Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [316]
3 “I really don’t think”: Peggy Connelly, in discussion with the author, May 2006.
4 “Sometimes I’d be”: Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters, p. 83.
5 “When I would get”: Ibid., p. 84.
6 “She was a pisser”: MacLaine, My Lucky Stars, p. 82.
7 “I think my dad”: Tina Sinatra, My Father’s Daughter, p. 14.
8 “Honest and truly”: Lyrics from “Honest and Truly,” words and music by Fred Rose (New York: Leo Feist, 1924).
9 “He was a hijacker”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 21.
CHAPTER 2
1. Or maybe just having seen the writing on the wall: Marty O’Brien, “a tough battler from Hoboken,” according to boxrec.com, nevertheless compiled an unspectacular 1–6 lifetime record, losing his last fight, on June 6, 1921, to Johnny Dohan, by a knockout in the fifth round. In all, Marty was knocked out in three of his seven prizefights.
2. One must understand the succession of immigrations to appreciate the true power of the ethnic pecking order in early-twentieth-century America. Mario Puzo used the German-Irishness of Don Corleone’s adoptive son Tom Hagen to signal that he was one classy consigliere. Likewise, the German-Irishness of Hoboken’s Park Avenue was a sign that the Sinatras had, at last, well and truly Arrived.
3. In his monumental biography Mozart: A Life, Maynard Solomon tells us how “[i]n several of Mozart’s most characteristic adagios and andantes a calm, contemplative, or ecstatic condition gives way to a troubled state—is penetrated by hints of storm, dissonance, anguish, anxiety, danger—and this in turn is succeeded by a restoration of the status quo ante, now suffused with and transformed by the memory of the turbulent interlude … The felicitous states that frame Mozart’s excursions into anxiety may [psychologically] represent a variety of utopian modalities, and the impinging, disturbing materials may be taken to represent a variety of fearful things—the hidden layers of the unconscious, the terrors of the external world, a principle of evil, the pain of loss, or the irrevocability of death. An argument can be made, however, that in the last analysis we bring to the entire continuum of such states derivatives of feelings having their origin in early stages of our lives, and in particular the preverbal state of symbiotic fusion of infant and mother, a matrix that constitutes an infancy-Eden of unsurpassable beauty but also a state completely vulnerable to terrors of separation, loss, and even fears of potential annihilation … Not without good reason, the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described a baby as ‘an immature being who is all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxiety,’ an anxiety that is kept at bay only through a mother’s ongoing, mirroring validation of the infant’s existence. It may be such a precarious moment where inexpressible ecstasy collides with unthinkable anxiety that we sense in the Andante of Mozart’s A-minor Sonata, which, reduced to its simplest essence, tells a story about trouble in paradise” (p. 187).
If ever there was a story about trouble in paradise, it is the sixty-two-year story of Frankie and Dolly.
4. The story of Sinatra’s naming is, with mythological aptness, clouded. Sinatra family history would have it that he was Francis Albert at birth, period. The truth doesn’t seem to be so simple. By some accounts, the big baby was purposely named for his godfather, Frank Garrick, who was triply qualified, being (a) Marty’s close friend; (b) Irish-American, and therefore classy; and (c) (best of all) the nephew of a Hoboken police captain. According to other accounts, Dolly and Marty meant to name their son for Marty, but at the christening (poor Dolly, still recuperating, was absent) the priest, mistaking Garrick for the dad, asked his name, and Marty, staring at his tattoos, or just too flummoxed to speak up, left himself uncommemorated for the ages. (And a good thing, too: “Marty Sinatra” wouldn’t have looked nearly as good on all those great Capitol albums.) The name on the birth certificate was rendered, by some ethnically