His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [9]
“You going to take me out?” he asked when he saw her.
“No,” said Toni. “I just brought you a sandwich.”
“I can’t take it no more,” said Frank, starting to cry.
“I don’t see your girlfriend around here to help you.”
“Please, Toni. Don’t do this to me,” he said, sobbing.
“You embarrassed me, Frank. You humiliated me. What makes your mother, an abortionist, think she is better than me? You have to apologize to me and your mother has to apologize.”
Dolly was willing to promise anything to get her son out of jail, so Toni signed the papers withdrawing her charges against Frank.
Three weeks later, no one had yet apologized to her. When Frank did not call, Toni was convinced that it was his mother’s fault, so she drove to Hoboken “to have it out with that awful Dolly.”
“I went to her house on Garden Street and said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Your lousy son is so thin. Don’t you ever feed him or don’t he want to stay home with you long enough to eat?’ She got so mad she threw me down the cellar. But I wasn’t scared. The next-door neighbors heard all the screaming, and Frank’s aunts recognized my car in the front of the house and came over yelling at Dolly not to hurt me.”
Within minutes, the police arrived, as did Toni’s grandfather, Anthony Della Penta.
“This nut is keeping my granddaughter in the cellar,” the old man said.
The police asked Dolly why she had Toni locked up. “She’s running with my son and I don’t like it. She’s caused a big disturbance here and I want her arrested like she arrested my son,” said Dolly.
Detective Sergeant John Reynolds arrested Toni, who was given a suspended sentence for disorderly conduct. The next day, December 22, 1938, Toni swore out her second warrant for Frank’s arrest, this time charging him with adultery.
But before Frank’s hearing, Toni’s grandfather persuaded her to drop the charges and forget Frank’s songs of love. He had looked up Dolly’s arrest record and did not want to be related to her even by marriage. “How bad you need a boyfriend to have one with a mother who kills babies?” he asked her.
“It took me fourteen years to get married again after Frank,” she said many years later. “I don’t hate him for what he did to me. He was in a hole at the time and had to do what his mother said. It was really her fault. She ran his life.”
Dolly Sinatra also ran part of Hoboken, a mile-square city of seventy thousand people, which had long since lost its luster as a resort for New York’s monied socialites. From the turn of the century on, the lush landscape had been devoured by concrete foundries and wooden tenements to accommodate the waves of immigrants who had come in search of a dream.
The Germans had arrived first and in time had become prosperous merchants who lived in mansions high on the hill of Castle Point, overlooking the Hudson River. Their lawns stretched to the banks of the river, where their view spanned the skyline of Manhattan. They sent their daughters away to finishing schools while their sons stayed home to attend the Stevens Institute of Technology, the oldest college of mechanical engineering in the country.
Next had come the Irish, who nestled snugly in the middle of town, where they were welcomed by the Catholic church and soon dominated the police force and the fire department.
At the bottom of the heap were the Italians, who lived on the west side of town, packed into five-story wooden tenements. Little Italy was the dirty downtown area west of Willow Avenue, where the air smelled of the garlic and hunks of provolone hung in the front windows of groceries alongside strings of spicy sausage and garlands of red peppers. Old Sicilian women wearing black dresses, black stockings, and black shawls