Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [15]
It was a lucky April shower,
It was a most convenient door.
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.
And maybe if the right someone heard him on the air, big things would happen.
Dolly, touched by his initiative, leaned hard on Joseph