Free Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill

outlaw, the desperado, the good man who was dealt a
     bad hand by life: they were central to the emerging American myth, as defined and spread by the new technology of mass culture.
    That culture was also forming young Frank Sinatra. In 1927, a few months before Sinatra’s twelfth birthday, the first talkie
     was released,
The Jazz Singer,
with Al Jolson. There on the screen, a man opened his mouth and you could hear him sing. The story itself was a Jewish version
     of the conflicts in Hoboken. Jolson played the young son of immigrants who resists his parents. They want him to sing only
     in synagogues; he goes out into the world and finds his way to show business, fame, and fortune. Translated into the struggles
     of Little Italy, it was a triumph of
la via nuova
over
la via vecchia.
    At the movies Sinatra began to dream his own American dream. Sometimes he carried those visions to school. Sometimes they
     were with him after school, when he was in the care of his maternal grandmother, Rosa Garavente. Old-timers from Hoboken would
     remember him later as a lonely boy, standing in the doorway of his grandmother’s building, watching life go by without him.
     In a neighborhood of large families, he was often all by himself. Meanwhile, Dolly worked and laughed at the bar of Marty
     O’Brien’s and combed the tenements for votes. The year 1927 was momentous: Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Babe Ruth hit 60 home
     runs, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Massachusetts, Stalin took power in the Soviet Union, and Dolly Sinatra got her
     husband a job with the Hoboken fire department. Later, there were stories claiming that Dolly also had a side business: providing
     abortions. Like many families, the Sinatra family had its own secrets, and it’s unlikely that they were shared with their
     son.
    “Sometimes I’d be lying awake in the dark and I’d hear them talking,” he remembered years later. “Or rather, I’d hear her
     talking and him listening. Mostly it was politics or some worthless neighbor. I remember her ranting about how Sacco and Vanzetti
     were framed. Because they were Italians. Which was probably true. All I’d hear from my father was like a grunt. They never
     talked about themselves. Except for things like, How could you
do
a thing like that? That was my mother. He’d just say, Eh. Eh.” Sinatra smiled and said to himself, “Eh.”
    It was his mother he remembered most vividly. In his sixties he would remember Dolly nagging him about the dangers of tuberculosis,
     insisting that he stay away from kids who coughed. He remembered her fears of polio, shared by millions in those days, and
     her refusal to let him go to beaches or public swimming pools. (He went anyway.) He remembered how she wanted him to go on
     to a career as an engineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology. And he remembered how she kept a small bat, a kind of billy
     club, behind the bar at Marty O’Brien’s.
    “When I would get out of hand,” he said, “she would give me a rap with that little club; then she’d hug me to her breast.”
     He paused, and smiled: “I married the same woman every time.”
    He was serious. In various ways, in spite of admirable efforts to change himself and leave behind his personal disguises,
     Sinatra would swing back and forth between father and mother for the rest of his life. Too often he could fall into the patterns
     of the mute Marty Sinatra, locking himself in cramped cages of solitude. At other times he would become a male version of
     the garrulous Dolly, waving her vulgarity like a flag of triumph. Across his long life those swings in mood and style would
     offer him little relief from the template cut in Hoboken. Always he would be driven by the solitary’s longing to be reconciled
     with the world.
    On October 19, 1929, the world abruptly shifted again as the stock market crashed and the end came for what Westbrook Pegler
     later called the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. At first, nothing