They were suave and crude, sexy and sexist, famous and infamous and drunk not only on booze but on the enormous power they had accrued.
Frank, Sammy and Dean — each notorious enough to be known by a single name — were the talents, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop the official hangers-on. And for roughly six heady years, 1957 to 1963, they lived out an erotic, narcissistic fantasy that had the rest of buttoned-down America eagerly following their exploits.
Well before the Pill had launched the sexual revolution and Elvis (and rock ‘n’ roll) had brought a more explicit carnality into America’s living rooms, the Rat Pack stood at the cutting-edge of self-indulgence.
To this day, in fact, their volatile mixture of sublime art and substandard behavior continues to intrigue America. If you doubt it, then try to explain the current wave of all things Rat Pack, including a new HBO movie (debuting Aug. 22), two tell-all books (Sean Levy’s “Rat Pack Confidential” and Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell’s “The Rat Pack”), a slew of Web sites (including the indispensable “Rat Pack Home Page”) and various nightclubs that try to rekindle a vanished era (in Chicago, the leader of the pack is Jilly’s, on North Rush Street, named for Sinatra’s thuggish, long-gone best friend Jilly Rizzo).
Clearly, this is the Year of the Rat Pack.
Even more remarkably, some of the Pack’s most ardent fans are kids barely in their 20s for whom Sinatra and the rest are nearly pre-historic figures. Nevertheless, they sip martinis, puff on cigars, listen to swing records and otherwise emulate entertainers who had peaked long before they were born.
The question is: Why?
“I think as people reach a certain age, they’re looking for models on how an adult behaves,” says author Levy.
“And the (Baby) Boomers didn’t necessarily provide the next generation with those models. I mean, you don’t necessarily want to act like Bob Dylan as a grownup, but to put on a jacket and tie and have drink and a cigarette, that seems kind of grown up in a twisted way.”
Considering that we now live in the age of AIDS, political correctness and something close to sexual equality, one might think that the Rat Pack’s shenanigans would be about as popular as a salacious joke at a sexual harassment seminar.
Or perhaps that’s just the point.
“This whole politically correct thing — you’re afraid to open your mouth today,” says esteemed Chicago singer-pianist Audrey Morris, who admired the Pack as much as any unenlightened male of the day.
“But when the guys in the Rat Pack referred to women as `broads,’ they weren’t saying it to be mean. It’s just a kind of loose, street language, and they behaved like street guys.
“I thought they were great fun, and I still do. Those three singers were absolutely terrific, great artists, and when they sang they weren’t fooling around.”
Therein lies the essential paradox of the Pack, three brilliant performing artists (and their two onstage valets) who sang like gods but cavorted like teenagers in heat. If the artistry of Sinatra, Martin and Davis represented an apex in the evolution of American pop, their sharing of women, patronizing of prostitutes, catering to mobsters and reveling in racist language stands at the nadir of American public behavior.
Though contemporaries, such as Morris, are willing to excuse the Rat Pack’s antics, perhaps Morris’ younger counterparts would object.
“No, I think that the Rat Pack was a necessary outlet of naughtiness in a time that was all about staying within the lines and having a white picket fence and a nice wife,” says the young Chicago jazz singer Stephanie Browning, whose stage manner is considerably more aggressive than would have been tolerated from a woman in the heyday of the Pack.
“It was a pretty (sexually repressed) universe at the time. These guys were completely irresponsible men, and, strangely enough, that’s got a lot of appeal, especially in the context of the ’50s, when keeping this facade of normalcy was more important.
“The Rat Pack was having a good time for everyone, which is why they had to overdo it.”
Did they ever. Having acquired the dubious sobriquet from Lauren Bacall, who called Sinatra and an earlier group of heavy-drinking friends the most demeaning term she could think of at the moment, the Rat Pack at first was little more than a Hollywood imbibing society (its guzzlers included Sinatra, Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland and husband Sid Luft, Swifty Lazar and Nathaniel Benchley).
But it wasn’t until Sinatra had brought Martin and Davis into his orbit, in Las Vegas in the mid-’50s, that the myth began to gel.
“Stupid as it sounded, they called Frank the Leader,” writes Levy in “Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey & the Last Great Showbiz Party” (Doubleday).
“Sammy they called Smokey –because he smoked a lot, not because of his skin.
“Dean was Dago–Dag for short –and they’d actually call him that in the act until Joey (of all people) walked off, complaining that Frank wouldn’t want to be called `dago’ offstage; Frank agreed, so it became a private thing.”
So in 1959, with Lawford as oh-so-British sidekick and Bishop as class clown, the Pack took up residence at the Sands, a sumptuous Copa-for-the-desert in which Sinatra and his mob pals owned points.
The occasion was the shooting of “Ocean’s Eleven,” a second-rate heist movie that helped make the Rat Pack the hottest act in America. A small army of Hollywood types had invaded the town to work on the film, with Sinatra and his pallies shooting during the day and playing the Sands at night in a gig they called the Summit. To unwind, the Pack headed daily to the steam room–which Sinatra had built in the Sands– to plan the day’s activities.
Onstage, they were a laugh a minute, with Martin prat-falling, Sinatra attempting to crack wise and Davis bowled over with forced laughter at his Leader’s every quip. Between numbers– and even between sung phrases– they sipped Jack Daniels, drew deeply on Camels and acted as if this were a party rather than a stage act. No show was complete without Martin picking up the tiny Davis, stepping seriously toward the microphone and saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank the NAACP for this award.”
Sinatra roared; some winced.
“Their horsing around with race and religion has finally gotten out of hand,” wrote columnist Ralph Pearl in 1960, after a Summit performance during the Las Vegas premiere of “Ocean’s Eleven.” “Mix an abundance of blue material with that and you have a highly inflammable situation.”
Yet he hastened to add, “I’d be a fat, old hypocrite if I said I didn’t enjoy their act. It’s like eavesdropping on a stag party.”
Indeed, “The Rat Pack was about what every man wants to be in his lifetime, going through life not bowing down to anybody, doing what you want to do, going where you want to go, doing it your way,” says comedian Tom Dreesen, who toured the world with Sinatra for 13 years.
“For a five- or six-year period, the period of the Rat Pack at its height, these were three guys who said: `Let’s go appear on any stage we want to anywhere in the country, no agents, no lawyers,
just have some fun–that’s our policy.’ “
Yet for all the apparent interest in the Rat Pack today, with those in their 20s professing a love of swing music and aping the cigarette-and-martini mannerisms of the ’50s, the clan seems more like a period piece. Certainly it’s unlikely that Frank, Sammy, Dino and their cohorts would hold much fascination if they were emerging today, rather than a couple generations ago.
“I think there was always a sort of double standard with these guys — they were functioning in the era of Camelot, when the press was more complicit with the people they covered,” says author Levy. “So the full extent of their corruption as fathers and husbands and businessmen wasn’t really known at that time.”
Thanks to the recent spate of revelatory books and films, however, their dark, nihilistic side is becoming increasingly apparent.
In the new HBO film, “The Rat Pack,” for instance, Sinatra is portrayed as a self-obsessed, often ugly man consumed by a lust for power. When a reporter who has been writing unkind articles about Sinatra shows up in one of the singer’s favorite watering holes, Sinatra physically assaults him. When President John F. Kennedy snubs Sinatra, opting to stay at Bing Crosby’s mansion, rather than at Sinatra’s, during a presidential tour of the West Coast, the singer again erupts into violence: He picks up a sledgehammer and begins destroying the special accommodations he had been building for the presidential visit.
These stories are not the imaginings of some screenwriter but, rather, documented fact.
“I just thought there was no sense in doing another puff piece,” says Rob Cohen, director of “The Rat Pack,” in explaining the no-holds-barred nature of his film.
“The beauty of a person’s life is not in its gloss, it’s in its complexity. So Frank, for instance, is all the greater because he had flaws. When an audience is presented with the flawed side, as well as the great side, they feel they’re seeing more of the truth than they’ve ever seen.”
Yet one wonders whether fans of the Rat Pack in general, and women in particular, will be so smitten when they see Sinatra, as portrayed by Ray Liotta in Cohen’s film, serving as JFK’s pimp.
“Well, this is certainly not the feminist version of paradise,” says Cohen.
Nor, in fact, was the milieu in which the Pack flourished. Rather, Sinatra and friends were living in a thoroughly male world, one in which the bonds among men–as expressed by the famous, group handshake in “Ocean’s Eleven” –are of paramount importance.
It’s a theme that echoes through American literature (as in the novels of Ernest Hemingway) and film (in westerns such as “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”), and it may have reached its peak in the reign of the Rat Pack. Combine the male bonhomie with the musical virtuosity and sexual charisma of Frank, Dean and Sammy as stage performers, and it’s no wonder the Pack was so difficult to resist — then and now.
The assassination of Kennedy, in 1963, brought the party to a quick close — for the Pack and for the rest of the country. Frank, Sammy and Dean, however, were the last to know it, attempting as late as 1987 to recapture the old glory in an ill-fated “reunion” tour. Martin bailed out shortly after the venture began, finding the prospect of carousing with Sinatra into the wee hours rather tedious. After the trio’s appearance at the Chicago Theatre, in March 1988, Martin headed to Vegas, and Frank and Dean never spoke again.
The Rat Pack was but a memory.
“To take them too terribly seriously is a mistake, but they were sort of like a flag in the breeze, and they really did stand for something at its moment,” says author Levy.
“And perhaps in retrospect that moment stood for something. . . . It was the last redoubt of grownups before the onslaught of rock ‘n’ roll and teeny pop culture.”
For that, at least, we can be grateful.
Next Sunday: A behind-the-scenes look in TV Week at the making of HBO’s “The Rat Pack.”
OUT OF THE PACK
The new wave of Rat Packiana is immense, with offerings in various media. Following are some of the best:
Movies
“The Rat Pack,” 8 p.m. Aug. 22 on HBO. By definition, it’s impossible to re-create the particular chemistry that Frank, Sammy and Dean achieved on stage, if only because the three principals aren’t around to do it. Within that limitation, however, director Rob Cohen has told a more truthful account of the Rat Pack’s often seamy backstage life than has yet been seen on film.
“Dino.” Director Martin Scorsese reportedly plans to make a film based on Nick Tosches’ biography, though a script has not yet been written.
Books
“Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey & the Last Great Showbiz Party,” by Sean Levy, (Doubleday). This one owes much of its information to Kitty Kelley’s “My Way” and its tone to Tosches’ “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.” Yet Levy, one of the best show-business authors around, has placed the Pack in its high-flying, celebrity milieu better than anyone.
“The Rat Pack: The Hey-Hey Days of Frank and the Boys,” by Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell (Taylor Publishing). Here’s a drier, more straightforward account of the familiar saga.
Web sites
“The Rat Pack Home Page”: www.primenet.com/drbmbay/indexthm/. Want to hear the theme to “Ocean’s Eleven” or read a collection of articles on the Pack? This is the place.
“Ratpack Rarities”: www.ratpack-rarities.com. Collectors converge here to find videotapes, vintage LPs and other ephemera.
“Frank, Dean and Sammy: An Evening With the Rat Pack”: www.nick-at-nite.com/ratpack. Until the Nick at Nite/TV Land cable networks decide to rebroadcast this 1965 concert footage, or until it’s released on video, this Web site will have to do. Fans can download snippets of the program, which was telecast for the first time earlier this year.
THE MOVIES
Not all of the Rat Pack’s film work stands the test of time, though even the lesser efforts are interesting as Hollywood oddities.
“Some Came Running” (1958). Sinatra and Martin turned in their best screen performances together in an adaptation of James Jones’ novel, an edgy study of post-World War II ennui. Shirley MacLaine, an honorary Rat Packer, looks and sounds ineffably vulnerable.
“Ocean’s Eleven” (1960). No one is going to call this heist movie great (or even very good) cinema, but at least it documents all the Rat Packers in their prime, with Las Vegas itself as neon-lit co-star.
“Sergeants 3” (1962). The Pack takes on the story “Gunga Din”? Sinatra and friends as cavalry sergeants? Nice try, but not one of the Pack’s stellar moments.
“Robin and the Seven Hoods” (1964). Joined by Bing Crosby and Peter Falk, the Rat Pack are at their best in a Robin Hood tale set in Roaring ’20s Chicago. How can you dislike a film in which Davis sings, dances and shoots up a bar (all at once) and Sinatra unveils “My Kind of Town”?
