Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [13]
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