His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [7]
Frank walked into the room. “Did you say God, Ma? I haven’t seen you go to church in quite a while.”
They had barely sat down to dinner when Dolly turned to Mr. Della Penta and said, “Don’t you think these kids are kind of young to be going around together?”
Frank looked at him and said, “I care for your daughter.”
“It’s only puppy play,” said Dolly.
“Mom, I’m a twenty-two-year-old man,” said Frank. “Besides, you got married young.”
Dolly persisted. “I don’t want these kids to get married. Frankie has to go to school first.”
“I quit school, and you know it,” said Frank.
“You what?” said Toni, who thought Frank was a high-school graduate. “When did you quit?”
“Now you know,” said Frank. “You don’t have to read it in the papers with Ma around, do you?”
“I don’t want Toni to go with him,” said Dolly. “They’re too young. She’ll keep Frankie from being a big singer. I want him to be a star.”
Mr. Della Penta looked at Marty, who had not said a word. “Are you against this too?”
Turning to Dolly, Marty said, “I’ve had it. She’s a fine girl. Just because she has Italian grandparents, does that mean she is so bad? Your parents did not like the idea of me, but you did it anyway, so why can’t Frankie do what he wants?”
“Shut your goddamned mouth,” said Dolly.
“Yeah, if someone’s not Irish, you don’t want me to have anything to do with them,” said Frank.
Rose Della Penta left the room, and Toni’s brother turned to Dolly. “Your son came after my sister,” he said. “She didn’t go after Frank.”
“I don’t care,” said Dolly. “I don’t want them going around together anymore.”
Mr. Della Penta went into the kitchen to join his wife. Frank turned to his mother. “You should not have come. You’re making Mr. and Mrs. Della Penta feel bad,” he said.
Toni got up from the table to serve dessert. “Would you care for some fruit?”
“Oh, no,” said Dolly. “I’m on a diet.” Then she asked to go to the bathroom. Toni showed her where it was, saying, “Watch yourself coming down the steps.”
“Oh, I can watch myself, don’t you ever worry about that, young lady,” said Dolly.
The dinner ended with Frank’s telling his parents to go home without him because Toni would drive him back later.
“You have to get your rest, Frankie,” said his mother. “You can’t stay out late.”
“Don’t worry, Ma. I’ll be home later.”
“I don’t like that. What time will you be back? I worry. I don’t sleep right.”
Marty looked at her and said, “You do okay. I’m the one who gets up at night.”
Dolly never called to thank the Delia Pentas for the macaroni dinner, nor did she ever invite them to Hoboken to have dinner at her house on Garden Street.
Frank told Toni not to take his mother’s insults personally. “It’s not just you,” he said. “It’s any girl I go with. No matter who the girl is, my mother always has something to say.”
In the summer of 1938, Frank asked Toni to go steady and gave her a small diamond ring. A few days later, she said, he proposed in his car, saying, “I got to make more money, but I’m going to marry you, Toni.”
He teased her because she wouldn’t go to bed with him, saying that other girls treated their boyfriends better than she treated him.
“I’m not that type,” Toni recalls.
“What have you got to lose?”
“What do you mean? If you marry me, okay, but otherwise you can’t touch me until you marry me.”
“Why, you made of gold or something?”
After a few nights of such sparring, Toni softened, convinced she would eventually get a divorce and marry Frank. She said she had known him a long time and felt good about him.
“Frank didn’t seem like he had been to bed with anyone before,” she said later. “He was kind of shy. He wasn’t all that good because he was so thin. But he was very gentle with me. He did not grab me the first night. He could have but he didn’t. We had gone to a big hotel outside of town with a bunch of other couples. We never slept together at my house. We always went to hotels, and Frank registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra. He sang to me in bed.”
Within six weeks, Toni was pregnant. When she broke the news to Frank, he did not