Why Sinatra Matters (5 page)

“When I was young,” Frank Sinatra said when he was in his sixties, “people used to ask me why I sent money to the NAACP and,
you know, tried to help, in my own small way. I used to say, Because we’ve been there too, man. It wasn’t just black people
hanging from the end of those fucking ropes.”

The story of the New Orleans outrage spread swiftly through the world of the Italian immigrant in America, underlined by the
decision of the Italian government to withdraw its ambassador in protest. Mainstream America didn’t express much horror. According
to Professor Richard Gambino, in his book
Vendetta,
the lynchings were approved by the editorial writers of the
New York Times, Washington Post, St. Louis Globe-Democrat,
and
San Francisco Chronicle,
along with about 50 percent of the other newspapers in the nation. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the leading younger Republicans,
said the lynchings were “a rather good thing” and bragged that he had said so at a party to “various dago diplomats.”

“Maybe that’s why so many people didn’t trust the newspapers, even if they
could
read them,” Sinatra said, almost eighty years later. Then he laughed. “Maybe it’s why I did so many dumb things with newspapermen
too.”

The message from New Orleans was clear to the immigrants. Americans didn’t like Italians. An American was supposed to be white,
Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. He was supposed to come from northern Europe. Yes, the Americans talked big about democracy and
equality and the virtues of hard work; but in reality, the game was rigged. In the aftermath of the New Orleans lynchings,
a grand jury couldn’t find enough evidence to indict the murderers, in spite of the presence of hundreds of eyewitnesses.
Instead, the grand jurors indicted six men who worked for the
defense
attorneys, charging them with jury tampering. This chilling illustration of the failure of the American criminal justice
system was part of a wider pattern. There were anti-Italian murders in the Midwest and barn burnings on the property of Italian
farmers in the American South. Men from the drought-stricken fields of Sicily and Calabria were in awe of the rich earth of
La America, but too often they were driven off that land by night riders. It was no surprise that many of those once-optimistic
and naive Italians sought refuge in the cities. And no surprise that their ghettos became fortresses, where only one social
unit mattered: the family. Nobody else could be trusted, up to and including the president of the United States.

In such places the Mafia
did
begin to establish itself, usually victimizing Italians but bringing a kind of authority to the social structure of the ghetto.
If the government treated you with contempt or suspicion, if trade unions rejected you, if at last your children had a chance
for an education and the teachers made fun of them, then you would have to live by your own rules, or pack up and leave. In
fact, hundreds of thousands of Italians did go home, many of them embittered by their American experience. For them, the promises
implied by the Statue of Liberty were part of a cruel joke; more Italian immigrants returned home than any other nationality.

But millions stayed on, seeking their own means of protection within the warm fortress of the family and its extension, the
ghetto. If, in the pursuit of justice or progress they could not depend upon the police or the courts, if they could not obtain
loans from the banks, then they would go to the man in the white suit from Francis Ford Coppola’s version of
The Godfather,
the agent of the Honored Society. He could arrange for extortionary loans. He could settle disputes. He could dispense rough
justice. Always at a price, of course. In cash, or in obligations. During the years before World War I, he was a parochial
figure, strictly local, an exotic import, a poisonous flower unique to the closed ghetto hothouse. But he was created by an
American failure. More than anything else, he emphasized how cut off many Italian immigrants were from the larger American
society.

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.