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“She showed me a few of the letters,” said Marion Brush, “but Frank never knew because Dolly threw them away.”

When Frank had begun seeing Nancy Barbato, Dolly was naturally suspicious. But after scrutiny, she had decided that this quiet little girl who came from a devout Catholic family and was so devoted to her son would not pose any problems. Nancy understood how much singing meant to Frankie.

Since leaving The Hoboken Four, Frank had been singing at every Italian wedding and Irish political rally in town. He sang at the ladies’ auxiliaries and at Elks Club meetings for two dollars a night. He sang in Hoboken social clubs like The Cat’s Meow and The Comedy Club and on local radio stations like WAAT in Jersey City at no charge. He haunted music companies in New York trying to get auditions. He badgered song pluggers for professional copies of sheet music. He hounded radio stations for air time. He followed musicians and begged to carry their instruments so he could get into the hall free and, once inside, sing with the orchestra.

At one point, he thought he might have a better chance for success if he changed his name when he sang outside of Hoboken, so he appeared as Frankie Trent. The name change lasted as long as it took Dolly to find out about it. If he was going to accomplish anything in life and bring honor to his parents, he had better, by God, do it with the family name—either O’Brien or Sinatra, preferably Sinatra.

Around this time, Frank went to a New York vocal coach, John Quinlan, for forty-five-minute voice lessons costing one dollar, but the lessons seemed to be as much diction as music. “He talked different,” Tamby said. “He didn’t talk Hoboken anymore. He sounded like some Englishman or something. I asked him about it, and he told me he took lessons from some professor or something.”

Impressed with Frank’s range, the vocal coach said: “He has far more voice than people think he has. He can vocalize to a B flat on top in full voice, and he doesn’t need a mike either. Frank is over-particular and fussy about his work. But he has a great brain—for what he is doing. He has his faults. We all have.” The relationship ended a few years later when Quinlan suffered a heart attack and could not accompany Sinatra to California. “I guess Frank didn’t understand,” he said. “He hasn’t spoken to me since.”

Years later Sinatra said, “I never had a vocal lesson—a real one—except to work with a coach a few times on vocal calisthenics to help the throat grow and add a couple of notes on the top and spread the bottom.”

In 1938, Frank heard about an opening at the Rustic Cabin, a small-time roadhouse along Route 9W above the Jersey Palisades. The owner, Harry Nichols, was looking for a singing waiter who would act as master of ceremonies and introduce the dance selections of Harold Arden’s band. The pay was only fifteen dollars a week, but the roadhouse had a wire—direct radio line—to WNEW in New York City, and once a week the band and the singer were heard on the Saturday Dance Parade broadcast. What better way to be heard by a big-time band leader? Frank immediately arranged for an audition. The problem was Harold Arden, who remembered Frank from the days he chauffeured The Three Flashes. He hadn’t liked him then, and he didn’t like him any better after his audition.

Dejected, Frank went home and told his mother about the opening.

“But the bandleader doesn’t like me,” he said.

“That’s just fine,” said Dolly. “I won’t have you staying out until all hours, singing in one of those night clubs.”

“Frankie just looked at me,” Dolly told a reporter a few years later, “and he didn’t say a word. He took his dog, Girlie, in his arms and he went up to his room. Then I heard him sobbing.”

To have her son in tears was too much for Mama Sinatra.

“I stood it for a couple of hours, and I suppose I realized then, for the first time, what singing really meant to Frankie,” she said. “So I got on the phone and I called Harry Steeper, who was mayor of North Bergen, president