His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [38]
“Although it was an unheard-of thing to do in 1940, Frank and Alora lived together when he was in California. She stayed with him at the Hollywood Plaza, which is where the band was staying.”
Back in Jersey City taking care of their new baby, Nancy Sinatra had no idea of what was going on. She called Frank frequently, but usually ended up talking to Nick Sevano or Hank Sanicola, who tried to allay her fears with all sorts of creative stories about how tired and bored everyone was working at night and filming all day. By the time Frank returned home, he was besotted with Alora Gooding and carried her picture in his wallet. His wife soon found it.
“Sometimes I wondered if Frank did that kind of thing on purpose just to get caught,” Nick Sevano said. “When Nancy confronted him with the photograph and demanded to know who the beautiful blonde was, he said, ‘Oh, that. She’s just a fan, a kid who was hanging around the band and wanted me to have her picture.’ I couldn’t believe it when he said that. Nancy wasn’t stupid, but what could she do?”
A procession of women followed Alora Gooding, including a sixteen-year-old named Rita Maritt, who said she was fresh from a convent school when the twenty-five-year-old singer first seduced her.
“I remember when he took me to bed and told me stories about his childhood—how he would have to steal milk bottles to get the money to feed his family,” she recalled. “He said that when he was a little boy, he would stand on the street corners in Hoboken singing songs to people, who threw coins at him.”
Between the touch of Hollywood glamour and the teenager was a Long Island debutante who looked like Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. She lived on an estate in Great Neck with nine acres fronting on Manhasset Bay and separate quarters for the maids and butlers. Her father was an oil baron, and she and her prep school friends loved the big bands. Every week they climbed into their shiny new cars to seek out the swinging sounds of Glenn Miller at the Glen Island Casino or Benny Goodman in the Manhattan Room.
“That’s how I first met Frank,” said Mary Lou Watts. “I’d gone with a date to hear Tommy Dorsey at the Astor Roof, and I went up to say hello to the trumpeter, Bunny Berrigan. He introduced me to Frank, and we became very good friends.”
Frank was immediately beguiled by this Episcopalian princess from America’s upper class. “She was some kind of untouchable thing to him,” said Nick Sevano. “He couldn’t reach that high, not where he came from. With a highfalutin family like hers, he was definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. They did not acknowledge him, of course, but that didn’t make any difference to Frank. He called Mary Lou constantly and saw her all the time. He cared a great deal for her.”
Mary Lou attended the Mount Vernon School for Girls in Washington, D.G., which she described as a private finishing school of sorts that taught one hundred and fifty young women how to be ladies.
“It was comparable to the first year of junior college, and a very strict establishment,” she said. “We had to write down who we were going out with, and when we had dates, who came to see us. We had to introduce them to everybody, and bring them into one of the small living rooms to sit down. The doors to these rooms had to be open at all times. When Frank visited me, I always signed him in as Frank Steel because I didn’t want the other girls mooning around. I knew they’d go in and look in the book and come out screaming and shrieking and all that kind of stuff if they saw his name.
“One weekend he came on a Sunday night and he was going to go to chapel with me. Afterwards, we were sitting in one of the little rooms, and some girls walked by who had just come from a prom in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Dorsey band had played. I could see them looking in and going ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah’; then they ran up the stairs, and fifteen minutes later, three quarters