(4 of 10)
By a similar token. Sinatra is doggedly independent. "Don't tell me!" he often tells friends, eyes blazing, as he jabs them with a forefinger. "Suggest. But don't tell me." "Why, he might even vote Republican," one friend surmised, "if I told him to vote Democrat." A friend tells how Frankie walked out on the christening of his son because the priest would not let him have the godfather Frankie wanted, who happened to be a Jew.
Is there an essential Sinatra hidden somewhere in this bony bundle of contradictions? One of his best friends thinks not. "There isn't any 'real' Sinatra. There's only what you see. You might as well try to analyze electricity. It is what it does. There's nothing inside him. He puts out so terrifically that nothing can accumulate inside. Frank is the absolutely genuine article, the diamond in the rough. If you want to understand a diamond, you ask about the pressures that made it. And if you want to understand Frank, you ask about Hoboken."
Another Slice of Pizza. In Hoboken, in a coldwater flat ("one can to four families"). Frank was born on Dec. 12, 1915. He weighed 13½ lbs. at birth, and in the delivery his head was badly ripped by the forceps, and one of his ear lobes was torn away; he carries the scars to this day. The doctor laid the unbreathing baby on the bed. thinking him stillborn, and turned to save the mother. Frank survived because his grandmother snatched him up and put him under the cold-water faucet.
Frankie's father, Martin Sinatra, was a run-of-the-gym boxer who fought under the name of "Marty O'Brien," a quiet little man who could stand up to a beer and mind his own business. Frankie's mother, "Dolly" Sinatra, was another slice of pizza altogether. That sturdy little woman could stand up to anything, come Hague or firewater, and minded everybody else's business along with plenty of her own. Dolly, who says she started out as a practical nurse, was soon helping Marty run a little barroom at the corner of Jefferson and Fourth. She sang at church socials ("Dolly was a barrel of fun"), faithfully turned up at the Democratic political meetings, and assisted at a lot of neighborhood births. In a few years she was a power in her part of town, and in 1909 Mayor Griffin made her district leader. In 1926 Mayor Bernard L. McFeeley, the political boss of Hoboken for 30 years, appointed her husband to a captaincy in the fire department.
When Frankie came along, mother Dolly had little time to be a mother. She was off, day and night, in the political swim, and if sometimes the water was polluted, Dolly always insisted that she kept her chin above it. Frank was sent to live with his grandmother, Dolly's mother. He also spent a lot of his time with his Aunt Josie, and with a motherly Jewish lady named Mrs. Golden.