Why Sinatra Matters Read online

  This isolation, this shared solitude, created problems that took generations to solve. Education was often sneered at; what was the use of working hard in school if you couldn’t take a diploma into a good job? “I know a guy went to college,” I would hear from my Italian American friends growing up in Brooklyn. “He’s driving a truck.” Many would retreat into passivity, keeping their heads down, getting through a life in silence and safety. Others would try to defuse potential danger by performing the public role of caricatured Italian Americans, the organ grinder, the fruit peddler, a Mediterranean variation on the earlier role of the Stage Irishman.

  “You know what radio show I hated the most?” Sinatra would say, many years later. “It was called Life with Luigi, with J. Carrol Naish – there’s a good Italian name for you – and it was all about Italians who spoke like-a-dis, and worried about ladies who squeeze-a da tomatoes on-a da fruit stand. The terrible thing was, it made me laugh. Because it did have some truth to it. We all knew guys like that growing up. But then I would hate myself for laughing at the goddamned thing.”

  This is certain: many of the older people among whom Frank Sinatra grew up in Hoboken were shaped by the stark conflict between what America promised and what America delivered. Such a conflict can lead to the development of a defensive style, the adoption of masks of cynicism or irony, or some merger of both. Or it can lead to the guise of the don’t-fuck-with-me tough guy. At different times Sinatra would try on all the masks.

  “Sometimes with me, it was a case of if-you-got-the-name-you-might-as-well-have-the-game,” he said to me once. “You think I’m just some wop wise guy off the street? All right, I’ll be a wop wise guy off the street and break your fucking head.”

  II. For those Italians who stayed on in the American cities, life did have its consolations. In spite of the cold-water tenements, the hostile police, the sneers of strangers, the slurs in the newspapers, life in those cities was better than it was in the places left behind. As if to maintain continuity with the Old Country, the Italian immigrants – like the Irish before them – reproduced many of the rhythms of the old life. Sinatra grew up in a world of feasts, weddings, funerals, and celebrations, with insistence on the traditions of courtship, marriage, personal honor. At the same time, he was pulled by baseball, the Fourth of July, the vistas of the American deserts that were shown in westerns at the movie house. He was forced to choose between two modes of thinking, admirably described by Richard Gambino in his study Blood of My Blood. One was la via vecchia, the old way, the rules as encoded over many centuries in the Old Country. The other was la via nuova, the new way, the American way, with its loose rules, its many freedoms, its abundance of choices. In some important ways, Sinatra was faithful to the old way: suspicious of, if not hostile to, authority; possessive of women; needy of family. Like most young people of his age, he despised informers, thought the law was hypocritical, the world a hard place. At the same time, he was a genuine product of the new way, exulting in the freedoms of the American, gambling for big stakes in life and career, seizing all opportunities.

  Walking the streets of the neighborhood, listening to the grown-ups talk at kitchen tables or in barbershops, he came to understand something else. It was called power. Within the Little Italies of the American cities, there existed subtle structures of social power, most of them carried intact from the Old Country. As Luigi Barzini has written:

  “Power has many sources. The first and nearest source is one’s family. In Sicily the family includes relatives as far as the third, fourth, or fifth degree, collaterals, in-laws, relatives of the in-laws, godfathers and godmothers, best men at marriages, dependents, hangers-on, servants, and vassals. They all help or must be helped, as the case may be, in times of necessity.”

  In the years of his own power, Frank Sinatra would remain true to that particular vision of responsibility; he was ferocious in protecting his family (even after leaving his first wife); he often acted as if it was his duty, and his alone, to come to the aid of friends when they were in trouble. In some ways, of course, this attitude was not unique to Sicilians or to Italians in general; there was a pagan or Christian element to it, as could be seen among the Irish, and a tribal or religious element that could be witnessed among Jews who came together from many nations and accepted responsibility for one another. But the style and its underlying codes made their marks on Sinatra in Hoboken.

  “When I was there, I just wanted to get the hell out,” he said. “It took me a long time to realize how much of it I took with me.”

  In Hoboken, as in other places, the story was certainly not one of unrelieved misery. The core of the immigration myth is this: it was about the way people overcame misery, how they found their consolations, and, in the end, how they redeemed America in a time when America believed it was not in need of redemption. There was a spirit of patient optimism in Sinatra’s Hoboken, although he could not have imagined as a child that he would one day become one of the agents of consolation.

  For millions of Italian immigrants and their children, technology would provide some of those consolations and accelerate the process of Americanization. The rapid development of the motion picture would provide one form of national unity, allowing people from every region and every ethnic group to share common emotional experiences, some of them virtually mythic. More important, when Frank Sinatra was a child, the phonograph and the radio were invented. When each became widely available, the lives of the immigrants changed in a revolutionary way. Many immigrants added wind-up Victrolas – which came on the mass market in 1915 – to their American homes. After 1921, when regular radio broadcasting began on WJZ out of Newark, those ghetto-bound immigrants who were cut off from English could listen to it at home, trying to crack its codes, while their English-speaking children were entranced. A few years later the immigrants could listen to the Italian-language radio stations, and thus be informed and entertained even if they could not read or write in any language. An even greater impact was made upon their children. Frank Sinatra was part of a generation that could not remember a time when there was neither a radio nor a phonograph in the house; by the time of his first communion, he was listening to the music of America.

  “The radio was like a religion,” Sinatra remembered. “They were even shaped like cathedrals.”

  For the immigrants themselves, the phonograph was initially more important. For the first time, Italian immigrants could bring great music into their daily lives in ways that were impossible in the Old Country. These were people, the contadini from the countryside, who could never afford entrance to opera houses or grand concert halls. If they could buy the tickets, they could not afford the clothes that would grant them entry. Many knew the melodies of Puccini and Verdi from the singing of inspired amateurs. They had heard some of the music from the mouths of organ grinders. But now here was Caruso himself, singing in their kitchens or living rooms. After 1940 Frank Sinatra would also sing in many of those rooms.

  III. Two immigrant couples concern us here: one from Sicily, the other from the distant north of Italy. They had a common goal but were shaped by different histories and geographies. As a nation, after all, Italy was even younger than the United States; the various city-states were not consolidated into a united Italy until 1871. To be Italian instead of Piedmontese or Sicilian required an act of the imagination so powerful that it could erase the disputes and violence of centuries. For many, that psychological unification never happened. Even in America, the old regional and city conflicts often continued, leading to snubs and feuds and rare spurts of violence; it took American bigotry to make them all feel like Italians. And by then most of them wanted to be something else: Americans. If they were not readily accepted, so be it; their children would be Americans by right of birth.

  Begin with the Sicilian couple. John and Rosa Sinatra (the name, in some versions of the tale, was originally Sinestra, and “John” surely must have been baptized Giovanni) were from Agrigento, a lovely town on the southwestern coast of the island. The town was founded by the Greeks about 500 b.c. Growing up in Agrigento, the Sinatras were familiar with the extensive Greek ruins, the underground water systems built by the Greeks, the secret catacombs. There were traces, too, of centuries of occupation by the Saracens, and later by the Spanish, in the language, the cuisine, and above all, in the social structure with its elites at the narrow top and the broad, uneducated mass at the bottom.

  From the hills around Agrigento, a man could stare off across the Mediterranean toward Africa. Or he could look west, toward America. The town’s most famous modern citizen was the novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello (born in 1867 in a suburb appropriately called Chaos). Pirandello was almost an exact contemporary of the elder Sinatra. With their mixture of love and hate for their island, their cynicism about authority, and a need to escape and start over, many Sicilians often must have felt like characters in search of an author.

  As a young man in Agrigento, John Sinatra was a grape grower, subject to the whims of wind and weather. Much of Sicily, like almost all of the “boot” of the lower mainland, had undergone across the centuries what would now be called an ecological disaster: its forests obliterated for fuel or profit. The once-rich land turned powdery in summer, hard and unforgiving in winter. In the spring, floods transformed clay into glue. The swamps were infested with mosquitoes that spread malaria. Infant mortality was high. Doctors were rare. Education did not exist.

  Like millions of other immigrants, the Sinatras were seduced by the gaudy promises of shipping agents and labor contractors and made the decision to cross the ocean. John could not read or write English (and might have been illiterate in Italian), but he surely must have believed that in America, his son, Anthony Martin Sinatra, would have a better chance at a decent life than he could ever have in Sicily. The Sinatras left for America in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They settled behind the Statue of Liberty in a town called Hoboken, a once-genteel bedroom for New York City that was being swiftly transformed by the immigrant tide into an industrial workshop. The rudeness of the German longshoremen didn’t matter to the Sinatras, nor did the power of the Irish police and politicians. John soon had a job in a pencil factory, earning $11 a week. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to feed his family.

  The other couple in our story was the Garaventes. Unlike the Sinatras, they were city people, from Genoa, a hard northern port that, with its drydocks and piers and buildingways, looks in old drawings and photographs like the waterfront of Brooklyn. Henry James, visiting in 1890, described the “wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing Genoese alleys” and the “sensuous optimism” of the inhabitants. Founded several centuries before the birth of Jesus, conquered and ruled at various times by the French, the Saracens, and the Austrians, the port was known for centuries as La Superba, the proud or haughty one. When I visited there twenty years ago, the narrow alleys of the old town exuded a sense of danger, even menace; but the city also contained baroque marble palaces that whispered of vanished glories. Genoa’s connection to America began with Christopher Columbus, who was born there. After the discovery of America, the merchants of Genoa amassed huge fortunes in trade with the New World. But the city also fomented a rebellious spirit. It was the birthplace of two great heroes of revolutionary nineteenth-century Italian nationalism, the romantic Giuseppe Garibaldi (who once lived in Staten Island) and the idealistic Giuseppe Mazzini. Those names would also be saluted in places like Hoboken.

  The Garaventes settled among the poor of Hoboken, protected from outside dangers by the rigid structure of the ghetto. The fairest of their children was Natalia, known as Dolly. In Genoa her father had been a skilled lithographer, was literate, and knew the value of an education. He quickly found work while his spouse became a midwife. In Hoboken the Garaventes worked very hard to make a traditional home for their children, a place of safety and manners and respect for older people. There was no reason why the values of the Old Country should not continue in this new country; those old rules were not unique, after all – they were common to all good people. Or so they believed.

  The Garaventes surely did not anticipate the assimilating power of America, la via nuova, the mysterious process that combined schooling, the streets, social and political institutions, and a new set of myths, peopled by baseball players, prizefighters, and movie stars. The power of la via nuova would inevitably change their children into Americans.

  This process was dramatized about 1912. At some point that year, the young man named Anthony Martin Sinatra met the young woman named Dolly Garavente. Aside from the neighborhood in Hoboken, they had only one thing in common: each had blue eyes. Otherwise, they were very different.

  Martin was quiet, shy, virtually uneducated (one account says that he was illiterate), but marked by a somber Sicilian gravity. The family narrative, constructed years later (and thus possibly suspect, as are all family narratives), tells us that, like many children of immigrants, he had turned to the prize ring, boxing at 118 pounds under the name of Marty O’Brien. We don’t know if this is true; so far, no records confirm it and there seem to be no photographs of him in boxing gear. But the use of the pseudonym makes it plausible. Certainly, Martin Sinatra would not have been the only immigrant to don a mask in order to scrape out a hard living. Assuming an Irish name was not unusual in that era of boxing; there were Jewish fighters with Irish names too; and Jim Flynn, the only man who ever knocked out Jack Dempsey, was actually named Andrea Chiariglione. One reason for the name changes is that there were not enough Irish fighters to satisfy the large number of Irish fans. The Irish were living their own American success story, moving away from the practice of the brutal sport, as doors opened to politics, police work, and the law. With his blue eyes, Martin Sinatra could pass for Irish. He certainly had no major career in the ring: he suffered from chronic asthma, had easily breakable “bad hands,” and in the various Hoboken versions of his tale is usually described as a club fighter of mediocre skill.

  “He could fight,” Sinatra said, years later. “He used to show me in the yard, you know, how to jab, how to throw a left hook, set your feet, that kind of thing. But he never hit me. Not once. Not ever. He was a gentle man. I think he was the kind of guy who never gave anyone any crap and walked away from most of the jerks he’d meet. But if you pushed him too far, watch out.”

  There was nothing mediocre or reserved about Dolly Garavente. She was two years old when she came to America, and said later that she had no memories of Italy. With her blue eyes, strawberry blond hair, fair complexion, and, above all, her attitude, she appeared solidly American. Her confident, freewheeling style might have caused some uneasiness for her parents, epitomizing, as she did, la via nuova. But it made her a vivid force within that family and on the street. She managed to get through the eighth grade, a considerable accomplishment for a woman in that neighborhood in those years. She was infused with that “sensuous optimism” of the Genoese, but she was also tough, ambitious, capable of brassy vulgarity in two languages. She was very different from Martin Sinatra, and that was a surprise. In his great book The Italians, the writer Luigi Barzini writes:

  “The private aims of southerners and northerners are, of course, more or less the same. The northerner, however, thinks that there is one practically sure way to achieve them: the acquisition of wealth, la richezza. Only wealth can, he believes, lastingly assure the defense and prosperity of the family. The southerner, on the other hand, knows that this can be done only with the acquisition of power, prestige, authority, fame.”

  After Dolly Garavente married Marty Sinatra, she combined the characteristics of north and south in the same person, becoming an Italian and an American. That fusion helped shape the character of her only child. She brought to motherhood a special combination of rebelliousness and will, defying many of the codes of the old way. The marriage itself was fiercely opposed by the Garaventes. From the viewpoint of haughty Genoa, marrying a Sicilian was a step down. To marry a young man who was barely literate, who was a prizefighter, who had tattoos: that could not be allowed. At the same time, the Sinatras were not enthusiastic either. They had no use for people from Genoa. Such people were snobs. They thought too well of themselves. Martin should forget about this boisterous woman with the blond hair and marry a nice, quiet Sicilian girl. Both sets of parents forbade the marriage. The young people ignored them and the social codes to which they gave such immense value. This was, after all, America, not the Old Country. La via nuova would win out over la via vecchia. On February 14, 1913, Dolly and Martin eloped all the way to Jersey City and were married in City Hall. It was, of course, St. Valentine’s Day, the day on which Americans celebrated romance.

  Romance meant little to the Sinatras and the Garaventes. Both families were outraged. A marriage in City Hall? That was no marriage. A marriage of two Catholics had to be performed by a priest! Ignoring the cold war between the Garaventes and the Sinatras, the young couple moved into a flat in an eight-family tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken. Dolly took a job in a candy shop. Marty scrambled to make a living and found work as a boilermaker in a shipyard. If necessary, they would be self-reliant; this was America. But the general unhappiness of the two families couldn’t go on. The following year, to calm their parents, Dolly and Marty got married again, this time by a priest. The second ceremony took place at home. Of course. But it was done more for the parents than for themselves, a bow to la via vecchia.

  In an important way, Marty and Dolly – especially Dolly – were part of a bridge generation of Italian Americans, technically immigrants but confident enough as Americans to use their freedoms to discard old-fashioned conventions. If the narrative of their parents’ lives had been permanently interrupted when they boarded the ships for La America, their own narratives would be lived out in that same America. For them, America was not a destination; it was a place of beginnings.