Chapter 6 - Ethical Culture Fieldston School

“Mr. Sinatra Gets Rejected”
show, and was invited to tour with a series of other acts in Bowes’s national
company. Sinatra stayed on until the bullying of other group members led him to
quit at the end of the year.
Marty Sinatra was disappointed in his nineteen year‐old son. Here was
one more failed attempt to make something of himself. But for Frank the
Hoboken Four had never been much more than a necessary detour on the road to
becoming a solo act. As usual, Dolly supported him. “The two of you are driving
me nuts,” she said of the fighting between father and son. “Frankie wants to sing,
Marty. Jesus Christ, let him sing, will ya?” Once more, it appears, Mother Knew
Best. 18
The next stage in Sinatra’s career began in 1937 when a song promoter
named Hank Sanicola became his unofficial manager and got him a job waiting
tables and singing with the house band at the Rustic Cabin, a club in Englewood,
New Jersey, right on the shore of the Hudson. But even Dolly was dubious about
this idea. “His salary was only fifteen dollars a week, and I used to give him
practically twice that so he could pick up the tabs of his friends when they
dropped in,” she said. “When he got a five dollar raise, I told him ‘This isn’t
getting me anywhere. It would be cheaper to keep you at home.’ ‘Mama,’ he said,
it’s going to roll in someday. I’m going to be big time.’ He always believed
that.” 19
While the Rustic Cabin was hardly a major musical showcase, it offered a
number of crucial advantages to Sinatra. One was its strategic location near the
George Washington Bridge, which provided him easy access to the most
important New York City venues, where he could see and learn what was going
on. The other was that the Rustic Cabin had a direct radio wire to radio station
18 Dolly Sinatra quoted in Taraborelli, p. 23.
American History for Cynical Beginners
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