Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [20]
Macrophallus is the medical term: a peculiar condition, ostensibly enviable. Every man has witnessed it at one time or another: that college acquaintance, say, a small and skinny and otherwise totally unprepossessing fellow, emerging quite startlingly from the shower in a dorm bathroom …
By some evidence, Sinatra was proud of his extraordinary endowment: he is even said to have called his penis Big Frankie. (Unlike the little Frankie it hung from.) On the other hand, much testimony suggests that throughout his life, he was ambivalent at best about his physical self. His height. His flat behind. His facial scars. His receding, then vanishing, hairline. “I hate your husband,” he once told the actress Betty Garrett, who was married to the actor Larry Parks. “He has what I call a noble head. I’ve got a head like a walnut.”
He may have had similarly mixed feelings about Big Frankie. After all, the special underwear cited by George Jacobs was a cosmetic as well as a physical accommodation: Sinatra didn’t want to attract undue attention while wearing close-cut tuxedo trousers.
Sinatra’s lovers, too, may have had mixed feelings: contrary to the worries of insecure men (in other words, most men), not every woman is crazy about the idea of a big member, which, even if visually stimulating, can be an impediment to lovemaking. History itself is indecisive on the subject. None of the Don Juan stories seem to be anatomically specific. Greek myth, on the other hand, rarely holds back—the god Priapus is said to have had a penis so large that no woman wanted to sleep with him. On the other hand, Petronius’s Satyricon tells of a rural youth so well-endowed that the locals revered him, literally tripping over each other to touch it for good luck.
Oh, Frankie …
But Frankie had something more than physical presence: when he was onstage, every one of them, every last one, believed, to the core of her being, that he was singing to her and her alone.
The Hoboken Three, the original Flashes, didn’t like that very much. They weren’t liking Frankie Boy too much in general, if the truth be told. Especially Tamby and Skelly. Patty Principe, just five one in his shoes, was cheerful and even tempered. But Freddie Tamburro and Skelly Petrozelli were bruisers, truck drivers both of them, and not at all bad-looking, either. What was the skinny runt with the pizza face doing outshining them on the stage and getting all the tail afterward? They took to laying a beating on him now and then, just to show him who was boss. Once, Tamby knocked him out cold. So much for Marty’s boxing lessons.
And Frankie—you could hardly blame him—didn’t enjoy it at all. In fact he was pretty damn sick of the Number Five tour unit: of living in YMCAs and cheap rooming houses and fleabag hotels, of eating lunch-counter food for dinner. He liked all the sex just fine, but the beatings pretty much counterbalanced that.
And another thing: the original Flashes weren’t doing too much for him professionally anymore. He knew (and the audiences’ reactions, especially the women’s, confirmed it for him) that he had more talent in his left pinkie than all three of them put together. They could beat him up all they wanted, but they couldn’t beat that out of him.
In mid-December, soon after his twentieth birthday, he left the tour in Columbus, Ohio, and went back home to Hoboken. Just in time, once more, for Christmas.
It wasn’t a defeat but a strategic withdrawal. For four years he had been chasing after far lesser musicians like a pesky mascot. Now—in his mind, at least—the shoe was on the other foot.
His homecoming this time was a good deal more subdued. He was back, he was twenty, and he was unemployed—a potentially volatile situation, as we’ve seen, at 841 Garden Street. Dolly was moderately impressed by his run with Bowes, but What Have You Done for Me Lately? could have been the woman’s middle name. That big mortgage still needed paying, there was still a depression