His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [30]
“When Nancy told me she was getting married in February. I was quite taken aback,” said Adeline Yacenda. “She and Frankie had been sweetheart kids together and he used to pick Nancy and me up from school in Jersey City. We were good friends then and I knew they hadn’t planned on getting married so soon at all. That wedding was very, very sudden. I guess it was on account of Frank getting caught going out of a lady’s bedroom window. Poor Nancy. It was a nice wedding, though, but not big. It was so sudden, I don’t know how they got it planned as quickly as they did.”
Dolly insisted on giving her future daughter-in-law a bridal shower in her home in Hoboken.
“None of Dolly’s Hoboken friends was invited except for me, and I didn’t know a soul in the place,” said Marion Brush Schreiber. “It was just Nancy and her friends and family. All her sisters and their successful husbands were there, and all the husbands were big, strapping guys at least six-two. Poor Frank looked like a baby around those guys. He had just turned twenty-three, but he seemed like a pathetic kid.”
“I remember Dolly’s shower for Nancy because Frank showed us his nice clothes afterwards,” said Adeline Yacenda. “He opened his closet for everyone.
“He had a terrific personality in those days and could win anyone over. Nancy was very much in love with him. But he did not have an education, which meant a lot at that time. I did not know anyone who didn’t go to school. We knew that he didn’t even go to high school and that he was not educated. As I said, education was important to all of us. But… Frank dressed very well.”
Because the Barbatos were such devout Catholics, the wedding took place at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City with Monsignor Monteleone presiding over a nuptial mass and a double-ring ceremony. The bride wore a long white dress, which was made at home, and walked down the aisle on the arm of her father. “I still remember Nancy coming down that aisle and crying her eyes out,” said Adeline Yacenda. “I always wondered why.”
“It was a small wedding. After all, most of us didn’t have two nickels to make a dime back then,” said Nancy’s friend Andrea Gizza. “But it was nice.… The reception was in Nancy’s family’s house over on Arlington Avenue. There must have been about fifty people at the reception. There was wine and sandwiches and Italian cookie trays. Frank was nervous. I think it was the first wedding he didn’t sing at.”
Noticeably absent among the wedding guests were any of the Sinatras’ Hoboken friends, with the exception of Marion Brush Schreiber. None of Frank’s childhood friends from Little Italy or Park Avenue was there. Nor was his godfather, Frank Garrick, invited. That feud was not to be forgotten even to celebrate a godson’s married future.
“I don’t think Nancy wanted to have much to do with people from Hoboken,” said Marion Brush Schreiber. “When I was leaving the reception at her house, I went up to the bedroom to get my coat, and Frank followed me. We had become such good friends by then. I wished him all the luck and happiness in the world and he kissed me. I’ll never forget him that day. He looked like the saddest man I’d ever seen.”
5
After a four-day honeymoon that was spent mostly driving to and from North Carolina, Frank and Nancy moved into a three-room Jersey City apartment, which they rented for forty-two dollars a month. Their combined monthly income at the time was two hundred dollars: Nancy earned twenty-Five dollars a week as a secretary for American Type Founders in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Frank, who had received a raise at the Rustic Cabin, was making twenty-five dollars a week as a singing waiter. Together they earned more than Marty Sinatra brought home as a fireman.
With 9.4 million Americans unemployed that year, Frank’s and