The Rat Pack, moreover, became closely identified with the coming generational change in American politics. John F. Kennedy, the charismatic young senator from Massachusetts, made a stop in Las Vegas in the midst of his campaign for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination and came to see their dinner show on February 7. Sinatra introduced him from the stage—“the brightest man in the political world, in this country or any country in the world today, and I personally feel that I’m gonna visit himself in that house one day very soon”—as Kennedy stood and took a couple of bows. Sinatra was one of JFK’s closest friends and strongest supporters in Hollywood during the 1960 presidential campaign. Lawford was even part of the family. Never before in America had show business and the nation’s business been so intimately connected.
The Rat Pack show at the Sands Hotel in January and February of 1960 was a once-in-a-lifetime event, never again to be repeated in Las Vegas with the full original cast. The group did get back together a month later in Miami, joining Sinatra for the last few nights of his engagement at the Fontainebleau Hotel. And they had a brief one-night reunion in Las Vegas on August 3, 1960, at the world premiere of Ocean’s 11, attended by a who’s who of Vegas celebrities (Joe E. Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Tony Curtis, Danny Kaye, Louis Prima, and Keely Smith), along with ten thousand fans who jammed the streets outside the Fremont Theater, where the film was screened at midnight.
The movie got only mixed reviews, but it holds up surprisingly well—an enjoyable heist caper that perfectly captures the Rat Pack camaraderie in the early, fun years. More important, it was a box-office hit, one of the ten top-grossing films of 1960. That ensured there would be a second Rat Pack film, and Sergeants 3, a comedy-Western update of Gunga Din, reuniting all five of the Rat Pack principles, went into production in the spring of 1961, shot mostly on location in Utah. Las Vegas was too far away for a repeat of the Rat Pack shows, so the stars made separate forays into town: Sinatra, Martin, Davis, and Bishop each did a week at the Sands, promoted by Entratter as “Jackpot Month.” The group made one trip into Vegas together in early June, dropping in on the shows of Eddie Fisher and Danny Thomas, and celebrating Dean’s forty-fourth birthday at the Sands with a five-foot-tall cake in the shape of a J&B Scotch bottle.
They were the axis of power in Las Vegas, the in-group everyone wanted to be in with. Their clubhouse was the Sands steam room, where they would gather late in the afternoon, to relax and schmooze before their evening shows. Each had a robe with his own moniker: LEADER for Sinatra, DAGO for Martin, SMOKEY for Sammy. After their shows, they would often be found in the casino, dealing blackjack cards (flouting the rules, so that the customers wouldn’t go bust), or in the audience for other shows along the Strip. “There was an electricity when they were in town,” said Bob Newhart. “The whole town just glowed. There was an excitement in the air that was palpable. And everybody benefited from it. Every act benefited from their being in town.”
Their original name, the Clan, was surprisingly persistent, despite its unfortunate echo of that other Klan. Eventually it was retired in favor of the Rat Pack. But under any name, Sinatra always dismissed the notion that it was any kind of organized club. “There is no Clan,” he told columnist Earl Wilson. “It’s some guys that like each other and get along together. There are no membership cards or anything like that. This whole thing is silly.” Sammy, typically, was more willing to embrace his affiliation with the coolest fraternity in show business. “I am a member of the Clan,” he told an audience at the Copa in New York. “That’s a little group of ordinary guys that get together once a year to take over the entire world.”
Sinatra was the king, Vegas’ undisputed Most Valuable Player. No headliner brought in more high rollers—the big gamblers who could drop thousands of dollars a night in the casinos. (Sinatra, too, could lose thousands gambling, but the Sands would either extend his credit or just forgive the debt. He was a good investment.) He was the star other Vegas entertainers looked up to, tried to copy, or wanted to hang out with. “If Frank went to a tailor, everyone went to that tailor,” said Corinne Entratter. “If Frank drank Jack Daniel’s, everybody drank Jack Daniel’s.” Mia Farrow, who began dating Sinatra in 1965, observed the strange effect he had on people. “I noticed that no matter who was in a room, when Frank entered it, he became the focus,” she wrote in her autobiography, What Falls Away. “And no one was ever really at ease with him, no matter who they were or how charming he was, because there was something about him that made people uncomfortable. He was absolutely without falseness, without artifice, in a world of pretenders. He had a child’s sense of outrage at any perceived unfairness and an inability to compromise. He was tough in his judgments of others, and of himself.”
He was thin-skinned and quick-tempered. “With Frank it was like walking on eggshells,” said Corinne Entratter. “People would come to me and say, ‘Corinne, what mood’s Frank in today?’ And I’d go, ‘Lay low.’ ” Stories of his bad behavior abounded—waiters he abused for fouling up an order, fans who got a rude brush-off for pestering him, reporters he punched out for writing things he didn’t like. Lisa Medford, who worked as a Copa Girl and was dating Sands casino boss Carl Cohen, recalled sitting at a blackjack table with Sinatra one night when a well-dressed woman—“lovely woman, in her late twenties, not a hooker, could have been from Shaker Heights”—rebuffed some of his crude comments and then stormed out of the casino. But not before Sinatra, according to Medford, dropped his gold Dunhill lighter into her purse and then called security to claim that she had stolen it. Sinatra could be generous with friends, modest about his fame, and charming when he wanted to be. “But when he was an asshole,” said Medford, “it was in neon.”
Jack Entratter, Sinatra’s boss at the Sands, was one of the few who could handle him—though some thought it was the other way around. “Sinatra really had Jack wrapped around his little finger,” said Eydie Gormé. “Sinatra in the middle of the casino would pick up a bottle of booze, open the top, and throw it in Jack’s face, and Entratter wouldn’t do anything about it. This man was tough, but he took a lot of crap from Sinatra. I’ll never understand why.” Entratter, who had an impressive temper of his own, knew to keep it in check with Frank; let the man blow off steam, he figured, and reason with him later. Once, when Sinatra was in Italy for the filming of Von Ryan’s Express, his demands got so out of hand that the film’s producer made an emergency call to Entratter: get over here fast. Entratter packed his Turnbull & Asser shirts, hopped a plane to Italy, and helped get Frank under control.
Dean Martin needed no such coddling. He was nearly as valuable to the Sands as Sinatra, one of the few stars who came close to him in attracting high rollers. (“Dean Martin is worth his weight in $100 chips—a star who pulls in the big players to the casino,” Variety noted in July 1960.) But he was as easygoing and laid-back as Sinatra was prickly and high-maintenance. He was affable with friends (everyone was “pally”), polite with fans, more respectful of women. He was the only member of Frank’s circle who didn’t grovel for his approval, and the only one who could bail out early from his late-night partying. (Dean needed the sleep, so he could get up early and play golf.) But he was remote and inscrutable, and few felt close to him. “He was nice to everyone,” said Shirley MacLaine. “He just didn’t want nice to go on too long.” He had seven children with two different wives, but even they didn’t know him well. “The important thing to say about my husband is that I don’t understand him,” said his second wife, Jeannie, after their divorce in 1973. “He is one of the rare human beings who is not comfortable communicating. He’s just not interested.”
Sammy, on the other hand, was as inexhaustible offstage as he was on. He loved the Vegas party scene, always surrounding himself with other show people, screening films he had shipped in from Hollywood, then wrapping up the night with breakfast in the Sands Garden Room. “Sammy always had to be with people,” said Vera Goulet, who was married to singer Robert. “You needed two mont
hs rest after two hours with Sammy.” His obsessive partying and showbiz extravagances, along with his white girlfriends—in 1960 he married Swedish actress May Britt—made him controversial in the black community. (“Is Sammy Ashamed He’s a Negro?” read a headline in an African American newspaper in the 1950s.) And his fawning relationship with Sinatra, both onstage and off, was unsettling to many. “Over the years I watched Sammy dress like Frank, walk like Frank, smoke like Frank,” said Cindy Bitterman, a friend of both. “He wanted to be a little Frank, which I thought was pathetic.”
There was, of course, no shortage of people who wanted to be friends with Frank Sinatra. His circle of pals included New York saloon owner Jilly Rizzo, sometime business partner Hank Sanicola, songwriters Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, along with Hollywood friends whom he often cast in his movies, like Richard “Nick” Conte and Buddy Lester. Not to mention a steady stream of girlfriends, a few of them serious (like dancer Juliet Prowse, to whom Sinatra was briefly engaged), along with countless one-night stands. In Las Vegas, performers he liked always got a boost when Frank dropped in to see them—Hank Henry, for instance, a burlesque comic who headlined a show over at the Silver Slipper (Sinatra cast him as the undertaker in Ocean’s 11), or Sonny King, Dean Martin’s former roommate in New York City, who worked the Sands lounge and had bit roles in two Rat Pack films. But no entertainer benefited more from Frank’s favor than a bald-headed insult comic who was causing a nightly ruckus at the Sahara Hotel, Don Rickles.
Sinatra had first seen him at a Murray Franklin’s nightclub in Miami. When Frank sat down at a table, Rickles greeted him with a line heard round the showbiz world: “Make yourself comfortable, Frank. Hit somebody.” Luckily Sinatra laughed. Later, when Rickles became a regular in the Sahara lounge, Sinatra would often come in with friends to see him. Rickles’s barbs became the talk of the town. To Frank: “I saw you in The Pride and the Passion. The cannon was great.” To Sammy: “You tell everybody he’s your best friend. Then you go backstage and bust all his records.” Rickles soon became part of Sinatra’s circle, a regular at the Sands steam room, where he got his own robe (with a rhino head on the back—because that’s what he looked like) and his own share of abuse. Once, as a gag, the gang stripped off his towel and pushed him out into the pool area, in front of all the guests, stark naked. Good times.
The Rat Pack’s triumph in the early 1960s was also a triumph of the Great American Songbook—the pop standards of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, and others that were the core repertoire for nearly all the top nightclub singers of the era. These popular vocalists formed a bulwark against the advancing threat from another kind of music that was dominating the radio airwaves and grabbing the attention of the younger generation: rock ’n’ roll.
Sinatra hated rock ’n’ roll. As a young singer back in the forties he had made the bobby-soxers swoon, but the screaming frenzy that greeted Elvis Presley in the mid-1950s was of a different order. Frank couldn’t understand it. He would sit alone in his den, his valet George Jacobs recalled, listening over and over to Elvis songs like “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up,” “trying to figure out just what the hell this new stuff was.” He would joke to friends about Elvis, “If I want a nigger, I’ll get a real nigger.” (This, too, according to Jacobs, who was black.) In a 1957 article for a French magazine, Sinatra unleashed a scathing attack on the whole genre, denouncing rock ’n’ roll as “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. . . . It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact—dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
Elvis, the sideburned delinquent who was Sinatra’s chief target, was considerably more temperate in response. “I admire the man,” he said when asked about Sinatra’s remarks at a press conference in Los Angeles. “He has a right to say what he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but I don’t think he should have said it. He is mistaken about this. This is a trend, just the same as he faced when he started years ago. I consider it the greatest in music.”
Elvis was in Germany when the Rat Pack took Vegas by storm in early 1960. But he was due to be discharged from the Army in March, and the nation was already gearing up for the most heralded homecoming in show-business history. Few would have guessed that the host for that homecoming—Elvis’s first appearance on national TV after his return from the Army—would be, of all people, the man who had bad-mouthed his music so viciously three years earlier: Frank Sinatra.
Television was the one medium Sinatra could never conquer. He starred in a CBS variety series in the early 1950s, but it lasted only two seasons. He landed another series on ABC during the 1957–58 season, but that one, too, was canceled because of low ratings. He did four specials for ABC, sponsored by Timex, in the 1959–60 season, but they were not exactly setting the world on fire. Then, in the fall of 1959, Sinatra negotiated with Colonel Tom Parker to pay Elvis $125,000 (more than Sinatra himself was getting) to make a guest appearance on Frank’s last ABC special of the season. “After all,” Sinatra rationalized to the press, “the kid’s been away two years, and I get the feeling he really believes in what he’s doing.” The kid’s comeback also promised to be a ratings bonanza.
Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley was taped in Miami in March 1960, just after Sinatra finished up his engagement at the Fontainebleau. Sinatra packed the show with old friends, including three Rat Packers—Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford—as well as his nineteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, who was engaged to marry her own rock ’n’ roll star, Tommy Sands. It may have been Elvis’s homecoming, but Sinatra was going to make sure everyone knew who was still head of the household.
The special, which aired on ABC in early May, is a fascinating glimpse of the culture clash between two generations of American popular music. Sinatra opens the show with Sammy Cahn’s “It’s Nice to Go Traveling,” with special lyrics for the occasion, and Elvis comes out in full-dress Army uniform to intone the final lyric: “But it’s so, so nice to come home.” Elvis then retreats for most of the hour, as Sinatra presents a look back at what Elvis missed in the two years he was away. What he missed, it turns out, was a Sinatra hit single (Frank sings “Witchcraft”), the movie Porgy and Bess (Sammy performs his big number from the film, “There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York”), and the 1959 Academy Awards (Sammy does some impressions, while Frank and Joey heckle him, Rat Pack–style, from the sidelines).
Elvis returns for a mere eight minutes near the end of the show. Now dressed in a tuxedo, hair greased up and standing at attention high on his head, he sings two numbers from his new album: the ballad “Fame and Fortune” and the more rocking “Stuck on You.” He is in good form, a little tense at first, then loosening up with some vintage head- and hip-shaking that draws screams from an audience stocked with teenage girls. “I’m glad to see the Army hasn’t changed you,” says Sinatra, not very convincingly, as he greets Elvis after the number. “First time I ever heard a woman screaming at a male singer,” offers Bishop, in a painfully obvious setup for Sinatra—who responds with a mock-annoyed expression, hands on hips, “Don’t you remember me there, Charlie?”
Bishop then supplies the lead-in for the show’s big number: “Mr. Presley, would you think it presumptuous of Frank to join you in a duet?” “I would consider it quite an honor,” Elvis replies, and they launch into a two-song medley: Frank doing a swinging version of “Love Me Tender,” and Elvis taking a crack at Sinatra’s “Witchcraft,” the two singers alternating verses before harmonizing together prettily on the last couple of bars of “Love Me Tender.” Frank comes off better than Elvis; it is clearly Sinatra’s turf, and Elvis never really seems comfortable. But it was a
win for both: the show drew a phenomenal 67 percent of the viewing audience, the highest rating ever for a Frank Sinatra show, and proof that Elvis’s two-year absence had not dimmed his enormous drawing power.
Sinatra and Elvis had relatively little contact after that and were never close. But Elvis had strong ties to two other members of the Rat Pack. He and Sammy had gotten to know each other in Hollywood before Elvis went into the Army; they ran around with the same crowd of young actors and were even once mentioned for the costarring roles in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, a racial allegory about black and white convicts chained together after a prison escape. (Kramer eventually made a wiser choice and cast Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.) Elvis also had much admiration for Dean Martin. “People call me the king of rock,” he told Martin’s daughter Deana, when he met her on the Paramount lot. “But your dad is the king of cool.” One can see the influence—in their sultry, chesty baritones, as well as in Elvis’s song choices after he came out of the Army, which included the Italian-flavored love song “It’s Now or Never,” an anglicized version of “O Sole Mio.”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 8
