His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [27]
Josie pointed to the attractive young girl sitting on the porch across the street. “Well, she seems like a nice child,” said Dolly, dismissing the eighteen-year-old girl as harmless.
That summer, Frank wrote to Marion Brush, his Garden Street girlfriend, and sent her a picture of himself, but by then both of them knew their relationship had no future.
“Frankie was the one with the crush, not me,” said Marion. “After the boyfriend-girlfriend business wore off, we became very good friends. I never even thought of marrying him or getting seriously involved because I knew that he didn’t have any money, and as a singer he would be on the road and have a loaf of bread one day and be starving the next. Besides, my mother was the type to instill in me the need for a college education, and I was leaving that fall for Jersey City State Teachers College.
“When Frank came home at the end of that summer, he brought Nancy Barbato to Hoboken and introduced me. She was a nice little Italian girl from Jersey City, but the way Dolly was carrying on, you’d have thought she was a duchess or something. She was not your typical poor little Italian girl. Her dad was a plasterer and her five sisters were married to accountants and lawyers, which Dolly just lapped up. Marrying up like that was so important to her. Nancy certainly was not rich, but she was well off in comparison to Frank, which is why Dolly fussed all over her so.”
Not only had Nancy Barbato’s sisters married well, but her family lived in a freestanding wooden house with a porch. That porch signified a comfortable life-style to Dolly, and certainly one far removed from Hoboken’s Little Italy. The Barbatos did not have to take in tenants as Dolly did. Within one generation, Nancy’s father, Mike, had made enough money to move his family of six daughters and one son into a house with a front porch, which was the kind of worldly success that Dolly respected.
Still, girlfriends worried her. Very much aware of the trouble that adolescent boys could cause, Dolly had been on the alert ever since Frank was fourteen years old. One night, he had stayed out too late with Marie Roemer, and Dolly had sent her husband in a cab to Marie’s house to bring Frankie home after instructing Marty to smack his son a few times so that he’d get the message.
When Frank was still seeing Marion Brush, he had grabbed her by the hand one night to lead her upstairs to his bedroom to show her something. Dolly would not let the youngsters out of her sight.
“She was dirty-minded,” said Marion. “She stood at the bottom of the stairs glaring at us as if we were going to do something terrible in Frank’s room. She didn’t trust him at all. She didn’t say anything, but she looked scared to death when we walked up those stairs. She stood at the bottom, watching to see if we were going to go in his room and close the door. God only knows what she would have done then.”
And it wasn’t only Frank Dolly was watching.
“I still remember what happened to Chit-U when he met a woman in the neighborhood and took her out for a few drinks, wanting to get to know her better,” Marion said. “Dolly found out about it and stormed up to the rooming house where the poor soul lived and started screaming at her to stay away from Chit-U. I thought that rooming house would come down brick by brick. That was the end of Chit-U’s relationship with the woman, but it was more that he was spending his money on her for drinks rather than doing anything sexually with her. After all, Dolly wouldn’t have Chit-U drinking money away with some woman when he could be giving it to her. She was very grasping that way, and in the end Chit-U never married. He lived with Dolly all his life and did her cleaning.”
Though Dolly still didn’t take Frank’s singing seriously, she didn’t want anything to stand in his way, especially a hurried marriage or an unnecessary baby. She had seen some of the women whom Frankie had met since he had started singing and she didn’t like them, especially