Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  This was the setting Frank chose for his big buddy movie—Gomorrah with the vice all legal, just reaching its popular zenith, its sleek new pleasure palaces celebrating Las Vegas’s role in the atomic age just as its downtown sawdust joints evoked the pioneer past.

  The Rat Pack Summit capitalized on the buzz around the city and around the Sands, but it also helped create and spread it. It availed itself of the city’s iconography to give itself soul and context, but it became one of the central myths of the city and expanded its aura crucially. And it became one of the key rescuing events in the life of a city that seemed always on the verge of going bust.

  At the dawn of the sixties, the Las Vegas gaming industry wasn’t quite so stable as the city’s reputation led outsiders to believe, but it nevertheless carried the potential to explode into something truly huge. In the previous decade, the Strip had gone from four major casinos to thirteen, and the city had risen to such prominence as a vacation destination that civic leaders had built a lavish convention center amid the resorts. The resident population was booming—schools and city services were overburdened—and the transient population of tourists had grown to rival that of such fabled spots as Miami and Los Angeles.

  Still, for all the overheated atmosphere, there was trouble. Some major hotels failed—the Royal Nevada and Moulin Rouge, most spectacularly—and the value of others was grotesquely overinflated, with cash-flow problems at the Stardust, Dunes, Frontier, and Riviera actually hitting the papers. This didn’t necessarily bother all interested parties. The mobsters behind the overvalued casinos knew how to profit from such disparities and, in fact, had helped to create them by skimming profits. But for the civic leaders not party to the backroom shenanigans jocularly known as casino management, the situation was frightening. The cost of building materials rose dramatically, and the local tax base—even with hefty taxes on tourism—was uncertain (to this day, the city has never successfully incorporated the golden miles of the Strip). It seemed to many observers that the glorious growth that had swelled the city through the fifties could pop like a soap bubble; in many respects, it was just a sleepy western town, a place where the grocery stores accepted casino chips and people would give strangers lifts along the road on particularly scalding days.

  The federal government, which had so frequently fostered the growth of the city through public works projects such as the Hoover Dam and national defense sinecures like Nellis Air Force Base and a subsidized magnesium mining industry, suddenly seemed antagonistic, snooping around the ways the town did business like it never had before. The feds were after the mob, and they’d begun to look into how things worked in Vegas.

  This wasn’t the first time the government had made a grand posture of busting up the Vegas rackets. Estes Kefauver had visited the city in 1950, sniffing around and making noise so he might get nominated for president. But the mobsters behind the casinos weren’t cowed by the show; they’d seen him too often around dames and racetracks to fear that he could truly hurt them.

  In 1957, however, another probe began—and this time it was followed quickly by events that gave it some teeth. In January, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to open an investigation of labor racketeering and impaneled a committee headed by John McClellan and featuring, as the presumed voice of the workingman, the liberal senator from Massachusetts, Jack Kennedy—who, the mob figured, was also nobody to worry about, what with his daddy’s bootlegging connections to Raymond Patriarca and Frank Costello and his own fondness for the ladies.

  In May, though, somebody took a shot at Costello in an apartment house foyer on Central Park West. The mob kingpin’s expensive haircut was given a new part with a .38 slug, and he was rushed to the hospital in a bloodied daze. Detectives arriving at the emergency room searched Costello’s pockets and turned up a wad of cash and a piece of paper inscribed with an impressive series of numbers totaling $651,284—which happened to be the exact amount taken in by the brand-new Tropicana Hotel during its first twenty-four days of operation. Up until that moment the mob had been connected to Vegas mostly by whispers and innuendos; this was a genuine smoking gun—handwriting analysts identified two casino executives’ penmanship on the paper.

  That November came the biggest jolt of all. A highway patrolman in Apalachin, a New York lake district hamlet, noticed lots of big cars with out-of-state plates converging on an estate owned by Joseph Barbara Sr., a local soda bottler. He knew about Barbara’s lengthy rap sheet, and he knew that Barbara had recently placed an unusually large meat order with a butcher and reserved a large number of nearby motel rooms. Still, he had no legal reason to raid the place. He did, however, have the right to stop and check any vehicle on a public road, so he set up a little checkpoint on the sole access road to the estate—just him and three deputies.

  A local fish peddler leaving the mansion after a delivery got a whiff of what was going on, made a U-turn, and ran into the house yelling that the cops were outside. A mad melee ensued, with most of Barbara’s guests—more than one hundred all told—bolting from the house. Some ran into the woods, others jumped into limos, Lincolns, and Caddies and tried to run the roadblock. Sixty-three men were rounded up for questioning: Genovese, Profaci, Bonanno, Galante, Lucchese, Trafficante, Scalise, Zerilli, Civella—a coast-to-coast who’s who of mob bosses. The next day, the FBI, which had sworn throughout the Kefauver ruckus that there was no such thing as a nationally organized syndicate of criminals, began its Top Hoodlum Program with the express aim of busting the mob. Naturally, Las Vegas became a focal point of their investigations.

  Within a year of the debacle at Apalachin, there was sufficient heat on organized crime in Nevada that Governor Grant Sawyer instituted a state gaming commission to oversee the gambling industry and certify the owners and key executives of all casinos. At first, this was seen as a merely perfunctory demonstration of zero tolerance, a sop to show the feds that the state was toughening up on the mob. But then the Gaming Commission got big ideas: Without telling anybody what it was doing, it began making lists of mobsters from around the country who’d been rumored to have connections to Las Vegas; eventually, the names of eleven of these men—residents, mostly, of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Kansas City—would be entered in a volume known as the Black Book, a list of people forbidden to enter the grounds of any casino in the state; even the coffee shops would be off limits. Laughably feeble though the gesture may have been, it was good P.R.: Nevada, the state’s Mormon powers hoped, was showing the world that it could clear itself of bad guys on its own and be a legitimate (in every sense of the word) rival to Miami, L.A., or Honolulu as a tourist mecca.

  But despite the high-profile cleanup efforts, the mob was brazenly insinuating itself into the town more wholly than ever before. In part, it was doing so out of necessity: Almost exactly one year before work on Ocean’s Eleven began, Fidel Castro marched into Havana and seized the casinos that had for more than a decade earned millions annually for the mob. Havana, where every sinful indulgence was available to Americans for pennies, had long worried Nevada gambling interests who feared competition from Cuba’s decidedly looser atmosphere; in April 1958, the state Gaming Board barred anyone with a Nevada gaming license from operating in Cuba.

  But now that Nevada had won the war against its Caribbean rival, it had to accommodate the refugees it created. The mob, after all, wasn’t going to get out of the gambling business just because it had lost its Havana casinos. Instead, it sought to bolster its declining revenues with increased profits from Vegas. The city became by default the onshore home of all the vices for which Havana had been such an ideal remote repository; Vegas was, as far as organized crime was concerned, a banana republic.

  Enabling the mob to build up its Vegas holdings was a bottomless new source of funding—the Central States Pension Fund of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In 1959, International president Jimmy Hoffa, just over one year into his reign, began to turn the pension fund into a pile of play money for the mob to
do with as it pleased in Las Vegas. Using Teamster money, mob-connected interests built hospitals, golf courses, small businesses, and new hotels; existing hotels switched hands and underwent expansion and renovation. The Fremont, the Dunes, the Stardust, Caesar’s Palace—all these hotels were built, bought, maintained, enlarged, or in some other way capitalized with the money that started flowing through Hoffa’s hands as the fifties came to a close.

  And as the new decade dawned, Frank Sinatra and his cronies merrily set about creating even more business for their larcenous friends by creating the kind of gaudy splash that only entertainers can provide, a prospectus, a come-on, a P.R. even that was equal parts movie, nightclub engagement, and billboard for the Zeitgeist of a swinging new age.

  Part 3

  Much, much, much

  Early sixties: Frank’s dressing room at the Sands, just off the Copa Room floor; half hour to show time.

  Dean walks in, already in his tux (he liked to dress in his bedroom, then walk fast through the casino, ready to go).

  “How’s your clyde?”; “Who’s out front?”; little jokes; shoptalk.

  Frank’s been thinking: “How come you always get the laughs and I don’t?”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “Well, let me try.”

  “Okay, pallie.”

  This night they reverse the lines: Dean works straight to Frank’s quips.

  Frank: “Say, Dean, do you know how to make a fruit cordial?”

  “No, Frank, how?”

  “Why, just be nice to him.”

  Polite laugh.

  But Dean’s look afterward: Big laugh.

  Frank doesn’t get it. Or, rather, he only just begins to get it. Dean was funny in and of himself and—after ten years of monkeying around with that goddamn Jerry—the world’s greatest straight man, one of the most original comic personalities ever in the business.

  Zarathustran drama, intoxicating romance, grab-you-by-the-throat authority: That was Frank’s bag.

  Dean’s was making the audience his friend—especially compared to how they felt watching Frank or Jerry. Dean took the edges off of Jerry’s hysteria and Frank’s egoism. He made each one go down easier. Standing beside each of them with a look of bemusement and mild shock, he was us—but cool and breezy and quick-witted and easy on the eyes: entertaining even on his own. Frank could never catch up.

  Take the time Frank came on Dean’s TV show and the two of them did a medley together: black stage, no props, tuxes, a swing beat. Frank was singing his bit when Dean broke out into a little jog, his face a blank. Then Dean sang his bit without breaking stride; he was going to do this jogging thing all the way through, apparently, and with a Buster Keaton face on, to boot. Frank stared with a drifting gaze: He hadn’t a clue how to hold his own. He ad-libbed terribly: “What are we—in training? For what?” But Dean never, not even when he was singing, gave over. He was hilarious; Frank drowned.

  Take the night at the Sands with Sammy when Frank sang “Too Marvelous for Words” and threw in a few extra beats: “You’re much much much much too much.” Dean wouldn’t let that go. The rest of the night, he’d be mixing drinks and moving stools and listening to the others sing and ad-libbing between set pieces, all the while barking off little much much muches like he had Tourette’s. Frank had merely been in a groove and ventured a little improv; to Dean, it was good for five to ten laughs.

  The press liked to say that only Joey could make jokes at Frank’s expense and live to tell about it, but Dean did it for decades and Frank was forever in awe of him for it.

  This was one of the reasons Dean would always be in—and Sammy, too, for that matter. Yes, they were pallies and brothers and all that crap, but they could do things that Frank couldn’t and wished he could: comedy, dancing, winning over a crowd with a raised eyebrow or a “who dat?” look. (Peter and Joey, in this regard, did nothing special and were easily discarded.)

  Frank was cool in the sense of remote. Dean and Sammy were warm in the sense of comfortable. When Frank took the stage it was an annunciation; people came to worship, weep, get quivery in the genitals, feel their hearts stop. When Dean and Sammy were with him, it was a party; you went to enjoy yourself.

  Alone, Frank couldn’t relax: He was insistent, a perfectionist, a lionizer of himself and his art. His audience adored him and feared him and envied him and lived through him, but they didn’t exactly like him—and as a singer he never particularly cared if they did.

  But his career came to be more than just his singing; it became his absent family—both the one he never had as a boy and the one he’d dumped for Ava. He’d surrounded himself with these guys to stave off loneliness, sure, but he could have (and did have) mere flunkies for that.

  Dean and Sammy, though, were brothers onstage and in movies and on records; they weren’t brothers who were really thumbbreakers or yes-men, or brothers who were so powerful that it was you who actually wanted something from them. They were guys who did the same thing as you and made it easier and more fun: golf buddies the world would pay good money to watch you play with.

  Seeing him hang out with them, play their ringmaster, relax with them, suddenly the world didn’t any longer just behold Frank: They liked him.

  He didn’t just like them: He needed them.

  Stupid as it sounded, they called Frank the Leader. This was years after he was the Voice, Swoonatra, and the Lean Lark, and before he became the Chairman of the Board, Ol’ Blue Eyes.

  Sammy they called Smokey—because he smoked a lot, not because of his skin.

  Dean was Dago—Dag for short—and they’d actually call him that in the act until Joey (of all people) walked off, complaining that Frank wouldn’t want to be called “dago” offstage; Frank agreed, so it became a private thing. (Dean, of course, didn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone called him, and he simply called everyone “pallie” even if they were strangers, presidents of his bank, or people he knew for thirty years.)

  Joey didn’t have a nickname but Peter had a few: Petah, the Brother-in-Lawford (Frank’s inspiration), and Charlie the Seal, because, they told reporters, he had a smoker’s cough, but just as likely because his bad arm caused him to clap funny or because he liked to go down on women.

  Actually, they were all Charlies, Charlies and Chicky Babys, which is another thing they called each other. (These were good things to be, as opposed to, say, being a Harvey.)

  To be a Charlie was to be in. Milt Ebbins, Peter’s manager, was Charlie Bluecheese because he never sat in the sun. Sammy called himself a million Charlies—Charlie Humble, Charlie Suave, Charlie Dapper, Charlie Star, Charlie Boor; his Swedish bride called him Sharlie Brown.

  She was his broad, his clyde, his gasser; he was all locked up with her; he was electric.

  This was really how they talked: an insider’s game that was meant to exclude the Harveys and the bunters. Frank had picked some of it up riding buses with jazz orchestras, Sammy brought some of it over from the Chitlin Circuit, Peter picked up some of it from the surfers on Santa Monica State Beach, and some of it they just made up.

  Clyde, for instance, could be anything or anyone—good or bad, it didn’t matter: “Pass the clyde” when you wanted the salt; “How’s your clyde?” as a form of greeting (much less particular than “How’s your bird?,” which was also a greeting but specifically anatomical); “I don’t like her clyde” for a broad with a fat ass; “Let’s lose Clyde” to get rid of a Harvey.

  They needn’t have worried about the Harveys. When they wanted to cut somebody out, they could do it by talking in their code. Journalist Stephen Birmingham once sat patiently while Charlie the Seal bragged about how their fame had spread abroad: “Like, we were getting off the boat the other day in Le Havre, and this French dame—this French reporter—comes up to me and says, ‘Etes-vous un Rat?’ Luckily, I speak French, but I don’t dig ‘Etes-vous un Rat?’ She’s asking me, am I a Rat? I don’t dig. Then I dig. She’s asking me about the Rat Pack, you di
g? But there’s no word in French for Rat Pack, you dig?” (“I told him I dug,” Birmingham sighed.)

  Even the term “Rat Pack” was pregnant. Frank didn’t like it—or the insinuation that he was aping Bogie. For a while they were the Clan until they remembered they had a black guy and two Jews with them. Frank liked to call it the Summit. It didn’t matter. It was like the mob: If you belonged, you didn’t ever have to refer to it directly, and if you didn’t, you sounded like a fool or worse talking about it.

  It wasn’t enough to drive the right car, wear the right clothes, screw the right broads, be on the same stage, or be admitted to the holy steam room or a party in the Springs. You had to talk like you belonged: certain words, certain rhythms. It added to the atmosphere, but it was also a make-or-break thing with them, separating the true insiders from those around them who were merely tolerated.

  In 1961, Frank finally started his own record label and he called his first album Ring-a-Ding-Ding. It was a swell record filled with lively, cheeky music that lived up to the insouciant title, a phrase that he’d interpolated a couple of years earlier into a version of “I Won’t Dance” and had lifted, apparently, from comedian fat Jackie Leonard. (He had to lift it from somewhere, because he could not, to a demonstrable certainty, scat. On his 1949 recording of “It All Depends on You,” his vocalese passages sounded like nothing so much as a kid blowing bubbles in milk with a straw.)