Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [12]
Of course he did. He was frequently seen, in those days, not only smoking a pipe like his idol but also wearing a white yachting cap with gold filigree.2 In addition, according to a female friend of the time, Frankie, in his nonworking hours, dressed in much the same style as, and every bit as well as, the college boys at Stevens Institute, up on the hill. (One of the more unpleasant features of manual labor, for him, must have been the dirt. Like Dolly, who had Chit-U on tap to mop and dust, Frank was a neat freak.3 One good reason for a large wardrobe was that he always had something clean to wear.)
In his mind he was a Personage. He had wheels, he had threads, he had a dream. In his mind, all that business on the docks, the drudgery, was just an illusion, like some dingy version of the veil of Maya.
He didn’t last long at any of the jobs, but he wasn’t idle. Even if he was only a singer by his own nomination, a singer had to sing. It was an era of live music, and Hoboken was full of bands: at school dances, political clubs, taverns. Frankie idolized real musicians, sought their company constantly. Sometimes they brushed him off; sometimes they indulged him. He had a way of insinuating himself; Dolly helped him out. She could never help spoiling him. He knew instrumentalists were always hungry for orchestrations, and so he hit her up for them. A dollar here, a dollar there—soon he had a sheaf of arrangements. And if he provided the charts, occasionally the bands were kind enough to let him sing along.4 Just like Rudy Vallée (and like Crosby in his early days), Frankie vocalized through a megaphone, microphones being an expensive rarity then. The neighborhood boys used to try to pitch pennies into his mouth through the megaphone—a fat target.
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.