Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [3]
Against her family’s outcry (and probably at her urging), the two eloped, ages seventeen and nineteen, and were married at the Jersey City city hall on Valentine’s Day (a holiday that would loom large at two junctures in Frank Sinatra’s first marriage) 1913. On the marriage certificate, Marty gave his occupation as athlete. In truth, he only ate regularly because his parents owned a grocery store. Soon the couple made it up with her parents, got remarried in the church, and set up housekeeping in the cold-water flat at 415 Monroe Street.
Every family is a mystery, but some are more mysterious than others. After Dolly and Marty Sinatra’s only child was born, theirs was a centrifugal household. Family lore says that the birth rendered Dolly unable to have more children, but it seems equally likely she simply decided—she was a decider—she didn’t want to go through that again. Besides, she had many other fish to fry. Her skill with Italian dialects and her fluency in English led her to become a facilitator for new immigrants who had court business, such as trying to get citizenship papers. Her appearances in court brought her to the attention of local Democratic politicians—the Irish bosses of Hoboken—who, impressed by the force of her personality and her connection with the community, saw in her a natural ward leader. Soon she was getting out votes, petitioning city hall (as part of a demonstration for suffrage in 1919, she chained herself to the building’s fence), campaigning for candidates, collecting favors. All the while roaming the streets of Hoboken with her black midwife’s bag.
It all meant she simply wasn’t at home very much. In any case, home wasn’t the place for Dolly: she was out, not in; she had the politician’s temperament—restless, energetic, unreflective. And she had unique ideas about child rearing. Of course, to present-day sensibilities filled with the art and science of what we now call parenting, child rearing in the early twentieth century has a distinctly primitive look to it. Poor and lower-middle-class families were large, and with the parents either working or simply exhausted, the older children—or the streets—frequently raised the young.
Neither was an option for Frank Sinatra. As an only child in Hoboken in the 1920s and 1930s, he was an anomaly. His mother paid him both too much attention and too little. Having wanted a girl, she dressed him in pink baby clothes. Once he was walking, there were Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits.
He was the apple of his parents’ eye and their ball and chain. Dolly had babies or votes to deliver; Marty had things to do. Italian men left the house whether they were employed or not, if only to sit somewhere and sip a beverage with pals. Late in the second decade of the twentieth century, Dolly borrowed money from her family, and she and Marty bought a bar, on the corner of Jefferson and Fourth, which they called Marty O’Brien’s. While they ran the place, little Frankie was looked after by his grandmother or a cousin or, most regularly, a nice Jewish neighbor named Mrs. Golden. She taught him Yiddish.
When Dolly was with her son, she alternately coddled him—beautiful clothes continued to be a theme—and abused him. In those days it was known as discipline. The child was spirited, and so was the mother. It’s a miracle the child kept his spirit. Dolly once pushed her son down a flight of