Chapter 6 - Ethical Culture Fieldston School

“Mr. Sinatra Gets Rejected”
outlook. But I suspect that the series of thoughts and experiences that led him to
wield a sledgehammer that March day originated in a relatively unprepossessing
house in Hoboken. The real ground‐breaking took place there.
“He didn’t dream. He said, ‘I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna get across this river.
I’m gonna go there [New York City] and make a name for myself.’”
‐‐Tina Sinatra on her father’s youth in Hoboken 10
“As I left the theater, with the shriek of young lungs still ringing in my ears, I was bothered by a
strange discovery – that you could become a public idol simply by looking young, sad, and
undernourished, then by skimming off a certain amount of your misery and pouring it into a
microphone.”
‐‐journalist Jack Long after a Sinatra performance, 1943 11
It may be a perverse tribute to the elasticity of the American Dream that
by the early twentieth century Martin Sinatra would adopt an Irish name –
O’Brien – as a means of upward mobility. Of course, he probably didn’t think
about his situation exactly this way. For the young Sicilian immigrant, it was
probably more a matter of common sense: there was no way an aspiring boxer
was ever going to get into a gym, nevermind a ring, with a name like Sinatra.
Perhaps he was aware that there was a time when people with names like
“Kennedy” had been viewed with the same degree of disdain and dismay that
the Italians like him were. Perhaps he could anticipate a time when there would
be those (Puerto Ricans? Koreans?) who would take their place at the bottom of
the pecking order along with a fixed underclass of Negroes. But he probably
didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.
9 As noted elsewhere, Sinatra held a fund-raiser for Martin Luther King in the early sixties; his ties to
Monaco stem from his friendship with (future princess) Grace Kelly, which took root during their work
together in the 1956 film High Society.
10 John Lahr, Sinatra: The Artist and the Man (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 4.
11 Jack Long, “Sweet Dreams and Dynamite,” The American, September 1943 (included in Legend: Frank
Sinatra and the American Dream, edited by Ethlie Ann Vare (New York: Boulevard Books, 1995), p. 9.
American History for Cynical Beginners
6