 | |
 |
• If you haven’t heard of The Voice, you simply don’t know. You’re not “with it,” as the kids say. You are, in a word, obsolete. At twenty-six, this skinny, big-eyed youngster with the ever-so-slightly Hoboken accent, is the biggest thing in the whole darn entertainment world. People talk about him in New York and Montreal and Mexico City. They talk about him in Italy and Australia and North Africa. They even talk about him on those tiny Pacific islands that are just specks in your Atlas, if you can believe this tale brought home by some Navy boys. Seems replacements had just reached this one island, and one of the new lads had a vic and a stack of records. “Look guys,” he said, “some swell Sinatra!” |  |  |
| One of the kids who’d been on the islands for ages spoke without looking up from his magazine. “If it’s anything like that lousy sherry your pal just tried to sell me, keep it, chum.” The first boy stared at him, a long incredulous stare. “You’ve never heard of Frank Sinatra,” he intoned in a low, awed voice. Then he banged his fist into his palm, “I wish I were home,” he said. “I could exploit you.” And don’t think he couldn’t. Funny, you’d never have thought in the old days that Frankie Sinatra was eventually going to knock the world for a loop. In fact, one morning not so very many years ago, you wouldn’t have thought he was ever going to brush with the world at all. It was a little past midnight on December 12, 1917. The doctor wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked out of Nathalie Sinatra’s bedroom window for a long time. |
 |
 | |
| Snowflakes swirled through the darkness, rested briefly on the window-pane and then were gone. A second of existence, then nothingness. How like this little boy, he thought, looking at the still face of the child he’d just delivered. A flicker of a heartbeat at the end of his stethoscope, then no sound at all. How to tell the father who was waiting on the other side of the door; and the mother, the brave little mother, smiling now as she slept. And then beautifully, incredibly, it happened. The still face puckered, and a yell heard all over Hoboken came out. Awed, the doctor picked him up again and looked him over. Sound as a dollar. It couldn’t be, and yet it was. Science had no explanation for it; it remained for Frankie himself to grow up and give the answer. “Heck, any cluck can be born,” is how he figures it, “it takes a ham to do it dramatically.” His dad heard the yell and dashed into the room, wild-eyed. “What was that?” he croaked hoarsely. |
 |
 | |
 |
“Your son,” the doctor told him, placing the bundle in his arms. “Our little boy,” Mr. Sinatra breathed, doting on him, “our beautiful little boy.” Beautiful was stretching it a little. Frankie was not too smooth as an infant. It had been an extremely difficult birth, and his head was slightly battered. One of his earlobes was missing. In addition to which he was very fat—all of fifteen pounds—and very red. For his father’s dough, however, he was okay. He was handsome and good. He was the king. For the old man’s dough, he still is. In the months that followed, it was Mom who had to make with the discipline. Mom who no-noed bric-a-brac tossing and ink-spilling. When she could keep a straight face that was. |
 | |
|
One day before he was a year old, Nathalie was entertaining one of her cronies while Frankie was on the loose somewhere in the house. All breakable objects had been put out of reach, live hazards had been removed, and he was quite safe. For thirty uninterrupted minutes the two gals chatted. “Good child, isn’t he?” the friend mentioned eventually. Nathalie expanded a little. “Good as gold,” she smiled. “Hardly know I have him half the time.” Whereupon Frankie entered on all fours, his face smeared with butter, bits of liverwurst and dill pickle. It developed that he’d just discovered he could pull himself up on the icebox and maneuver the catch. “Ma-ma,” he beamed, reeking of garlic. It was a moment for discipline and plenty of it, but the girls just looked at each other and were lost. There was a lot of fun in those early days, and the little house on Monroe Street was merry with laughter most of the time. Everyone in town knew the Sinatras: Nathalie, small, bright-eyed and pretty, recently back from overseas duty as a nurse. Marty, square and handsome, a scrappy little guy who combined fire-manning with professional boxing. And everybody liked them. The house was always jumping with company—an uncle or a grandmother, one of Dad’s pals from the firehouse or some of the neighborhood kids. Almost any time you dropped in, there was spaghetti to eat and pinochle to play and the baby to kid around with. They weren’t wealthy people, but—contrary to popular opinion—Frank’s parents were never poor. They always had a big share of life’s good things. It was a happy house, and Frank was well-pleased with the deal he’d gotten. One cousin in particular charmed him; a chubby, curly-haired roughneck four years older than he was, also named Frank Sinatra. From the first minute the baby saw him, it was written all over his face— “This I like,” and as soon as he could get around under his own steam, he pursued him. The fact that Big Frank had to go to school oppressed and mystified him, but when he reappeared in the afternoon, everything was jake again. Somehow, Big Frank’s gang tolerated the squirt, although they gave him absolutely no quarter. If he wanted to tag along on their hikes, he tagged at his own risk. Nobody carried him when he got tired. If he wanted to hang around when they played baseball, he could darn well work for the privilege, so they made him bat boy. By the time he was four, Frankie was a man. He’d had a drag on a cigarette, sworn a few times and generally sown a wild oat or two. About the only thing that kept him from being a thorough sophisticate was his speech. S’s gave him no end of trouble. In the middle of a word he could cope with them, and even at the end he could swing them. But at the beginning, they floored him. Snow was ’now, and stone was ’tone, and it did sort of place him chronologically. The big kids used to laugh and laugh at him, until one afternoon, Big Frank settled them once and for all. They were walking along the docks watching the ferries plow back and forth, idly picking up pebbles and skimming them on the water. Frankie watched them carefully, then he picked one up. ’ticks and ’tones “Watch me ’kim this ’tone,” he said. The lads guffawed. “Say it again, Shorty,” one of them gasped, holding his sides. “That’s the best yet” A couple of the fellows had to sit down for a minute they were so completely overcome with laughter. Big Frank stood stolidly by for a moment, watching his cousin blush the way he always did when he’d said or done something that struck the big kids funny; watching him hold his underlip firm with his straight little teeth. What the heck did those guys think they were doing, riding the kid? “What’s so darned funny, you guys,” he blazed at them. “Tell me that, will you?” “Him,” howled one of the lads pointing at Frankie. “Tones,’ he says. Oh boy, that’s rich.” “He did not,” said Big Frank hotly. “The heck he said ’tones. He just says the s way back in his throat, and anyone that can’t hear it is a cross-eyed monkey. Say stones, squirt.” “’Tone.” There was no sound whatever from the back of Frankie’s throat. “There, hear it?” The kids’ eyes were round as saucers. “Yeah,” they murmured as one man. “Yeah. I heard it.” No one picked on Frankie for a long time after that. big shot small fry... He lived a double life at that stage. By day he was one of the boys, swaggering across the baseball diamond, airing his views on Babe Ruth, setting the lads up to a round of tootsie-rolls at his grandfather’s candy store. He was big stuff, by day. By night he was a little boy again, sleepy and loving. Clamoring for Mother Goose and Uncle Wiggily. Sometimes it was Mother who read to him before dinner. Sometimes—when Mrs. Sinatra was off on a case—it was Grandma. The same old stories over and over, and the Lord help them if one syllable was skipped. He learned to pick out words in his story books. Cat and boy and house. It pleased him, recognizing words, and he kept asking everyone how soon he’d be old enough to read. “Next year,” they’d tell him. “When you go to school.” So school became a magic place. And then he was five, going on six, and school turned out to be kind of a dreary joint after all. One from which one fled at the stroke of noon with never a backward look. His whole outlook changed. School was a chore to be endured, and the leisure he had hitherto scorned became the thing. Afternoon, that was the time. Anything could happen in the afternoon. Like going down to Grandpa’s candy store and discovering a brand new kind of penny candy. Stuff that looked like gumdrops but that had perfume inside. Or maybe, like walking home with Anne, his second grade sweetheart, and having her mother invite him for lunch. Or—best of all—discovering a stray dog or cat and bringing it home. That was his hobby. Some kids collected stamps or playing cards. Frankie collected animals. Mrs. Sinatra put up with it, mostly because she couldn’t bear Frank’s face on the few occasions she remonstrated. “Oh, but, Mom,” he’d say, and his face would suddenly be nothing but eyes. “He’s starving, Mom.” “All right,” she’d hear someone saying, and it always turned out to be herself. “All right, he can stay a while.” Fortunately, the animals were usually transients. Hard-bitten gypsies they were, grateful for a square meal and a nights lodging, and then, tally-ho, they were off again. Frankie would dash home from school the day after he’d brought home a new one, eyes aglow. “Where’s Dutchess?” he’d call. They all had names, even the one-night-standers. “Gone,” his mother would say, looking down. “She lit out around ten this morning and hasn’t come back.” frankenstien in fur... Then one night he appeared with something that can only be described as a canine character. She was part Spitz, part Airedale, and after that it was anybody’s guess. She was definitely not an attractive addition to the group, and as far as Mrs. Sinatra was concerned, the more transient she was the better. The day after her arrival Frankie raced home after school. “Where’s Girlie?” he asked. The reply from the kitchen was not enthusiastic. “Right under my feet.” Sometimes, in the ensuing years, Mrs. Sinatra would say to her husband, “Funny, Marty, with all the pretty dogs he’s brought home, this thing would be the one to linger.” Frankenstein in fur, that was Girlie, but she and Frank idolized each other. They were together from the minute school was out until it began again next day. Eventually, when it became necessary for Frank’s mother to keep off the stairs somewhat on account of her heart, Girlie remained downstairs when Frank was up in his room in order to carry messages. “Girlie,” Nathalie would say. “The telephone for Frank.” Whereupon Girlie would tear up the stairs and bark at Frank’s door. Down he’d come, the pup at his heels wiggling and wagging with joy. Came a day when Frank got into some slight scrape in school. His teacher phoned Mrs. Sinatra, and Girlie made it her business to eavesdrop on the conversation. “He did?” Frank’s mother was saying in a horrified voice. “Frank did that?” There was a pause electric with emotion. Then, “Well, I most certainly will reprimand him. Severely.” The receiver clicked, and Girlie tried to make herself invisible. “Girlie,” said Mrs. Sinatra. “Go get Frank.” Girlie was busy with a flea and feigned deafness. “Girlie!” Nathalie’s voice was sharper. Girlie yawned a little and settled down. “I said,” Nathalie told her clearly and authoritatively, “go-get-Frank.” To make a long story short, a shoe was thrown, and Girlie eventually sulked up the stairs, barked weakly at Frank’s door and gloomed down again. Later on, when that particular crisis was past, and Frank and his mother were buddies again, they got a big laugh out of that incident. There were other scrapes after that, of course. Like when Frank set an alarm clock to go off in the middle of Assembly. Mr. Stover, the principal, phoned that time, and Marty handled him. He heard him through patiently, then he said, “Well, Mr. Stover, he’s a boy.” That was Marty’s comeback anytime anyone said boo against Frankie. That and, “Well, we’d worry about him if he didn’t get into mischief once in a while.” Just once did he spank his son, and he’s never really forgiven himself for that. Some kind of country fair came to town, complete with merry-go-round. Nothing would do but Frankie ride on it, and his dad said okay, why not So Frank and his buddies tooted over to the fairgrounds, paid their dimes and got on. Frank was on a large, white steed and, in imagination, the steed was fiery, and Frank was Hoot Gibson. “Yippee, fellas,” he yelped and, so saying, he leaped in his saddle, and his head crashed through the carousel roof. Pandemonium followed. In the course of time three facts became obvious. The roof would have to be removed, Frank’s hair would have to be shaved off in order to treat the cut, and Frank’s father would have to be apprised of the affair. Carousel roofs, it developed, came high, and the new one was on Papa Sinatra. It was immediately after getting the bill that Marty let his practically-bald son have it. A typical American childhood was Frank’s, with nothing in it anywhere to indicate the incredible career that was to come. He went to church every Sunday at St. Francis’. Made his First Communion and was confirmed there. He never was in the choir, but he was an altar boy for years, cherubic in the white robe. He had measles and mumps, chicken-pox and whooping cough; all the kids’ diseases you can think of, and he was really sick with them. That’s why he’s such a fiend on inoculations for his youngsters. There was the inevitable ball club that all little boys belong to. The club that is as dear to their hearts as anything can ever be. Half secret handshakes, half baseball, it was, and the club’s name was the Turk’s Palace. They had flashy orange and black uniforms with a half moon, star and dagger on them, and they all called each other Turk. Confusing? Not to a foxy eight-year-old. The uniforms were donated by Frankie’s family, and on the strength of this he was made manager as well as pitcher. There was, in due time, that momentous business, the first date. It was with a girl named Marie for the grammar school graduation dance, and his family will never forget it. The splashing in the tub; the slicking of the hair first one way, then another; the eventual appearance, shiny-faced in the new suit. “Get it good and dark,” he’d admonished Mom before the purchase, “to look like a tux.” “Do I look okay?” he asked, hand casually in pocket, straining for nonchalance. “Wonderful.” “Well, so long, then.” And when the door closed on him, a look passed between Marty and Nathalie, a long misty look. growing pain pangs... Oh, it was a typical childhood, all right, followed by a typical adolescence. If you have a brother or a son, you can practically write the words yourself. Those Saturday night movie dates for which he preened for hours. The school dances and Mom’s vigil at the window till she heard his key in the lock. The ukulele era, oh hideous memory! He was in his early teens when the world went ukulele-mad. Remember? You just had to have one or you were a social zero. They got him one, just as they’d gotten him a bike and a pony and everything else he’d ever wanted, and it seemed never to be out of his unskilled hands. Then, to really fix things, he sang with it. His voice, as his mother recalls, was “all right-nothing swoony,” and if you’d told her then he would someday drive the girls ma-ad with it, she would very likely have given you the Sinatra special, known as the horse laugh. One afternoon Mrs. Sinatra came home and saw an unbelievable looking vehicle in front of the door. It was painted red, yellow, green and blue, and there was something about the set of the headlights that gave it a leering expression. “This,” she thought, “gives the house an air.” They had moved by this time to their lovely corner home where people just didn’t go in for rainbow-hued flivvers. Presently, the car vanished, when or how, she failed to notice, but she asked no questions. It was enough that the thing was no longer in the vicinity. However, came six o’clock, came Frankie, came—oh no, it couldn’t be—the car! “I got a car, Mom.” “So I see.” “Isn’t she a honey?” he grinned at her. “To be brutally frank,” his mother said, “I dislike it. Why all the colors, and why all the scribbling on it?” “Gee, Mother,” he said, giving her that don’t-you-know-anything-look, “that’s what gets ’em.” Who it got and why was never observed, as the car collapsed shortly thereafter, never to rise again. Frankie, who now drives a Fleetwood Body Cadillac, looks back affectionately on that car. Life at the Sinatra home was not dull, you see, any more than an Andy Hardy movie or a Henry Aldrich broadcast is dull. Things kept happening. There was the time Frank wanted one of his father’s old fedoras. A play or something, Nathalie thought vaguely. He was always needing things for plays. A clown suit here, a pair of velvet draperies there. “In the top of the closet, hon,” she told him. “Help yourself.” In time his father discovered that his best Stetson had been pinched. “Where the heck is it?” he boomed. Mrs. Sinatra was fluttery, but not without hope of retrieving it. “Oh, Frankie borrowed it for a play or something.” Frankie had done no such thing. He had cut off the brim and pinned campaign buttons and fishing tackle and everything pinnable all over it. buck-passing birds And then there were the pigeons. How he got them up to his room remains a mystery, but Grandma discovered them one morning when she went in to make his bed. Hordes of them. When he came home from school, his mother nailed him. “It’s the pigeons or me,” she said. “The house isn’t big enough for all of us.” Frank and another boy co-owned the birds and aspired to train them to be carriers. Frankie didn’t want to fib about them—(a kind of blazing honesty was one of the imp’s redeeming features)—but gee, he wanted to keep those pigeons. “Gosh, Mom,” he said, “I’m sort of minding them for a guy.” “For how long?” “Oh, a few days, maybe.” The co-owner gave his mother the same line, and the birds were shunted back and forth in a series of boxes a couple of times a week. Until the two mothers met by accident one day and got on the subject of the pigeons. You can imagine how it went. “My son’s Pigeons! Why they’re your son’s pigeons.” “My son’s? Why heavens, no.” And it seemed like just the next day that she and Marty were sitting side by side in the Demarest High auditorium watching them graduate, and they would have given their souls to have him fourteen again instead of seventeen. Practically a man. Kid stuff was really behind him now. The champion basketball team he’d been so proud to be a part of, the swimming team he’d battled to make and did, the fun he had singing with the school band. The lazy summers, the irresponsibility. All that was finished. There’d be a quick vacation at the shore, then a job that he’ lined up with the Jersey Observer. And in the fall, college at Stevens—New Jersey’s big engineering school. He’d be at aviation engineer, earn about ten thousand dollars a year, get married when he was around thirty. He’d planned just how it would be, and life stretched before him as smooth and well-posted as Route No. 1 But he’d reckoned without Fate. Less than a month after he graduated (with high honors, by the way), he met Nancy Barbato, the girl he was to marry before he was twenty-one. And that same momentous summer he realized that he’d never be happy in anything but music. Part II of Frank Sinatra’s life story will appear in the October issue of MODERN SCREEN. | |