Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [6]
And not long after setting Cousin Vincent to work, she got busy with Marty, marching to city hall and calling in some Democratic Party chits to demand for her husband a coveted spot in the Hoboken Fire Department. Since the HFD (a) was predominantly Irish and (b) required a written test of all applicants, and since Marty Sinatra was (a) Irish in nickname only and (b) illiterate, one would imagine his chances to have been slim. But no, to Dolly Sinatra, was an inaudible syllable. Presto, Marty was a fireman! And now, with her husband established in a rock-solid and well-paying (and as a bonus, not excessively labor-intensive) position, and Chit-U’s income from the docks added to Marty’s pay and Dolly’s own, escape from Guinea Town was at long last possible.
He was a lonely boy, by turns timid and overassertive. He desperately wanted to be “in”—part of a gang or group of any sort. Pampered and overprivileged, he used the money Dolly gave him to try to buy friendship with gifts, with treats. Still, as in the early Hal Roach Our Gang films in which the prissily dressed stock character of the rich boy is pushed into mud puddles, he was mocked: for his outfits, his oddity.
And his emotionalism. He would never be one of the cool kids—he was hot, and his anger and laughter and tears came too easily.
Yet this was not the rich boy in Our Gang. The damaged left ear was clearly visible, as was a scar at the top of the philtrum. This was a face to be reckoned with—a startling face, not least because of the similarity to what it would become; but also in itself: serene, mischievous, beautiful. Late in life Sinatra told a friend that as a child he had heard the music of the spheres.
He may have been timid and babyish and spoiled; he may even, as some accounts suggest, have played with dolls as late as age twelve. But he seems from early years to have had the strong sense that he was Someone—a sense that would have been encouraged by the material things lavished on him, and undercut by the attention that was denied. Not to mention the billy club.
Still, if there’s any truth to the idea of victims’ identifying with the oppressor, it can be found in young Frank Sinatra’s face. Dolly wanted and expected things: things material and immaterial, possessions and power. She wanted the world. Her son may have been uncertain of the ground he walked on where she was concerned, but if there was one thing he was absolutely sure of, it was that he had big things coming to him.
And in early adolescence (just as his family was beginning to bootstrap itself out of the ghetto) he began to dress the part. Frankie had a charge account at the local department store, Geismar’s, and a wardrobe so fabulous that he acquired a new nickname: “Slacksey O’Brien.” A lesser boy might have become just a well-tailored layabout, a Hoboken vitellone, but young Frank’s splendor was much more than skin-deep. And his large sense of himself derived not only from his identification with Dolly’s voracious sense of entitlement but also from the Secret he entertained, the sounds he heard in his head.
In September 1927 the Sinatras made their big move east, from Monroe Street across the super-significant border of Willow Avenue and into a three-bedroom apartment, at $65 a month, in a German-Irish neighborhood on the tony-sounding Park Avenue.2 Later in life, Frank Sinatra liked to foster the impression that he’d led a pretty rough-and-tumble boyhood among the street gangs of Hoboken. More likely, he spent his early years dodging the gibes and brickbats of the tougher boys of Guinea Town. Now, however, he and his family had crossed a crucial line, into their new life in the high-rent district: every morning, Marty went off to the firehouse to roll up his sleeves (revealing those impressively tattooed arms) and play pinochle; Dolly roamed Hoboken with her black bag; Chit-U limped off to the docks (in his spare time, he limped around the new