Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  Sammy’d get another number going: “She’s funny that way …”

  Dean’s turn: “What way is she funny, Sam? What way? What way? I might go over the house …”

  Or they’d do impressions. Sammy was famous for this—he did all the usual guys, plus novelties like Billy Eckstien, Vaughn Monroe, and Al Hibbler—but Dean could do an okay Cary Grant and Clark Gable, and Frank, well, Frank could do Cagney at least as good as a school kid.

  There’d be dancing: again, Sammy’s area, but Peter had been in all those MGM musicals, so he’d do a bit, too, with Sammy: “Shall we dance? Shall we lay down some leather, shall we dance?” He was no cripple up there, but he didn’t make anyone forget Will Mastin, either; Sammy took pity and reined himself in.

  And jokes: nonstop shtick with a Vegas bent. Frank, looking up like he just realized something: “You know, I never heard anybody in this town say, ‘Hey, I just came from the Thunder-bird!’” Dean, mixing a drink: “How’d all these people get in my room? Oh well, I guess I’ll fix me another salad.” Joey to Frank: “Stop singing and tell people about all the good work the Mafia is doing.”

  Joey wrote a lot of it—another reason Frank had him along. And Frank, so dismissive of Milestone and the movie script, protected the comedian’s work. When Peter wasn’t thrilled with a bit about pretending to be a busboy, Frank spat daggers: “Do it how Joey says or get the fuck off the show.”

  There were musical bits they’d worked out, familiar tunes rewritten with special lyrics by Sammy Cahn, or multipart versions of crowd-pleasing songs like “The Birth of the Blues.” Joey would get a chance to croon, and they’d all pretend to be offended at the nasal whine of his voice and make him leave the stage; even big Jack Entratter would get up there, wheezing along with them and reading the words off of dummy cards.

  And there were bits they dreamed up on the spot—Peter, Joey, and Frank walking across the stage in underwear with their pants folded over their arms and serious expressions on their faces while Dean sang straight—a real laugh. And one they trotted out for years: Frank or Dean would lift Sammy up like a fireman holding a baby and say, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this award.”

  Frank and Dean and Sammy had a ball because they were doing a shambles of their own shows: What, was Variety gonna say they were out of voice?

  Joey was the traffic cop—and the one unmistakable sign that this was a show and not a glimpse into their private lives.

  And Peter, who could barely do this sort of thing, let alone live (though he’d been doing an occasional act, if that’s what you’d call it, with Jimmy Durante in New York and Vegas for a few years), well, he persevered.

  “I always thought that Peter felt uncomfortable,” said Joey, and everybody knew it. The joke around town went like this: A couple of low rollers get tickets to the Summit; they’re lined up outside the Copa Room and one turns to the other and asks, “Who’s the star tonight?” and his buddy says, “With our luck, it’ll be that Lawford.”

  But the point was never a great show—though the critics, believe it or not, fell over themselves praising it. The point was showbiz, or, rather, showbiz as event: the ultimate you-hadda-be-there that seems even more fun as the years pass, especially to those who never had the chance to be there: Paris in the twenties, Berlin in the thirties, Greenwich Village in the fifties, the Rat Pack Summit.

  By mid-February, the Las Vegas portion of Ocean’s Eleven had wrapped; the final Summit show came a few days after that. On February 18, the whole traveling satyricon regrouped at Warner Bros, studios in Burbank for five more weeks of shooting.

  Things should’ve gotten easier for Milestone at this point, what with no groupies nosing about, no gamblers so transfixed by the action that they wouldn’t move to accommodate the film crew, no late-night shows squelching the cast’s work ethic, and—most important—no desert separating the set from Jack Warner and his flunkies, who could now drop in and watch what was going on at any time. But the deportment the Rat Pack had displayed on the stage of the Sands had spilled over into their work habits.

  Frank, predictably, was worst. As Peter recalled, Frank’s attitude toward filmmaking had changed drastically since the two had made It Happened in Brooklyn together a dozen years earlier. On that film, Peter said, Sinatra “took direction beautifully, listened, contributed, and was generally extremely professional about the whole operation.” By 1960, Frank’s onset demeanor had radically changed: “He had reached the point where he would tear handfuls of pages out of the script and allow the director only one take of a scene.” His petulance, Peter said, directly harmed the film: “I remember once the sound man kept complaining about an unusual number of low-flying airplanes, which he was picking up through his earphones.… Well, after about the fourth take, which was unheard of for Frank, he said, ‘Aw, fuck it! Everyone knows they’re airplanes.’ Indeed! But flying through a bathroom?”

  On a lesser scale, Milestone had to put up with water pistol fights, squirting seltzer bottles, and even cherry bombs (which, comically, gave Mack Gray a case of the jitters). Discipline was so lax that Milestone eventually allowed people to use cue cards rather than bother them with learning their lines. Frank took a few days to cut some tracks with Nelson Riddle; Dean played the Sands as a solo and then missed some work on the movie when he agreed to substitute for Jerry Lewis, who was to follow him in the Copa Room but had exhausted himself in Florida filming a movie; Peter raced off to Israel to make Exodus for Otto Preminger. It was pure chaos.

  When the picture finally wrapped on March 18, Dean and Frank each still owed Milestone a day’s work, which he’d have to get from them later that spring: The Rat Pack Summit had already resurfaced in Miami. Nevertheless, Milestone brought the picture in at $2,037 million, nearly $100,000 under budget. His Job-like fortitude and the subsequent financial success of the film earned him a plum assignment on his next picture: MGM’s misbegotten remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, two years of hell during which Marlon Brando nearly put his director in an early grave; sixty-seven years old when the thing finally premiered, Milestone never completed another film.

  Frank may have been the headliner and the producer, but Peter was the one who had discovered the property, and Peter would be the most active in it to the very end. He kept an eye on Milestone’s cut and dashed off several memos to Jack Warner with suggestions for changes. He didn’t like Sammy’s solo number, for instance: “Musically, which is not my department, I think it would be stronger to have Josh sing only.… I don’t believe the dance is strong at all.” And he had very strong opinions about how the robbery sequence should be reworked: “I think a great sense of urgency and excitement could be added to the whole section prior to the explosion by very simply adding a few inserts of wristwatches showing the progress of time during that period.… I personally was confused as to where we were in the evening.”

  For all his sincerity and effort, he was ignored. There really was no use trying to put too pretty a finish on the film. Ocean’s Eleven was never really a movie movie: It was a publicity event, and the studio was sharp enough to see it that way.

  The premiere was a gigantic affair that rivaled the Summit for headline-making power. On August 3, in a break from what had become a steady routine of campaigning for Jack Kennedy, the Rat Pack reunited for a brief, final redux of the Summit (curiously Frank’s only appearance in Vegas between January 1960 and June of the following year). Everyone was in attendance: Dean, who was already appearing at the Copa Room; Joey, who flew in from Chicago where he was engaged in a nightclub gig; Sammy, taking a break from a Canadian club date; Peter; dozens of supporting actors and bit players from the film; and the usual assortment of hangers-on and glad-handers: Leo Durocher, Joe E. Lewis, Danny Kaye, Sophie Tucker, George Raft, Louis Prima, Keely Smith, Diana Dors, Barbara Rush, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Nick the Greek—a perfectly representative snapshot of the cream of Vegas royalty circa 1960.

  An entire evening’s revelry was staged as a b
uildup to a midnight screening of the film: a cocktail party for the five dozen or so reporters invited on the junket; a dinner party and show in the Copa Room; a parade of convertibles up the Strip; and a live performance in front of the Freemont Theater. Ten thousand civilians crammed Freemont Street for a gander at all the high-toned flesh; the entire contingent of the city police force and the Clark County sheriff’s detail was on hand, with all but emergency leaves canceled.

  It was another tremendous boost to the town—Jack Paar had the festivities filmed for a special—but there were grumblings nevertheless: Longtime Vegas showbiz columnist Ralph Pearl attended the one-shot Summit and griped “their horsing around with race and religion has finally gotten out of hand. Mix an abundance of blue material with that and you have a highly inflammable situation.” Pearl admitted that the audience seemed to like the material—in fact, he confessed, “I’d be a fat, old hypocrite if I said I didn’t enjoy their act. It’s like eavesdropping on a stag party with binoculars”—but the very fact that he voiced some reservations at all was notable. After all, the city’s famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign had been covered with an Ocean’s Eleven banner to mark the premiere.

  It was their town, and everybody knew it.

  The only singer

  For the first three days of March 1960, Frank worked a schedule that simply defied comprehension.

  He had been back in Los Angeles for two weeks since the conclusion of the Summit, and he was still reporting to Lewis Milestone’s set every day to do the studio work on Ocean’s Eleven. From about 10:00 a.m. to well past dinnertime each day, Frank went, however lackadaisically, through the paces of the film; it was his single busiest week of the entire production.

  Then each night, he made his way to Hollywood and Vine and the Capitol Records tower, where, recovering from the heady bombast of the Summit, immersing himself more and more fully in the Kennedy campaign, putting in long days as star and producer of a major Hollywood film, he recorded some of the most lavish and gorgeous singing performances of his entire career.

  Nelson Riddle had written dramatic orchestrations of songs that Frank had sung in the forties under the musical direction of Axel Stordahl, grand, romantic ballads such as “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “You Go to My Head,” “Fools Rush In,” “Try a Little Tenderness,” “How Deep Is the Ocean?” In recording them again during a whirl of activity that would have paralyzed a less frenetic or expansive spirit, Frank sang of love not with the anguished, suicidal edge of, say, Only the Lonely or No One Cares, but rather with a fullness and confidence of heart that was just as transporting as his agonized saloon songs and perhaps even of a rarer stripe. The music he recorded those three nights was vibrantly orchestral—strings and soft solos dominated, with none of the mischievous trickery of a Sinatra-Riddle swing album—but no instrument could equal Frank’s voice, which by sheer will of heart and mind could sweep listeners out of their bodies. Although he had seemingly mined these songs to their fullest in the forties, he somehow found something more in each of them, transforming them from lush, hopeful stirrings of youth to ripe, gratified affirmations of maturity.

  This was acting, of course. His nonfictional life held none of the pure romantic satisfaction that this music bespoke; it was far too crammed with fleeting raptures, dazzling prospects, and quick, distracting activity. But the music wasn’t part of all that; it was music in and of itself that he loved, the perfect marriage of his voice, a song, an arrangement, a band; he could, uncannily, lift himself out of his own life and sing—and take us all with him.

  How else explain how these overwhelming sounds emerged from a man living such a life?

  How else explain a soul capable of such godly breadth?

  More: The material recorded those early nights of March was finally released later that year as part of an album that took its name from a song that Frank didn’t record until April (after the Rat Pack reunited in Miami for another Summit), a song that struck him as so trivial and pointless when he first heard it that he lifted the sheet music off the composer’s piano with his fingertips and dropped it to the floor like a dirty Kleenex. Over the subsequent weeks, Hank Sanicola (who really could play the piano) kept noodling with the song, which he thought Frank should record, whenever Frank was nearby. Finally Frank broke down: “What is that cute little thing you keep playing?” Sanicola handed him the music. It was “Nice ’n’ Easy,” by Lew Spence and Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Frank cut it and released it as the kickoff track for the eleven other songs, giving him a moderate little hit single, a new signature tune, and, inevitably, further proof of the seeming infinity of his talents.

  No one else could have done it, certainly not Sammy or Dean, thoroughly respectable singers when—and this was hardly always the case—they were given the right material, collaborators, and conditions. It was music that had provided Frank a leg up in the world, and, despite all the carousing and skirt-chasing and movies and politics and careerism and foofaraw, it was music that was still at the core of his identity. Others might sing as a career, as an avocation, as a means of communicating something to the world; Frank sang as if to commune with the music, as if to to dissolve what was worldly about him—his body, his money, his authority, his things—into pure aesthetic form. He could do things in music—fast music, slow music, giddy music, wrenched music—that no one else could do, presumably because he was more intimate with the art than anyone else who’d ever lived.

  The songwriters, musicians, engineers, and producers with whom he worked over the decades always spoke respectfully of his knowledge of their shared work. He didn’t know any theory—he could barely sight-read—but his instincts were impeccable, the best, perhaps, of any singer of the century. Part of it was song selection, part of it was style, part of it was sheer chops, part of it was the ineffability of talent. And he kept it up for decades, changing sounds, changing his very voice, always setting the standards in style and performance, remaining vital for more than thirty years until he gave up trying and took up singing oldies in stadiums and in duets with artistic midgets. Even then, a barrel-chested belter giving the crowd something it was stunned to find out he still had, he was peerless.

  He didn’t necessarily respect his talent in the same ways as, say, an opera singer. He would frequently light a cigarette at the start of a number and smoke it during the song; he would make a point of sipping Jack Daniel’s during his act; and he could let his carousing impinge on his constitution. Recalling the recording of All Alone in early 1962, an observer said, “Frank looked like hell when he came in. It was as if he’d just been to nine orgies.” But this, too, was part of the act: Shouldn’t a singer of woeful ballads have a touch of alcohol and nicotine in his voice? Shouldn’t the man who sang the mournful waltzes of All Alone, one of his most underrated and beautiful records, have sounded weary and wan? Other singers could be placed in a mood; Frank became it.

  And more: Frank Sinatra simply was twentieth-century popular singing. His voice and manner became the center to which all else was relative. Some singers would be jazzier than Frank, some would be rawer, some would avoid his influence by choosing models from gospel, blues, folk, or country, but it didn’t matter: They performed in a world comprehended by a grammar and a logic that Frank had invented. Phrasing, microphone technique, musical acting, stage decorum, recording method: Whatever he did became King’s English. Everyone was more like Frank or less like Frank—even those who came before him like Crosby and Astaire and Armstrong and Fitzgerald, even those who ignored him like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline and those who sought to vanquish him like Elvis and Mick Jagger and Johnny Rotten. Without Frank, no one would have an idea of what a popular vocalist should do or be. He was the Only Singer.

  Which had to be very, very strange for Dean and Sammy. Compared to the aesthetic rigor that constituted Frank’s mission in life, their acts were, well, acts, lounge acts, actually, more novelty than epiphany. Silver poets, they each found a little something in Frank�
�s act they could do something with, expanded it with a personal spin, presented it in inimitable, repetitive, familiar styles, and made perfectly respectable careers onstage and in the recording studio. In a sense, they owed him their very lives.

  Dean very assuredly would not have had a singing career had there not been a Frank Sinatra. Two years the younger, he was swept to the top in the rage for Italian boy singers that Frank incited. He had a mellower tone than Frank—he sounded more like Perry Como, actually—and there was that curious low warble in his voice, an atavism of the Neapolitan singing he’d grown up listening to on the Victrola; he also liked to slur his sibilants into a slight lisp, making up in manner what he lacked in depth of heart. He sang more novelty stuff than Frank—Italian songs, country and western, duets with Jerry Lewis, for chrissakes—and, of course, he had the drunkie thing going and truly had no work ethic. But from song choice to presentation to attitude, his act was Frank—triple-A Frank, maybe, or Frank Lite, but Frank.

  With this difference: Something about Dean’s singing always stayed within him. You sensed that he was enjoying the song—maybe exclusively—and that he didn’t necessarily care if anyone else did, not even the putative lover to whom he addressed such songs as “All I Do Is Dream of You” and “I’ll Always Love You.” There was a self-satisfied element to his phrasing, a smugness, even a touch of the lascivious. In a few of his love songs, he sounded vaguely contemptuous, like romance was something that made him want to take a shower. You could imagine him flicking a cigarette on his girl; in his hands, a song like “Standing on the Corner” sounded like the interior monologue of a rapist (“You can’t get arrested for what you’re thinkin’.…”). He always had the grace and bonhomie to pull it off—audiences loved him—but his critics were correct to so frequently note the disdain with which he seemed to hold his audience, especially when he was performing live as a solo. When in later years he wouldn’t even condescend to finish songs he’d started, there was no denying the impression that he was only concerned with himself.