His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [26]
“We were the rowdies of the lot,” said Skelly. “Me and Prince were the clowns, Fred was the fighter, and Frank was the serious one. That’s the reason he got where he did.
“They tried to keep us like baseball players, making us go to bed before eleven o’clock, and all that. But we’d sneak out and get caught, or we were always late for the shows.”
“They wanted to fire us at least twenty times,” said Tamby.
One such time was in San Diego, when the group was singing “Shine” and Frank, Skelly, and Patty Prince started giggling. Tamby, the boss, slugged anyone who got out of line and threatened to kill him if they didn’t stop. Convulsed now and unable to sing, the trio ran offstage, leaving Tamby alone. He apologized to the audience as Major Bowes brought the curtain down. The four performers went into their dressing room and waited for the Major to come in and fire them. Tamby was furious and lunged at Frank, yelling, “Are you crazy?” Frank, still giggling, said, “I can’t help it. You can’t keep me from laughing onstage. That’s my sense of humor.”
“Well, here’s my sense of humor,” screamed Tamby, smashing his huge fist into Frank’s face and knocking him off a wardrobe trunk into a heap on the floor.
“After I hit him, it took us nearly an hour to wake him up,” said Tamby, “but when he came to, I said, ‘Frank, now you know my sense of humor.’ ”
Frank picked himself off the floor, glared at Tamby, and walked out of the room.
As the lead singer of The Hoboken Four, Frank stood out as the best in the group. He soon became the star of the entire traveling unit, getting a lot of attention from Major Bowes and the other executives running the tour. Every time he growled in a song or crooned a solo, the girls besieged him backstage, which made Tamby and Skelly extremely jealous.
“They would be asked to sign an autograph or two, but Frank was practically torn apart,” said Patty Prince many years later. “He’d have to fight off the nicest women you’ve ever seen.
“That’s when Tamby and Skelly started getting in the habit of beating Frank every once in a while, whenever they got mad at something and had to take it out on someone. It happened often enough so that you could call it abuse. They abused Frank, and it happened most often when Frank went off with some woman after the show and these two no-talents had to go to their rooms alone.
“Sometimes it got pretty bad for Frank. After all, he was a skinny little guy and the two picking on him were older and bigger, truck drivers back home, and Frank couldn’t fight back. Once, we were sitting in a diner, stretched in a line along the counter. Frank leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Why don’t you beat me, too, and make it unanimous?’ I shrugged him off. I felt real bad about it… but what could I have done back then?”
It was still only 1935 when, unwilling to take the beatings any longer, Frank left the tour in Columbus, Ohio, and returned to Hoboken, while Tamby, Skelly, and Patty Prince continued with Major Bowes as The Hoboken Trio. Dolly didn’t call the newspaper when Frank returned home, but she told her friends that he was coming back because he was homesick and missed Nancy Barbato, his new girlfriend from Jersey City.
The previous summer he had gone to Long Branch, New Jersey, to stay with his aunt, Josephine Monaco. During that time, Frank had worked as an occasional chauffeur for the Cardinale family of Hoboken, driving the car for the younger children.
“Frank used to drive us crazy playing the ukulele on the porch all the time,” said his aunt. “He would sit there and play, kind of lonesome. Then one day I noticed him talking to a pretty little dark-haired girl who was living across the street for the summer. She was Nancy Barbato, the daughter of Mike Barbato, a plasterer from Jersey City.”
When Dolly and Marty arrived for a weekend that summer, Josie told them that Frankie had a girlfriend. Marty was indifferent. Dolly, ever pragmatic,