His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [25]
The Three Flashes had no intention of upgrading their driver, so they turned Frank down. He told his mother what had happened. The next day, she went to see Tamburro, known as “Tamby,” one of eight children living on Adams Street in the heart of Little Italy, where Dolly Sinatra was the immigrants’ lifeline to the new world. By that afternoon, Frank was part of the group.
“Sinatra’s mother, who was a big wheel in Hoboken, started pestering us to take him along,” said James “Skelly” Petrozelli, another of The Three Flashes.
“There was nothing I could do about it,” said Tamby many years later.
The movie shorts—The Night Club and The Minstrel—took seven days to film, and every day Frank drove Don Milo and his band, who were, as they frequently did, playing with The Three Flashes, to the Biograph Studios on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. “It was a minstrel show and Frank, who was twenty years old, was paid ten dollars a day to wear a top hat and make up in blackface with big, wide white lips,” said Don Milo. “He acted as a waiter in one of the shorts, and in the other The Three Flashes sang to him in blackface. Every morning at five A.M., before we left for a day of filming, Dolly got up and made us all a big breakfast. Then Frank drove us to the Bronx over the George Washington Bridge, which had just opened.”
“The way Frankie flipped about appearing in blackface, you’d think he was already a star,” said Tamby. “All he had was a walk-on. He kept haunting the theaters here asking when they were going to play his pictures—HIS pictures!”
The movie shorts, entitled Major Bowes Theater of the Air, were shown in Radio City Music Hall in October 1935, but before their release Major Bowes summoned the boys for an audition for his amateur hour, which was broadcast nationally every week.
Again Dolly made sure that Frank was included in the group, and The Three Flashes became The Hoboken Four. Don Milo told them to sing the Mills Brothers’ arrangement of “Shine.”
“I also told them to dress with class,” he said, which meant white suits, black ties, and black hankies.
The boys did as they were told, and Major Bowes was impressed enough to schedule them as contestants on his show, which was broadcast from the stage of the Capitol Theater in New York City on September 8, 1935.
That evening, Major Bowes introduced them as The Hoboken Four, “singing and dancing fools.” In response to an offstage question about his description, he said, “I don’t know. I guess ’cause they’re so happy.”
Tamby then introduced himself and Skelly and Pat Principe (Patty Prince), telling Major Bowes where each one worked. He ignored Sinatra.
“What about that one?” Bowes asked, pointing to Frank.
“Oh, he never worked a day in his life,” said Tamby, and the audience laughed.
The applause meter scored highest for the singing and dancing fools of Hoboken, who Major Bowes said had “walked right into the hearts of their audience.” He immediately signed them to contracts—fifty dollars a week, plus meals—with the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit to play the country. The boys were to sing at every stop along the way. Traveling by bus and by train, The Hoboken Four joined sixteen other acts, including mouth organists, bell ringers, jug players, yodelers, and tap dancers. Tamby later described them all as “hillbillies and cowboys.”
“We were sponsored by a coffee company [Chase and Sanborn],” said Skelly. “We used to have to play the grocery stores in all the cities where we stopped, and they made us sign our autographs on the company’s coffee cans.”
At first, the boys were thrilled by their new celebrity, but soon the novelty of performing on the road began to wear thin. In a letter to his mother from Vancouver, Frank wrote, “Still going strong on this tour, but there’s no place like Hoboken.” Dolly immediately called The Jersey Observer’s society page and told the editor what Frank had written. “Dolly was always calling the newspapers to get her name in for something,” said photographer Irv Wegen. “Then she