His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [14]
Dolly’s son was frequently seen dressed up like a little girl. “I wanted a girl so I bought a lot of pink clothes,” she said many years later. “When Frankie was born, I didn’t care. I dressed him in pink anyway. Later I had my mother make him Little Lord Fauntleroy suits.”
Every day before leaving for City Hall to make her rounds, Dolly took Frankie to the two-family house on Madison Street that her mother shared with Dolly’s sister and brother-in-law, Josephine and Frank Monaco.
Dolly made no secret of the fact that she disliked her older sister, Josie, who was pretty, petite, and refined, in direct contrast to the loudly profane Dolly. Rosa Garavante, a sweet elderly woman, ignored the rivalry between her two daughters and concentrated her loving attention on her grandson, Frankie, nursing him through all his childhood diseases. She prayed fervently when he had to have a mastoid operation, which left a massive scar behind his left ear and caused him partial deafness. Despite the ugly gash and the permanent loss of hearing, Grandmother Garavante felt her prayers had been answered when Frankie did not develop meningitis, as often happened when the mastoid bone was not drained in time. She worried about his catching tuberculosis, which had been the chief cause of death throughout the world during her childhood and which still claimed the lives of thousands of children subjected to crowded living and inadequate diets. So every time Frankie coughed, his grandmother fed him, and soon he grew fat on Rosa Garavante’s pasta. But he was not a happy child.
“I used to see Frankie sitting forlornly on his tricycle on the sidewalk outside his house, waiting quietly for his parents to come home,” said Thomas Fowler, a Monroe Street neighbor.
“I remember Frankie as a very lonely child—no brothers or sisters and no little friends to play with. He was quiet and shy,” said Beatrice Sadler, a family friend.
“I’ll never forget that kid leaning against his grandmother’s front door, staring into space,” recalled another.
When Frank started elementary school, he went to his grandmother’s house every day for lunch. “Afterwards, he would hang around here until Dolly came home at night,” his Aunt Josie said.
Dolly was not so lenient and loving with Frankie as his grandmother was.
“Dolly really made him toe the line,” said Rose Carrier, who baby-sat for Frank on the weekends. “I remember when he said ‘the bad word’ once. It came out when Dolly least expected it, and she was so shocked that she grabbed him and dragged him to the sink to wash his mouth out with soap. Frank screamed and yelled, but Dolly didn’t care. She jammed that soap right in his mouth. Even though she used that kind of language all the time, she wanted to teach her son not to say bad words, especially that one.”
On Saturdays, after Dolly turned her household over to Rose’s care, she went to work in the backroom of Cochone’s Ice Cream Parlor as a chocolate dipper.
“That was the only soda store in Hoboken,” Rose said. “It was owned by a Greek, and I had to take Frankie there every Saturday afternoon because Dolly wanted to see him. We watched her dipping almonds and niggertoes in chocolate. I guess I shouldn’t call them niggertoes anymore, but that’s what we called them way back then. They were Brazil nuts, and Dolly would dip them in chocolate and put them on a tray to chill. She hand-dipped everything with two fingers. It was a production line.
“After I took Frankie in there, we would go to the movies to see the Pearl White serials. Dolly didn’t pay me much, but she always gave me lots of candy. She’d just take it right off the tray and give it to me and Frankie.
“Frankie liked going to the movies, but the poor kid didn’t have much choice in the matter because that’s where I was going and he had to be with me. The movie houses didn’t have any air-conditioning in those days, so when it got hot, they