His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [15]
Dolly had taken the weekend job as a chocolate dipper because Marty was out of work. After breaking both wrists boxing, he retired from the ring in 1926 and took a job on the docks as a boilermaker, but because of his racking asthma attacks, he was laid off.
“When Marty was out of work, I would go to Grandma Sinatra’s grocery store on Jackson Street every week with a list from Dolly, and Marty’s mom would send over a week’s worth of food for them,” said Rose Carrier. “It was hard because Marty’s cousin, Vincent Mazolla, had come from Italy. They called him Chit-U, but I don’t know why. He didn’t have any people except for Dolly and Marty, so he lived with them on Monroe Street, and he didn’t have a job either.”
Once Dolly had firmly established her base of power and could be counted on to deliver six hundred votes from the third ward at election time, she wasted no time in using her influence. Beginning with Chit-U, she marched him down to the docks and demanded that he be hired as a steward’s assistant.
“She made Chit-U hand her his pay every week,” said Doris Corrado, “but he didn’t seem to mind because he always said, ‘She good to me. She give me money for shoes when I need it.’ Then Dolly took out a life insurance policy on Chit-U and made herself the beneficiary.”
Next, Dolly headed for City Hall and banged on the mayor’s door, telling his assistant, James J. Rutherford, that she wanted her husband to be appointed to the Hoboken fire department.
“But Dolly, we don’t have an opening,” he said.
“Make an opening,” she demanded.
On August 1, 1927, Marty Sinatra was appointed to the Hoboken fire department. Because of his wife’s political connections, he was spared the embarrassment of taking a written test.
Having established her husband in the Irish-dominated fire department, in a position which paid two thousand a year and provided a pension, Dolly was now ready to make her move uptown. She found a three-bedroom apartment at 703 Park Avenue. Only ten blocks from their Monroe Street tenement, the Sinatras’ new home might as well have been a thousand miles away, for it was completely removed from the noisy street vendors of Little Italy and much closer to the Hudson River in the part of town reserved for those with money and power.
Dolly outfitted herself splendidly for this move and bought loads of new clothes for twelve-year-old Frankie, who had become extremely thin following an emergency appendectomy. She insisted that her husband dress up as well. Throwing out his worn overalls, she sent him off with one of the neighbor boys to buy some gabardine pants.
“I still remember when Dolly made my brother take Marty shopping for those pants,” said Doris Corrado. “He kept saying, ‘I want “gardenia” pants.’
“I also remember the traveling merchants who would come to our doors selling Chantilly lace and chenille bedspreads and organdy doilies, things like that. Dolly would buy and buy and buy, and then never pay. She was always a dollar down and a dollar when you catch me. One lady who sold her loads of stuff came to collect but Dolly hid and sent Chit-U, the general mop, to answer the door.” (Doris coined the description “general mop” for Chit-U, because, as Dolly’s gofer, he not only ran her errands and fetched her beer but mopped her floors and cleaned her house.) “Chit-U said, ‘No here. She no here.’ So the lady came to my mother’s house and called Dolly on the phone. Dolly answered. ‘Oh, what a surprise,’ she said. ‘I just walked in the door.’ The lady yelled at her. ‘Stay there. I’m coming over for my money.’ But when she got to the apartment, Dolly was gone and ‘the mop’ was hiding.”
No one else living on Park Avenue had “gardenia” pants or Chantilly lace or an only child with a closet full of new clothes, so the Sinatras, or O’Briens, as they frequently called themselves, appeared prosperous to their new neighbors.
“Frank’s people was rich,” recalled Tony