Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [27]
The case fell apart like the house of cards it was, except that it fell in slow motion. First, Dolly sent Marty to call on Toni’s father. Marty had such a hangdog expression—“He looked like a hobo at the door begging for something to eat,” Toni recalled many years later—that her father offered the poor old pug a shot of booze. The two men drank together—sacred bond—and finally Toni was persuaded to go spring Frankie herself.
According to Toni, Frankie sobbed when she confronted him in his cell. She withdrew the charges, but only after (she remembered) she made her lover promise that his mother would apologize for the mean things she’d said. Dolly apologize! Three weeks later, no apology having occurred, Toni went to Garden Street to confront Mrs. Sinatra. After a screaming fight that brought the neighbors out of their houses, the forty-two-year-old, four-foot-eleven Dolly somehow managed to throw the young woman into the basement. The police arrived. This being Dolly Sinatra’s turf, Toni was arrested and given a suspended sentence for disorderly conduct. She thereupon swore out a second warrant against Frank Sinatra: not having been able to make seduction stick, this time she owned up to her non-single status and went for adultery. Three days before Christmas, he was arrested once more—again at the Cabin, this time by court officers purporting to be bearing a Christmas gift from admirers. Dolly once more arrived with bail, and Frankie was once again released on his own recognizance. A headline in the next day’s Jersey Observer read: SONGBIRD HELD IN MORALS CHARGE.
It may have been North Jersey light opera, a tempest in a 1930s teapot, but Mike Barbato can’t have failed to notice that his prospective son-in-law was neither a lawyer nor an accountant nor even a plasterer, but, well, a songbird and a perp. (Though Toni eventually dropped these charges as well because, she claimed, she’d found out about Dolly’s arrest record, for abortion.) Nancy Rose might have looked like a terrific match to Dolly, but things can’t have appeared quite so rosy from the Jersey City side. And what did Nancy herself think about all this? Her boyfriend’s stonewalling wasn’t helped by a second arrest, not to mention newspaper headlines.
But she loved him. And he loved her. It was the God’s honest truth. She knew him to the bottom of his soul, and loved him for it and in spite of it. What’s more, she knew he contained that strangest of all quantities, there among the frame row houses and brownstone tenements of blue-collar, bill-paying Hudson County: greatness. And he loved that she knew it, and he loved that she loved him, and he loved her goodness, her wisdom, and her sweet kisses.
It was just that he needed so much more …
It was time to put a cap on things. There were more Tonis out there. Dolly came up with a 1930s solution: against the Barbatos’ grave misgivings, Frank and Nancy would be married. It happened just a little over a month after his second arrest—Saturday, February 4, 1939, at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City. A small wedding, in the Barbatos’ territory; few Hobokenites in attendance. The bride’s white dress was as true as the tears that flowed from her eyes as her father, guardedly happy, walked her down the aisle: she did love Frank Sinatra, but now she was joined to him forever, with all that entailed.
Three weeks later, Dolly was arrested once more, for performing another abortion. This too made the papers. The Sinatras were famous all over Hudson County.
So the boy left his mother (sort of: he was commanded to visit Garden Street at least once a week