His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [24]
“Frank did such a great job for our school dances on Wednesdays that he wanted to take the orchestra to Our Lady of Grace for their Friday night dances, but the Irish Catholics wouldn’t let him in because of the scandals involving his mother. They would have nothing to do with him. When he found this out, he went into one of his terrible moods. He’d get real sullen and sour, and you couldn’t get a word out of him. There were no tantrums; just an ugly silence that could sometimes last for hours. He also got headaches all the time.”
Dolly felt so bad about the church’s refusing to let Frank arrange the orchestra because of her abortion business that she bought him a sixty-five-dollar portable public address system so that he would have an easier time booking musicians.
“That PA system had a mike and speakers and a case covered with sparkling stuff,” said Tony Mac. “Those things were rare in those days, so when Frankie would let a band use his PA, the leader would usually let him sing—for free, of course.”
Dolly also gave her son money to buy orchestrations, which helped him as much as the public address system. “I always liked to sing and I liked to be around bands and to have a part of the band glamour,” Frank said a few years later. “I couldn’t play an instrument and I didn’t care about learning to play one. So I tried to figure out a way in which I could be sure of being a part of a band. … I started collecting orchestrations. Bands needed them. I had them. If the local orchestras wanted to use my arrangements—and they always did, because I had a large and up-to-the-minute collection—they had to take Singer Sinatra too.
“Nobody was cheated. The bands needed what they rented from me, and I got what I wanted too. While I wasn’t the best singer in the world, they weren’t the best bands in the country either.”
He sang the songs of the time, ones he had heard on the radio. But people in Hoboken agreed with him that he wasn’t the best singer in the world. And his ukulele-playing—an instrument his uncle, Champ Sieger, gave him—was no better. Whenever he went to Cockeyed Henry’s and pestered the older men with his singing and playing, they threw him out. Even Frank’s friends were unimpressed. Adeline Yacenda refused to let him sing at her wedding. “He was that bad,” she said.
Tony Mac told him to get out of the business. “I heard him on WAAT and the next time I saw him, I said, ‘You’d better quit. Boy, you were terrible.’ ”
“Frank was always asking for work,” said Don Milo, who had his own orchestra. “He was a real pusher like his mom. He never let up. I lived across the street from him and he was always coming over and ringing the bell wanting me to hire him, but I used Ozzie Osborn instead because he was a much better singer than Frankie. I’d use Frankie only when Dolly told me to.”
By 1935, when Frank was twenty years old, still living at home and without a steady job, his mother finally acknowledged that singing was all he cared about. So she set out to find him work by calling Joseph Samperi, the owner of the Union Club at 600 Hudson Street in Hoboken.
“Why don’t you give Frankie a job?” she asked. “You’ve got a nice place here. You ought to have a boy like Frankie singing for you.”
No Italian in Hoboken was going to say no to Dolly Sinatra, so Frank was hired for a couple of months.
“We could afford to pay him forty dollars a week for a five-night week, but we couldn’t put in a radio wire,” said Samperi. “We weren’t big enough for that kind of thing.”
Following his Union Club gig, Frank began hustling one night stands at the Italian social clubs in Hoboken. He also drove a local trio called The Three Flashes to Englewood Cliffs and watched them perform with Harold Arden’s orchestra at the Rustic Cabin.
“Frank hung around us like we were gods or something,” recalled Fred Tamburro, the trio’s baritone. “We took him along for one simple reason. Frankie-boy had a car. He used to chauffeur us around. Then, one night, a guy came up to us and said he wanted us to make some movie shorts for Major Bowes. When Frank