Why Sinatra Matters (6 page)

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.

“One thing about Dolly,” Sinatra said later. “She never looked back very much. She was alive today and looked forward to tomorrow.
That was her. The thing about my grandparents was, they never really got over leaving the Old Country.”

In 1914 their personal drama overshadowed the distant dramas of the public world. Far away in Europe, in the town of Sarajevo
on the last day of July, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and set off the horrors of the Great War. At
first, in the streets of Hoboken’s Little Italy, there was interest, some anxiety, but no obvious alarm. Italy immediately
declared its neutrality and would not be sucked into the charnel house until May of the following year. The young Sinatra
couple didn’t care. By that spring of 1915, Dolly was pregnant with the couple’s first child.

The tale of that birth is essential to the almost mythic structure of the Sinatra saga. Frank Sinatra was born at home on
Monroe Street on December 12, 1915. Dolly’s mother was present, but her skills as a midwife were simply not sophisticated
enough to manage the breech birth. A doctor was summoned. He was nervous and panicky. He used forceps to extract the baby’s
head, but his technique was so clumsy that the boy was permanently scarred on the face, neck, and ears. Scars were a minor
concern; the immediate problem was death itself. In the midst of all the blood and pain, it first appeared that the baby was
dead. He was immense – thirteen and a half pounds – but he was not breathing. Dolly’s mother, Rosa, moved faster than the
despairing doctor. She took the baby in her hands and held him under the cold water tap in the sink. The shocked baby began
to howl. Frank Sinatra was born.

IV.
Later, he would have no memory of World War I, except its ending. “People started running around banging pots and pans and
shouting and singing and then drinking and feasting in the streets,” he remembered. “It was one great big party.”

But the years of the war and its immediate aftermath would also affect Frank Sinatra and other Italian Americans. As it grew
clearer that the United States would be sucked into the great European conflict, there was much debate about the potential
loyalties of so many foreign-born citizens and residents. Every immigrant was suspect. Would the immigrants and their children
fight for the United States in a European war? Would the Irish fight on the side of England against Germany? Would German
Americans fight against Germany? Nativism revived, now equipped with crackpot theories about the genetic inferiority of southern
Europeans, and Congress passed the first of many laws that would bring an end to immigration. D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
was released in the summer before Sinatra’s birth; it was a brilliant artistic triumph, establishing much of the syntax of
the feature film, but its racism was vile and served as a powerful recruiting device for the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan in those
days was not simply the enemy of blacks; it hated Jews and Catholics too, and all those immigrants from southern Europe.

The paranoid American imagination was inflamed by news of revolutions in Mexico, Ireland, and, most spooky of all, Russia.
By October 1917 the Bolsheviks had taken power. In the United States, fear of communism and anarchism was added to the existing
fear and contempt for the foreigner. Both communism and anarchism, after all, were “foreign” ideologies. Both were organized
in secrecy and believed in the use of violence. Hadn’t an Italian anarchist from Paterson, New Jersey, assassinated King Umberto
of Italy in 1900? Weren’t Italian anarchists causing labor unrest in silk factories and textile mills and allying themselves
with the revolutionaries of the International Workers of the World? A new version of the “dual loyalty” debate was born; were
these immigrants primarily loyal to the United States or to their un-American ideologies?

Patriotism was soon redefined. It was no longer enough to love the United States; to prove your American identity, you also
had to hate other countries and “foreign” ideologies. In its preparations for war, the administration of Woodrow Wilson had
organized a brilliant propaganda campaign whose intention was to meld various nationalities into one. The first enemy was
the Hun; the second was the Red. The Hun bayoneted babies. He executed nurses. He was the enemy of democracy everywhere, and
the British and French were its defenders (this was news to the millions who lived in their colonies, of course, but logic
was an early casualty of the war). Tin Pan Alley was enlisted for the duration, under the command of George M. Cohan, who
created the patriotic music that is still played to this day. When the United States declared war on April 6, 1917, there
was an orgy of flag-waving celebration, rallies, and parades. Even Enrico Caruso made a recording of Cohan’s “Over There.”
There were no songs about chasing Reds.