The rat pack cast
For two shows each evening, at least one, perhaps two or three or four, sometimes all five entertainers, would appear on the Copa Room’s stage. The Sands entertainment director agreed to a format for the Summit that fitted its improvisatory informality. Sinatra clearly relished the Kennedy connection his Rat Pack nickname for Peter was Brother-in-Lawford. By the late fifties he wasn’t doing much, but he had other assets - his wife was Jack Kennedy’s sister Pat. The fifth member of the Pack, suave, London-born Peter Lawford, was an actor and entertainer who had landed a contract with MGM when he was twenty but never broke into serious leading roles. With Davis and Bishop already signed to long-term contracts, the Sands was the de facto home of the Rat Pack well before the Summit. In 1958 Sinatra’s percentage in the hotel and casino was raised from two to nine points, and Dean Martin was sold a point. The Sands was the classiest, and it offered incentives to hold on to top talent. The pressure was now on Las Vegas, where the mob-with financing courtesy of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund-had in the course of the 1950s invested in such new hotels as the Fremont and the Dunes. Earlier that month Fidel Castro had marched into Havana and seized casinos that earned the mob millions annually. It was a good thing, for the Sands, for Las Vegas, for the people whose money built all those modernistic hotels. Variety reported: “Frank Sinatra joined his Great & Good friend onstage, and the pair put on one of the best shows ever seen at the Sands.” In January 1959 Sinatra joined Martin for the first time on the stage of the Sands, setting the tone and format for the Rat Pack shows. By the early fifties, the fellow Capitol recording artists had grown close, and they sealed their friendship in 1958 on the set of Some Came Running, which also featured the future Rat Packette Shirley MacLaine. Singing with the Dorsey band in 1941, Frank had befriended the aspiring dancer, Sammy Davis, Jr., then part of the Will Mastin Trio they reconnected after Sammy was discharged from the army, Dean Martin had come up as a singer very much in Sinatra’s mold. Joey Bishop, who grew up Joseph Gottlieb in South Philadelphia, the son of a bicycle repairman, was known as the Frown Prince of Comedy for his world-weary style. Sinatra liked having people around him, and after Bogart died in 1957, he assembled his own court. The story goes that when Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall, saw the drunken crew all together in the casino, she told them, “You look like a goddamn rat pack.” In 1949 Sinatra had moved his family from L.A.’s Toluca Lake to Holmby Hills, just blocks from Bogart’s house, and the Hollywood rookie was inducted into a group of the film star’s drinking buddies. Postwar Americans had learned to take their popular culture spiked with a touch of risk, and Sinatra had molded his adult image on the sensitive tough guys portrayed in the movies by Humphrey Bogart.īogart in fact is central to Rat Pack history. Sinatra and Martin and the Rat Pack exuded machismo and danger, a style lent authority by their known associations with powerful and violent men. It was a giddy version of multiethnic American democracy in which class was replaced by “class.” The Rat Pack were more than entertainers, and the Summit was more than a stage act. Successful, self-assured, casual, occasionally vulgar, they were sign and symptom of what the war had done to the American WASP class system. The Rat Pack announced that a new generation was laying claim to American tradition and to the right to define American Cool: one black, one Jew, two Italians, and one feckless Hollywoodized Brit, three of them second-generation immigrants, four raised during the Depression in ethnic city neighborhoods.
#The rat pack cast movie
Billed, with intentional swagger, as “the Summit” (a reference to the coming conference of Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and Khrushchev), their stage act took off like a rocket, its momentum carrying them beyond the three-week club date into movie and record and business deals, reprises in Miami, Atlantic City, and Palm Springs - power and influence unusual even for movie stars. In 1960, an unlikely group of entertainers, all loosely gathered around Frank Sinatra, went to Las Vegas to shoot a movie and do two nightclub shows each evening, spending most of the hours in between at all-night parties.