by Shawn Levy
Two years later, when the allure of profits and aesthetic freedom drove Sinatra to seek his release from the Dorsey band, he was, once again, bereft of bandmates, so he gathered to his bony bosom a band, of sorts, of his own. He expanded his entourage to include such semiregulars as Mannie Sachs, a Columbia Records executive; Ben Barton, his music publisher and business partner; composer Jimmy Van Heusen; lyricist Sammy Cahn; bruisers Tami Mauriello and Al Silvani; and Jimmy Taratino, a boxing writer whose mob ties eventually formed a costly web for the singer. And he gave them all, guilelessly, a name: the Varsity.
En masse, the Varsity hit all the swell spots—nightclubs, saloons, showbiz eateries, and, especially, the Friday night fights at Madison Square Garden, where they mingled with mobsters, Times Square sharpies, and other supernumeraries of the fight game. Grown men actually vied to be admitted to their numbers, but that privilege was rarely granted, and the resultant loyalty of its members was embarrassingly high: When Mauriello was inducted into the service and sent overseas to fight, he gave Frank his golden ID bracelet, which the singer wore with puppy-dog pride.
After the war, the Varsity evolved, with some members resuming their lives without Frank (not always peaceably or voluntarily) and others accompanying him out West, where he had joined the extended family of MGM studios. There was a Softball team—Sinatra’s Swooners, with uniforms and cheerleaders (and Ava Gardner as, ahem, honorary bat girl); there were card games, pub crawls, the works.
But then the spiral that demolished his career began: Divorced, his voice uncertain, his name connected with reds, hoods, and a dozen drunken little fistfights, without a record company, film contract, or agent to call his own, he suddenly didn’t seem like a Sun King anymore. A few steadfast partisans held on; the larger crowd vaporized.
It was a subtle thing: People didn’t so much snub Frank as stop courting him. He couldn’t get tables in the same restaurants, or not the same tables, anyway. He couldn’t round up a poker game or gang of drunks to obliterate a night with him. Early one morning at the dawn of the fifties, Sammy was walking through Times Square, overjoyed with just having been allowed to break the color barrier long enough to schmooze with the big stars at Lindy’s. He passed the Capitol Theater—the place where Frank had once hired him and his dad and uncle when they were still unknown—and lo, there Frank was, walking along with a wounded air.
“Not a soul was paying attention to him,” Sammy recalled later. “This was the man who only a few years ago had tied up traffic all over Times Square. Thousands of people had been stepping all over each other trying to get a look at him. Now the same man was walking down the same street and nobody gave a damn.”
For Sammy, to whom the clubbiness and fame of showbiz were brass rings worth one’s very soul, it was a stunning sight. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him, walking the streets alone, an ordinary Joe who’d been a giant. He was fighting to make it back again but he was doing that by himself, too. The ‘friends’ were gone with all the presents and the money he’d given them. Nobody was helping him.”
There were others who sensed Sinatra’s pain and tried to help. L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen, an admirer of the singer’s (“If you call Frank’s hole card,” he said approvingly, “he’s gonna answer”), tried to rally his spirits by hosting a testimonial dinner for him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Instead, the sparsely attended event simply underscored Sinatra’s dilemma. As Cohen recalled in his hilarious autobiography, “A lot of people that were invited to that Sinatra testimonial, that should have attended but didn’t, would bust their nuts in this day to attend a Sinatra testimonial. A lot of them would now kiss Frank’s ass after he made the comeback, but they didn’t show up when he really needed them. I don’t know the names of a lot of them bastards in that ilk of life, but I remember the people that I had running the affair at the time telling me, Jesus, this and that dirty son of a bitch should have been here.”
At the time, Frank wasn’t really keeping up with all the snubs—he was far too bewildered by life with Ava and the prospect of resuscitating his career. But he was still Dolly’s boy, and he had to have noticed the slights. And if he’d ever shown himself to be curt and exclusive before bottoming out and being left behind, when he recovered he became more demanding than ever of the loyalty of those he allowed around him. Only the surest would be abided.
Such a one was Humphrey Bogart, the movie god whose blessing upon Frank was one of the lifelines that kept him hopeful that he might someday emerge from the straits in which fate had left him foundering.
In all Hollywood, nobody had a flintier or more enviable reputation than Bogart. An Upper West Side sissy boy who went from playing juvenile walk-ons to psychotic killers, paranoid adventurers, and cynics with soft hearts, he danced just within the boundaries of the game. His drinking, womanizing, and bellicosity never quite made the front pages, his bad-mouthing of bosses never quite stooped to insubordination, and his liberal political beliefs and headstrong independence never quite severed him from the basis of his wealth, fame, and popularity. The one potential faux pas of his life—his affair with starlet Lauren Bacall—was easily cast by studio flacks and gossip mavens as a great May – December romance, especially after the couple wed and started a family.
For a large part of the movie colony, Bogie was a cult hero—a Knight of the True Way. He did his work best by being something that no one else could be: himself. Off-camera, he drank away afternoons in restaurants, went out of his way to upset prigs at parties, cruised the Pacific on his sailboat, and made, with his young wife, a home that offered haven to those very select few in his business who, like him, weren’t fooled for a minute by their own press.
Nothing, but nothing, rattled Bogart more than the sight of Hollywood kissing its own behind, especially over unproven new talent, and especially unproven male talent that was rooted in alleged sex appeal. So in 1945, when the jug-eared boy singer who made the bobby-soxers wet their pants showed up in town to great foofaraw, Bogart was ready to dismiss him out of hand. They ran into one another for the first time at the Players, the Sunset Boulevard restaurant, bar, and theater owned by Preston Sturges.
“They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint,” said Bogart, an expert needler. “Make me faint.”
Sinatra stood right up to him: “I’m taking the week off.”
Bogart liked the response, liked the kid. And Frank, of course, saw in Bogart all the things he always wanted to be: aloof, profound, world-weary, slightly drunk, slightly sentimental, romantic, tender, tough, loyal, and proud. (He could take his hero worship too far. Once, when a date of Frank’s declared, in Bogart’s presence, “You sound like Bogie sometimes,” the actor laughed and said, “Don’t remind him, sweetheart, the poor bastard’s trying to kick it!”) He tried to cajole producers into casting him in Knock on Any Door as a tough street kid opposite Bogart’s impassioned lawyer; such was Sinatra’s stock as an actor that the role went to John Derek.
Nevertheless, the two men got into the habit of spending time together whenever the occasion arose, which, given Frank’s hectic schedule of filmmaking, recording, and touring, wasn’t often. In 1949, though, Frank moved his family from Toluca Lake to Holmby Hills, just blocks from Bogart’s house. This new proximity allowed the two stars more frequent contact; soon after moving into the neighborhood, Sinatra organized a guys-only baby shower for Bogart when Lauren Bacall was pregnant with their first child.
The relationship got a little strange. After Frank had left Nancy and the kids, he was still welcome in their house; he would frequently crash on his estranged wife’s couch after nights of bingeing with Bogart, shuttling between the two homes as if, in his mind, they constituted one. “He’s always here,” Bogart told a reporter. “I think we’re parent substitutes for him, or something.” Bacall empathized with Frank’s need for companionship, but Bogart warned her against getting wrapped up in it. “He chose to live the way he’s living—alone,” he admonished his wife. “It’s too
bad if he’s lonely, but that’s his choice. We have our own road to travel, never forget that—we can’t live his life.”
In fact, Bogart was one of the few people who were willing to tell Frank exactly what they thought of some of the things he did. There was the time he hosted Sinatra, David Niven, and Richard Burton for a night of drinking on his beloved yacht, Santana. Frank was at a career ebb, and he passed part of the night on deck, serenading yachters on the other boats moored nearby; Bogie grew so irate with Sinatra’s preening performance, recalled Burton, that he and Frank “nearly came to blows.”
There was the time when Frank, riding high on the early reviews for From Here to Eternity, visited his hero in search of approval. “I saw your picture,” said Bogie. “What did you think?” Frank asked. Bogart simply shook his head no.
And there was Bogart’s famous line about Frank’s thin-skinned egoism: “Sinatra’s idea of paradise is a place where there are plenty of women and no newspapermen. He doesn’t know it, but he’d be better off if it were the other way around.”
Still, there was a bond between the two: father-son, mentor-acolyte, king-pretender—somehow the dynamic was agreeable to them both. They both reviled the traditional cant and decorum of Hollywood protocol, they both had deep political concerns for the everyman, and they both loved to needle people, especially the thin-skinned twits their lives as famous performers gave them so many chances to meet. Frank was always welcome in the Bogart home; the Bogarts, in turn, accepted his hospitality when he would want to scoop up a gang of pals and run off for a weekend in the Springs or Vegas.
In June 1955, for instance, he gathered a dozen or so chums, rented a train, and took off to catch Noel Coward’s opening at the Desert Inn (yes, that Noel Coward and that Desert Inn; Vegas was always great with novelties). During that particular spree, legend has it, the group had gotten so deep into its cups that Bacall was startled by their debauched appearance when she caught a gander of them ringside in a casino showroom. She looked around at all the famous flesh—Frank; Bogart; Judy Garland; David Niven; restaurateur Mike Romanoff; literary agent Swifty Lazar and his date, Martha Hyer; Jimmy Van Heusen and his date, Angie Dickinson; a few well-oiled others.
“You look like a goddamn rat pack,” she muttered.
It broke them up. A few nights later, back in Romanoff’s joint in Beverly Hills, she walked in and declared, “I see the rat pack’s all here.” Again, a big hit, but this time the joke picked up momentum of its own: They founded an institution—the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. They drew up a coat of arms—a rat gnawing on a human hand—and coined a motto: “Never rat on a rat.” And they assigned themselves ranks and responsibilities: Frank (and you can just see him standing there excitedly conducting the whole sophomoric enterprise) was named Pack Master; Bacall, Den Mother; Garland, Vice President; Sid Luft (Garland’s husband and manager), Cage Master; Lazar (so full of pep they gave him two jobs), Treasurer and Recording Secretary; and humorist Nathaniel Benchley, Historian.
Bogart was named Rat in Charge of Public Relations, and the next day he spoke about the whole silly business with movieland reporter Joe Hyams. “News must be pretty tight when you start to cover parties at Romanoff’s,” Bogart responded when asked about the Rat Pack, but, assured that the story would be treated with such overblown pomp that it would obviously be seen as a goof, he acceded to an interview. The Rat Pack, he declared, was formed for “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.” They’d briefly considered adding some absent friends to the roster, he said, but the requirements were often too high: When Claudette Colbert, for instance, whom they all liked, was nominated, Bacall insisted that she not be admitted because she was “a nice person but not a rat.” Hyams dutifully jotted it all down, agreed once again when Bogart insisted that “it was all a joke,” and reported it the next day in the New York Herald Tribune.
Hyams’s scoop was true enough: There was indeed a group, centered around Bogart, that hung out together to the exclusion of the remainder of Hollywood, which, though they were part of it, they had no qualms about mocking. “You had to be a noncomformist,” said Bacall, “and you had to stay up late and drink and laugh a lot and not care what anybody said about you or thought about you” (one last criterion: “You had to be a little musical”). But the idea of an organization and a creed and all that, that was strictly a lark, another of Bogart’s beloved practical jokes taken to an absurd height.
Nevertheless, the publicity incited a reaction that revealed that Bogart’s attitude wasn’t necessarily laughed off by the world at large. Hollywood was an extremely cliquish society, and Bogart’s clique had always taken the perverse ethical stand that the local social mores—and the cliques it spawned—were bullshit. The notion of such a disdainful group legitimizing itself into an honorable cult, even in jest, struck some in the movie colony as an affront.
The poor schmucks didn’t get the joke: There was no such thing as the Rat Pack, not really. The principals might all get together at Romanoff’s or Bogart’s house and carry on like a drunken fraternity, but that’s all they really were: There were no dues or meetings or minutes or rules; there were just nights together in a company town of which they were all valued—and jaded—assets. If they wanted to pretend they were wild rebels, fine; they still all showed up on movie sets and in recording studios bright and early the next morning with their material prepared and their bodies and voices ready to perform. The whole Rat Pack thing was like bowling or square dancing or watching TV—the things they would’ve done together if they’d been squarejohns living between the coasts and not movieland royalty.
The subtle caste system out of which the Rat Pack arose became somewhat more manifest in 1956 when Bogart was diagnosed as having incurable throat cancer. A parade of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances spent the ensuing year paying fealty to this man who neither wanted nor acknowledged their sympathetic indulgence. “Haven’t you people got anything better to do than come over here and bother me?” Bogie would admonish his guests. “How am I supposed to get any rest with the likes of you coming every day?” It was the sandpaper wit they’d come to expect from him, and they cherished it.
Despite his crusty bravery, though, the last year of Bogart’s life was a horror of weight loss, discomfort, incapacity, depression. Bacall, still in her early thirties and an established star in her own right, bore it as well as she could, but she needed occasional escape from the traumatic scene unfolding in her home. Bogart insisted that she continue to go out on the town, and he was grateful whenever she took him up on the offer, most frequently escorted by Sinatra.
Frank had determined to remain steadfast during his idol’s illness, visiting regularly even though he was mortified by Bogart’s condition. “It wasn’t easy for him,” Bacall remembered. “I don’t think he could bear to see Bogie that way or bear to face the possibility of his death. Yet he cheered Bogie up when he was with him—made him laugh—kept the ring-a-ding act in high gear.”
More than that, it has been suggested, he filled the loneliness in Mrs. Bogart’s life with more than just suppers at Romanoff’s. Intimates of the group whispered about a budding love affair between Sinatra and Bacall—“It was no secret to any of us,” said one—and they pointed to a Rat Pack trip to Las Vegas for Bacall’s birthday which Bogart skipped, preferring to take his young son, Stephen, to sea on the Santana.
Bacall was aware of the dynamic, admitting that Bogart “was somewhat jealous of Frank. Partly because he knew I loved being with him, partly because he thought Frank was in love with me, and partly because our physical life together, which had always ranked high, had less than flourished with his illness.”
When the end finally came, Frank, a fixture in the Bogart household, was nowhere to be found. Bogart died on January 14, 1957, when Frank was in New York working a club date at the Copacabana. He canceled three days’ worth of shows (Sammy, who was starring on Broadway in Mr.
Wonderful, and Jerry Lewis, who was in the midst of a successful solo run at the Palace, subbed for him), but he didn’t return to California for the funeral, holing up instead in his Manhattan hotel.
Even if he didn’t have any reason to feel guilty, he couldn’t have been too comfortable back on Maplewood Drive. Bogart’s house had become a kind of shrine to his final days: His favorite chair, his clothes, his photos, his very aura hung about the place unaltered. Bacall couldn’t bring herself to change a thing, even though she, too, found it difficult to live amid it all. Frank—always indulgent of widows—gave her and her children the run of his Palm Springs estate for as long as they needed it.
By the end of 1957, the time had arrived when he could offer her more. His Mexican divorce from Ava Gardner, a mere legal technicality in their shattered relationship, had coincidentally come through that June. Frank and Bacall began seeing one another socially, with all observers assuming they were intimate. When Frank entertained at his homes in Coldwater Canyon or Palm Springs, Bacall was hostess, and she was his date for the Las Vegas premiere of Pal Joey and the L.A. premiere of The Joker Is Wild. It made perfect sense: the Pack Master and the Den Mother, a golden couple come together after their storied marriages had ended, respectively, in passionate disaster and heart-wrenching tragedy.
Despite the fairy-tale appearance of the romance, though, they had to endure one another’s considerable faults. Bacall got into the habit of checking up on him whenever he was with other women—taking a phone call from her while his latest conquest listened along in his hotel room, he made a big show of his impatience, answering, “Yes, Captain. Yes, General. Yes, Boss.” In exchange, she was subject to Frank’s moodiness. His swings between indulgent companionability and icy remove rattled her, especially, as she noted later, since she had previously “been married to a grown-up.”
But her will was no match for his; like many of Sinatra’s women, she was eager to do anything to please him. She even went so far as to give up her home on Maplewood Drive, in part because of the painful memories the place harbored for her, in part because, as she later told her son, “I don’t think Frank was comfortable in that house. The ghost of your father was always there and I knew that Frank would feel better if I moved.”
