Free Frank: The Voice by James Kaplan Page B

to the door, to scattered applause (which began with the band).
    They took him to the county clink, in Hackensack—it was two in the morning—and booked him.
    Even in a mug shot it is an astonishing face. The extravagantly sensual lower lip. The intelligence of the pale, wide-set eyes. The greasy hank of hair over the left eyebrow—he could have flicked it out of the way; he chose not to—is a rebellious 1930s touch worthy of a Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd. It is a sensitive face, but one of a man with full knowledge of his own importance.
    Full-face he looked defiant, but in profile he looked weary. A night in jail had taken the starch out of Frank. Now he was allowed to make his single phone call. Dolly answered, and told him she would have him out in an hour.
    It took a bit longer than that. The whole episode was an operetta in three acts, playing out over months, each part taking its own sweet time. The original arrest warrant stated that on November 2 and 9, 1938, Frank Sinatra, “being then and there a single man over the age of eighteen years, under the promise of marriage, did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant who was then and there a single female of good repute for chastity whereby she became pregnant.”Then and there. Good repute for chastity. Old English language aside, the warrant had a couple of holes in it. The beginning of November sounds like very quick work if indeed she did become pregnant; some have speculated the affair actually began in the spring and was consummated during the summer, which sounds more plausible. And there was this small detail: The female was not single. She was legally separated, but still married.
    The case fell apart like the house of cards it was, except that it fell in slow motion. First, Dolly sent Marty to call on Toni’s father. Marty had such a hangdog expression—“He looked like a hobo at the door begging for something to eat,” Toni recalled many years later—that her father offered the poor old pug a shot of booze. The two men drank together—sacred bond—and finally Toni was persuaded to go spring Frankie herself.
    According to Toni, Frankie sobbed when she confronted him in his cell. She withdrew the charges, but only after (she remembered) she made her lover promise that his mother would apologize for the mean things she’d said. Dolly apologize! Three weeks later, no apology having occurred, Toni went to Garden Street to confront Mrs. Sinatra. After a screaming fight that brought the neighbors out of their houses, the forty-two-year-old, four-foot-eleven Dolly somehow managed to throw the young woman into the basement. The police arrived. This being Dolly Sinatra’s turf, Toni was arrested and given a suspended sentence for disorderly conduct. She thereupon swore out a
second
warrant against Frank Sinatra: not having been able to make seduction stick, this time she owned up to her non-single status and went for adultery. Three days before Christmas, he was arrested once more—again at the Cabin, this time by court officers purporting to be bearing a Christmas gift from admirers. Dolly once more arrived with bail, and Frankie was once again released on his own recognizance. A headline in the next day’s
Jersey Observer
read: SONGBIRD HELD IN MORALS CHARGE.
    It may have been North Jersey light opera, a tempest in a 1930s teapot, but Mike Barbato can’t have failed to notice that his prospectiveson-in-law was neither a lawyer nor an accountant nor even a plasterer, but, well, a songbird and a perp. (Though Toni eventually dropped these charges as well because, she claimed, she’d found out about
Dolly’s
arrest record, for abortion.) Nancy Rose might have looked like a terrific match to Dolly, but things can’t have appeared quite so rosy from the Jersey City side. And what did Nancy herself think about all this? Her boyfriend’s stonewalling wasn’t helped by a second arrest, not to mention newspaper headlines.
    But