His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [10]
Within Little Italy there was a further division: The northern Italians dismissed their countrymen from the south as peasants. And it was this class distinction that affected the coupling of Natalie Delia Garavante from Genoa and Anthony Martin Sinatra, a Sicilian from Catania.
When nineteen-year-old Natalie, considered so adorable as a child that they called her Dolly, first began dating the twenty-two-year-old boxer with tattoos all over his arms, John and Rosa Garavante began to worry—especially when she crept out of the house every night wearing her brothers’ clothes so that she could watch Marty fight. Women were not allowed to attend boxing matches in those days, but Dolly refused to stay away. So she pulled on her brothers’ trousers, shirts, and boots, stuffed her strawberry-blond hair into a poor-boy’s cap, stuck a cigar into her mouth, and marched into a gymnasium with her two brothers, who were also fighters.
While Marty Sinatra seemed nice enough, he certainly wasn’t anything special, and Dolly’s parents were heartsick when their exceedingly gregarious daughter decided she wanted to marry the quiet, asthmatic boxer. The son of a boilermaker, Marty could neither read nor write, and he’d never held a steady job, but because of his mother’s small grocery store he never went hungry. To the Garavantes, though, he exemplified the southern Italians’ attitude which held that learning was for a cultural life that peasants could never aspire to. “Do not make your child better than you are,” runs a Sicilian proverb.
Dolly, pretty and spirited, was the daughter of a lithographer’s stonecutter, and she had had an elementary education that put her light years beyond her would-be fiancé. Her proud Genoese parents pleaded with her not to marry this Sicilian who wasn’t even a good boxer and had little chance of ever making a successful life for himself, but Dolly wouldn’t listen. She felt that her driving ambition more than compensated for Marty’s lack of direction and that his weaknesses softened her toughness. In a last attempt at dissuading her, the Garavantes refused to give their daughter a wedding. But Dolly remained undaunted. On February 14, 1914, she and Marty headed for City Hall in Jersey City.
The young couple told the clerk they were born in Jersey City rather than admit they were from “the other side”—or “over the line,” as immigrants referred to their motherland. Giving his full name as Tony Sinatra, the bridegroom said his occupation was athlete. He didn’t mention that he had to fight under the Irish name of Marty O’Brien to be permitted in the ring, since even the gymnasiums closed their doors to Italians in those days. With their Hoboken friends Anna Caruso and Harry Marotta standing up for them, Natalie Garavante married Martin Sinatra against her parents’ wishes.
The young couple started housekeeping in a four-story eight-family building at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken. The water was cold, and the bathroom was in the hallway. Even so, Dolly and Marty were the envy of their immigrant neighbors who were living in one-room novels crammed with beds, and whose toilets were in the backyard.
Monroe Street was the heart of Little Italy, and few immigrants dared to venture out of their enclave. Most could not speak English well and they feared people in authority, especially policemen in uniform, who, they believed, could send them back to Ellis Island. Their swarthy complexions, dark hair, and brown eyes coupled with their broken English made them immediately recognizable to the uptown Irish, whom they sought to avoid.
Most Italians would never be so bold as to cross the dividing line of Willow Avenue into Irish territory, but Dolly