Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [5]
The Fortunate Pilgrim is a beautiful, harrowing story, depicting the travails of an Italian-American family living in Hell’s Kitchen in the depths of the Depression. When the father, the family’s breadwinner, has a breakdown and is institutionalized, the mother, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, takes matters into her own hands, deciding she will not let her six children go hungry or be farmed out to other households. She learns how to earn a living; she holds the family together by the sheer force of her will.
The book was based on Puzo’s own childhood, and he would later make an amazing admission: he had based the character of Vito Corleone, the Godfather, on the very same person who had been the model for Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo—his own mother. Just like Lucia Santa and Don Corleone, Mother Puzo had been benevolent but calculating, slow to anger but quick to decide: the ultimate strategist.
Like Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, Dolly Sinatra managed, by sheer force of will, to make a life for her little family in the years leading up to, and into the teeth of, the Depression. It wasn’t easy.
She was a politician and a master strategist: endlessly ambitious, fiercely determined, utterly pragmatic. She was also abusive, violent, and vengeful. It was quite a different version of the godfather from Mario Puzo’s. But it was a cogent version nonetheless. Frank Sinatra may have grown up with Fischettis down the street, Dutch Schultz around the corner, Waxey Gordon on the next bar stool at Marty O’Brien’s, but he had his own model for a Mafia chief right inside his house. Small wonder that when he eventually met the real thing, he felt a shot of recognition, an instant pull. And small wonder that when the real mafiosi met Sinatra, they smiled as they shook his hand. It wasn’t just his celebrity; celebrities were a dime a dozen. It was that part of Dolly that her son always carried with him: his own inner godfather. He both wanted to be one of them and—in spirit and in part—really was.1
A heavy hand. “She scared the shit outta me,” Sinatra recollected to Shirley MacLaine. “Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do.” Frank and Dolly on a trip to the Catskills, circa 1926. (photo credit 1.2)
2
First Communion, 1924. (photo credit 2.1)
Even with Dolly’s Napoleonic drive, moving up from Guinea Town was no simple matter. She and Marty endured 415 Monroe Street for fourteen years, Frankie, almost twelve. A long time.
Toward the end of their tenure there, another joined them.
It was a strange little ménage, the precise sleeping arrangements lost to history: Dolly and Marty in one bed, Frankie in another, and somewhere Marty’s cousin from the Old Country, one Vincent Mazzola. In her memoir, Tina Sinatra remembers “Uncle Vincent, a tiny, darling man with a severe limp from World War I, where he’d earned a Purple Heart. With no family of his own, he’d lived with my grandparents since the late thirties.”
In fact, according to a family friend, it was a dozen years earlier, around 1926, when Vincent Mazzola moved into the little flat with Dolly and Marty and Frankie. Mazzola’s mysterious nickname was Chit-U. Nobody seems to know what it meant, but one wonders if it was in any way related to citrullo, an Italian word for simpleton, or fool. (Or a crude joke—shit-you-pants?) In any event, Chit-U seems not to have had much going on upstairs. In all likelihood he was shell-shocked.
His arrival at Monroe Street came at a particularly inopportune moment for the family: Marty could no longer box, having broken both wrists in the ring,1 and had lost his job as a boilermaker because of his asthma. Between the fees she earned from midwifery and abortion and a weekend job dipping chocolates in a candy store, Dolly was holding the Sinatras’ fortunes together. Imagine her delight at having to take in a slow-witted cripple.
But she pulled up her socks and put Chit-U to work, using her political influence in the Third Ward to get him a job on the docks. Every week, he