Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [9]
Still, Crosby’s influence on him cannot be underestimated. The period of Bing’s explosion into the American consciousness, propelled by radio’s beginnings as a truly mass phenomenon, precisely coincided with Frank Sinatra’s emergence as a sexual being. There he was alone in his room, just him and his radio—with that voice coming out of it. (Talk about masculine role models: poor grunting Marty couldn’t have compared well.) Anyone who came of age in the early 1960s, hearing Dylan and the Beatles for the first time, can remember the feeling: There you are with your hormones aboil, and someone is speaking, really speaking, to you … And if that someone who’s speaking happens to possess genius, interesting things percolate in your mind.
Even in early adolescence, Frank Sinatra’s mind was an exceedingly interesting one. He was already aware of something that set him apart from others his age: an inner riot of constantly flowing emotions, happy to sad to miserable to ecstatic to bored, sometimes all within the space of a minute, each shift hanging on the precise character of the daylight, the look of the clouds, a sharp sound in the street, the smell of the page of a comic book … He might have been ashamed of his inner chaos at times—weren’t these kinds of feelings for girls?—or he might’ve been proud. In any case, he kept this part of himself to himself.3
As—for now—he kept secret the thrill he felt at the sound of Crosby’s voice, couched in the certainty that Bing was speaking to him. In fact, in the case of Crosby and Sinatra, genius was speaking to genius—though in Sinatra’s case, the genius was very much nascent. Frank Sinatra was a slow bloomer. With his feet rooted firmly in the soil of New Jersey. When a Life magazine writer asked him, in the early 1970s, if he could recall the first time he ever sang in public, Sinatra said, “I think it was at some hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Late 20s … I probably sang ‘Am I Blue?’ and I probably got paid a couple of packs of cigarettes and maybe a sandwich.”
Which begs the question of those piano-top performances at Marty O’Brien’s, but still—he was singing. Unlike school, this was something he could do.
In June 1931, he graduated from Hoboken’s David E. Rue Junior High School; around that same time—perhaps as a graduation present—his mother, always looking to boost his popularity, bought him a used Chrysler convertible for $35. That fall, she had reason to regret her generosity: after a mere forty-seven days’ attendance at A. J. Demarest High, Frankie either dropped out or, as he later claimed—probably in another attempt to bolster his bad-boy credentials—was expelled, “for general rowdiness.” He was not quite sixteen.
According to some sources, Dolly, who’d dreamed of Frankie’s becoming a doctor or a civil engineer, was furious. “If you think you’re going to be a goddamned loafer, you’re crazy!” she is said to have screamed. According to other accounts, however, Dolly was unperturbed (“Her way of thinking,” a niece recalled, “was that Italians didn’t need an education to get a job”), even if Marty’s plans for his son to attend Stevens Institute had hit a rough patch. In any case, somebody was disappointed.
If Frank Sinatra’s boyhood were a movie, a continuing visual theme would have to be Dolly marching around Hoboken, her firm jaw set, bent on accomplishing for the powerless males around her what they seemed unable to accomplish for themselves. This time she marched straight over to the offices of the Jersey Observer and buttonholed Frankie’s godfather and namesake, the Observer’s circulation manager, Frank Garrick, refusing to leave the premises until she had secured for her son a job bundling newspapers on a delivery truck.4
A famous story ensues: Frankie, restless and smart and intellectually ambitious, though also possessing a strong streak of intellectual laziness, didn’t like bundling newspapers on a delivery truck.