On A raw December afternoon in 1915, the kitchen of a flat in the Little Italy area of Hoboken, New Jersey, was full of women, all gathered around a table, all shouting at once.
On the table lay a copper-haired girl, just 19, moaning. Dolly Sinatra’s labour had stalled.
The midwife wiped the poor girl’s brow and sent urgently for the doctor.
When he arrived ten long minutes later, he clamped metallic forceps round the baby’s head.
Then he pulled hard, hauling the child from its mother’s womb and, in the violent process, tearing the left side of its face, neck and ear.
The doctor cut the cord and laid the boy - huge and blue, bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, then quickly shifted his efforts to saving the nearly unconscious mother’s life.
The women all leant in, shouting advice in Italian. At the back of the scrum, one of them looked at the seemingly lifeless baby, picked up it up and, just in case, ran ice cold water from the sink over it and slapped its back. It snuffled and began to howl.
Mother and child both survived, but neither ever forgot the brutality of that birth. Frank Sinatra — the superstar with a voice that would bewitch the world - bore the scars, both physical and psychological, to the end of his years.
Throughout his vastly documented life, he would avoid being photographed from his left.
One scar, hard to disguise (though frequently airbrushed), ran diagonally from the corner of his mouth to his jaw line.
His ear resembled an apricot run over by a steamroller. In childhood, a mastoid operation would leave another thick ridge of scar tissue on his neck, while in adolescence, severe acne left pockmarks on his skin.
As an adult, he would apply Max Factor Pan-Cake to his face and neck every morning and again after each of the several showers that, as a compulsive and obsessive hand and body washer, he took every day.
The world’s women might fall at his feet in adoration and long to be in his bed, but, in his own eyes, he was disfigured, a freak, the ‘Scarface’ that his schoolmates in Hoboken taunted him with when he was a kid.