Francesco found work, and soon had enough confidence to start sending for his family. His eldest son, Isidor, joined him in America, and Salvatore, just fifteen and declaring himself a shoemaker like his father, arrived in 1902. Rosa arrived at Christmas the following year, accompanied by Antonino, age nine, and their two daughters, Angelina and Dorotea, who were younger. Antonino—Anthony Martin or Marty, as he would become in America—was to father the greatest popular singer of the century.
The Statue of Liberty smiled, Frank Sinatra would say in an emotional moment forty years later, when his father “took his first step on Liberty’s soil.” For many Italian newcomers, however, the smile proved illusory.
IN FRANCESCO’S DAY, Italian immigrants were greeted with widespread hostility. They were at the bottom of the heap in New York, ostracized by those who had arrived before them, by the Germans and the Irish especially. Italians were said to be dirty, ignorant, and criminal, and were vilified as “wops,” “dagos,” “guineas.” Early in the twentieth century, when blacks were being lynched in the South, some Americans considered Italians—immigrants from southern Italy and Sicily especially—“not even white.” The Ku Klux Klan railed against them. They found themselves excluded from churches used by other ethnic groups, consigned to menial work, and persecuted by the police.
The accusation of criminality had some basis in fact. Mafia fugitives from Sicily had by then been active in the United States for some years. Palermo’s mob chieftain Don Vito, describing himself to immigration officials as “a dealer,” arrived from Europe the year after Francesco and during a two-year stay laid the foundation of what would eventually become the American Mafia.
To oppressed Sicilian immigrants, Vito and his kind were the uomini rispettati who had ruled the roost back home. They offered protection, loaned money, made many things possible—at a price. They extorted money from shopkeepers and workmen, and those who did not cooperate got hurt. To some immigrants, joining the ranks of the criminals was more attractive than legitimate work. “I realized Italians were considered dirt, the scum of the earth,” recalled “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, the son of a Calabrian tailor who was to become a senior American mafioso. “I quit . . . went the other way.”
Lucky Luciano, who arrived in America from Lercara Friddi several years after the Sinatras, made the same choice. “We was surrounded by crooks,” he recalled of his childhood years on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, “and plenty of them were guys who were supposed to be legit. . . . All of them was stealin’ from somebody. And we had the real pros, the rich Dons from the old country, with their big black cars and mustaches to match. . . . The only thing is, we knew they was rich, and rich was what counted.”
Francesco, for his part, struggled. Many Italians were cobblers, apparently too many, for he found work as a boilermaker. He later landed a job at the American Pencil Company that paid $11 a week (about $200 today), and stayed with the company for seventeen years. Rosa, like Francesco already well into her forties, raised their children and eventually opened a small grocery. By that time, the couple had long since left New York City for the town now inseparably linked with the name Sinatra—Hoboken.
In the nineteenth century the town had been a resort for opulent New Yorkers like the Vanderbilts and the Astors. By the time the Sinatras arrived, however, it had become a grubby industrial town of sixty thousand people. Its waterfront, on the Hudson River, served oceangoing ships and backed onto a jumble of factories and railroad yards. The Irish ran the city, held the plum jobs, occupied the best housing. Italian newcomers, crammed into a few mean streets to the west, made the best of it in tenements.
The Italians stayed in their own territory, in part because they were unwelcome elsewhere and in part because it suited them. In the town’s Little Italy they had the comfort of their own church and their own customs and rules, rules enforced by their own criminal protectors. Sicilians, especially, tended to gravitate to streets settled by earlier arrivals from their hometowns and villages. Close relatives often lived on the same block or even in the same building.
Hoboken was a tough town, and Italians straying into Irish territory after dark invited violent attack. Many men in the Italian section owned firearms, mostly antiquated handguns, and in 1909 some of them fought a battle against the Irish-dominated police force. The police, summoned to the scene of a fracas on Monroe Street—an Italian child had been killed in an accident involving other Italians—came under heavy fire. “Excited Italians armed with revolvers,” the New York Times reported, “were lurking behind windows and doors taking pot shots at the police. . . . A hundred or more shots were fired, and at a late hour last night quiet had not been entirely restored.”
Francesco and Rosa raised their five children in Hoboken through a decade and more of freezing winters and sweltering summers. They had no central heating and, of course, no air-conditioning. Isidor worked with his parents in their grocery. Salvatore became a baker. Marty, who dropped out of school when he was ten or eleven, could neither read nor write nor speak much English. He turned fifteen the month of the Italian immigrants’ battle with the police.
Marty was a small fellow, “the size of a mushroom,” one acquaintance said. He soon had a prematurely receding hairline and, perhaps to compensate for his lack of stature, sported multiple tattoos. He was dogged by chronic asthma. Relatives recalled him as having been a gentle character, most of the time, but he was prone to long brooding silences and had an explosive temper. He also liked to drink.
Following in the steps of his father and his brother Salvatore, Marty started out as an apprentice shoemaker. For years, though, he had no steady job. At one point, when he was listing his occupation as “chauffeur, ” he was involved in a fatal accident. After running over and killing a five-year-old child on Newark Street, near the docks, Marty simply drove away. Tried for manslaughter, he told the court he had been “unnerved” and lost his head, and was acquitted. He also got into trouble for receiving stolen goods.
For a while he fought professionally, as a bantamweight. He called himself Marty O’Brien in the ring, after his sponsor, an Irishman from Philadelphia. Italian boxers often used Irish names to make themselves acceptable to a wider public. It was probably through a fellow prizefighter, Dominick “Champ” Garaventa, that he met the woman who was to become Frank Sinatra’s mother.
Dolly Garaventa, one of Dominick’s eight siblings, was also an immigrant—from northern Italy. Her father, a peasant from Rossi, a hamlet near Genoa, had brought his wife and children to the United States before the turn of the century. If he had high hopes for his sons, however, he was sorely disappointed.
Dominick was involved in bootlegging, and got arrested after a shooting incident involving his brother Lawrence. Lawrence, known as “Babe” because he was the youngest of the brood, turned out to be the worst of the lot. Also a boxer, he was arrested more than twenty times, convicted of loan-sharking and pulled in for bootlegging offenses and for two armed holdups that resulted in murder. Another brother, Gustavo, was arrested several times for running numbers.
Dolly, more properly Natalina, or Natalie, Garaventa, had been born the day after Christmas in 1896. She had blue eyes and light skin and, as a young woman, strawberry blond hair. Though tiny, she was formidable even as a teenager. Women were not allowed to attend fights, but Dolly dressed as a boy to see Marty Sinatra box. She talked tough—her foul mouth became legendary—and nonstop. She never forgot or forgave a perceived offense. She was literate, spoke fluent English, and could get by in several Italian dialects. She was a good organizer, and at some point trained as a nurse. She could also sing, a talent inherited from her father. She sang popular songs and operatic arias at weddings and family affairs, and at Hoboken’s Clam Broth House—while standing on a table.
Marty Sinatra met Dolly in 1912 when he was eighteen and she sixteen. He could sing, too, and serenaded her with a sentimental ditty called “You Remind Me of the Girl Who Used to Go to School with Me.”
Dolly was brainier, bossy, and domineering, but love flowered. Defying opposition from her parents, she and Marty ran away—all of two miles—to Jersey City, where they were married at city hall on Valentine’s Day 1913. Afterward, they returned home, made up with their families, and later married again in church.
They rented an apartment at 415 Monroe Street, on the block where four years earlier their fellow Italians had fought with the police. Salvatore Sinatra—he now called himself Charlie—and his wife moved in across the hall. Publicists would one day describe the building as having been a slum tenement. In fact it was a modern wood frame structure, four stories over a cellar, divided into eight apartments. There was no hot water and two families shared the single toilet on each floor, but in those days that was nothing out of the ordinary. Each family had three rooms, plus a kitchen with a stove. Dolly’s brother Dominick remembered it as “a pretty good, lower-middle-class neighborhood.”
WHILE DOLLY AND MARTY found each other, tied the knot, and set up house, the world had gone on turning. The Titanic was sunk by the iceberg. Woodrow Wilson was installed as president, avoiding as best he could a demonstration in Washington by women demanding the right to vote. A French aviator flew over the Mediterranean past Sicily, taking his airplane farther over water than any man before him. The Panama Canal opened, joining the Atlantic to the Pacific. Henry Ford established a “moving assembly line” to build automobiles. Einstein refined his Theory of Relativity. Europe was engulfed by war, though for the time being the United States was staying out of it.
There was something else. Wind-up Victrolas—phonographs— were now on the market and easily available. For the first time, Americans could listen to music on rapidly spinning discs called records.
These seismic tremors impinged little on the newlyweds, though Dolly, who would one day immerse herself in local politics, may have cheered for the suffragettes protesting in the capital. For the time being, though, she was preoccupied, and so was Marty. Brides, especially brides with Sicilian husbands, were supposed to get pregnant.
3
The Only Child
WE WERE MARRIED for a long time,” Dolly was to recall, “and we didn’t think we were going to have any babies.” Then in early 1915, after a wait of two years, she did become pregnant. She hoped for a girl.
The pains came in the second week of December. Midwives plodded through snow-covered streets to reach the Sinatra apartment, then summoned a doctor. Sprawled on the kitchen table, Dolly was in trouble. She was less than five feet tall and weighed just ninety pounds, and the baby was enormous. She was in agony.
Other women crowded around, shouting advice. There was Dolly’s mother, Rosa, her sister Josie, and a neighbor from across the street. The labor was not progressing and the patient was becoming feeble. Fearing for Dolly’s life, the doctor opted for forceps. The baby was literally torn from the birth canal, bleeding at the head and neck. It was not the girl Dolly had hoped for but a boy weighing thirteen and a half pounds, and he appeared to be dead.
“I don’t think he’ll live,” Josie remembered the doctor muttering. “Let’s take care of the mother.” Then one of the women—Dolly’s mother is usually given the credit—thought to hold the huge infant under the cold-water tap. He spluttered, was tapped on the back with the palm of a hand, and began to squall.
The trauma left Dolly unable to bear more children. The child’s left earlobe, cheek, and part of his neck, torn by the doctor’s forceps, would be scarred for the rest of his life. As an adult he would use makeup on occasion to cover the damage. A perforated eardrum, discovered far in the future, may also have been a result of the birth.
The grown man would talk publicly of his gratitude at having been revived. Privately, he had trouble accepting what he learned about the circumstances of his birth. At age eleven, he reportedly tried to attack the doctor who had delivered him. As an adult, he would astonish one of his lovers with an irrational outburst of resentment. “They weren’t thinking about me,” he said bitterly, “they were just thinking about my mother. They just kind of ripped me out and tossed me aside.”
The birth certificate, registered with the state of New Jersey on December 17, 1915, gave the newborn’s name as “Frank Sinestro.” “Sinestro” was a clerk’s mistake, but the “Frank” made sense. It is the Italian custom to name a firstborn child after a paternal grandparent, in this case Francesco. A quarter of a century later, when the grown child had become a celebrity, the name would be reregistered as “Francis A. Sinatra.” The “A.,” the world was told, stood for “Albert.”
“God loves you,” family elders told the boy; “he saved you for something. You’re meant to be somebody.”
A baby photograph of Frank Sinatra, taken in his birthday suit against a painted backdrop of a rural scene, shows a plump child. “It wasn’t until he was four or five that he got to be real skinny,” recalled his aunt Josie. A tinted print that has been published shows him swaddled against the cold in his mother’s arms, a cap hiding the scarred left side of his head. Nineteen-year-old Dolly looks as though she is finding it hard to smile, and Frank—Frankie, as he would be called until early adulthood—appears to be looking at her doubtfully.
That old family snapshot now seems symbolic of the childhood that followed. Dolly had a strange concept of motherhood, and Frank had all the problems of an only child and more. Having hoped for a girl, she had bought pink baby clothes, and that is what he wore. “I didn’t care,” she recalled. Later, she got her mother to make him Little Lord Fauntleroy suits. Frank played with dolls and was “a little bit of a sissy” far longer than is usual, according to a childhood acquaintance.
Staying at home with the baby was never a priority for Dolly. Frank spent most of his infancy being minded either by his grandfather Francesco or by his maternal grandmother. In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Marty was exempted from the draft as a man with a dependent family. Dolly, however, volunteered for overseas service as a nurse. When her offer was not accepted, she went to work as a chocolate dipper in a candy store.
Dolly’s sights were set higher than that. She became a midwife and plunged into local politics, both activities that made her a controversial figure. In 1919, in the final months of the campaign for women’s suffrage, she was one of a number of women who chained themselves to the railings at Hoboken city hall. After the suffrage struggle was won, still in her twenties, she became a Democratic ward leader. “I was asked to run because I spoke all the dialects,” she recalled.
When the Irish city bosses started to solicit Italian immigrant votes, they needed someone with influence in the neighborhood. Dolly won that influence by getting people jobs, securing welfare checks for the needy, giving advice on health problems, getting bags of coal distributed in the winter. “She was like a godmother,” said Anthony Petrozelli, who grew up on Monroe Street. “They respected her. She was strong, and she didn’t give a damn about nothing.”
The politicians Dolly worked for ruled Hoboken and Jersey City for thirty years, a period infamous for corruption and thuggery. She was close to two mayors of the period, both notorious characters, and spent her spare time, in the words of her granddaughter Tina, “buying votes for the local Democratic machine.”
Dolly wanted to get her husband into politics, too, but, as her niece Rose Paldino put it, “Marty wasn’t smart enough.” At home, he would tease his wife by pretending to favor the Republicans, and she would retaliate by refusing to cook. Frank was soon pressed into carrying placards for the Democrats. He grew up supporting the Democrats and would continue to do so until he was in his fifties.
Women in the Italian neighborhood knew about Dolly because of the entry in the city directory that read, in bold print: “DELLA SINATRA, Maternity Nurse and Midwife—Phone Hoboken 985.” Writing about the family years later, Kitty Kelley made much of the fact that Sinatra’s mother performed abortions, at a time when the procedure was an illegal, shameful affair. Dolly was arrested severa
l times for performing abortions and convicted twice. Some knew her as “Hatpin Dolly,” and her reputation would one day cause her son to be barred from performing in a local Catholic church.
Others were less condemnatory. “If someone got themselves pregnant by mistake it was a big disgrace,” Petrozelli said, “so their mother called Dolly and begged her: ‘Please, before my husband finds out, you’ve got to do something.’ She did. No money involved, she just did it out of her own heart.” Sinatra’s mother delivered more babies than she performed abortions, others maintained, and sometimes did not charge for her services.
While Dolly worked and wheeled and dealed she continued to farm Frank out to relatives and neighbors. When not with Francesco or Dolly’s mother, or one of her sisters, he might be with an old Jewish lady, Mrs. Golden, or a teenage baby-sitter, Rose Carrier. Rose took Frank to the movies, still silent then. Mrs. Golden fed him coffee cake and apples, and gave him an inscribed Jewish charm that he came to treasure. One day, in her memory, he would pledge to buy a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of Israel bonds. Frank picked up more Yiddish from Mrs. Golden, it seems, than he did Italian from close relatives. He had some understanding of Italian, but never learned to speak it well.
Dolly tried to make up for her absences by showering her son with toys, more bikes than he needed, and holidays in the Catskills every summer. She dressed Frank in clothes so smart that his appearance became something of a local legend. “She would have had me wear velvet pants, I think,” he said, looking back, “except that in that neighborhood I would have gotten killed.” As he grew older and Dolly a little richer, Frank even had his own charge account at Geismar’s, the local department store.