Frank: The Voice (6 page)

His pretensions didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Who the hell did he think he was, strutting around Hoboken in fancy duds and a yachting cap? (He also used to loll around on the stoop plunking on the ukulele that an uncle had given him.) When he brought home musicians to jam, Marty made them play in the basement. Even Dolly got fed up. “
When she saw Crosby’s picture on Frank’s bedroom wall,” a relative recalled, “she threw a shoe at her son and called him a bum.”

Marty went her one further. One morning at breakfast, he looked coolly at his son and told him to get out of the house. “
I remember the moment,” Sinatra told Bill Boggs in a 1975 television interview. “He got a little bit fed up with me, because I just wasn’t going out looking for work. [Instead] at night, I [was], you know, singing with the bands—for nothing, so I could get the experience. And he, on this particular morning, said to me, ‘Why don’t you just get out of the house and go out on your own.’ That’s really what he said. ‘Get out.’ I think the egg was stuck in here for about twenty minutes … My mother, of course, was nearly in tears. But we agreed that it might be a good thing. Then I packed up the small suitcase that I had and I came to New York.”

My mother, of course, was nearly in tears. We agreed that it might be a good thing. I packed up the small suitcase that I had …
Here is a scene from an old family melodrama: the mother dabbing her eyes with her apron; the implacable father, an arm thrown out to one side, index finger pointed at the door; the shamefaced son standing with his head bowed. (That small suitcase is the real killer.) The actual scene was probably slightly less genteel: more likely, Dolly’s mouth fell open with surprise at the sound of Marty speaking up. Those two words, however—“Get out”—ring absolutely true.

Where, exactly, Frankie went after he stepped off the Hoboken Ferry (fare, four cents) at Twenty-third Street and what, precisely, he did during his mini-exile—not to mention just how long he was gone—remain a mystery. It seems certain he crossed the river to the Emerald City for a short spell, that he made some sort of stab at singing there, and that he failed miserably. He returned home with his
tail between his legs. In 1962, Sinatra laid down a considerably more glamorous-sounding official version for the starry-eyed English writer Robin Douglas-Home. “
It was when I left home for New York that I started singing seriously,” he said—perhaps giving Douglas-Home a piercing glance with those laser-blues to make sure he was getting it all down. “I was seventeen then, and I went around New York singing with little groups in road-houses. The word would get around that there was a kid in the neighborhood who could sing. Many’s the time I worked all night for nothing. Or maybe I’d sing for a sandwich or cigarettes—all night for three packets. But I worked on one basic theory—stay active, get as much practice as you can. I got to know a song-plugger called Hank Sanicola … and he used to give me fifty cents or a dollar some weeks to buy some food. For some reason he always had terrific faith in me.”

Looking beyond the improbability of roadhouses in New York (at least after the nineteenth century) and the self-aggrandizement of the word’s supposedly getting around, what seems most clear from this slightly jumbled account is that Sinatra was rewriting his past to make himself look more precocious than he actually was.
⁵
The little groups, the roadhouses, meeting Sanicola—all this would happen, but not for a couple more years, when Sinatra was closer to twenty. At seventeen, he may have been cocky, but he couldn’t have been very confident; on his own in the big city, he wouldn’t have had the emotional wherewithal or the professional smarts to figure out how to get much practice. The Apple was the toughest of tough towns, especially in the Depression, and he would have to go at it several times before he made any inroads.

As a Grand Old Man holding forth to the journalist Sidney Zion, on the occasion of the first Libby Zion Lecture at Yale Law School in 1986, Sinatra painted the perfect motion-picture ending to his brief foray into Manhattan: “
On Christmas Eve I went home to visit my folks and there was the hugging and the make-up.”

Perhaps it really was a visit and not an abject (and probably famished) retreat. Perhaps it was a beautiful combination of the Return
of the Prodigal and
It’s a Wonderful Life—
though it’s much easier to imagine Dolly giving him a sharp slap (now that he was too old for the billy club). Marty would have felt guilty about losing his temper with the boy; Dolly (after the slap) would have fixed him a hell of a meal.

Yet what seems certain is that both parents had come to a realization: they had a strange duck on their hands. The boy, God help him, really did want to sing. There would be no further trips to the docks or the publisher’s warehouse.

Some say he borrowed the $65 from Dolly; some say, more convincingly, that she simply gave it to him. In any case, $65 was a lot of money in 1934, the equivalent of over a thousand today, a very decent couple of weeks’ wages for anybody fortunate enough to be employed in that very unfortunate year. The money went for a sound system: a microphone connected by a cable to a small amplifier. The amplifier had vacuum tubes inside: after you clicked the on switch, the tubes took a minute or so to warm up, the tiny filaments gradually glowing bright orange. The speaker was covered with sparkly fabric—very classy-looking. At the height of his career, Sinatra liked to use a mike that was as unobtrusive as possible—black was the preferred color—to give the illusion that his hand was empty, that he was connecting directly with the audience. That was at the height of his career. This early microphone would have been neither black nor unobtrusive. But it was a microphone.

It meant so much more than not getting any more pennies thrown into his mouth. It meant power. Dressing like Bing was just the beginning of his transformation: what Frankie discovered, as he used the mike, was that it
was
his instrument, as surely as a pianist’s piano or a saxophonist’s sax. It carried his voice, which was still relatively thin and small, over the big sound of the band, straight to the kids in the back of the room—particularly the female kids in the back of the room.

For that was the power of the microphone: not just its symbolic
force as an object, but the literal power it projected. Like a gun, it made the weak strong; it turned a runt with scars and a starved triangular face into … what?

Into a dream lover, was what. The quality of a man’s voice is one of the primal signals to a woman’s brain—it goes right in there and messes with the circuitry. It tells her stories, stories about all the wondrous things he’ll do for her … and to her. All at once, this dropout, this punk who was so going nowhere that Marie Roemer turned up her turned-up nose at him, had been alchemized into—well, into something else. Those blue eyes, formerly merely insolent, were suddenly compelling … And he was so thin! One night at a school dance, while he was trying to hold a note, his voice caught out of sheer nervousness, and—ever watchful—he got a load of what it did to the girls: they melted. This was a boy who clearly needed to be taken care of.

He filed away the memory.

Little Frankie wasn’t going nowhere anymore. Even though it was still far from clear just where he might be going.

When Marty wasn’t looking, Dolly slipped him a few more dollars for additional orchestrations. Now the musicians, hesitant at first, began to flock to him. He had charts, he had equipment, he had a car. He didn’t have much of a voice, but things being what they were, he played school dances and social halls and Democratic Party meetings and the Hoboken Sicilian Cultural League, singing mostly Crosby numbers: “Please” and “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store)” and “June in January” and “Love in Bloom.” And—in his head at least—he really did feel like Bing up there, the mike allowing his voice to glide smoothly over the horns and piano and drums …

That summer he took a vacation. Not that he was exactly working his fingers to the bone, but it was summertime, vacation time, so he went to the beach—
down the shore
, as they say in Jersey: to Long Branch, where Dolly’s sister Josie Monaco was renting a place. It was his nineteenth summer, and he was finally a young man, no longer
a boy—broader in the shoulders, deeper voiced. With a dark tan (he loved the beach and the sun) setting off those eyes, his hair floppy on top and razor trimmed on the sides, he cut a striking figure.

Across the street was a girl.

“
All life’s grandeur,” Robert Lowell wrote, “is something with a girl in summer.” She was a little thing, dark haired, tan, and cute.

Nanicia—Americanized to Nancy Rose. Just seventeen that summer.

The clingy tang of salt air, the pearly morning light, the faint sound of someone’s radio carrying on the breeze. Bing. Oh God, that voice of his. The feeling of the warm, pebbly asphalt on the bare soles of his feet. She sat on the porch of the big house, watching him.

Maybe he called to her; maybe she pretended not to notice.

Later in the day, after the beach, he stopped by again, and there she was again, same wicker rocking chair, same nail file.

He ducked into Josie’s house and returned holding something behind his back. Now he brought out the ukulele, strummed, and sang:

It wasn’t a bad voice at all: boyish, yearning. It made her feel nice to listen to it. In a minute her sisters and cousins were staring out the windows.

Frankie had never had a steady girl before. This one came with a lot of strings attached: strict father; big, noisy family. Lots of people at the dinner table, lots of questions. Opera always playing somewhere. He loved it. He felt as if he’d finally come indoors from the cold, into a warm, crowded room. Home.

He would have whispered his most deeply held dream to her: he wanted to be a singer.

And she would have responded, instantly and sincerely, that she believed in him.

In September, back home, he had to keep seeing her. Her and that big household, five sisters and a brother, just a hop, skip, and a jump away, in a nice big house, with a front porch, on Arlington Avenue in Jersey City. The house and the girl: both pulled him equally. But with sisters giggling behind hands and furtive necking on the couch after the house was quiet—with all this came assessment, and rules.

Mike Barbato, a plastering contractor and self-made man, looked the world right in the eye, and he knew that ukulele strumming did not make the world go around. This Sinatra kid was cute, and respectful enough when he talked to Mike. But real respect would mean holding down a steady job—which, it looked like, the kid had absolutely no intention of doing. Mike popped the question one night after dinner, leaning back in his chair at the head of the big table, loosening his belt, and picking at his eyetooth, where the meat always caught.

So, Frankie (he’d certainly have asked). What are you doing for work these days?

A proud smile: he had a job singing at the Cat’s Meow Friday night, Mr. B.

Mike gave him that dark-eyed stare. And what about Monday morning?

This stopped him for a second. He didn’t like mornings. Or Mondays, for that matter.

The women were in the kitchen; for the moment it was just the two of them at the table. Mike leaned toward the kid with a regretful smile. No work, no Nancy.

And so, at an ungodly hour on Monday morning, Frankie reported for duty as a plasterer’s assistant on a repair job in Jersey City. Wearing a white hat and overalls, gamely laboring alongside Nancy’s brother, Bart. And Monday afternoon, he limped home, covered head to toe with the smelly white stuff and hurting in every part of his body.

He went through two weeks of it, doing work that Mike always had to do over. Then, one morning, he accidentally overslept. He decided to take the day off. The next one too.

It was the last day job he would ever have.

But now he was no longer welcome at Arlington Avenue. Now he and Nancy had to neck in his car, which was cramped and embarrassing—once a Jersey City cop rapped on the glass with his nightstick at the worst possible moment—or down in his basement, with Dolly clomping around upstairs.

In the meantime, he wasn’t letting the grass grow under his feet. He kept foisting himself on the attention of every musician in Hoboken. He entered an amateur contest at the State Theater in Jersey City, and won. He darkened the door of radio station WAAT, also in Jersey City, until, in April 1935, they vouchsafed him a precious (and unpaid) weekly fifteen minutes of airtime. He took along a pal, guitarist Matty Golizio, as an accompanist. (In a few years Golizio would be playing on Sinatra’s Columbia recordings.) We’ll never know just what he sang, but we do have the testimony of his oldest friend, Tony Macagnano, as to how he sounded. “
You’d better quit,” Tony Mac told his pal. “Boy, you were terrible.”

Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t. His voice was thin and high, but he had nerve and a sense of style and—you’re born with it or you’re not—he could sing on key. He was unformed, but he wasn’t clueless. Maybe Tony Mac was just jealous.