Frank: The Voice Read Online Free PDF Page A

figure of benevolence and authority:
the man who had given him his name
.
    “Like Dolly, he resented authority in any guise—especially when he knew he was wrong,” Sinatra’s daughter Tina wrote. “The more you yanked him by the neck, the less he liked it, and the more he’d dig in his heels.”
    The Garrick episode has a whiff of sulfur about it. It speaks of the Old World spirit—the true, violent spirit—of vendetta. But even worse: if true—and there’s no reason to suppose it isn’t, since both Garrick and, later, his widow recalled the incident—it says not-so-good things about the teenage Sinatra. Does this make him a tougher customer than we’d first suspected?
    Probably not. For all Sinatra’s claims that he’d run with a rough crowd, carried around a length of lead pipe, and so on—not to mention his stories about Marty teaching him to fight—there are too many accounts from Hoboken contemporaries that portray him as a natty little weakling who couldn’t punch his way out of a paper bag, who tried desperately to bribe bigger, tougher boys to be his friends. An old photograph in Nancy Sinatra’s second book about her father,
Frank Sinatra: An American Legend
, shows Frankie, aged about twelve, looking rather timid as he stands on the sidewalk with his big, expensive bicycle. He’s wearing a newsboy cap, beautifully pressed trousers, and a jacket marked “TURKS.” “Frank, sporting the T-shirt of his street gang, the Turks,” Ms. S.’s caption reads. “Just like they do today, street gangs protected their territory.”
    But it turns out the gang wasn’t a gang at all: it was an after-school club called the Turk’s Palace. The Turks had secret handshakes, they played a little baseball, they wore flashy orange and black jackets with a half-moon and dagger on the back. 5 And Dolly was the one who bought the jackets, thus ensuring that Frank would be the club’s manager and the baseball team’s pitcher. Which makes it hard to credit theidea that the Fauntleroy of Park Avenue had suddenly turned into a hard guy as he entered adolescence.
    Instead, what we see is a type: the overaggressive, loud-talking bantamweight who snarls to hide his terrors. Sinatra’s explosion shows a ferocious sense of entitlement, built on a foundation of sand. (It also shows a deep fear of his mother, and how she might feel about his losing his job.) Frankie had to have known that he was in the wrong, and the resulting self-dislike would have stoked his tantrum. He then would have felt furious at himself for losing his temper, and further furious at Frank Garrick for
making
him lose his temper. A nuclear chain reaction.
    There would be many such exhibitions in Sinatra’s life.
    (In later years—perhaps abetted by his publicist George Evans—he liked to let it slip that he had once worked as a sportswriter for the
Jersey Observer
. 6 The assertion found its way, unchallenged, into many later accounts of his life. Once he was famous, he found a way to
have been
a sportswriter.)
    We are told that after Frankie recounted the Garrick incident to Dolly (no doubt carefully spinning it in his favor), she never spoke to the man again. For his part, Sinatra didn’t talk to his godfather for close to five decades. He failed to invite Garrick to his first wedding, to the baptisms of any of his children, or to Dolly and Marty’s fiftieth-anniversary party.
    Then, out of the blue, not long after Dolly died (in 1977), Sinatra phoned Garrick, asking if he could come by to visit. Generously, Garrick told him that would be fine. Sinatra didn’t show up.
    He called several more times, but each time failed to appear.
    Finally, in 1982, the sixty-six-year-old Sinatra went to see the eighty-five-year-old Garrick and his wife in their three-room apartment in a senior citizens’ building in Hoboken. Not alone—he brought along his secretary, Dorothy Uhlemann, and his best friend, Jilly Rizzo, as insulation. Picture the commotion in