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Bikes, Cars. If Dolly could not spend time on Frankie, she could and she did spend money. So did his uncles, two ex-fighters engaged vaguely in "the promotion business." All agree: "We spoiled the kid." In a street where all the other kids had nothing, Frankie had plenty. Almost every day he wore a different suit; by the time he got to high school, he had 14 sport coats, and when he was married, says his mother, there were no fewer than 30 suits in his closets. As a kid, he ran through more than half a dozen bikes before he was twelve. During his teens, he owned five cars.
Being a well-fixed boy in a poor neighborhood had its disadvantages, but Frankie made the least of them. When the green-eyed little monsters mobbed him, Frankie fought foot and fang, and won their respect. Moreover, those he could not beat he could buy. In short, Frankie soon found himself with a gang at his back, and a gang in Hoboken had to be kept busy.
"We started hooking candy from the corner store," Frankie recalls. "Then little things from the five-and-dime, then change from cash registers, and finally, we were up to stealing bicycles." Pretty soon Frank was involved in some rough gang wars. He got so good at planning jobs that his awe-struck henchmen called him "Angles," and he had plenty of bad examples to follow, pretty close to home. The streets he played in were full of bootleggers and triggermen; there were even a couple of neighborhood gang killings.
At length Dolly saw what was happening, and decided to put an end to it. ("I wanted Frank to have it better than I did." she says.) She moved to a house on Park Street, in a nicer neighborhood. After that, Frank's errancy consisted mostly of pranks—he released a couple of pigeons in the school auditorium during assembly, sometimes took a cat into a movie house and shot it in the hindquarters with a BB pistol to make a commotion. "School was very uninteresting," he remembers. "Homework . . . we never bothered with . . ." In his last year in high school he was expelled, he says, on grounds of general rowdiness.
Frankie could not have cared less. He had already decided what he wanted to do with his life, and it didn't require a high-school diploma. At the age of 16, he had seen Bing Crosby on the stage. Cried Sinatra, in a voice that broke in his mouth like raw spaghetti: "I can do that!" Dolly and Marty had a good laugh. "G'wan, ya bum." his father used to twit him. "Why'n't ya go to work?" Frankie would burst into tears of rage and frustration, but his ambition held firm and sure. The next thing Dolly and Marty knew, he had won an amateur contest at the State The ater in Jersey City.
Boy Gets Break. Dolly gave it to him straight. "Listen, Frank, you're going to be something nice, like an engineer, and I don't want no more argument." But Frankie talked her out of $65 for a public-address system with a rhinestone-studded case, and started hiring out as a single at lodge dances for $3 a night. He worked over his technique meticulously, tirelessly. "My theory was to learn by trial and error," says Sinatra. "Not sing in the shower, but really operate. Execute!"