Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217)

by Zoglin, Richard

  Sinatra was a familiar sight in Las Vegas during these years, even when he wasn’t performing—often in the audience for other Vegas shows, holding court in all-night drinking sessions with an assortment of friends, fellow performers, and hangers-on. “He’d always be there,” said lounge singer Freddie Bell. “You’d never know when you were gonna see Frank. It was a close-knit group in those days. Fly in and fly out, you know? You gotta understand, he partied pretty heavy in those days.” “Frank enjoyed a good time,” said actress and sometime girlfriend Angie Dickinson. “After his shows we would hang out with him and whoever was around in those days. You convened around him, and the table would grow before the night was over, since Frank would always invite people to come and sit at his table.” And from that Vegas revelry came something called the Rat Pack.

  It was, more correctly, the second Rat Pack. The nickname was first applied to a band of hard-drinking Hollywood friends who coalesced around Humphrey Bogart in the mid-1950s—a group that included Sinatra, Judy Garland, David Niven, the agent Swifty Lazar, and songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen. Lauren Bacall, Bogart’s young wife, supposedly coined the term one night in Las Vegas, when she walked in on the group as they were sitting around a showroom table, looking the worse for an evening’s wear. “You look like a goddamn rat pack,” she cracked. As a lark, they embraced the name and turned the group into a tongue-in-cheek club—electing officers, creating a coat of arms, voting on new members.

  The Bogart Rat Pack came to an end with Bogart’s death from throat cancer in 1957. But Sinatra soon became the center of another circle of hard-partying showbiz friends. Some date its origins to August 1958, when Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine bonded while on location in southern Indiana shooting the movie Some Came Running. The Sinatra-Martin bromance went public when the pair came to see Judy Garland’s show at the Sands in October 1958. When Garland—the former MGM star (and onetime Sinatra girlfriend) who was battling alcohol, drug, and weight problems—seemed to falter during her performance, Martin and Sinatra began catcalling from the audience. Garland played along, bringing them up onstage to chastise them like unruly schoolboys, and the resulting interplay was “a comedy routine that was out of this world,” said Louella Parsons. The following January, Sinatra and Martin traded guest appearances in each other’s shows at the Sands—Dean filling in for Frank at the last minute when he had to cancel a performance because of voice problems, Frank returning the favor a couple weeks later, joining Dean onstage for his own Sands opening night.

  Martin—born Dino Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, on June 7, 1917—had much in common with Sinatra. Both came from working-class Italian American families; both were high school dropouts; and both were well acquainted with neighborhood characters of ill repute. (Steubenville at the time of Dino’s youth was a notorious center of illegal gambling and prostitution.) Dino began singing with local bands in Ohio, then moved to New York City and was gaining attention as a nightclub singer when he teamed up with a brash young comic ten years his junior, born Joseph Levitch and now calling himself Jerry Lewis. They made their debut together at Atlantic City’s 500 Club in July 1946, improvising a unique musical-comedy act—Dean playing the cool, crooning straight man, while Jerry, dressed as a busboy, kept interrupting him and causing general mayhem. Martin and Lewis’s madcap stage antics caught on quickly, and they were soon the hottest nightclub act in America, the stars of hit movies, and top-rated hosts of TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour.

  Sinatra was initially unimpressed with the singing half of Martin and Lewis. “The dago’s lousy, but the little Jew is great,” he reportedly said when he first saw the team in 1948. But they got to know each other as fellow Capitol recording artists and members of Jack Entratter’s stable of entertainers at the Sands. After his breakup with Lewis in 1956, Martin made his solo debut at the Sands in 1957 and was signed by Entratter to a five-year contract. (Like Sinatra, Martin also got a small piece of the hotel.) He developed a drunk stage persona that became one of the most recognizable acts in Vegas. “And now, direct from the bar,” went the announcer’s typical introduction, as Martin staggered onstage with a cocktail glass in hand (usually filled with apple juice) and delivered woozy comedy patter in between laid-back performances of his hit songs, like “Memories Are Made of This” and “Volare.” Sinatra admired Martin’s ease onstage, his matinee-idol good looks, and his defiantly blasé attitude—such a contrast with Sinatra’s intense, high-strung personality. “Sinatra was enthralled by Dean,” wrote Martin biographer Nick Tosches. “In his eyes he saw the man he himself wanted to be.”

  With Sammy Davis Jr., it was pretty much the opposite. Born in Harlem in December 1925, he was a decade younger than Sinatra, and a child of show business unlike either Frank or Dean. His parents were vaudeville performers, and Sammy was a childhood dancing prodigy, starring in a movie musical short, Rufus Jones for President, when he was just seven. Soon he was appearing with his father and veteran vaudeville hoofer Will Mastin as part of the Will Mastin Trio, a song-and-dance act that played the nightclub circuit in the forties and fifties. Sammy loyally remained part of the group (billed as the Will Mastin Trio Starring Sammy Davis Jr.) even as he became one of the most prominent black stars of the 1950s. He had hit records (“Hey There” from Pajama Game put him on the charts in 1954), starred in the 1956 Broadway musical Mr. Wonderful, and played Sportin’ Life in the 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess. On a nightclub stage he was a versatile, inexhaustible performer: he danced, sang, told jokes, did impressions, even played the drums. If you asked a veteran of the golden age to name the best all-around entertainer ever to play Las Vegas, chances are the answer would be Sammy Davis Jr.

  But he was also a needy, driven performer, and he felt indebted to Frank Sinatra. Frank had given the Will Mastin Trio a big break in 1947 by requesting them as his opening act at New York’s Capitol Theater. When Sammy lost an eye in a serious car accident, on a drive from Las Vegas to LA in 1954, Sinatra spent days at his hospital bedside, let him recuperate at Frank’s home in Palm Springs, and even invited him to his mother’s house in Hoboken the following Christmas. A longtime opponent of race discrimination, Sinatra was a champion of Sammy’s in the days when segregation still ruled Las Vegas, insisting that he be allowed to stay, dine, and gamble at the Sands when he appeared there. Sammy and the Will Mastin Trio had already broken that color barrier in 1954, when the Last Frontier dropped its all-white policy and allowed them to stay at the hotel during their engagement. Still, Frank’s support meant a lot to Sammy.

  Yet he also knew the perils of getting on Sinatra’s bad side. In 1957, during a radio interview in Chicago, Sammy let his mouth run on when asked about Sinatra: “Talent is not an excuse for bad manners. It does not give you the right to step on people and treat them rotten. This is what he does occasionally.” Worse, when asked whether he considered himself “bigger than Frank” as a singing star, Sammy replied, “Oh yeah.” Sinatra refused to talk to him for months and even had him written out of the movie Never So Few—in a part Sinatra had had written expressly for Sammy. “That was it for Sammy,” said Peter Lawford. “For the next two months Sammy was on his knees begging for Frank’s forgiveness, but Frank wouldn’t speak to him.”

  Peter Lawford knew well what a Sinatra freeze-out could mean. The British actor (born out of wedlock in 1923 to a couple of lesser members of the English aristocracy) came to Hollywood in 1942, while still in his teens. He got to know Sinatra at MGM, where Lawford was a pleasant if unexceptional supporting player in such films as Easter Parade and (with Sinatra) It Happened in Brooklyn. But the two had a falling-out in 1953, when a gossip columnist reported seeing Lawford having a drink with Ava Gardner, the wife from whom Sinatra had just separated. The jealous Sinatra didn’t speak to Lawford for five years. Only after Peter married Patricia Kennedy, and her older brother Jack was making noises about running for president, did Sinatra see the advantage of reestablishing friendly relations.

  Dean, Sammy,
and Peter were fully credentialed members of Sinatra’s inner circle by late 1958, when the press began to take notice. Life magazine devoted a feature story to the group in December, dubbing them the Clan and providing a helpful guide for readers, listing the group’s chief members (including a few peripheral figures, like Eddie Fisher and Tony Curtis), explaining their nonconformist ethos (“a public and aggressive indifference, not only to what the customers expect of their movie stars but also to what Hollywood expects of its own citizens”), and even supplying a glossary of their private slang: Charlie was the name they affectionately called one another; women were broads; a good show a gasser; clyde, a catchall noun to replace almost anything they pleased. They were the embodiment of Hollywood cool—what passed for hipsters at the end of the button-down 1950s and the dawn of the New Frontier.

  It was Lawford who was responsible for their defining group adventure. In 1955 he ran into a Hollywood assistant director named Gilbert Kay, who was peddling a script about a band of former Army buddies who plot a heist of five Las Vegas casinos on New Year’s Eve. Kay wanted to direct the film himself, but when he couldn’t make a deal after a couple of years, he sold the script outright to Lawford. He took it to Sinatra, who “flipped” for the idea, envisioning it as a vehicle for himself and as many of his Hollywood friends as he could jam into the cast. Warner Bros. agreed to back the picture, which would be produced by Sinatra’s own Dorchester Productions and directed by Hollywood veteran Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front). After multiple script revisions by a battalion of screenwriters, filming was set to begin in Las Vegas in January 1960.

  Sinatra was booked for a four-week engagement at the Sands at the same time, and he suggested combining the two events—bringing some of his Ocean’s 11 costars to join him onstage each night after the day’s shooting was finished. Someone, most likely Al Freeman, came up with the idea of calling it the Summit, and the publicity drumbeat began. “Producer Jack Entratter comes up with the show of the year, or for that matter, of the century,” announced Les Devor in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on January 8, “when he presents IN ONE BIG SHOW AT THE SAME TIME—FRANK SINATRA, DEAN MARTIN, SAMMY DAVIS JR. AND PETER LAWFORD.”

  Joey Bishop appears to have been a late addition. Born in the Bronx and raised in Philadelphia, another high school dropout (five Rat Packers and not a single high school diploma among them), he had been working as a stand-up comedian for more than a decade. In Chicago, his hangdog, deadpan style got him dubbed the Frown Prince of Comedy. He opened for Sinatra at the Copa in New York, played Las Vegas a few times, and was a frequent guest on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV variety programs. According to Corinne Entratter, Bishop talked his way into the Rat Pack show when he found himself on a flight from New York to Las Vegas with Jack Entratter, buttonholed the Sands boss, and pleaded for the job. Entratter felt the act needed an emcee of sorts, and Sinatra was a fan, so Bishop was added to the cast. By the January 20 opening, the Sands was touting all five stars—though not necessarily all of them all the time: “Which star shines tonight?” read the ads. “It’s a guessing game, and you’ll be the winner of the show-of-shows any night.”

  The opening night was a winner all the way around. Lucille Ball, Cyd Charisse, Dinah Shore, Sammy Cahn, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Peter Lorre, and world heavyweight champion Ingemar Johansson were among the many celebrities in the audience. Sinatra opened the show, with a twenty-minute set that included “Pennies from Heaven,” “The Road to Mandalay,” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?” “That was a great opening act,” quipped Bishop, who came out next to oversee the roundelay of singing, dancing, drinking, wisecracking, and general anarchy that followed. Sammy did a few numbers, and Lawford joined him for a soft-shoe routine to “Shall We Dance,” in which Sammy did most of the work. “What a great team,” Sinatra cracked. “One dances, the other applauds.” Martin handled the anchor leg, wedging a few songs in between the heckling and other stage antics around him. The show ran for two hours and closed with the whole crew together onstage, with the Copa Girls and Entratter himself joining in.

  “Mr. Entratter, sir, you have a ‘gasser’ on your hands,” wrote Les Devor in the Review-Journal, leading the parade of rave reviews. “The only possible topper to this show is booking of the Civil War and its original cast, and we hear you’re working on that.” Raved Hedda Hopper, “I flew to Las Vegas for what Frank Sinatra called his summit meeting. It sure was, plus New Year’s Eve and Christmas. If Ike has anything like that in Russia, we won’t have to fear their missiles.” The Los Angeles Times called it “an entertainment ball which will be very difficult to match in the future anywhere.”

  Twice a night for four weeks, the Rat Pack would reassemble on the Copa Room stage after their day’s filming was done. (Shooting days were rarely taxing, usually requiring only one or two of the stars on set for a few hours in the afternoon.) Every show was sold-out (cover charge: $5.95, which included dinner), and in the first week alone the Sands reportedly had to turn away eighteen thousand requests for room reservations. Seemingly every celebrity in Hollywood turned up in the audience sooner or later; some, like Red Skelton, Bob Hope, and Milton Berle, got up onstage to join in the act. “This is an evening I will never forget,” said Berle. “Because I remembered every joke.”

  The myth of the Rat Pack shows has somewhat eclipsed what actually took place onstage—which, judging by the spotty film excerpts available, was a scrappy and self-indulgent affair. Booze was the bonding agent: a drink cart would be wheeled out early in the show and tended to assiduously by the stars for the rest of the evening. “When you’re drinkin’ / When you’re drinkin’ / The show looks good to you,” sang Martin—and apparently it did, at least to them. But the frat-boy antics and wisecracks, both planned and unplanned, were pretty crude. In one bit, Bishop and Lawford parade across the stage in front of Sinatra with their pants off—followed by Sammy, waving a scarf and asking in a fey, lisping voice, “I beg your pardon, did you see two fellas go by here?” They interrupt one another’s numbers and goose each other’s asses. One night a giant birthday cake was brought out for pianist Bill Miller’s birthday, and the show devolved into an all-out food fight.

  Bishop did most of the writing, and certain bits and lines would be repeated nightly. “Any old business?” Joey would interject at random moments, poking fun at the group’s clubby reputation. Or he’d needle Sinatra: “Why don’t you tell us about the good the Mafia does?” (Not a bad line, considering Frank’s sensitivity about the subject. “Joey was a ballsy guy,” said Henry Silva, an Ocean’s 11 cast member. “Frank loved anybody who had balls.”) They called Sinatra the Leader, or the Pope, and their fealty to him became a running gag. When Sammy sings “The Lady Is a Tramp,” Sinatra takes mock-offense, and Martin chastises Sam, “You know you shouldn’t sing the leader’s song, boy!” Later, when Sinatra does an impression of James Cagney, Sammy gets offended in return; impressions are his turf.

  The racial and ethnic wisecracks are nearly constant, and hard to stomach today. “I tell you, the dagos are taking over the world,” Sinatra says on introducing Martin, the other Italian singer. One night the gang comes out dressed in hokey Indian headdresses, holding tomahawks and talking like Tonto. (Dean: “Me no take single drink all year. Just doubles.”) The dismissive, Mad Men–era treatment of women is also painfully retrograde. Martin trots out lewd song parodies, like “You made me love you / You woke me up to do it.” One night Sinatra spies a female violinist in the all-male orchestra and exclaims, “Hey, look at that—there’s a broad in the band!” On his way offstage, Martin casually swipes his hand across her cheek.

  Sammy, a black man and recent convert to Judaism, comes in for most of the ribbing. Frank and Dean—and Sammy too—lapse frequently into minstrel-like Amos ’n’ Andy dialect. At one point Sinatra grabs a white tablecloth, puts it over his head, and announces, “All right, folks, the meeting is on Friday afternoon.” Sammy responds to these antics with hysterical laughter,
and occasionally a lame comeback. When Peter wants to join Sammy in a dance number, Sammy bristles, “If I were you, I wouldn’t want to dance with one of the great Jewish Mao-Mao dancers of our time.” In one oft-repeated gag, Sammy leaps into Dean’s arms, and Dean, carrying him like a child out of a burning building, announces, “I want to thank the NAACP for this award.” (Bishop, who wrote the line, originally wanted it to be the B’nai B’rith, but Dean had too much trouble pronouncing the name.)

  Sammy’s collusion in all this tomfoolery gives the group some cover, but doesn’t make the racial banter any less disquieting. The Rat Pack members, most of them political liberals, thought of themselves as above prejudice; they were thumbing their nose at societal taboos, satirizing racial stereotypes by making fun of them. But at a time when Lenny Bruce and other stand-up comedians were challenging those taboos with much more pointed satire, the Rat Pack’s juvenile japery seemed more like an outlet for the locker-room banter of four privileged white guys—and one complicit black one.

  Not everyone in Las Vegas was taken with the Rat Pack shows. “I hated the idea that people got so crazy about this piece of shit act,” said Shecky Greene, probably the leading lounge comic in Vegas at the time. “I mean, it was nothing. It was grammar-school kids having a good time.” Jerry Lewis called up Martin, his former partner, and complained that the Rat Pack were basically recycling old Martin and Lewis bits. “They were doing our act,” said Lewis, reminiscing many years later. “I told Dean, ‘You want me to come over? Glad to come over and help you out.’ Dean said, ‘No, everything is working great, leave it alone.’ So I left it alone.” Lewis’s take on the Rat Pack’s achievement: “They showed up, is what they did.”

  But showing up was enough. For all the juvenile, politically incorrect horseplay, audiences got to see three of Las Vegas’ greatest entertainers—Sinatra, Martin, and Davis—onstage together at their performing peak. (Bishop’s role was simply to manage the chaos, and Lawford seemed there mainly for the booze.) They gave audiences an insider’s peek at how Hollywood stars acted in real life, when they let their hair down. “For the first time on such a visible platform,” wrote Shawn Levy in Rat Pack Confidential, “American entertainers acknowledged their adultness. They smoked, drank, caroused, talked of their sex lives, their ex-wives, their politics; they used jazzy slang. . . . They made fun of their own professions; they carried on as if they were alone and the audience had paid to see what they were really like.” This was liberating for audiences emerging from the 1950s world of Emily Post and Dale Carnegie—but not so threatening as to bother them when they returned home to their jobs, kids, and PTA meetings.