His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [22]
The house on Garden Street was a multiple-family unit, and Dolly intended to take in tenants, including her brother, Babe, when he got out of prison. With Marty’s salary as a fireman, the profits they had received when they decided to sell the saloon, Chit-U’s salary, Dolly’s political job, and her thriving midwife and abortion business, they were able to make a sizable down payment and move in time for Frank to throw a New Year’s Eve party, which Dolly reported to the newspaper’s society page.
“[A] New Year’s Eve party was given at the home of Mr. and Mrs. M. Sinatra of upper Garden Street in honor of their son, Frank. Dancing was enjoyed. Vocal selections were given by Miss Marie Roemer and Miss Mary Scott, accompanied by Frank Sinatra,” the item read.
Frank’s friends, most of whom lived in small, rented apartments, were wide-eyed to be partying in a house that not only had central heating but a bathroom as well. “And not just a toilet, but a bathtub too,” said Tony Mac. “Everybody else we knew had to wash in a tub in the middle of the floor.”
The girls were dazzled by Dolly’s decor, especially the gold bird bath with the gold gilded angels holding red plastic roses that graced the entranceway.
“The house was full of what our parents called Guinea furniture, but we thought it was all wonderful,” said Agnes Hannigan. “Dolly had the best of everything, let me tell you. I remember her massive dining room set that looked like a banquet table, and the glass on top of that table, which was at least four inches thick. The same on the buffet. I had never seen that before and thought it was quite glamorous. She also had a small baby grand piano, and on it was draped a Spanish shawl. On top of that she had her radio, and on top of the radio was a baby picture of Frankie, nude on a rug with his bottom up in the air.
“In her bedroom, she had a chaise longue, and next to it was a high pedestal that held a gold and white French phone. I was only fifteen years old at the time, but I thought that that was really something right out of the movies.”
Dolly Sinatra’s Garden Street home became her show-place, and she kept it scrupulously clean. In fact, cleanliness became an obsession with Dolly, who often hired neighborhood boys to sweep and dust and wash windows. She bequeathed this compulsion to her son, who in later years became just as fixated. He showered three times a day, constantly washed his hands, refused to handle dirty money, and carried nothing but new bills in his pocket. His intolerance of dirty ashtrays was reminiscent of his mother’s chasing his father with a washcloth whenever he smoked cigars in the house—and finally making him go outside to smoke them.
The house-proud Genoese immigrant of the first generation believed that cleanliness was next to godliness. By the second generation, psychiatrists interpreted this mania for cleaning, especially constant hand washing, as a person’s attempt to cleanse himself of real or imagined guilt, or to remove the mire of a sullied past. It would seem that Dolly cleaned to establish her position, while her son possibly wanted to purge himself of a past that made him feel dirty.
“He hid his face once when I got mad and called his mom an abortionist,” said Toni Francke. “He was mortified by her baby-killing.”
The shame that Frank carried over his mother’s abortion business intensified when he moved to Garden Street.
“That was where the real trouble started,” said Marion Brush Schreiber, Frank’s pretty, red-haired neighbor who became his Garden Street girlfriend. “Dolly did an abortion there in her basement on a girl who almost died. The girl had to be rushed to the hospital and was in critical condition when she arrived. She barely survived. Dolly was arrested and had to stand trial. She was put on probation for five years and had to go down to the probation office every week to sign in. I remember how mad she’d get every time she had to go. She’d say it was a ‘goddamn