His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [29]
“Well, Harry had heard Frankie sing, and he must have noticed the start of that quality which Frankie later learned to bring out so effectively. So Harry said he’d fix that—that I was to tell Frankie he was as good as hired. That’s how it happened. So many people claim to have started Frankie professionally, but the truth is it was actually Harry Steeper.”
From the minute Frank started at the Rustic Cabin, he felt that he was destined for success.
“He told me and my brother that he was going to be so big that no one could ever touch him,” said Fran Capone Ciriello of Hoboken. “ ‘Yeah, sure, Frankie. Sure you are,’ we’d say. No one thought he’d ever make it, except for him, that is.”
Even Dolly was dubious. “His salary was only fifteen dollars a week, and I used to give him practically twice that so he could pick up the tabs for his friends when they dropped in,” she said. “When he got a five-dollar raise, I told him, ‘This isn’t getting me anywhere. It would be cheaper for me to keep you at home.’ ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘it’s going to roll in someday. I’m going to be big time.’ He always believed that. But I said, ‘Yeah, it’s going to roll in and you’re going to roll out.’ ”
“I worked a lot of club dates with Frank,” said Sam Lefaso, a Jersey City musician. “He was such a nuisance, hogging the mike all the time and singing every chorus when he was only supposed to do an occasional vocal. Finally, we started taking the mike away from him. We ridiculed him because he just wasn’t that good. Even though he was singing at the Rustic Cabin, he didn’t seem to have any talent. No style whatsoever. Until he started going to a vocal coach, he was singing in a tight, high voice and sounded awful.
“But when we’d tell him how bad he was, he’d get furious and start cursing and swearing at us. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he’d yell. ‘You bastards wait. You just wait. One of these days, you’re going to pay to hear me sing. You just wait.’ ”
While Frank yelled at the musicians, Dolly yelled even louder at Frank when he started dating Toni Francke.
After Toni dropped her charges against Frank, Dolly decided that he should marry Nancy Barbato as soon as possible. Despite the newspaper publicity about his arrests, Dolly knew that Nancy was very much in love with him and wanted to marry Frank as much as Dolly now wanted her to. She felt that her son was too vulnerable to women like Toni. She wanted him to be married and settled down.
Frank was not enthusiastic about getting married. After the uproar with Toni, he had told Nancy that he didn’t want any woman getting in the way of his ambition. “I’m going to the top,” he said, “and I don’t want anyone dragging on my neck.”
Nancy promised never to get in his way, and the wedding was set for February 4, 1939.
Dolly asked him what he was going to give Nancy for an engagement present inasmuch as he had no money. It had cost fifteen hundred dollars to get him out of jail after the first arrest and five hundred after the second arrest. Frank said that maybe he could save up for something. Dolly said that would take years. “Well,” he said, “maybe I could give her your diamond ring.” Dolly sputtered for a few moments about how she had just finished making payments on the ring and that it was so expensive, but in the end she handed it over.
“The only reason Frank married Nancy is because Dolly made him do it,” said Marion Brush Schreiber. “She really pushed him into that one fast.”
Toni Francke was convinced that they were forced to marry. After all, Frank had told her Nancy was pregnant. Some of Nancy’s friends suspected as much when they received the abrupt announcement