His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [6]
“He got on the platform to sing and I turned to face him,” she said. “I was sucking a lemon from my Scotch, and he got mad at me. He came to the table afterwards and said, ‘Look, young lady. Do you know you almost ruined my song? You suck a lemon and you make me go dry.’
“ ‘I’m going to give you a lemon in your sour face,’ I joked to him. He asked me to dance and then he said, ‘Can I take you out next week?’ He was playing two against the middle with me and Nancy Barbato, but I didn’t know it for a long time. We went together quite a few months, but then, because of his mother, he dropped me. He made me die of humiliation over something. To this day, I think about it.”
Toni Francke was from Lodi, New Jersey, an Italian blue-collar town of tiny clapboard houses, several of which had plaster shrines to the Blessed Virgin Mary on their front porches. Dolly Sinatra, who prized her uptown location in Hoboken, was enraged that her son had reached into such a poor area for a girlfriend.
“After dating Frank awhile,” Toni said, “I learned how to drive, and sometimes I’d pick him up in my car. Dolly would come out and holler at me, ‘Who are you waiting for?’
“ ‘I’m waiting for Frank,’ I’d say.
“ ‘You are after his money and you are nothing but cheap trash from Lodi,’ she’d say.
“Then Frank would come down. He’d feel real embarrassed. He’d put his head down and get in the car, but Dolly would start screaming at him. He used to cry in my car because she didn’t want him to be a singer. She said he was a bum. ‘Go to college. Go to college,’ she’d yell. ‘You would not go to school.’ ‘You want to sing.’ ‘You bring home bad girlfriends.’ She kept it up all the time, always nagging and screaming at him.
“I asked him how he could stand all that hollering. Frank said that she yelled at him all the time. Even when he went for a walk with his dad, she’d scream out the door. ‘Where youse going? Don’t start making him drink beer like you do, do you hear me?’ Frank loved his father then. He really did. He used to say to me, ‘I’d give Ma anything if she’d just leave my old man alone.’
“I said to him, ‘Frank, why don’t you open your mouth to your mother?’
“ ‘I don’t like to say anything,’ he said. ‘She’s my mother.’
“He loved her but he didn’t, if you know what I mean.”
Despite his mother’s strenuous objections, Frank kept going to Lodi. After a few months of steady dating, Toni and her parents invited the Sinatras to dinner.
“Frank told me that Dolly yelled, ‘What do you mean I have to go down there?’ You see, she felt she was better than us.”
Dolly finally relented and went with her husband and her son to the Della Penta home. Frank was looking forward to introducing his father to Toni, but he was worried about his mother kicking up a scene. He didn’t have long to wait.
Tension pulsated on both sides of the front door when the Sinatras arrived and rang the bell. Mr. Della Penta answered, and Dolly walked in first, followed by Marty and Frank. Toni stepped forward and said hello. “You look so nice,” she said. “You have such a nice dress on.” As Dolly was looking around the house, Toni took their coats and hung them up. Here’s how she recalls the occasion:
Frank went into the living room, sat down, and asked Toni to sit beside him. His parents sat down as well. Mrs. Della Penta said she was going into the kitchen to check on dinner. Frank popped up to help her.
“That’s more than he does for me,” said Dolly. “I’m sorry I had a boy. I should have had a girl.”
“You get what God gives you,” said Toni’s father.
“How many children do you have anyway, Mr. Delia Penta?”
He said that he had two daughters and one son, which seemed excessive to Dolly. “My, that’s a big family, isn’t it,” she said.
“Big?” said Toni. “It’s a pleasure. At least you are never alone.”
“If God wanted me to have more kids, I would’ve had them,” Dolly