Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  If Jack didn’t inherit his father’s intimacy with the ways of men of dark power, he had plenty of Joe’s lustful wantonness. In this, Frank made a perfectly agreeable playmate, especially when it came to the young senator’s favorite diversions—women and gossip. The two began partying together soon after Frank reconciled with Peter—“I was Frank’s pimp and Frank was Jack’s,” Lawford ruefully recalled. “It sounds terrible now, but then it was really a lot of fun.”

  Whenever Jack came to the West Coast for fund-raising or other official duties, he made sure to hook up with Frank, more often than not with Peter in tow. They didn’t hide their budding friendship from the press: “Let’s just say that the Kennedys are interested in the lively arts,” Peter told a reporter, “and that Sinatra is the liveliest art of all.”

  In November 1959, Jack extended a trip to Los Angeles by spending two nights at Frank’s Palm Springs estate. Frank got a huge belly laugh out of him by introducing him to his black valet, George Jacobs, and suggesting that the senator ask the mere servant about civil rights. “I didn’t like niggers and I told him so,” Jacobs remembered. “They make too much noise, I said. The Mexicans smell and I can’t stand them either. Kennedy fell in the pool he laughed so hard.”

  Fun over, Jack had to return East, even though he would’ve just loved the next night, when Frank, joined by Joey Bishop, Tony Curtis, Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Durante, Judy Garland, and about a thousand others toasted Dean at the Friars Club. But he made a mental note to catch up with them the next time they’d all be together: the following winter in Las Vegas when they’d be making a movie.

  It was one last bit of patrimony thrown Peter by his new best friend. Frank had taken a literary property off his hands: Ocean’s Eleven, a movie about a group of World War II vets who hold up Las Vegas.

  I was told to come here

  Never So Few, Peter’s comeback picture, was shaping up into quite a party, maybe even bigger than Some Came Running. After rescuing Peter from TV, Frank used his weight to get Sammy a $75,000 part. (The producers had balked, “Frank, there were no Negroes in the Burma theater.” And Frank shot them down: “There are now.”)

  To Sammy, it only seemed proper: With his talent, youth, versatility, vitality, and powerful friends, he was on the verge of being the biggest star of his time.

  Then he stumbled. Speaking to a radio interviewer in Chicago, he trashed Frank, just trashed him: “I love Frank and he was the kindest man in the world to me when I lost my eye in an auto accident and wanted to kill myself. But there are many things he does that there are no excuses for. Talent is not an excuse for bad manners—I don’t care if you are the most talented person in the world. It does not give you the right to step on people and treat them rotten. This is what he does occasionally.” (As a coup de grâce, asked who the number one singer in the country was, Sammy replied that it was he. “Bigger than Frank?” “Yeah.”)

  It didn’t take long for him to regret his words. “That was it for Sammy,” Peter remembered. “Frank called him ‘a dirty nigger bastard’ and wrote him out of Never So Few.” The part went to Steve McQueen—one of his first important roles. Sammy, who was nearing $300,000 of debt, certainly regretted losing the work, but he was far more concerned with the way Frank had written him off.

  “You wanna talk destroyed?” said Lawford’s manager, Milt Ebbins. “Sammy Davis cried from morning to night. He came to see us when Peter was at the Copacabana, appearing with Jimmy Durante. He said, ‘I can’t get Frank on the phone. Can’t you guys do something?’ Peter told him, ‘I talked to Frank but he won’t budge.’ ”

  Sammy was banished from Frank’s very presence. “For the next two months Sammy was on his knees begging for Frank’s forgiveness,” Lawford recalled, “but Frank wouldn’t speak to him. Even when they were in Florida together and Frank was appearing at the Fontainebleau and Sammy was next door at the Eden Roc, Frank still refused to speak to him.” (He wouldn’t even be in the same building with him; he had Sammy banned from his shows and wouldn’t go next door to watch him perform.)

  But there must have been some sort of bond there, because Frank relented, even when he had nothing in particular to gain from it. “Frank let him grovel for a while,” Peter said, “and then allowed him to apologize in public a couple of months later.”

  The reconciliation went as far as new offers of work. Frank was assembling the cast of Ocean’s Eleven. He would let Sammy back in the fold in time to take a role in the movie, but one with a bit of a sting to it: For no obvious reason other than petty spite, Sammy was cast as a singing, dancing garbageman.

  Sammy was nevertheless overwhelmed to be asked aboard because Ocean’s Eleven had begun to take shape as something more than just a movie. Frank decided that he would film it at his place, the Sands, and fill it with chums—everybody from Dean and Sammy and Peter to vibraphonist Red Norvo and actor buddies like Henry Silva and Richard Conte.

  As a bonus, there’d be a freewheeling live show in the Copa Room each night featuring the actors. For that, Frank realized, he’d need a traffic cop, somebody who fit in with the A-list names but with the nightclub experience to get guys on and off the stage and who wouldn’t embarrass himself in front of the movie camera.

  He had just the guy in mind: Joey Bishop.

  Frank called him “the Hub of the Big Wheel” and preferred him to almost every other stand-up comic. He addressed the world with a stiff-shouldered, side-of-the-mouth delivery that was as much jab as shrug, a deft emcee who knew how to keep the show moving and not draw attention from the stuff the people really came to see.

  But nevertheless, to most observers it was the Big Mystery of the Rat Pack: What was Joey Bishop doing up there?

  Frank, Dean, and Sammy were clearly peas from the same pod, and Peter was a guy who swung like them and provided entrée to the Kennedys.

  Joey, however, had neither powerful relatives nor a reputation as a roué, and as performer he was plainly one-dimensional: He acted about as well as Sammy, sang about as well as Peter, danced about as well as Dean.

  But he had an air about him—the world-weary little guy with the plucky, jaded attitude—that appealed to Frank, who indirectly sponsored his career from the early fifties on. Other comics would try to win an audience with dazzling wit or class clown antics. Joey went the other way, wearing a stage face that suggested he found the idea of entertaining the crowd slightly undignified. It was largely a matter of style—“My technique is to be overheard rather than heard,” he liked to say—but there was temperament there as well.

  “My cynicism is based upon myself,” he told a reporter in a self-analytic moment. “I don’t tell audiences to be cynical. I just bring them down to reality. I feel that when you try to cheer somebody up, you probably have a guilt complex. When a child sulks, eventually you ask him what’s wrong because you probably feel you’re the reason he’s sulking.”

  He should’ve known. For a guy best known as a chum among chums, he could be taciturn, moody, aloof, exclusive. Even when he was among the honored guests at the Party of Parties, he kept to himself. “I was always a go-homer,” he admitted. “When we were doing the Summit Meeting shows in Vegas, the other guys would stay up until all hours, but I went to bed. I may rub elbows, but I don’t raise them.”

  In fact, he gave off an almost perverse aura, as if he resented his own success and the hand his padrone, Frank, had in it. “I met Frank in 1951,” he said, “and, sure, he’s helped me a lot. We’ve worked together many times, and I enjoy it, but we don’t socialize afterwards.” And he didn’t care if he pissed him off. During the Summit, Frank was feuding with a Vegas club owner and declared the guy’s joint officially off limits; Joey, the story went, went anyhow.

  His independence was his trademark, his currency, and he gambled that Frank would read it not as insolence but rather a sign of maturity and maleness. It almost backfired. “I have always respected Frank’s moods,” Joey recalled. “I have never walked over to Frank when
he’s having dinner with someone and just sat down uninvited. Which, I think, was another reason why he chose to have me with him. Then it got to the point where he would say to me, ‘What’s the matter, Charlie? You’re getting stuck up?’ ”

  It was a fine line that he braved. Reporters who got close to him during the Rat Pack era seemed genuinely to like him, but few of them depicted him as, in the cliché of the showbiz puff piece, rough on the outside but sweet at heart. “You can pretend to be happy if you want to,” he told one; “I’m a worrier by nature,” he confessed to another. “No worrier is ever good-humored. I don’t know if a worrier ever is happy.”

  Of all the moons in Frank’s orbit, only Dean had anything like Joey’s need for independence. They were the only ones who ever seemed willing to do without Frank’s blessing—or even to outright defy him. Maybe it was because they had a few things in common. Unlike Sammy, Frank, and Peter, they’d grown up with siblings and stable homes, and their career successes came relatively late in their lives. Dean was thirty when he broke through with Jerry Lewis; Joey was nearly forty when the public and the business started taking real notice of him.

  He’d had a few brushes with the big time, and their failure to materialize seemed to cauterize him against the world all the more: “Once, when I was sharing a bill with Frank at the Copacabana, the audience kept me going 28 minutes overtime almost every night,” he told a reporter. “Frank kept telling me, ‘You’re solid now—you’re on your way’ Know what happened? I didn’t work for six weeks.”

  It was the kind of mixed success his career had accustomed him to. He’d been trying to make it big for more than twenty years when he was picked by Frank for the cast of Ocean’s Eleven. Prior to that, he’d glimpsed the top frequently enough to develop a sardonic attitude about not ever having reached it. He was a plugger, and he knew it: “I’m a slow starter. There can never be a big, hitting thing with me … I don’t have the type of personality that shatters you right off. I have to work at being funny. The work is hard. I’m hard sometimes.” That way he had of dismissing things, deflating things—it came naturally to a guy who’d had to fight for everything and even then didn’t quite get it.

  He was born in the Bronx in 1918, the fifth and last child of Jacob Gottlieb, a machinist and bike repairman, and his wife, Anna. He was sickly—the littlest baby, he used to brag, ever born in Fordham Hospital (he told the story to an incredulous Buddy Hackett, who responded with a look of concern, “Did you live?”). At three months, the family moved to Philadelphia, where the slight baby grew into a slight child.

  The Gottliebs never had much money, and the kids learned to tiptoe around Jacob, who was always irritable with the vagaries of his business. He could be nurturing, encouraging Joey and his older brother Morris in pursuing music (Jacob himself played the ocarina and sang Yiddish songs), but he could also terrify them—a kid could get spanked for the mere offense of coming home with a dime, a sum their father believed no child could earn honestly. Joey, who began his schooling as an apt, engaged student, once won a fifty-cent prize in a spelling bee; when he came home, he caught a beating from one of his brothers who, in imitation of Dad, was certain the money was stolen.

  After that spelling bee, Joey did nothing to distinguish himself as a student other than quit altogether after two years of high school to work in the bike shop. It was a dispiriting experience—“What would anyone want with a bicycle during the Depression?” he asked a reporter years later—and being around Jacob all day was no picnic. Joey took on work in a luncheonette and then decided he’d move to New York to try and break into show business.

  Show business? Okay, maybe he was funny around school and the shop, always ready with a cocky, cutting jibe, and he’d won a few amateur-night contests with his patter, his impressions, even a bit of tap dancing. But this wasn’t exactly the sort of ambition Jacob had tried to instill in his sons—“It was a choice of either getting a steady job or getting killed,” Joey remembered. He told his folks he’d stay with relatives in Manhattan and keep a day job; they gave him the green light. For a brief moment, it looked like he might pull it off—he worked in a hat factory by day and got a gig as an emcee in a Chinese restaurant on Broadway at night. But soon enough he was back with the smock and the spokes and the inner tubes in Philly, a flop.

  He didn’t give up the stage, though. With Sammy Reisman and Morris Spector, a pair of kids from the neighborhood, he formed a comic singing-dancing-spritzing act called, cleverly, Gottlieb, Reisman and Spector. They met a black kid who was willing to drive them around if they’d adopt his surname as their stage names: They became the Bishop Trio. They were scraping by on the burlesque circuit when Reisman got ill; Joey and Spector (now known as Rummy Bishop) took the act to Florida and got lucky—two years’ work on and off at the Nut Club in Miami. When Spector was drafted in 1941, Joey opened as a single in E1 Dumpo, a Cleveland nightspot, at $100 a week.

  He had married—the bride was Sylvia Ruzga, a shiksa from Oak Park, outside of Chicago, whom he’d met in Florida (her first words to him: “I don’t think you’re funny”)—but they had no children by the time Joey’s draft notice came. He would spend the better part of the next four years in the special service of the army, finally receiving an emergency discharge when Sylvia was hospitalized.

  The couple spent a while in San Antonio, and Joey found a few gigs. He got noticed by a small-time bandleader, who recommended him to the William Morris Agency. A booking at the Greenwich Village Inn followed—one week blossomed into eleven—but New York once again proved a chimera. Running out of options, Joey and Sylvia went to her hometown, where he was recognized by musician Russ Carlyle, who invited him to do a little comic spritzing onstage during his act. The owners liked Joey’s shtick and hired him on. He spent the next two years working in Chicago clubs like the Oriental, the Vine Gardens, and the Chez Paree, where he finally broke the $l,000-a-week barrier in 1949, billed, to his chagrin, as “The Frown Prince of Comedy.”

  In 1952, after jumping to New York, he was playing the Latin Quarter and he caught Sinatra’s eye; as he had with Sammy, Frank encouraged the younger man’s career. He saw that Joey got booked on the bill with him when he was playing around New York—the Riviera, the Copa, the Paramount—and sometimes on the road. Audiences who were initially cool to the comic, who viewed him as a necessary burden of being allowed to see Sinatra, became converts: He got a reputation as that tough little funny guy who opened for Frank. He always remembered his 1952 date opening for Frank at the Riviera: “my first job in a class club before an audience of the ‘right’ people.”

  But his following remained too select; the “right” people seemed to be the only ones who wanted to see him. Through most of the fifties, he was burdened with that most left-handed of praises: He was a comedian’s comedian, the sort of indisputably talented performer who lacked the charisma to reach beyond an audience of aficionados.

  His biggest successes had come in front of showbiz crowds. He played a star-studded benefit at which Danny Thomas killed for nearly an hour; backstage, the other comics huddled in fright—no one had the balls to go on next; Joey volunteered; he grabbed his overcoat, folded it over his arm, walked up to the mike, muttered, “Folks, what he said goes for me, too,” and walked offstage to a roar. Some years later, he floored the audience at the Friars Roast of Dean; following a string of entertainers who’d declared how happy they were to be in attendance, he opened his bit by declaring, “I was told to come here.”

  Showbiz-as-bullshit jokes: Frank loved it.

  (Joey could always get a laugh out of Frank. He was leaving the stage after opening for Frank at the Copa one night and Frank asked how the crowd was: “Great for me,” Joey said, breaking him up. “I don’t know how they’ll be for you.”)

  Still, for all his good buzz, he never quite made it over the top, never quite became the star his friends assured him he’d be. His act was based on his feel for the common man, but he was maybe a little too
much like the real thing. One night when he was playing on the bill with Frank at the Copa, manager Julie Podell stopped him at the entrance and told him to get in line with the other customers.

  It was this sort of thing that probably encouraged him to give up nightclubs—and the lucrative contracts they’d been bringing him—and take to the movies and TV, where he could court a larger audience. He made three films in 1958, all service pictures: Onionhead, about the Coast Guard; The Deep Six, about the navy; and The Naked and the Dead (“I played both parts,” went his stock line), the big-budget-flop adaptation of Norman Mailer’s classic army novel. That same year, he became a regular on a quiz show, Keep Talking, and, more memorably, on The Tonight Show, where he was one of Jack Paar’s semiregular sidekicks. He cut his hair into a tight buzz—no big deal, maybe, but he thought “it made the jokes seem funnier”—and he became known for a catchphrase: “son of a gun …”

  The Paar show, the movies, a growing reputation as a funnyman: Frank, who’d always been happy to toss him a bone, was pleased. He needed an emcee, he needed an opening act, he needed almost a dozen chums who knew how not to trip over the cables on a movie set. Who was he gonna call, Corbett Monica?