Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [317]
Frank, not Francis.
An equally careless census clerk in 1920 listed the family name as “Sonatri,” and the three residents of the cold-water flat on Monroe Street as twenty-five-year-old Tony (occupation: boilermaker), twenty-three-year-old Della (occupation: none), and four-year-old just plain Frank. (Interestingly, another “Sonatri” family also resided at 415 Monroe, also with a son—aged seven—named Frank.) The 1930 census lists the inhabitants of 705 Park Avenue, Hoboken, as Anthony (not Martin), Natalie (not Dolly), and Frank (not Francis) Sinatra (not Sonatri).
5. Rosebud alert: in his adult years, Sinatra’s favorite color scheme was … orange and black.
6. “There are singers in my family but not any professionals,” he told the Los Angeles Times’s music columnist in 1943. “I’ve been so busy singing since I left off being a sports reporter on a little New Jersey paper … that I haven’t had time to study.”
SOURCE NOTES
7 “Uncle Vincent”: Tina Sinatra, My Father’s Daughter, p. 162.
8 “a small grand piano”: Kelley, His Way, p. 26.
9 “The thing you have”: Giddins, Bing Crosby, p. 259.
10 “Bing Crosby is the only”: Ibid., p. 56.
11 “I’ve learned the meaning”: Lyrics from “Just One More Chance,” words and music by Sam Coslow and Arthur Johnson (New York: Famous Music, 1931).
12 “I think it was at some”: Thomas Thompson, “Frank Sinatra’s Swan Song,” Life, June 25, 1971.
13 “If you think you’re going”: Kelley, His Way, p. 28.
14 “Her way of thinking”: Summers and Swan, Sinatra, p. 25.
15 “Like Dolly”: Tina Sinatra, My Father’s Daughter, p. 16.
16 “Frank, sporting the T-shirt”: Nancy Sinatra, American Legend, p. 20.
CHAPTER 3
1. Frank had pursued Marie, the younger sister of his close friend Billy Roemer, but since he wasn’t doing very well in school and didn’t seem to be going anywhere generally, Marie had spurned his attentions. Whatever he sang at the joint recital appears not to have changed her mind.
2. But not for the same reason. Crosby started wearing hats in publicity stills, and then in the movies, to cover up his premature baldness—a little preview of the future for Sinatra, whose hairline at this point was still lush and low.
3. Yet Frank went a good deal further: he had a lifelong obsession with cleanliness and neatness—many friends and acquaintances have mentioned his need to clean ashtrays, line up bottles of liquor on a bar, and so forth—that verged on the pathological.
4. They could also be unkind. A cousin of a friend of the author, a man who had a lively dance-band business in Hoboken in the 1930s, recalled telling young Sinatra to beat it.
5. Picasso, who falsely claimed to have been able to draw like Raphael from the moment he first picked up a pencil, was guilty of the same peccadillo.
6. Earlier in 1935, during breaks in the Lindbergh-baby-kidnapping trial of Bruno Hauptmann, WNEW’s announcer Block had begun the revolutionary practice of playing records on the air—an idea that caught on and became The Make-Believe Ballroom. The station would become increasingly important in Frank Sinatra’s career, culminating in the arrival in the early 1960s of William B. Williams, the disc jockey who dubbed Sinatra “the Chairman of the Board.”
7. Although he well might have. In a clip from a Hollywood musical that came out a couple of years later (1937’s Manhattan Merry-Go-Round), the moviemakers have one of their characters refer unashamedly—and in a complimentary context!—to the new Yankee phenom Joe DiMaggio, who appears briefly, as a guinea (www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgrCCc12sFc).
8. Sinatra actually wound up recording the thing in 1961, in a blisteringly up-tempo Billy May chart—an exercise in redemptive revisionism—on Swing Along with Me.
9. The big and dreaded gong, which—when the Major gave the high sign to the gong striker—tolled like John Donne’s church bell right in the middle of a failed act, sending the aspirant not just off the show (that would have been bad enough) but in many cases back