Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [10]
When the Observer’s editor saw Frankie at the dead kid’s desk, he quite reasonably asked him what he was doing there. Frankie responded that Mr. Garrick had given him the job. The editor asked Mr. Garrick if this was the case. Garrick said it was not. The editor told Frank Garrick to let Sinatra go. More likely—with what one knows of editors, and the time and the territory—he told him to let the lying little son of a bitch go.
Garrick regretfully informed his godson that he, Frankie, had put him in an untenable position, and that it would be impossible for him, Frankie, to stay in the Observer’s employ.
Whereupon Frankie lost it.
Screaming, red faced, veins pounding, he cursed out his godfather, dredging up every scrap of gutter talk he’d learned on the sidewalks of Hoboken. A sixteen-year-old high-school dropout cursing out a grown man, a figure of benevolence and authority: the man who had given him his name.
“Like Dolly, he resented authority in any guise—especially when he knew he was wrong,” Sinatra’s daughter Tina wrote. “The more you yanked him by the neck, the less he liked it, and the more he’d dig in his heels.”
The Garrick episode has a whiff of sulfur about it. It speaks of the Old World spirit—the true, violent spirit—of vendetta. But even worse: if true—and there’s no reason to suppose it isn’t, since both Garrick and, later, his widow recalled the incident—it says not-so-good things about the teenage Sinatra. Does this make him a tougher customer than we’d first suspected?
Probably not. For all Sinatra’s claims that he’d run with a rough crowd, carried around a length of lead pipe, and so on—not to mention his stories about Marty teaching him to fight—there are too many accounts from Hoboken contemporaries that portray him as a natty little weakling who couldn’t punch his way out of a paper bag, who tried desperately to bribe bigger, tougher boys to be his friends. An old photograph in Nancy Sinatra’s second book about her father, Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, shows Frankie, aged about twelve, looking rather timid as he stands on the sidewalk with his big, expensive bicycle. He’s wearing a newsboy cap, beautifully pressed trousers, and a jacket marked “TURKS.” “Frank, sporting the T-shirt of his street gang, the Turks,” Ms. S.’s caption reads. “Just like they do today, street gangs protected their territory.”
But it turns out the gang wasn’t a gang at all: it was an after-school club called the Turk’s Palace. The Turks had secret handshakes, they played a little baseball, they wore flashy orange and black jackets with a half-moon and dagger on the back.5 And Dolly was the one who bought the jackets, thus ensuring that Frank would be the club’s manager and the baseball team’s pitcher. Which makes it hard to credit the idea that the Fauntleroy of Park Avenue had suddenly turned into a hard guy as he entered adolescence.
Instead, what we see is a type: the overaggressive, loud-talking bantamweight who snarls to hide his terrors. Sinatra’s explosion shows a ferocious sense of entitlement, built on a foundation of sand. (It also shows a deep fear of his mother, and how she might feel about his losing his job.) Frankie had to have known that he was in the wrong, and the resulting self-dislike would have stoked his tantrum. He then would have felt furious at himself for losing his temper, and further furious at Frank Garrick for making him lose his temper. A nuclear chain reaction.
There would be many such exhibitions in Sinatra’s life.
(In later