by James Kaplan
There was no one to say such a thing, because he was the Chairman—the emperor, no matter how, or if, he chose to clothe himself.
Jesus, you look terrific, Frank!
Had the man who had once harbored aspirations of being a serious movie actor—and had brought it off in From Here to Eternity and The Man with the Golden Arm—simply given up? Or had he himself become bigger than the movies?
The best thing about the picture was Sammy Davis’s replacement, Steve McQueen, who with his cat-ate-the-canary charisma more or less waltzed off with the show, making Frank look old and overheated.
It didn’t matter. While Never So Few sputtered out, Frank was in Las Vegas, creating a show of shows that would echo down the decades, for better and worse.
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“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The line is from an old movie about myth and reality in the Old West, but it might as well have been written about a legend that was born more than half a century ago in the town whose own myth has shimmered like a mirage on the high Nevada desert for as long as anyone alive can remember. The legend is the sometimes true, often highly imaginative story of the Rat Pack.
We will get to truth, but first, like the newspaperman in John Ford’s Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we must acknowledge the very real power of legends. They compel us, they stir us, they fill our dreams and guide our behavior. The idea of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack was born at a hinge of time in the American consciousness, a moment between the conformism of the 1950s and the chaos of the 1960s, an eyeblink when the horrors and heroism of World War II were still in recent memory (and nuclear fear underlay every diversion), when compensatory excess, in the form of sex, alcohol, and cigarettes, was winked at and twentieth-century ideals of manhood hadn’t yet been subverted by the androgynous aesthetic of rock ’n’ roll.
“The Rat Pack embodied Hollywood’s most elemental myth, its deepest unspoken appeal—that as its final reward, fame offered a life without rules, without the constraints of fidelity, monogamy, sobriety, and the dreary obligation to show up at a job every morning,” writes the political journalist Ronald Brownstein.
For Sinatra, for his cronies, life seemed a canvas with no borders…There was an electricity to it: to walk into the Sands Hotel with Sinatra, a phalanx of guards leading the way, heads turning, whispers rolling through the casino like waves, men in tuxedos rushing to greet you, was mesmerizing, almost otherworldly. Just the sheer scent of celebrity at Sinatra’s parties was intoxicating. “They charged off each other,” remembers [the playwright Leonard] Gershe. “The energy in the room was extraordinary.”
The Rat Pack was an idea, even more than it was a reality. And though Frank, Dean, and Sammy were three real men, their respective myths tend, to this day, to jostle reality aside. Throw in Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford as window dressing, or ballast, and you’ve got a sharkskin-suited, skinny-tied, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, Dionysian parade float. Watch it trundle down Main Street; cheer as it goes by. We won’t see its likes again. Even if it wasn’t quite there in the first place.
—
Ocean’s 11 had a plot that sounded great on paper: eleven former army buddies band together to rob five Vegas casinos—the Sands, the Flamingo, the Sahara, the Desert Inn, and the Riviera—simultaneously, at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Since Frank and Lawford had bought the idea (officially together, but as was the case with Puccini, almost certainly with Sinatra’s money) from Gilbert Kay, the script had gone through half a dozen writers, turning into a hodgepodge of plot mechanics. But the film’s plot was secondary in any case: it was ultimately a character-driven piece. And Frank Sinatra knew plenty of characters.
Frank would, of course, play the lead, Danny Ocean, the former sergeant in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division who masterminded the heist and assembled the crew. Dean Martin would play Sam Harmon, a lounge singer who was ambivalent about taking part in the caper. Peter Lawford was to play Jimmy Foster, a playboy eager to get out from under the thumb of his rich mother. Sammy Davis Jr. was cast as Josh Howard, a former baseball player who’d lost an eye in the war and now drove a garbage truck in Las Vegas.
Frank, Dean, and Sammy (along with Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop) at the Sands, 1960. The naughtiness was real, the camaraderie more complex. (Credit 13.1)
The movie had strands of reality woven in—some clear, some strange. It was no stretch for Sinatra to play the smooth kingpin of a group of men. Dean too was essentially playing himself: he’d begun his career singing in lounges and truly was reluctant about being part of any sort of group (the Rat Pack included). Lawford’s part—that of a feckless, sponging playboy—was painfully close to the bone. And was Sammy made to play a garbageman as some kind of punishment for his sins against Frank in the Chicago radio interview?
The strangest casting of all was Joey Bishop’s: his character, Mushy O’Connors, was supposed to be an ex-boxer, though it was difficult to imagine the slight, dyspeptic comic as any kind of fighter, ex or otherwise.
Ocean’s 11 began shooting on location in Las Vegas in January 1960. And from the moment the cast showed up in town through the film’s premiere that August, and ever after, none of the leading players, or Vegas itself for that matter, would be the same again.
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Cmdr. and Mrs. Orville W. Dryer of Point Mugu just returned from a week’s stay in that neon never-never land that is Vegas. They were on hand opening night to view a nightclub act to end them all—“modestly” referred to by its stars as the summit meeting, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, plus a quiet, deadpan comic named Joey Bishop, all at the Sands Hotel.
—Oxnard (Calif.) Press-Courier, January 29, 1960
Three weeks, from January 20 to mid-February 1960, was really all the time it lasted. Everything afterward was an echo, a kind of parody—though parody was what it was kind of all about in the first place.
Wasn’t it?
The point is, there was no Rat Pack in the first place. No plan, no script, no starting pistol. Nobody ever preconceived the idea of rolling out these five guys and their bar cart on the stage of the Sands’ Copa Room that January, as shooting for Ocean’s 11 began. The Rat Pack wouldn’t even be called that until much later, and Sinatra always hated the name anyway—the word “rat” having negative connotations where he came from. “The Clan” would be tried out briefly, but Sammy Davis didn’t like the sound of that too much. Finally, in tribute to the planned summit conference between President Eisenhower and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, coming that May, someone—it might’ve been Sands manager and entertainment director Jack Entratter—decided to call the more or less spontaneous shows featuring Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Lawford, and Bishop on the Copa Room’s stage the Summit. “You come to my summit meeting and I’ll come to yours,” Entratter wired the five entertainers late that January, signing the telegram “Khrushchev.”
Frank with the cast of Ocean’s 11: A vision of unrepentant American masculinity that continues to reverberate. (Credit 13.2)
The Summit. A big, ponderous, vaguely hollow name for a couple hours’ goofing around onstage. Goofing around that, surprisingly, was a fairly shocking thing in the small, tightly controlled, homogeneous town that was Las Vegas in 1960.
Anyone who’s been to Vegas in the past decade or two, anyone who has been fascinated or repelled by the pulsating megacolossal electric ultra-corporate glass-tower light show that is Las Vegas today, will have to make a mental adjustment to imagine the Vegas of that distant and palmy time, a small place with a downtown consisting of a few honky-tonk, neon-lit blocks along Fremont Street and, out along the Strip, just those mere dozen or so casinos with lots of desert in between; a place where the tallest building was nine stories high and where, as Shecky Greene recalls, “everybody knew each other; everybody took care of each other.” It was a time when the Mob co
ntrolled what went on in the casinos, and what went on outside was controlled by a kind of Old West justice; then as now, Vegas had an actual sheriff (in 1960, it was Butch Leypoldt; after him came the legendary Ralph Lamb), and the sheriffs have been famously tough and incorruptible. It was a time, older residents recall wistfully, when you could leave your doors unlocked.
It was also a time when gambling reigned supreme, and entertainers were the tail of the dog: entertainment was what drew the gamblers to town. Entertainers—even Frank Sinatra—were employees and, even in Sinatra’s case, did what they were told. They came, and they sang or told jokes for two shows a night, sixty minutes each—not a minute more; the audience had to get back to gambling, or the house would lose money. The cover charge for Sinatra’s shows in the Copa Room in that era was $6.50—the equivalent of about $50.00 today, but still a relative pittance. And the entertainers were richly paid for their efforts (and many of them gambled away their salaries before they left town). Then they cycled along to their jobs making records or movies or performing at clubs in other cities.
Ocean’s 11 changed all that.
But things didn’t change all at once. Though Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Lawford, and Bishop were all in town to act in the movie (and were all staying at the Sands), only Frank, Dean, and Sammy were scheduled to headline at the Copa Room—individually, on successive nights, not simultaneously, as Variety had breathlessly announced in November. As Ed Walters, who began working as a pit boss at the Sands in 1959, recalled, “Frank opened the first night, and all went well. Dean did the second night and did both shows.” Then, on the third night, Sammy Davis Jr. was running long. A no-no.
“Frank came onstage, did some talking with Sammy, and ended the show,” Walters says. “He said, ‘He’s got to go to bed; we’re doing a movie all day. Sammy, say good night.’ Sammy says good night. Frank takes him by the hand and tells the crowd, ‘I’ve got to get him to bed.’ They both walk off to a big round of applause.”
One headliner breaking into another headliner’s show was highly unusual. But the next night, something even more remarkable occurred. “Frank is doing his show,” Ed Walters remembers, “and out walks Dean and tells everyone Frank has to go to bed. The audience is shocked at first. Remember, this is Sinatra in the Copa Room in full tux, doing his usual very professional job. Frank would start a song, and halfway through it Dean would cut in—‘Frank, that’s enough. Frank, that song’s too long—sing something shorter.’
“The crowd doesn’t know if Dean is serious or not, if Dean is drunk or not. Dean did drink a lot at the time. I know that this stuff would [later] become legend, but at the time it was a shocking thing to see.”
What Martin was doing to Sinatra was the very thing Jerry Lewis had done to Dean Martin in 1946: interrupting a straight act with horseplay, to the discomfiture of the audience (and the performer) at first, but ultimately thrilling everybody. Everyone got to feel as if they were in on the joke; everyone could feel vicariously naughty. And Sinatra, by going along with the routine (and he seemed to have been truly startled by Martin at first), could feel vicariously funny. The laughs—the kinds he could never get with his own jokes or asides—were intoxicating to him.
“The audience just loved it and broke out in spontaneous applause,” Walters says. “That show ended with the audience going out and raving about what they saw. Everyone in the casino talked about it: Dean and Frank were funny together! By the end of the first week, it was almost certain that at every show, no matter who was doing his show that night, Frank, Dean, and Sammy would [all] be onstage [together]. The fooling around became the talk of the Strip and then the city, and then it spread to L.A. and New York. People were flying in from all over. Frank’s friends all wanted to be there. Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Roz Russell, Gregory Peck, and all his buddies came in and saw a show or two and went home raving about it.”
The rumors were flying all over town, Ed Walters recalls: Dean was drunk and stopped Frank from singing!
Frank and Dean were so drunk they couldn’t remember the words, so they yelled at each other!
You can’t believe it, Sinatra was interrupted right in the middle of singing by Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, who told Sinatra to stand aside while they showed him how to do his act!
The word spread, and the stars, and the public, kept flocking to the Sands. Attention begat more attention. “Every night there was some important or well-known person at the shows,” Walters says. “Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck. If they were introduced during the show, and they all were, it made news. The press ate it up. They hadn’t seen so many stars in one place in some time.”
At one point in early February, the Sands had eighteen thousand reservation requests for its two hundred rooms.
Soon Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop were joining in, too. Lawford, who had sung and danced very creditably in MGM musicals, rolled out his old skills, and audiences were glad to see him. And Jack Entratter, who had learned to be an impresario under Jules Podell at the Copacabana and was behind the scenes at the Copa Room, stage-managing this new whatever-it-was, had a very special role in mind for Joey Bishop.
Entratter was delighted at the comedy chaos that was unfolding nightly and turning the Sands into the center of the entertainment universe, but he never forgot what the casino’s main business was. Thus he assigned Bishop to perform the critical function of emcee. It was Joey’s job to control the onstage bedlam by introducing the act and then, after not too much more than an hour, making sure it got off in time for the gamblers to get back to gambling. But gradually, with Dean’s help and Frank’s blessing, Bishop, the straightest of straight men, also became part of the act. In the midst of all the nonsense, one long-suffering stare could go a long way.
“Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford were supposed to take turns entertaining in the Copa room but save for one night when Dean was ill, they’ve all been on for two shows, and the performances get crazier each time,” Hedda Hopper wrote in her column of February 11. “They had a cake throwing contest the night of Joey Bishop’s birthday [February 3]. He saw it coming but Frank and Dean didn’t and got it in the face and chest.”
It was nonsense, mostly. What’s usually said about the comedy that took place during those three weeks at the Sands is that you had to be there. What audio-taped and filmed records show students of the Rat Pack is that most of the humor was Neanderthal, if not antediluvian, at least by twenty-first-century standards. Lots of drinking jokes, mostly by Dean (after the initial ovation: “How long I been on?”). Lots of ethnic jokes, chiefly at Sammy’s expense (Frank, from off stage: “Keep smiling so they can see you, Smokey”; and the famous—and frequently reused—bit where Dean picked Sammy up bodily and piped up, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this award”), but even one or two at Sinatra’s (Joey: “Stop singing and tell people about all the good work the Mafia’s doing”).
Not everyone was charmed. “I thought it was plain, unadulterated shit,” said Shecky Greene, who knew all the participants well and attended some of the shows. He shook his head. “Calling [Sammy] Smokey and Blackie—I was offended.”
But to the paying customers—say, the Orville Dryers of Point Mugu, California—it was all new and profoundly startling. It was startling to see grown men in tuxedos—famous grown men in tuxedos—behaving this way, and no doubt the Dryers told their friends about it (whispering the naughty bits), and the legend began to grow.
—
During the day, they made the movie. Sort of. “The earliest call was for 5:30 p.m., and no actor had to be on the set for more than three hours,” writes Shawn Levy in Rat Pack Confidential. “On the first day of the Summit, January 20, there was no filming done at all. Thereafter, [the director Lewis] Milestone usually got one Rat Packer at a time, occasionally two, having the whole quintet at his disposal only once—to film the closing credits on a workday cut short by high winds.”
How could, and why w
ould, a movie be made under such circumstances? Because Frank Sinatra, the producer and star of Ocean’s 11, was calling the shots, that’s why. And as Tom Santopietro writes, “Frank looked upon the film, in essence, as a very well-paid vacation. He did not invest any of his artistry or passion in it, but rather viewed it as a means to make money and have fun with his friends.”
The distinguished and distinctively named sixty-four-year-old Milestone (he’d been born Lev Milstein) had won an Oscar in 1930 for All Quiet on the Western Front but lately had mostly been working in television. A small, ironic man with a Slavic accent and an ever-present cigarette, he did the best he could under the circumstances but “certainly knew exactly who held the power on the set,” Santopietro notes. “Sinatra…stood right next to him behind the camera whenever his presence was not required for the scene being shot.”
“Milestone had a very loose grasp, shall we say,” recalled the famed Hollywood photographer Sid Avery, who was working on the set of Ocean’s 11. “He would always address Frank first, because that is who everybody else followed. He’d say, ‘Frank. We need another take.’ And [Sinatra would] say, ‘Print that one twice.’ ”
Did Sinatra also hold the power over the other four principals? In a famous Vegas story, the actor Norman Fell, a co-star in Ocean’s 11, is said to have awakened one morning—it must have been very late in the morning—and looked out his hotel window to see Dean and Sammy and Peter Lawford running past the pool. Fell stuck his head out and yelled, “Hey, where are you guys going?” And Sammy said, “Frank’s up!”
It’s a cute story; add it to the legend. The camaraderie onstage led the outside world to jump to conclusions. “Some eastern press, mainly one woman who had a column [Kilgallen], put it out as ‘Frank Sinatra and his pack of regulars are up all night drinking and partying in Las Vegas,’ ” Ed Walters says. “That wasn’t exactly the correct scene as I saw it.”
