His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [56]
Frank returned their ardor in full. “I love all those girls the same as they love me,” he said. “I get thousands of letters a week from girls who love me, but not in a sex way. There is nothing degenerate about it. They wear Frankie Sinatra bow ties just like I do and form Frankie Sinatra fan clubs named after my songs. Every time I sing a song, I make love to them. I’m a boudoir singer.”
Most psychologists explained the Swoonatra craze as the result of frustrated love induced by the pressures of war in America in the 1940s—working mothers, absent fathers, and the awful sense of impermanence. But there was something deeper that made these youngsters identify with Frank Sinatra and idolize him.
“Most of his fans are plain, lonely girls from lower-middle class homes,” said E. J. Kahn, Jr., in The New Yorker. “They are dazzled by the life Sinatra leads and wish they could share in it. They insist that they love him, but they do not use the verb in its ordinary sense. As they apply it to him, it is synonymous with ‘worship’ or ‘idealize.’ ”
“Nearly all the bobby-soxers whom I saw at the Paramount gave every appearance of being children of the poor,” wrote Bruce Bliven in The New Republic. “I would guess that these children found in him, for all his youthfulness, something of a father image. And beyond that, he represents a dream of what they themselves might conceivably do or become. He earns a million a year, and yet he talks their language; he is just a kid from Hoboken who got the breaks. In everything he says and does, he aligns himself with the youngsters and against the adult world. It is always ‘we’ and never ‘you.’ ”
Years later, Sinatra talked about his bobby-soxer period and its effect on him: “I was—I was everything. Happy, I don’t know. I wasn’t unhappy, let’s put it that way. I never had it so good. Sometimes I wonder whether anybody ever had it like I had it, before or since. It was the darndest thing, wasn’t it? But I was too busy ever to know whether I was happy, or even to ask myself. I can’t remember for a long time even taking time out to think.”
Although Frank’s appeal was primarily to women, there were a few male fans, but none so devoted as teenager Joey “GiGi” Lissa of Hoboken, who had idolized Frank ever since he saw him walking into the Cat’s Meow poolroom in 1938 wearing a white trench coat.
Lissa’s job was to clean Dolly Sinatra’s house—a job it would seem every kid in Hoboken had at some time or other.
“When he was singing in New York, he always stopped at his mother’s place before he went home to his wife, and one time I was cleaning Dolly’s house when Frank walked in,” Lissa said. “I was only fourteen years old, but he gave me his tie. It was maroon with yellow flowers. He used to let me walk with him up to the Crystal Ballroom and hold his glass. When I was in the service on Guam I robbed the USO of all its Frank Sinatra records and then when I had the midnight watch on my gunboat, I would be the mystery midnight disc jockey, and open all the phones to play Sinatra’s music. All the ships in the fleet heard it and sometimes the officers came in and looked, but they always left me alone. Even Tokyo Rose mentioned it over the radio. ‘We know who the mystery midnight disc jockey is playing all those Sinatra records,’ she said.”
Sinatra’s female fans followed him like the Pied Piper to his performances and radio sessions for Your Hit Parade. They visited his white clapboard house on Lawrence Avenue in Hasbrouck Heights, sometimes standing for hours simply to stare at the windows. Other times, they rang the doorbell, knowing that Big Nancy would invite them in for Coke and cookies, and patiently answer all their questions about Frankie’s favorite foods, favorite colors, favorite hobbies. They begged her for the clothespins that held his laundry on the line in the backyard, and they were thrilled when she allowed them to walk her to the store and to help decide what to feed Frankie for dinner. They seemed to know