Free Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill Page A

affected the neighborhood in Hoboken or the growing prosperity
     of the Sinatras. Not many people in that neighborhood had plunged hard-earned money into the stock market. Some didn’t even
     trust banks. For a while life went on. In 1930 the Sinatras moved to a three-bedroom apartment in a large house, and for the
     first time fourteen-year-old Frank had his own room. Now he had friends too, from the street and from David E. Rue Junior
     High School, where he was an intelligent but lazy or indifferent student. He seemed desperate to make friends, to be thought
     of as someone other than a spoiled skinny kid, someone other than Dolly’s, or Marty’s, son. He would play class clown. He
     showed a talent for drawing. (He would do much painting in the last fifteen years of his life.) He would try to buy friendship
     with the generous allowance money given to him by Dolly, splurging on candy, ice cream sodas, baseball gloves and bats. Contrary
     to the public relations myth, he was never a member of an adolescent street gang, but he did get into some fistfights. He
     rode a bike. He played ball. He discovered girls, developed crushes on a few, was sometimes embraced and more often rejected,
     with some girls making fun of the scars he’d carried from birth.
    “I had some fun there,” he said later, about Hoboken. “I had some misery too.”
    There was much misery in the land now, and it was spreading. Hoovervilles began appearing along the New Jersey and New York
     waterfronts, clusters of crude shacks that housed the Depression homeless. In 1931, with 4 million Americans now unemployed,
     there were reports of food riots in Oklahoma and Arkansas and a riot over jobs in Boston. Through all of this, Frank Sinatra
     was sitting in the dark, watching James Cagney hit Mae Clarke in the face with a grapefruit in
The Public Enemy
and Bela Lugosi sucking blood in
Dracula
. He no doubt talked with his friends about Al Capone going to prison for tax evasion and Legs Diamond being shot to death
     in a hotel room in Albany; his youth was lived in the great era of the tabloid newspaper. But he wasn’t sure how he fit in.
     Anywhere.
    “I’d rather do time in Attica than be fifteen again,” he once said. “I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.”
    That year of 1931 the Sinatras moved again, this time into their own home, which they bought for $13,400, a considerable sum
     in that Depression year. They had, at last, their piece of the American earth. No more paying rent. No more hassles with landlords.
     Now they had a three-story home at 841 Garden Street, complete with steam heat, a bathtub, and a finished basement. A house
     that rode high over the street. Dolly was more active politically than ever before, operating as the ward boss. She helped
     the Depression casualties as best she could, laying out spreads of food, trying to find work for those who had lost their
     jobs. She tried to persuade some despairing Italians that they should not go home, that Benito Mussolini had not created paradise
     in his Fascist Italy; some departed anyway. During this period Frank Sinatra began to invent his dream.
    “I was always singing as a kid,” he said. “But it was never serious. I’d sing at the bar, you know, and get a round of applause,
     led by Dolly. There was a player piano in the joint, with music on a roll. I’d sing and they’d give me a hand, and sometimes
     a nickel or a quarter. It wasn’t that I was so great. Mainly, they cheered because I could remember the words.”
    But in Dolly’s saloon the only child was discovering that he needed an audience. If his mother whacked him and then hugged
     him, then he would present himself to strangers. If he was good, if he could be more than just a kid who remembered the words,
     they certainly wouldn’t whack him. Their cheers would make him feel valuable, and connected to others. Maybe then Marty and
     Dolly would recognize his existence in some new way, and if they