Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [4]
“When I would get out of hand,” Sinatra told Pete Hamill, “she would give me a rap with that little club; then she’d hug me to her breast.”
“She was a pisser,” he recollected to Shirley MacLaine. “She scared the shit outta me. Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do.”
If the primary intimacy was up for grabs, so was every subsequent relationship: Sinatra would feel ambivalent about women until the end of his days. He would show every lover something of what Dolly had shown him.
It seems straight out of a textbook: an only child, both spoiled and neglected, praised to the skies and viciously cut down when he fails to please, grows up suffering an infinite neediness, an inability to be alone, and cycles of grandiosity and bottomless depression.
“I think my dad desperately wanted to do the best he could for the people he loved,” Tina Sinatra writes, “but ultimately he would do what he needed to do for himself. (In that, he was his mother’s son.)”
Yet that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Yes, Frank Sinatra was born with a character (inevitably) similar to Dolly’s, but nature is only half the equation. Frank Sinatra did what he needed to do for himself because he had learned from earliest childhood to trust no one—even the one in whom he should have been able to place ultimate trust.
And then there is the larger environment in which Sinatra grew up, those knockabout streets of Hoboken during Prohibition and the Depression.
By some accounts, the Square Mile City was a pretty mobbed-up place in those days. Some say even Marty O’Brien’s little tavern was a hotbed of crime. We hear about big Mob names like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Joe Adonis and Johnny Torrio and the Fischetti brothers and Longy Zwillman and Willie Moretti and Dutch Schultz and Frank Costello and—of course—Lucky Luciano, who, as fate would have it, was born in the same Sicilian village as Frank Sinatra’s grandfather, Lercara Friddi.
What business could all these big cheeses of organized crime possibly have had with the small-time Sinatras of Hoboken? It all had to do (we’re told) with liquor. The Mob made millions from rum-running; Dolly and Marty Sinatra bought illegal booze from their lieutenants, or the lieutenants’ lieutenants. Poor Marty, it seems, once got hit, knocked unconscious, when he tried to make some pin money riding shotgun for a liquor shipment. The big-time bootlegger Waxey Gordon (identified in Nancy Sinatra’s book as “Sicilian-born,” which must mean a very odd neighborhood in Sicily, for he was born Irving Wexler) was said to be a regular at Marty O’Brien’s.
Meanwhile, by his own later account, little Frankie also hung out at the bar, doing his homework and, now and then at the urging of the clientele, climbing up on top of the player piano to sing a song of the day for nickels and quarters: Honest and truly, I’m in love with you …
It appears that Dolly’s brothers Dominick and Lawrence were both involved in shady activity. Both had criminal records; Lawrence, a welterweight boxer under the name Babe Sieger, dabbled in crime, sort of. “He was a hijacker with Dutch Schultz with the whiskey and stuff,” Dolly’s sister’s son recalled, somewhat vaguely. And, of course, Dutch Schultz did business with Lucky Luciano, and we can fill in the blanks from there.
But to understand the effect of organized crime on the evolving psyche of young Frank, we need look no further than Dolly herself—at least if we consider the writings of Mario Puzo.
In 1964, Puzo published his second novel, the highly autobiographical The Fortunate Pilgrim. Critics hailed it as a minor classic—much as they had hailed his first book, a World War II novel called The Dark Arena. After those two books, Puzo, unable to make a living from his writing, decided