Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  Ring-a-ding-ding: the sound of coins falling into his lap, the sound of telephones bringing new offers of sex or business, the sound of turnstiles, new cars, rocket ships, bra straps, Zippo lighters, champagne corks, election booths, color TVs, hi-fis.

  Everyone had a nickname, but all the words were his.

  Some things you don’t want to know

  Peter first stumbled across the idea that became Ocean’s Eleven on the beach in front of his house in 1955. B-movie director Gilbert Kay told him about a yarn he’d heard from a gas station attendant: At the end of World War II, there’d been a group of G.I.’s who’d done a few smuggling jobs for the army. Kay thought that a reunion of such a squadron of cat burglars could serve as the germ of a heist story set, say, in Vegas. Peter agreed, imagining the film as a vehicle for William Holden. (“I never dreamed of Frank,” he said later, “because—well, because we hadn’t been speaking for nine years.”) But Kay, who had a couple of stinkers to his credit, wanted to direct the thing, and Peter didn’t like it that much; he told Kay thanks but no thanks.

  By the summer of 1958, though, Kay hadn’t managed to sell the idea to anybody else, and, remembering Peter’s enthusiasm, he peddled the story to him again, this time without attaching himself. Peter jumped, investing five grand of his own money and five grand of Pat’s and buying the story outright. The timing was truly cagey: The Lawfords had just mended fences with Frank, and they told him about their newly acquired property at a time when his Dorchester Productions still owed Warner Bros, a film as part of a deal it had cut the year before. Frank, predictably, loved the idea of a caper movie with a Vegas backdrop, and in July 1958, Warner Bros, agreed that he should develop the movie further (Jack Warner cracked that they should forget the script altogether and pull off the job).

  The studio assigned Richard Breen, a crime film specialist, to come up with a script, provided that he passed muster with Frank. Breen and Sinatra first came together that September; “they had a very friendly meeting,” one of Jack Warner’s assistants reported. Breen had pulled quite a fast one to get the job; he’d never been to Vegas, but he “carefully concealed this fact from Sinatra.” After a few research trips to the city, he’d gotten several key sequences mapped out and won Sinatra’s confidence: “Frank seems in fine fettle and very cooperative,” Warner was told. The producer felt good enough to attach director Lewis Milestone, set a starting date of February 1959, and consider a few potential costars, including Jack Lemmon—unaware, apparently, that Frank had already hatched his scheme to turn the picture into a Rat Pack home movie.

  Breen and Milestone worked together throughout 1958, screening such caper films as The Killing and The Lavender Hill Mob for inspiration and calling Billy Wilder in as a script doctor to help them figure out the spine of the story. But Sinatra was still unsatisfied with the script (in one early version, his character was named, bizarrely, Pepe DeMaio). The shooting date was pushed back, and Breen was replaced by Daniel Fuchs, who was in turn replaced by Harry Brown and Charles Lederer, who got final credit for a script based, the world was told, on an original story by Jack Golden Russell and George C. Johnson—two guys who’d been involved so early in the process that they never actually worked for Warner Bros, on the picture.

  It was an awful lot of writers, especially given the extremely shaggy shape of the finished product. Milestone admitted as much once the shoot was on. “There is little now left of the original, other than the Las Vegas locale,” he told a reporter, adding that Dean turned to Frank one day during filming and asked, “You will give me a chance to read the script before we’re through shooting it, won’t you?”

  As things stood, the finished product hardly resembled a traditional caper film with the requisite tight timing, perilous coincidences, and narrow escapes. Not only did Dean and Sammy get musical numbers, but several scenes were camped up, others led nowhere, and still others seemed plainly improvised, the sort of stuff kept in by a filmmaker primarily for the amusement of his buddies—or his boss. When it was all over, the film had mutated so far from the original concept that it was nominated, despite not really being very good, for a Writers Guild award—as Best Comedy!

  While the screenplay was undergoing its patchwork genesis, Frank was casting his buddies and cutting them deals. Peter had been willing to sell the picture outright to Dorchester and Warner Bros., but Frank took care of him—just as he had in Puccini—by giving him $20,000 for the story, plus $300 per week for the shoot, plus—and this was the biggie—one-sixth of the gross: a phenomenal back-end deal which resulted in nearly a $500,000 profit on the Lawfords’ $10,000 investment. Dean got $150,000 flat out; Sammy got $125,000; even guys like Richard Conte (more than $8,000 per week) and Cesar Romero ($5,000-plus per week) got healthy. (Some who were rumored to have parts, such as Jackie Gleason, Tony Curtis, and Milton Berle, never showed; others, such as Shirley MacLaine, Red Skelton, and George Raft, worked for scale.)

  Frank got $30,000 for the story, $200,000 to act, and one-third of the gross—not to mention, of course, all that he stood to make as a 9 percent owner of the Sands, which was guaranteed to be packed with high rollers during the five weeks the Rat Pack planned to spend in Vegas working on the film.

  February was traditionally the nadir of business in Las Vegas, so the town went out of its way to welcome the production. Police chief R.K. Sheffer read over the script drafts—with heart in throat, no doubt—for accuracy; special editions of the Las Vegas newspaper welcomed the production; the owners of the five hotels featured in the film—the Riviera, the Sahara, the Flamingo, the Desert Inn, and the Sands—accommodated the actual filming and made rooms available to the 225 actors, extras, and crew members who stayed in town on Warner Bros.’ tab (the company dropped nearly $20,000 a day in out-of-pocket costs during the five weeks). The town positively boomed. The Sands, with only two hundred or so rooms to its cluster of two-story garden buildings, turned away eighteen thousand reservation requests during the first week of the Summit alone.

  Milestone and three dozen advance men converged on Las Vegas on January 12. Five days later, Frank flew in from New York (his luggage got lost in the confusion attendant on a rare southern Nevada snowstorm), and the Lawfords arrived by train with Peter’s manager, Milt Ebbins, and Frank’s secretary, Gloria Lovell. Sammy and Joey arrived the next day; Dean rolled into town two days later with his wife and his factotum, Mack Gray.

  Work began with three days of shooting at the Riviera. The earliest call was for 5:30 p.m., and no actor had to be on the set for more than three hours. On the first day of the Summit, January 20, there was no filming done at all. Thereafter, Milestone usually got one Rat Packer at a time, occasionally two, having the whole quintet at his disposal only once—to film the closing credits on a workday cut short by high winds. Most days found a single member of the Rat Pack on the set for about three hours, usually from about 3:00 p.m. to 6:00; Sammy and Peter had the most frequent morning calls (9:00 or 10:00 a.m.), with Sammy easily spending the most time in front of the cameras throughout the month. After they finished at the Riviera, Frank worked only six more days, only two of which lasted more than two hours (he even skipped town for a few days to tape a TV special in Hollywood); the only time anyone was filmed in the wee small hours was when Frank showed up one day at 5:00 a.m. for about two hours of work. Other than that, only Joey ever had a call before 9:00 a.m.—once.

  So it really wasn’t the film-all-day, perform-all-evening, drink-all-night scene that has become the legend of the Summit and the making of Ocean’s Eleven. There’s no doubt that there were twenty-four-hour hijinks—“They were taking bets we’d all end up in a box,” Peter recalled—but precious few hours were actually given over to Milestone. Indeed, when the brief filming days and the relatively short stage shows are added up, nobody really put in more than a six-or seven-hour day the whole month. Oh, sure, it looked like a lot of work—a high-profile film shoot and titanic nightclub engagement all in one—but it was cushier th
an, say, shooting a western in the desert or playing a series of gigs on the road. What with all the amenities and the attention, it was more like a premiere party held while the film was still being made: a P.R. event aimed at boosting the box office. The whole world watched the Summit unfold in the entertainment pages of newspapers and magazines, and when the film came out, they dutifully lined up as if to kiss St. Peter’s bronze toe.

  Of course, not all of it was for the public. Take Sunday, February 7, when the boys entertained and partied with a Democratic presidential hopeful, Peter’s brother-in-law Jack Kennedy. Kennedy was blitzing the West in the lull before the big eastern primaries. He had a complete entourage with him, including his youngest brother, Ted, and—in an era of press coverage so cooperative it was virtually comatose—he was at least as busy dallying with Peter and his chums as he was currying favor with Nevada’s political powers. Kennedy and his party were ensconced at the Sands and held court there: drinking and schmoozing in the lounge, dining on Chinese food in the Garden Room, holding press conferences, attending fund-raising receptions, and, of course, digging the scene in the Copa Room as the Rat Pack entertained.

  During each show Jack attended, Frank introduced him from the stage with a bunch of sugary bullshit; Jack stood and took a bow; Dean waited for the applause to die down: “What’d you say his name was?” Big laugh.

  There was more. On the night of February 8, just hours before he boarded an early morning flight to Oregon, Kennedy attended a soiree in a private room at the Sands. Strictly inner inner circle. Sammy was there. So was Peter.

  As Sammy remembered it, “Peter took me aside and whispered, ‘If you want to see what a million dollars in cash looks like, go into the next room; there’s a brown leather satchel in the closet; open it. It’s a gift from the hotel owners for Jack’s campaign.’ I never went near it. I was also told there were four wild girls scheduled to entertain him and I didn’t want to hear about that either and I got out of there. Some things you don’t want to know.”

  Amid all this carrying-on, Kennedy also apparently managed to start what turned into a serious, long-term affair. Frank had summoned Judy Campbell, a mixed-up twenty-six-year-old divorcée he’d been sleeping with on and off, to visit for the weekend. He introduced her to Jack and made his Sands apartment available to the two of them for a private lunch.

  Judy was a good listener. Dean liked to drop by her L.A. apartment and talk; he’d even enlisted her help in spying on his wife, whom he suspected of having an affair with his manager (she wasn’t). Campbell was, rarely for a woman in Frank’s world, independent, always swearing that she never took gifts or money from her men and even staying down the block at the Flamingo during the Summit after having been invited by Frank to stay in a free room at the Sands. She was also, in a fashion, true. When visiting Hawaii with Frank and the Lawfords, she was shocked when Peter made a pass at her: “Don’t worry, Frank will never know,” he assured her, but she got huffy and blew him off.

  The thing was, Frank truly wouldn’t have minded. In fact, he thought Judy was a pretty good time; in the coming months he kept trying to pimp her to half the world: Desi Arnaz, Joe Fischetti, bandy-legged Jack Entratter, and a weaselly-looking guy in Miami who called himself Sam Flood. She gave them all the high hat, vexing Frank to no end: “The things you could have if you weren’t so fucking stupid,” he eventually snarled at her. “Wake up and realize what you’ve got in the palm of your hand.” He didn’t, however, know that she was saving herself for Jack. By the time the candidate left Vegas, they’d already made plans for a rendezvous in New York.

  The Summit fostered all kinds of romances. Frank, for instance, was becoming more serious about dancer Juliet Prowse, who visited the hotel several times as the two neared engagement.

  And Sammy had stars in his eyes, too. At the end of 1959, his gaze fell upon May Britt, a Swedish starlet, in the commissary at 20th Century-Fox, and he was thunderstruck. She was playing in a remake of The Blue Angel and waiting out a Mexican divorce. Sammy was warned that she had ice water in her veins—her chief escort around town was her mother—but one look at all that leg candy convinced him he had to try. He concocted an elaborate end run: a big party for Dinah Washington to mark the end of a nightclub engagement. Sammy called May to invite her, and she asked if she could bring her mom—then showed up with a date. He tried again, asking her over for one of his big hey-kids-let’s-all-get-smashed-and-watch-a-movie nights—and inadvertently got her sick on orange brandy. Nevertheless, she found him charming, and she gladly accepted his invitation to visit the Summit when he called her from Las Vegas.

  But this was still Las Vegas, a town where the beloved Nat King Cole could find himself unwelcome at the front door of the Tropicana (“I don’t care if it’s Jesus,” said a thick-necked doorman when he was told whom he was bouncing. “He’s black and he has to get outta here”), where Sands management was once forced to drain the pool after a few southern high rollers caught sight of Sammy swimming in it. So Sammy couldn’t exactly let it be known that this very white actress was visiting the hotel to see him. He turned to the Leader: One afternoon in the steam room, he asked Frank to beard for him and let it be known that May was his guest: “Sure, Charlie, she’s my guest.”

  Yet another of Sammy’s amorous schemes seemed to fizzle when he met May at the plane only to discover she had brought along her mother (“Now she brings her mother,” he groaned to himself), but the visit went well. Before May returned to L.A. Sammy worked up the courage to kiss her (she had to take off her high heels to give him an angle). He spent the rest of the shoot in an adolescent swoon, trying to screw up the guts to call her and imagining the best (She loves me!) and worst (She hates me!) all at once.

  Even if she’d’ve been recognized, May Britt was about as unspectacular a star as made the trek to Vegas for the Summit. An unimaginable pantheon of stars partook in Frank’s ecstatic desert bacchanal, from Lucille Ball to Kirk Douglas, from Jack Benny to Cyd Charisse, from Ingemar Johansson to Milton Berle, from Peter Lorre to Cantinflas—a riot of famous mugs. It was the hottest ticket Las Vegas had ever seen, probably the hottest ever. (And at $5.95 it included dinner!)

  Nevertheless, the Sands felt some sort of obligation to promote it. You couldn’t get a ticket to the thing, but every day the Vegas papers carried ads for it: “Star-Light, Star-Bright, Which Star Shines Tonight? It’s a guessing game, and you’ll be a winner at the show-of-shows.” Hotel publicist Al Freeman even sent out press releases—surely the most superfluous such documents of all time—to grab up headlines.

  Frank and the boys did their share of drumbeating as well, for purely humanitarian reasons. On February 7—the day Jack Kennedy arrived in town—they moved the Summit over to the newly built convention center for a benefit performance to mark Four Chaplains Day, a local event commemorating the deaths of four Nevada clergymen of diverse religions who perished in the World War II torpedoing of the USS Dorchester; the money raised by the show helped pay for a monument in the martyrs’ honor.

  It was never the same thing twice, but it would most of the time go like this: Dean, say, would be introduced by Joey, say: “Direct from the bar …”

  He’d saunter out with a cigarette. After the ovation, he’d turn to the conductor: “How long I been on?” Then he’d sing, or at least he would start like he was singing, but with ridiculous words: “When you’re drinking” (not smiling, see?), or “The Gentleman Is a Tramp,” about how he was bad with money. Strictly for laughs. He was always funny—really funny—but most people were nevertheless surprised to see how easily laughs came to him, even without that monkey he’d started out with.

  After a few minutes, he’d introduce Sammy or Frank, who’d sing a number or two straight (good thing, ’cause neither could ad-lib).

  Then they’d schlep Joey and Peter out, they’d fetch the bar cart, and from then on in it was a travesty: Somebody would start a song, the others would blast it out of the water.

  Som
e nights, they’d focus a bit more. Frank—and only Frank—would sing for real: three, four numbers. But most of the time it was strictly shuck-and-jive—with a decided air of hazing.

  Sammy was the preferred whipping boy. Frank and Dean—big Amos ‘n Andy men, apparently—loved to do darkie dialect and goad Sammy about being black, being Jewish, having one eye: all that funny stuff. Sammy, like a courtier to Ivan the Terrible, would bend over laughing and make sure his liege saw it: his face stretched in desperate mirth, literally slapping his knees, yet not a sound coming out of his mouth.

  Sometimes he’d arrive onstage in a business suit or a sports coat and slacks—only to be upbraided by Frank for not wearing a tux: “Now you go get yourself into a dinner coat like the rest of us!”

  Sammy would turn on him: “What’re you, Esquire magazine? I’ll change my suit when I’m good and ready!”

  Frank’d give him a beady-eyed glare. “And when will that be?”

  Sammy’d shrivel up like Jerry Lewis: “I’m ready…” and slink off the stage.

  When he returned, it would be, apparently, to sing. They’d put a pinpoint spot on him, and he’d try a ballad:

  “What kind of fool am I …”

  “Keep smiling so they can see you, Smokey”—Frank from offstage, and the crowd roared. (He had other surefire lines: “Hurry up, Sam, the watermelon’s gettin’ warm”; “Why don’t you be yourself and eat some ribs?”—jokes funny only in that you couldn’t believe somebody trying to get a laugh with them, but Sammy would double up every time.)