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Frank Sinatra and the Price of a Name
Born in a Hoboken tenement to a Sicilian boxer and a Ligurian political boss, Sinatra turned down the chance to become “Frankie Satin” and became the most famous Italian American of the century, with all the pride and baggage that came with it. Early in Frank Sinatra’s career, the bandleader Harry James had a suggestion for his skinny new singer: change the name. Something smoother, something that would play better on a marquee. Something like Frankie Satin. Sinatra said no. It was a small decision that turned out to be a big one. For the next six decades, every time the most famous singer in the world stepped onto a stage, an Italian name went up in lights with him. Marty and Dolly Francis Albert Sinatra was born on Dec. 12, 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants. It was a brutal birth. He weighed 13 and a half pounds and was pulled out with forceps, which left scars on his left cheek and neck and damaged his left eardrum for life. His baptism had to wait until the following April. His father, Antonino Martino “Marty” Sinatra, came from Sicily. Marty couldn’t read or write. He boxed as a bantamweight and later joined the Hoboken Fire Department, eventually rising to captain. His mother, Natalina “Dolly” Garaventa, came from the area around Genoa, in Liguria. In Italy, a Sicilian and a Genoese might as well have come from different countries. In Hoboken, they were simply Italian. Dolly was the force in the family. Energetic, ambitious and politically shrewd, she became a power broker in Hoboken’s Democratic wards, and biographers see her as the dominant influence on her son’s personality. In 1935 she helped get him into a local singing group that became the Hoboken Four. They won the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, the “America’s Got Talent” of its day. The Voice In 1939 Sinatra joined Harry James’s band, and that November he moved to Tommy Dorsey’s, one of the biggest bands in the country. Within a few years he was a solo phenomenon. In October 1944, during a return engagement at New York’s Paramount Theatre, some 35,000 fans who couldn’t get in nearly rioted in Times Square. It was Columbus Day. The next year, at the height of that fame, Sinatra made a 10-minute film called “The House I Live In.” In it, he steps outside a recording session for a cigarette and finds a gang of boys chasing a Jewish kid. He stops them and tells them, in effect, that they are all Americans and that one American’s blood is as good as another’s. The son of Italian immigrants, in a country that had only recently treated Italians as enemy aliens, was using his fame to argue against prejudice. The film won an honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe, and in 2007 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. “Every time the most famous singer in the world stepped onto a stage, an Italian name went up in lights with him.” Pride and baggage Sinatra’s relationship with his heritage was never simple. Unlike Dean Martin, he rarely sang in Italian, and he scrubbed the Hoboken and Italian accents out of his singing voice. Scholars at a Hofstra University conference on Sinatra and Italy described a classic double bind: the pressure on immigrants’ children to keep the old culture while being told to become fully American. He was proud, and he was careful. He also carried the heaviest stereotype of all. His godfather, Willie Moretti, was a known mobster, and rumors and press reports about Mafia ties followed Sinatra for most of his life. His tough-guy image in bars and casinos didn’t help. As one scholar put it, Sinatra both confirmed and contradicted the stereotypes Americans held about Italian Americans. Italy, for its part, claimed him. In 1958 Italy’s ambassador presented him with an Italian American Man of the Year award. Over the decades he also traveled the same political road as many Italian Americans of his generation, from his mother’s Democratic Party toward the Republicans. The chairman’s legacy The honors piled up: an Academy Award for “From Here to Eternity,” the Capitol recordings of the 1950s that many consider the peak of American popular singing, his own label, Reprise, in 1960, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. He died in Los Angeles on May 14, 1998, at 82. Frankie Satin might have had a perfectly nice career. But he wouldn’t have been Sinatra. The kid from Monroe Street kept his father’s name, and in doing so he made it impossible for America to love its greatest singer without loving an Italian American, too.