Through the years many celebrity Mug Shots have proven to be gags. The one above is not.
Yes, it’s The Chairman of the Board, The Voice, Ole Blue Eyes.
Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here today to kick off our Mug Shot Monday series with a glimpse of a young Frank Sinatra pictured in hot water with police in Bergen County, New Jersey.
These photographs are probably familiar to hardcore Sinatra devotees, but they are new to us. Intrigued, we wondered, what did Sinatra do to deserve such treatment?
We certainly know that in his later years, Sinatra had many underworld connections. One of his pals, for example, was Chicago-based gangster Sam Giancana, who shared a mistress (Judith Campbell Exner) with President John F. Kennedy.
But the above mug shots were taken when Sinatra was a young man, just starting his career. What puzzled us initially was that the singer’s Hoboken, New Jersey birthplace is located in Hudson County, not Bergen County. So what DID happen that resulted in these shots?
It turns out that this is an early case of cherchez la femme in Sinatra’s life. The year is 1938, and Sinatra is 23 years old. He somehow gets himself involved with a young woman who lives in Lodi, New Jersey, which is in Bergen County.
According to law enforcement records, “on the second and ninth days of November 1938 at the Borough of Lodi” and “under the promise of marriage” Sinatra “did then and there have sexual intercourse with said complaintaint (the lass from Lodi), who was then and there a single female of good repute.”
Sinatra was charged with “seduction and adultery,” which sounds like an Italian movie title of the Sixties. Yes, reneging on a promise to marry was then considered a legal offense. Bergen County authorities were therefore dispatched to Hoboken to make the arrest.
As it turned out, the charges against Sinatra were later dismissed because the woman was married at the time of her fling with the young, unknown singer. Oops!
Within a year after these shots were taken, Sinatra actually did get married for the first time.
The bride was Nancy Barbato, an olive-skinned, brunette daughter of a Jersey City plasterer. According to author Arnold Shaw’s 1968 book — Sinatra: Twentieth-Century Romantic — the singer said that In Nancy, he had found beauty, warmth and understanding. Being with her was my only escape from what seemed a grim world.
Sinatra’s marriage to Nancy lasted until 1951, and Sinatra married three more times — twice to famous actresses.
Can you name them?
