Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  Still, his celebrity counted for something. And soon after the election, the Kennedys granted Peter and Frank the honor of planning a gala for the eve of the inaugural, a star-studded performance that would underscore Jack’s sense of glamour and defray the Democratic National Committee’s debts. Tickets for the show at Washington’s National Guard Armory were $100 per seat and $10,000 per box. Just under $2 million would be raised, enough to defer not only the cost of Jack’s campaign but some outstanding debts from Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 race as well.

  Frank, naturally, launched into his task with relish. He inveigled Ella Fitzgerald to fly in from Australia, Shirley MacLaine from Japan, Gene Kelly from Switzerland, Sidney Poitier from France. He and Peter convinced several Broadway producers to darken their stages for the night, freeing such performers as Ethel Merman, Anthony Quinn, and Laurence Olivier to attend. During a TV special saluting accomplished women in early 1960, Frank had renewed his acquaintance with Eleanor Roosevelt, and, though she had supported Stevenson for the nomination against Jack, he prevailed upon her to attend the gala. He got Leonard Bernstein to conduct patriotic music and Carl Sandburg to read poetry; he had special lyrics and music written for the occasion. Joey Bishop was named emcee; Dean and Sammy were slated to perform, along with Harry Belafonte, Jimmy Durante, Mahalia Jackson, Milton Berle, Nat King Cole, Fredric March, Red Skelton, Helen Traubel, Juliet Prowse, Alan King, Bette Davis, Louis Prima, and Keely Smith—an unprecedented constellation of celebrity talent.

  “This is the most exciting assignment of my life,” Frank gushed. But his feelings weren’t necessarily shared by his friends. Dean still couldn’t be bothered with Jack Kennedy, and he asked out of Frank’s to-do, insisting that he was committed to finishing a film back in L.A. Entitled Ada, it starred Dean as a rube manipulated by a corrupt southern political machine to become governor. The director, Danny Mann, liked Dean well enough but didn’t sense that his star was so deeply committed to the picture that he couldn’t have taken a few days off: “I never had a feeling that he was worried about the picture,” Mann remembered. Still, it provided Dean a deft sidestep.

  Sammy, on the other hand, made plans to suspend his engagement at the Latin Casino nightclub outside of Philadelphia in favor of the inaugural gala, ordered a new tuxedo from Sy DeVore, the Rat Pack’s preferred haberdasher, and insisted that May, who was trying to accustom her new husband to life on a budget, hit Bergdorf Goodman for a gown to wear to the performance and a Chanel suit for the swearing-in. He was overwhelmed with having been asked to participate. It was, in his eyes, a vindication not only for himself and his talent but for everything he’d ever believed was good and true and just: “It really can happen in America,” he remembered thinking. “Despite all the obstacles, still in 1960 an uneducated kid from Harlem could work hard and be invited to the White House.”

  They waited until practically the last minute to crush him.

  Three days before the gala, Sammy was awakened in his Philadelphia hotel room by a call from Evelyn Lincoln, Jack’s personal secretary. She stammered to her point: “Mr. Davis … Sammy…the President has asked me to tell you that he doesn’t want you present at his inauguration. There is a situation into which he is being forced and to fight it would be counterproductive to the goals he’s set. He very much hopes you will understand.”

  They didn’t even have the grace to have Frank or Peter do it; they might as well have shot him in the heart. He thought of a million objections he could raise, a million reasonable arguments. He remembered Jack’s joking, his smiles, his thank-yous, his “I won’t forget your help.…” But he muttered a lame “I understand” and got off the phone, then lay back on his bed, nauseated.

  Within the hour, Peter called. “They talked the President into it,” he explained. “They said, ‘Look, this is our first time out. Let’s not do anything to fuck up. We’ve got Southern senators, bigoted congressmen. They see you as too liberal to start with. Peter Lawford’s an actor, we’ve still got residue from “The Clan’s Taking Over the White House.” If we have Sammy here, is he going to bring his wife? We can’t ask him not to bring her.’ The President said, ‘Okay, then dump it. Call Sam. He’ll understand.’”

  The snow job continued: “You’ll be interested to know that Bobby argued for you,” Peter went on. “‘That’s bullshit! It’s wrong! The man campaigned!’ But he was overruled. He got so angry he walked out of the rest of the discussion.”

  Sammy wasn’t really listening anymore. He called May and told her the awful news, and for the next few days, he floated through his act numbly. The Latin Casino retracted its earlier announcement that he’d be canceling his shows, saying that “his audiences come first,” or some other lie.

  On the night that Frank was hosting his gala, Sammy stood in the wings in the nightclub torturing himself. “I wondered what the people would be thinking,” he remembered, “looking at me onstage in Camden, knowing that the rest of the Rat Pack was in Washington. It hurt like a motherfucker.” (When Jack was killed, the family invited Sammy to the funeral, but he was working in L.A. and couldn’t attend. He reflected later that Jack “had not been a friend of mine,” but he nevertheless made a ritual of visiting his grave whenever he was in D.C.)

  Frank would’ve commiserated with Sammy if he’d’ve had the time, but he had whipped himself into a frenzy with the gala. He worked diligently with Peter on the scripting of the program, down to the song lyrics and written introductions of performers. He pored over details of scheduling, transportation, and accommodation. An entire floor of the Statler Hilton had been reserved for the entertainers, each of whom had received, as a token of Frank’s gratitude, a silver cigarette box with an invitation to the inaugural inlaid on top (the bill for these party favors ran $90,000). For himself, Frank had ordered a custom-designed wardrobe of outlandish opulence: an inverness cape with red satin lining, silk top hat, swallowtail coat, striped trousers, a double-breasted gray suede weskit, black calfskin oxfords, white kid gloves—all in duplicate, lest he should somehow besoil himself.

  He had taken care of everything, it seemed, except the weather. Early in the afternoon, snow began to fall, and it fell till evening, bringing traffic in the city to its knees. The stars who’d come to the armory to rehearse were unable to return to the hotel to change into their performance attire. The gala was to begin at 9:00 p.m., but the auditorium was only half-full at that hour.

  Frank would’ve been agitated even without the storm—earlier in the day he’d tried to bar the press from rehearsals and then, forced to relent, banned them to a remote balcony in the otherwise empty auditorium. But pacing backstage in his fancy duds, wondering if the president-elect would be able to make it through the snow-choked streets, he died a thousand deaths. As Bill Asher, who directed a taping of the gala, remembered, “Frank was really into the juice that night, and he got mad at Peter. We had a lineup of people in the show on a big bulletin board, and Frank kept coming into the room screaming, ‘Fuck Lawford! I’m not gonna do this show. I’m out!’ and then he’d pull his name down off the board.”

  The tension was finally broken at 10:45 by the arrival of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Frank composed himself sufficiently to escort the president-elect’s wife to her box, and the three-hour show went off without a hitch. (Joey got the first laugh, looking up at the president-elect in his stage-side box and saying, “I told you I’d get you a good seat. And you were so worried.…”)

  At its finale, Jack took the stage and spoke: “We’re all indebted to a great friend—Frank Sinatra. Long before he could sing, he used to poll a Democratic precinct back in New Jersey. That precinct has grown to cover a country.” Peter, too, was patted on the back: “A great deal of our praise and applause should also go to the coproducer, my brother-in-law Peter Lawford. He has been a citizen of this country less than a year, but already he had learned a citizen’s delight in paying off a political debt.”

  Such stuff had little impact on Peter, who felt sufficie
ntly removed from the goings-on that he didn’t even attend the swearing-in the next morning and dallied with a pickup on the side. But Frank reveled in the president’s praise: He bought an ad in Variety to have Jack’s remarks reprinted, and he had them pressed onto a record which he would play for hours, boring guests in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, and L.A. to tears.

  On the night of the inauguration, Frank held a private party for the stars of the gala at their hotel, and he was overwhelmed with pride when Jack snuck away from one of the official balls downstairs to mingle with the celebrities for a little while. Photos of the evening, along with virtually every note and letter Jack ever sent him, found their way—framed—into a Kennedy Room in Frank’s Palm Springs house. The place where Jack and Frank had spent a few days grooving in the sun some fifteen months earlier was gradually becoming a shrine.

  What they were really being paid for

  Ocean’s Eleven had been such a lark and had made everyone associated with it such a nice piece of change that they all swore they’d have to do it again as soon as they could. That turned out to be the spring of ‘61, when the original Rat Pack quintet of Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, and Joey were reunited in the desert with supporting players and pals Buddy Lester, Henry Silva, and Sonny King, an old Times Square buddy of Dean’s who somehow was excluded from the first film; they even found work on the picture for three of Bing Crosby’s sons.

  Dean and Frank coproduced the movie through their companies, Claude and Essex, and United Artists was chosen to distribute it as part of Frank’s deal there. (As a wedding present the previous December, Frank had given Sammy profit participation in the picture, putting him on par with himself and Dean.) John Sturges, with whom Frank and Peter had worked on Never So Few and who had a reputation as a handy man with a western (Gunfight at the OK Corral, Last Train from Boot Hill, The Magnificent Seven), was given the directorial reins. The script and story were credited to W.R. Burnett, but the film was a fairly loyal remake of Gunga Din, the 1939 George Stevens classic based on a liberal interpretation of a few lines of a Rudyard Kipling poem. Burnett had translated the action to the American West, soon after the Civil War. Frank, Dean, and Peter were the title characters, cavalry officers and best buddies fighting the Indians (just like in Kipling—get it?) and about to be separated by the decision of one of them to get married. Joining up with them was a puppy-dog loyal freed slave (Sammy) who wanted so badly to be a cavalryman that he fetched their water and blew the bugle for them—another role suffused with the stuff of human dignity.

  The film was originally intended to be called Badlands, and it was shot under the name Soldiers Three, but MGM had made its own spin-off of Gunga Din with that very title in 1951; the studio kept threatening action against the new film throughout the shoot, and Frank finally agreed to change the name to Sergeants Three during editing. (Informed of the title change, Joey quipped, “I wish you’d told me. I’d have played it differently”)

  The film was shot in Kanab, Utah, a small desert town in the Monument Valley some two hundred miles from Las Vegas. There was, of course, no nightlife. “There was a Dairy Queen that was open until eleven o’clock,” Joey remembered. “My advice to everybody was to get two scoops, because after that there wasn’t a goddamn thing to do.” And yet they found their own fun. Frank had ordered extensive renovations to the hotel that was housing the company during the location portion of the shoot and dipped into the film’s budget to pay for it; with their rooms all connected by interior doors, the boys could pull pranks on each other after hours, or merely get together to watch TV, play cards, and drink.

  Another leisure activity was written off to the production as well: Call girls were shipped in and paid as extras for saloon sequences. “The man in charge, an older gentleman, very moral and proper, who had to handle the arrangements was so upset,” recalled a secretary on the film. “He had to pay them more than scale and he didn’t know how to figure it all out, how to designate what they were really being paid for.”

  There were other, legitimate indulgences. Uncharacteristically, Frank had arrived on the location early and insisted on being shown the rushes of the work that had been shot by an advance unit. Producer Howard W. Koch explained that the projection equipment hadn’t arrived yet from L.A. “I’d say it’s next to impossible,” he told his boss. “That word isn’t in my vocabulary,” Frank said. Koch, determined to make good, recalled that Kirk Douglas was shooting his own western, Lonely Are the Brave, in New Mexico, and, reaching that crew by phone, he arranged to have a projector flown to Kanab, where Frank watched the footage four hours later.

  Peter, for one, might’ve wished that Koch hadn’t been so eager. He showed up in Kanab thirty pounds overweight—he’d spent the last year lounging on the beach rather than playing volleyball on it. No one had ever seen him so bloated and puffy; when the crew gathered in the basement of the local schoolhouse to watch the rushes, Frank would snicker, “There’s fat boy,” whenever Peter appeared. Peter immediately took to a diet with the aid of Dexedrine, losing all the excess poundage but giving his performance a strange yo-yo effect: He would look tubby in some scenes, svelte in others.

  But that was the ethos governing a Rat Pack movie. Frank had always insisted these things were done for fun and money. Anyone who took them seriously was an idiot.

  Joey learned this the hard way. “Before the picture started,” he remembered, “Frank says to me, ‘Can you ride a horse?’ I said, ‘I never been on a horse in my life.’ He says, ‘Learn how to ride ’cuz you’re the sergeant in charge, you’re going to be leading us. Get a wrangler. Hire the best guy you can get.’ So for two months, religiously—I mean I couldn’t walk, my back was hurtin’, everything—I practice, stoppin’ the horse dead, around barrels, goin’ into a full gallop from a dead start. This is for two months. Finally I get the script and I go through it. On page 117 I am with a horse but I’m walking it. I’m holding the reins. And that’s my only connection with a horse.”

  What we do is a rib

  Everything was new that year.

  Jack had his White House. Sammy had his gorgeous-blonde bride and a baby on the way. Frank and Dean were buying into a casino, the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. And they were all working for a newly formed record label, Reprise, which was founded and owned by Frank. He was more than just the Leader now. He was literally their boss.

  For years, Frank had been chafing under the rule of Capitol Records, the label that had signed him when he was poison in the industry and that had been home to the greatest music he’d ever recorded. He started his own company, Essex Productions, and tried to convince the world that it was a fullblown record business that merely used Capitol’s distribution services, but nobody was fooled: Essex was a paper company, a tax dodge, and Capitol owned the rights to everything Frank had cut for them and everything he had yet to cut for them under a rich seven-year deal he’d signed with the label in 1957.

  Capitol, Frank felt, paid handsomely in every respect except the one that mattered most to him—his freedom. Repeatedly, he kept trying to finagle some kind of independence for Essex from Capitol president Glenn Wallichs; repeatedly, he was turned down. In the spring of 1959, he even went on strike, recording nothing at all for a period of ten months and threatening worse.

  During this hiatus, Frank kept trying to find a way to take complete control of his recording career. He nearly bought the Verve label for himself until it was snatched up by MGM. Finally, in 1960, he decided he’d simply start up an independent company of his own, commitments to Capitol be damned. In December, he announced the formation of Reprise Records. Reprise was touted as being particularly sensitive to the aesthetic and commercial prerogatives of its artists. All rights to their material would revert to them after a specified period (reprise, get it?), after which they would be free to repackage, rerecord, or rerelease it however they saw fit. (Sammy, always cash-short, sold these rights back to the company when he signed on.)

  It looked a bit to
industry insiders like the founding of United Artists, the original case of the “lunatics taking charge of the asylum.” But Frank got his chums to jump ship with him, found a few other willing artists to record, and released a full slate of five albums the month after Jack’s inauguration, including tenor saxophonist Ben Webster’s Warm Moods, and three albums that clearly signaled the label’s independent spirit: It Is Now Post Time, by Frank’s saloon crony Joe E. Lewis, The Wham of Sam, one of Sammy’s great recordings with Mel Torme’s longtime arranger Marty Paich, and Sinatra’s own thirty-minute homage to the zeitgeist he himself had birthed, Ring-a-Ding-Ding!, a record that came complete with its own exclamation point.

  Sammy’s album was audaciously dramatic, capturing the energy that he conveyed onstage with highly stylized renditions of show tunes like “Blame It on My Youth,” “Can’t We Be Friends,” and “Thou Swell,” the latter set in a wildly upbeat arrangement that exploited Sammy’s brilliant articulation to its height. Paich, who became Sammy’s greatest wrangler, getting several fabulous records out of the singer before losing his attention after a few years, found just the right balance between showbiz schmaltz and real jazz feeling—the core, indeed, of Sammy’s whole act. There were bigger hits before and after, but The Wham of Sam (what a title!) was Sammy’s great coming-out party on vinyl, a chance for people who’d never seen him live to get a real sense of his titanic strength as an entertainer.

  Still and all, Ring-a-Ding-Ding! made The Wham of Sam sound like a collection of Gay Nineties tunes crooned to a ukulele. There was that cover: a cartoon drawing of Frank in a snap-brim hat, fingering a blue bow tie and making a high sign with the same hand. There was the title song, an insidery number by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn built on a meaningless Rat Pack catchphrase and sprinkled with obscure showbiz slang (“do a skull,” for instance, referred to a kind of openmouthed vaudeville double take). There was the cheeky juxtaposition of “The Coffee Song” with “When I Take My Sugar to Tea.” There were Johnny Mandel’s foot-stomping, brassy arrangements, the most purely up-tempo stuff Frank would record until he worked with Count Basie a few years later. Like “Ol MacDonald,” the whole thing screamed out brashness, confidence, insouciance, balls. It was, almost coincidentally, a hit; what it really stood for was Frank’s domination of the era.