain. Even when he was made a captain at the local station, it seems to have been out of deference to his wife’s exalted station in town. ‘Yeah, I think that’s how it happened,’ said Sparky.

Dolly had, in fact, decided the time had come for Marty to be shown some respect – not easy in a town like theirs, where being a fireman was respectable and sometimes envied but regarded as a fairly lowly occupation, even so. So Dolly started pressing for an improved rank which she thought would be suitable for her status in town. One day there was a phone call. It was the voice of another local politician. ‘Dolly,’ said the man. ‘Congratulations.’

‘For what?’ she asked.

‘Captain Sinatra,’ he replied.

‘Oh, so you finally made him one,’ she said sardonically. ‘Thank you very much.’

Then she rang the fire station. ‘I want to speak to Captain Sinatra,’ she said. There was a silence at the other end, one that seemed to say, ‘Captain Who?’

‘Marty,’ the man called out, ‘it’s your wife, I think she’s gone nuts. She asked to talk to Captain Sinatra.’

Marty came to the phone. ‘Congratulations, Captain Sinatra,’ Dolly said. It was all he needed to hear. He wanted an improved status as much as Dolly did, but he would never have dreamed of doing anything about it – short of, perhaps, working a bit harder.

That small promotion in a small part of a small town gives a taste of how powerful Dolly was. Having proved that an Italian could break the racial barrier in getting a fireman’s job in the first place, she went on to get Marty a new job. In a way, the first task had been the harder one. The fire station until then had been as much an Irish closed shop as the local police headquarters – for much the same reason: the Mayor decided that when there was rescuing to be done, firemen had to be able to communicate in English to the people at the top of burning buildings. The notion that those people could have been German or Italian does not seem to have come into consideration.

Dolly was proud of Marty, particularly in his new uniform. She also knew that if her Frank was going to do well in his chosen career, he had to look the part too. Ever since she had first dressed him in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits – on her mother’s insistence; at first, he wore little girl’s dresses, quite a thought for Sinatra fans to contemplate – she decided that he was going to be a step above the average youngster from Hoboken. Stories that press agents loved putting about at one time – that Sinatra was a kid from the slums, who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps – are pure fantasy. Not only did Frank always have a shirt for his back; it was a well-stitched, comfortable shirt which Dolly believed suited her own position in life. From earliest childhood, young Frank was dressed better than the other children on the block. ‘They were jealous of him, especially the ones with rips in their pants,’ says Spaccavento. There are stories that he had a different suit for every day of the week. He was so well dressed from early childhood – he sported a smart fedora at the age of ten – that he was called ‘Slacksey’, which seemed to mean he was never without a new pair of trousers. And since the only well-dressed people round about were Irish, the nickname took on another dimension. Frank became know as Slacksey O’Brien.

He took it as a compliment. Dolly wanted him to be a gentleman, he would say years later. But a gentleman with a fairly select vocabulary. If she thought she could train him to speak as well as he looked, it would have to be with other people’s influence. She couldn’t easily leave her ward-meeting language behind. Dollars were bucks and not yet clams, but she was sowing the seeds of what would become Sinatra-speak. Slang was Dolly’s only language. When she wanted someone to do something, there was nothing polite about the summons. ‘Get your ass over here, you sonofabitch,’ she demanded. And the sonofabitch got his ass just where she wanted it.

Frank was not allowed to suffer for his mother’s indelicate approach to life. He had bicycles when other boys in the neighbourhood thought themselves lucky to have an orange box with four roller-skate wheels. ‘We spoilt the kid,’ said one of his uncles thirty years later. Dolly would never be satisfied with anything less than perfection for her boy – as though giving him anything else would somehow reflect on her. She was right. It was all part of the way in which she governed her family as powerfully as she helped run the neighbourhood.

Both parents expected a lot of their only child. Not having brothers and sisters was an unusual situation in itself in Italian families who regarded children as gifts from God and a gift that was not to be underrated. But Dolly’s experience with her thirteen-and-a-half-pound baby was not one she was able to repeat. There would never be any more children. As a result, she was as protective of Frank as a mother hen with a new chick. She wanted him to have friends, but only if they were ‘suitable’, nice clean Italian boys who didn’t get themselves into too much trouble.

Dolly saw to it that Frank had a baseball team to play in – because she founded the team herself. The Turks Palace, she called it, and she had uniforms specially made for all the boys. That way, she knew, her son would not only have a group of playmates but a team that he could control. It was like a soccer player always getting the goals, because he owned the ball. It was probably unnecessary – Frank was good with his feet anyway.

Those feet would have been useful had he ever needed to run away from the police, like a number of his friends who would have found it difficult to win Dolly’s approval. As Spaccavento remembers: ‘Kids would say, Come on, let’s get into that truck or let’s pick the Five and Ten Cents store, and Frank wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He didn’t believe in that.’

Years later, when he had taken upon himself the role of guide to the misguided, Frank embellished his childhood and his role as a juvenile delinquent – one that his contemporaries now say was never his. In the first fan magazine articles, he was quoted as saying: ‘We started hooking candy from the corner store. Then little things from the five-and-dime, then change from cash registers and finally we were up to stealing bicycles.’

But even if Frank had ever wanted to get into trouble, Dolly was there to see that he had a very limited opportunity of doing so. Instead he swam and played a little basketball, and when he did his fighting he generally had boxing gloves on. Marty was pleased to see him follow his footsteps around a three-roped ring.

Young Frank was good with his hands, too – which was why his parents were convinced he was going to be a civil engineer. ‘I did sketches of bridges and tunnels and roads,’ he said once. And to that end, the Sinatras decided they were going to send their son to finish his education at the Stevens Institute of Technology (named after John Stevens, the man who invented the first American steam locomotive), Hoboken’s pride and joy which it was boasted was second only to MIT.

As a small boy, Frank had progressed from local elementary school to the David E. Rue Junior High, which didn’t exactly extend his education – he spent a great deal of time impersonating stars from the new talkies – and then to the A. J. Demarest High School where he enjoyed singing, but little else. He wasn’t much interested in schoolwork. ‘Homework we never bothered with,’ he was quoted as saying years later.

In fact, the only thing that really did hold any attraction for him was singing. At eleven he sang with the school choir as well as in the choir at St Francis’s Church. When there were picnics, the high treble Sinatra voice could be heard along with the cries for more lemonade. But all this was not enough for Demarest’s Principal, Arthur Stover, who wanted more intellectual prowess from his students and saw no academic future for the boy at all. One day he rang up Marty and told him: ‘Get over here and get this boy out of school.’ The reason for the expulsion was given officially as ‘general rowdiness’.

In fact, young Frank had already heeded that request before it was made. A boy whose mother had bought him a second-hand car when he was fifteen years old was unlikely to take kindly to school discipline. For the best part of a year he had played truant from school; his time there, he later revealed, totalled no more than forty-seven days.

The call from the headmaster worried Marty much more than it did young Frank. ‘I knew then I wanted to become a singer,’ he said. His father hoped that he would develop other interests. He was impressed with his son’s bridge-drawings and agreed that the Stevens Institute was where Frank ought to go. But it didn’t happen. Instead, he spent just enough weeks at the Drake Business School to qualify for New Jersey’s minimum education requirements and then began a different life altogether.

By now, Frank was more than ever convinced that all he wanted to do was sing – and preferably in a band. When he told his mother about this ambition she threw a shoe at him. The truth of the matter was – and it may not have been a familiar phrase in those days – that in the early thirties Francis Sinatra was, to all intents and purposes, a dropout. Once he realised that his son was not destined for Stevens, Marty refused to speak to him – and, Frank later revealed, did not do so for a year.

It would be another forty years, thanks to a visit to his old haunts with the then President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, before Frank would get his graduation diploma.

Ironically, it was school that convinced Frank to go into show business. As well as singing in the school choir, occasionally, just occasionally, he had been allowed to sing with the school band, too, and these were the happiest of his schooldays. Now he made up his mind that he was going to be the best boy singer Hoboken had ever produced. That was how he was going to make his living. More than that. Frank had discovered the ukulele, the instrument favoured by the young blades of the time when serenading their girls, usually on a dark summer’s night in a hidden cove on the nearest beach.

The blame for his taking it all a lot more seriously than might have been expected of a teenage boy could be laid at the door of a young man a decade Frank’s senior who had gone from Spokane, Washington, all the way to Hollywood, via a group called the Rhythm boys and the Paul Whiteman orchestra. Sinatra heard a crooner called Crosby sing and decided he wanted to be just like him. Al Jolson had been an even earlier influence, but it was the smooth, easy tones of Harry Lillis Crosby, known for ever as Bing, that Frank knew he wanted to emulate. And not just the tones. ‘You’d see Frank standing on street corners wearing a blazer, a sailing cap and smoking a pipe,’ John Marotta told me in his Hoboken home.

Marotta is a musician himself (years later he would try – unsuccessfully – to have his fellow townsman join him in the biggest concert Hoboken had ever put on) and looking back more than sixty years, he can only admire the way the young Sinatra set about achieving his aims. ‘His middle name should have been Determination, not Albert. He would go anywhere that there was music.’

Frank had the advantage of parents who, by most Italian and Hoboken standards, were rich. Owning the tavern in town increased the Sinatra fortunes even more. As they got richer, so they moved, and each house was always better than the one before. First they settled in Park Avenue, which was not quite as grand as it sounds, and then in Garden Street, Hoboken.

The tavern’s success was aided by the end of Prohibition, which seemed to lead to more drinking, not less. Hoboken had seen all that coming. Long before Prohibition was introduced by the Federal Government, it had come to the town on an experimental basis. In 1914, Hoboken was the port of departure of the American soldiers bound for Europe and the Government banned drinking there lest it make the embarking Dough Boys too drunk to concentrate on winning the war and killing the Hun. Nevertheless, it was a regulation that was rarely enforced and ironically, when the Volstead Act became law in 1919, the town turned itself into an unofficial oasis in the midst of the Prohibition desert.

Eventually, when Frank told them that nothing was going to stop him singing for a living, his parents talked it over and Dolly decided that there was no point in throwing any more shoes. His schoolfriends and fellow baseball players laughed at the cheek of it all but others were less encouraging. As Frank said years later: ‘There’s always someone to spit on your dreams.’

Dolly wasn’t about to do that kind of spitting. If Frank didn’t succeed it might rebound on her and she was only interested in an idea that would work for them both. If her son was going to sing for a living, she would work as hard to help him as she did to find a stevedore’s job for a neighbour’s boy. Frank later remembered: ‘She loved it. She was the spark for my going into show business. My father joined forces and backed her.’ At least, that is what he said on one occasion.

As Spaccavento told me: ‘Marty was a really quiet man. She was the boss – and Frankie listened to his mother.’ When she said that he could go into show business, he listened more intently than ever. Not that he went straight into the band world. His father wanted to get him off the streets and got him a job as a riveter.

Frank Sinatra was one of the less skilled of the employees at the Teijent and Lang Shipyards. He wasn’t actually a riveter, but a riveter’s ‘catcher’. He was to say later that the guy who threw rivets at him was cockeyed, so he ‘couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bag of rice’. Neither of them lasted in the job long – which suited Frank perfectly, especially when a rivet, white hot, almost hit him on the shoulder. He now got a job unloading crates of books and then worked for a fruit company on one of the piers.

But it didn’t do his self-esteem a great deal of good. ‘This was a guy with a chip on his shoulder,’ recalls Sparky. ‘It motivated him a lot – and I think a lot of it had to do with the way Italian people were treated.’

For a while, Frank worked in the dispatch department of the local newspaper, the New Jersey Observer, hauling bundles of papers on to the trucks. His mother had decided that the moment had arrived for more pressure to be applied. Frank Garrick, the boy’s godfather, who was himself also something of a political wheeler dealer, was the paper’s circulation manager. When she thought it appropriate, Garrick, like all the others, was given the Dolly treatment – her son was not beyond saying a word or two himself – and after a conversation that lasted about as long as it would take to sing ‘Always’, he found young Frank a job on the newspaper.

But neither Frank nor his mother were satisfied with the idea of his humping bundles, even though it did provide him with a weekly paycheque of $11 and also led to a friendship with a photographer – who obliged when Frank, in his best sports jacket, asked him to take his picture, sitting in front of a typewriter, with ticker-tape machines, lamps and telephones in the background. The shot served perfectly for later publicity purposes – the early life of Frank Sinatra, ‘when he was a sports reporter’.

Old hands at journalism recall the times they used every conceivable device to get themselves jobs on newspapers, the sort of jobs that would make their careers. Frank had no such journalistic ambitions. It would have been a pointless use of the sort of energy he needed to make his way in show business. Let the hacks write, Sinatra was going to sing.

The photograph, which before long would be handed to George Evans, a budding press agent anxious to make his way every bit as much as was Frank, did wonders for the Sinatra ego. So did promotion of a sort – to the Observer’s City room. Frank had read in the paper about two copy boys being killed in a road accident. He immediately applied for one of their jobs and got it – although the stories that have circulated over the last sixty years are almost as much of an exaggeration as the myth that he was a sports reporter. The closest he got to the copy desk was filling the gluepots for the reporters and junior editors.

After two weeks of that, he was out on his ears. It wasn’t that he was inept at filling the gluepots, but rather that conflict of interest arose: his interest and that of the editor of the newspaper who couldn’t understand who this strange kid was, the one lolling on the desk looking as though he regarded himself as the next Damon Runyon. Had he known that the kid fancied himself as the next Bing Crosby, things might have been a lot easier.

Garrick was offered a choice that seems to have amounted to: ‘It’s his job or yours’, and his godson found himself looking for other work. This was a youngster driven by the kind of ambition about whom Depression-age novelists wrote best-sellers. He was single-minded. What made Frankie Run? The knowledge that there was a much bigger world out there; the self-assurance that anything Bing Crosby could do, he could do, too – and so could Dolly.

‘His mother’s influence was so strong,’ said Johnny Marotta, ‘that when she told him he had to look the part to get the work he wanted, he took notice of everything she said.’ She bought him another smart jacket and, more important, an open-top car. In 1935 there was no finer passport to success, and Frank managed to persuade a social club on Sixth and Grand Streets to pay him to sing on a Saturday night. Today, the Cat’s Meow Club, the place that gave Sinatra his first big chance, is somewhere the older citizens of Hoboken still talk about when discussing the ‘good old days’. It was just a start, an occasional song in a place unknown to anyone outside town, but he treated it with all the seriousness he would later reserve for the Sands Hotel at Las Vegas. It was the only way to get on.

That same year, a nine-year-old Joseph Spaccavento heard him sing at the Continental Bar on First and Hudson Streets – dangerously close to the German part of town, although by then old prejudices were beginning to die out. ‘He would go round the bars and people seemed to like what they heard.’ Another Hoboken restaurateur, Leo Deilizzi, recalls a similar story at the Oval Bar on First and Washington Streets. He has good reason to remember. ‘After every show, Frank would come down to my place for a plate of mussels. He also loved my pizza.’ Not enough, though, to put on any weight.

‘In a bathing suit, when he moved, he looked nude,’ Johnny Marotta recalls. ‘But it didn’t stop the girls in town running after him. He was a flashy guy and like a lot of flashy guys he was a womaniser.’ And the women of Hoboken talk about him to this day. One respectable matron still living within the square mile told me: ‘I slept with him partly because I was intrigued to find out what a bundle of bones like that could do. It wasn’t very much in those days. I imagine he got better.’

Another woman – ‘Ida’ she says we ought to call her – didn’t go that far. ‘We’d go on double dates together. He was fun. He would take his ukulele and sing in a voice he thought was wonderful but which we thought was pretty terrible, but we all enjoyed ourselves immensely.’ The open sports car he could produce for the occasion didn’t do any harm either.

‘None of us had cars at all,’ Marotta said. ‘So who Sinatra was dating week by week was a topic of conversation hereabouts. He was a real show-off.’ But, according to Marotta, the voice had a lot to do with his success. ‘I don’t know what there was about it. Not all good. That’s for sure. But when he sang, he ran them over. I wish I knew the secret.’

Another of the places to which Frank went on dates was Palisades Park, a huge Hoboken complex covering ten blocks with pools filled with salt water – ‘just like the ocean’. Afterwards, he would take the girls to Leo’s Grandezvous for more mussels and pizza. It was a never-changing routine: Palisades Park or wherever he was singing until very late in the evening and then on to eat. ‘We used to go to the Fourth and Jefferson Club together,’ Leo told me. ‘But when he became famous, he stopped coming.’

Franks friends were, of course, all Italians – like Ralph Bragnola, Joe Apone, who called himself Joe Farmer, Nick Pionbino and Joe Dice. He hung out with them at the clubs and went driving and swimming with them, not worrying about that ‘nude’ look in his bathing suit. In those days a bathing suit was precisely that – a suit that covered the chest as much as the lower regions. It was a fortunate fashion for Frank while it lasted.

As far as girls were concerned, he worked out a campaign based on the big weekly events for young Hoboken guys and dolls – the school socials. These were not New Jersey versions of high-school proms, but dances where the youngsters would meet, mostly months and sometimes years after they themselves had stopped learning, or pretending they were learning. The school buildings were the only ones that had halls big enough to take the social events.

When Frank arrived with Bragnola or Apone, or any one of the numerous girls he had on his arm in those days, the dancers knew he was going to sing. When he was with Augie Delano, there were other expectations. ‘Augie was the one everybody thought was going to make it,’ said Johnny Marotta. ‘But Frankie was the guy with drive. He would make sure he had a chance to sing. Sometimes, he would insinuate himself with the piano player.’

Now, ‘insinuating’ himself with the piano player was about the cleverest thing he could have done – if not the most popular. ‘He would pester anyone who would let him on the stage. He kept on saying, Can I sing a song? Can I sing a song?’ And they let him sing – numbers like ‘Sweet and Lovely’ and ‘Blue Moon’. He’d sing into a megaphone, à la Rudy Vallee, or make himself heard without the benefit of any sound equipment at all. ‘You didn’t have microphones for that kind of hop in those days,’ said Marotta. ‘They would accommodate him happily at first – and then it became pestering. The bands had their own vocalists, the people who had rehearsed with them. They couldn’t stop the dancing to let him sing, so they said no. Then he would go to the piano player and he would say, OK. What do you want to sing? So the dancing would stop and he would sing.’

Frank entered amateur contests. He didn’t win and he wasn’t offered any work as a result. But he didn’t get the hook either – that old tradition of vaudeville, the long pole with a hook at the end to drag off those whom the management considered the worst performers. It could only give him hope.

The changes in Hoboken life as well as in his own were by now becoming apparent. Youngsters of Irish and German ancestry were beginning to go to the Italian socials and musicians from other ethnic groups were allowed to perform there. Now the young Frank Sinatra had a much wider audience for what he was sure were his talents.

His friendships helped. His pals were the ice-breakers. They were the first to applaud and cheer, and what they did, others did, too. Says Marotta: ‘I can’t say that he was particularly generous to those people, even though he was the only one of them with any money. Generosity in those days was not part of the Sinatra take.’

His incursions into the socials were repeated at whatever school was holding the best gig that particular night. Joseph F. Brandt was the one with the best acoustics, which was why bands like those of Lou Gaborini, Frank Fosco and Tommy Giamo – in New Jersey terms, extremely good outfits – liked playing there.

But Frank Sinatra and his megaphone wasn’t exactly a welcome sight. ‘He carried that megaphone around like it was part of his wardrobe,’ says Marotta. The band leaders sensed trouble whenever he appeared. He was about to disrupt their carefully-worked-out programme. They tried to devise ways of keeping him away, but they never could.

‘He wasn’t that good,’ Marotta recalls. ‘There were plenty of others who were better than he was. His voice didn’t have much power then, but he sang in the known way of singing in those days. I’ve seen a lot of others try to sing the way he did, but they didn’t make his impact. I think his success was as much of a surprise to him as it was to us.’

Like the others, Marotta would have put money (at least the ten cents he might have been able to afford) on Augie Delano making it. And Tony Costello, another Hoboken youngster, too: ‘Tony was always thought of as the great singer of Hoboken. He had a beautiful voice – much better than Sinatra in those days.’

Frank always got his way, sometimes, it is now suggested by the less charitable among the citizenry of Hoboken, simply because of who his mother was. They knew who had provided the blazer and cap – to say nothing of the car he drove – a ready passport to the best dates in