by Shawn Levy
He owned casinos and record companies, restaurants and vast expanses of land; he produced films and TV shows; he slept with the women of his choosing, whether they were hookers, starlets, waitresses, or Marilyn Monroe; his entourage included the most celebrated entertainers of the day; he consorted with the underworld; he helped elect a president. What was not to brag about? The world was Frank Sinatra’s playground: He owned the equipment, he invited whomever he wanted to play with, and he could stop everyone cold whenever he wanted to and rivet everyone’s attention with his music. There’d never been anyone in the world of entertainment with so much talent and power at once.
Naturally, this wasn’t universally seen as a good thing. Frank was widely known for his hedonism, his flouting of conventional morality, his liberal politics, his temper. All of this made him anathema to many commentators in the press, not all of them kooks of the stripe who tortured Sammy. During the campaign, various showbiz columnists had attacked Frank and the Rat Pack, which was still generally known as the Clan. Longtime Sinatra nemesis Dorothy Kilgallen was, predictably, among the carping crowd—she actually quoted Jack Kennedy as saying of Frank, “He’s no friend of mine, he’s just a friend of Pat and Peter Lawford”—as was Ruth Montgomery, a Hearst syndicated columnist. But there were cavils as well from such presumably neutral voices as Time (“some of JFK’s biggest headaches may well come from the ardently pro-Kennedy clique that is known variously as the Rat Pack or the Clan”) and journalist-to-the-stars Joe Hyams, who reported that the Kennedys had warned the Rat Pack to start behaving like “serious citizens” and wrote a pair of unwelcome articles detailing Frank’s financial affairs.
In the final stages of the election, and periodically throughout 1961, the various members of the Rat Pack sought to downplay the talk of their mutual admiration society as some sort of cabal that threatened the very foundations of American democracy and decency. Frank was first and loudest, declaring outright that there was no such thing as the Clan: “The various guilds that are part of my professional life are the only organized groups to which I belong,” he pronounced through a press agent. “ ‘The Clan’ is a figment of someone’s imagination. Naturally, people in Hollywood socialize with friends, as they do in any community. But we do not get together in childish fraternities, as some people would like to think. There is no such entity as ‘The Clan’ and there never has been. I am fortunate to have many friends and many circles of friends, but there is no membership card.” Likewise, he told columnist Earl Wilson, then (but not always) in his favor, “There is no Clan. It’s some guys that like each other and get along together. There are no membership cards or anything like that. This whole thing is silly.”
Peter chimed in: “Now look—that Clan business—I mean that’s hokey. I mean it makes us sound like children—like we all wore sweat shirts that said ‘The Clan’ and Frank with a whistle around his neck. They make us sound so unsavory. We’re just a lot of people on the same wave length. We like each other. What’s wrong with that?”
Even Dean, of all people, had something to say. “It’s silly to call it anything like the Clan or the Group,” he said. “If anything it’s more like the PTA—a Perfect Togetherness Association.”
Sammy would joke about it sometimes, asking, “Would I belong to an organization known as The Clan?” and kidding that the Rat Pack was “just a little group of ordinary guys that get together once a year to take over the entire world.” And Joey, of course, got off the best line—“Clan, Clan, Clan! I’m sick and tired of hearing things about the Clan. Just because a few of us guys get together once a week with sheets over our heads.…”
The talk really did have a life of its own, with the same commentators who’d inspired the public fascination with the Rat Pack now reading into this “there is no Rat Pack” P.R. campaign signs that the group truly was finished: showbiz gossip waged as talmudic exegesis. Wrote columnist Sidney Skolsky, “Call it what you will—clan, group, PTA, or what have you—the summit meeting boys are going to dissolve slowly. The Clan will be no more because that’s what the leader wants.” Then this sort of writing gave rise to yet another layer of analysis, such as Dorothy Kilgallen’s comment that “reports elsewhere that the Frank Sinatra Clan has disbanded, or is coming apart at the seams, are far from factual. It’s still a tightly-knit organization, even if some members had to pretend to go ‘underground’ for obvious reasons.”
Indeed, that summer showed that the Rat Pack was far from kaput. There was the shoot of Sergeants Three, for instance. There they were, incongruously stuck out in Fuck All, Utah; one night, they managed to break the monotony by sneaking into Vegas to hit a trifecta of sorts, bouncing from casinos where Vic Damone and Eddie Fisher were playing to the Sands, where Danny Thomas had center stage. In each joint, they broke up the headline act with their antics, grabbing the spotlight and doing bits from the Summit to the delight of audiences and, at the very least, the patient indulgence of the stars.
Two months later, they were all in L.A. finishing work on the film and they did it again, crashing Sonny King’s opening night at the Slate Brothers nightclub. Dean and Frank pounded King’s toes from their ringside seats, then took the stage and poured whiskey on the comic: a 100-proof baptism from the pontiffs of cool. Sidney Skolsky, who was becoming a scold, wrote that the incident felt like “a college initiation to see if Sonny could get into the fraternity known as ‘The Clan.’”
Few had seen the Sonny King show, and few except self-righteous columnists cared. But a few nights later, the Rat Pack converged on a far more visible event and disrupted it to widespread annoyance. Eddie Fisher opened at the Coconut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel soon after his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, survived a serious bout of pneumonia, and columnists from all over the nation joined celebrities in showing up to support the singer.
Not long into the show, Eddie was singing “That Face” when Dean piped up from ringside, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be working—I’d be home with her”—just as if it were Sammy up there. Some people laughed, and Eddie seemed tickled, and soon enough, Frank, Dean, Sammy, and Joey took the stage, drinks in hand, for a mini-Summit of lewd jokes, bowdlerized songs, ad-libs—the usual shit. Some in the audience were no doubt thrilled at the sight of such high-wattage spontaneity, but they were in the minority, and the people who’d come to see Fisher weren’t terribly pleased.
“This was a disgusting display of ego,” groused Milton Berle, and the press agreed. Declaring that the stunt “came off with a thud,” Variety opined that “the audience was not amused.” “Frank and his henchmen took over and ruined Eddie’s performance,” grumbled Hedda Hopper. “You sensed a feeling of audience resentment,” tsked Skolsky. “This was the first time The Clan played to a hostile audience; the first time they received unfavorable comment in the press.”
Frank seemed sincerely puzzled by all the negative attention. He spoke out in a self-defense marked by a sense, exceedingly rare in him, that he’d been stung. “We never hurt anybody, and we don’t plan to,” he said. “I’ve never seen an audience dislike what we do.” Rather than accept that he and his cronies had disrupted Fisher’s show, he called it “beautiful. When we jumped on stage, he broke up and couldn’t sing any more. I never saw a reaction from a crowd like we saw that night—I swear it was like New Year’s Eve. What we do is a rib—a good-natured kind of rib. Really we rib ourselves.” (So they weren’t grown-up degenerates, after all; they were kidders.)
As if to counter the bad P.R., Frank spent a lot of 1961 running around doing charity gigs—a benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. here, a trip to Mexico City to help fight child poverty there—and he began to plan for a world tour the following year: Europe, Israel, Hong Kong. It didn’t fool anyone: Commentators, audiences, antagonists and fans alike still took him for some kind of seductive degenerate.
And the problem wasn’t necessarily that he was misunderstood. Rather, he may simply have succeeded too well: Whether he and his buddies acted
out of compulsive megalomania or calculated self-parody, they had riveted the eyes of the nation; everything they did was subject to intense scrutiny and apelike emulation. They were the subjects of New Yorker cartoons (psychiatrist to glum middle-aged guy: “What makes you think Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and all that bunch are so happy?”)—they were the popular national currency.
Studying the ins and outs of the Rat Pack became a form of Kremlinology, with gossips and journalists trying to figure out who was in, who was almost in, who’d been rejected. Author Richard Gehman published a paperback, Sinatra and His Rat Pack, listing two dozen or so of Frank’s buddies, along with official titles, and classifying them all into A and AA groups; the book went into three printings. Gehman’s old source Humphrey Bogart, who deplored the cant of showbiz idolatry, would’ve been disgusted.
In the fall, former MCA agent David Susskind kicked off the new season of his Open End talk show with a roundtable on the Rat Pack. Gehman was invited, along with another journalist, Marya Mannes, to decry the behavior of Sinatra and his cronies, while Jackie Gleason, Joe E. Lewis, Toots Shor, and Ernie Kovacs were called in to present the opposition point of view. It was meant to stir people up, but no one had anything really nasty or significant to say. Listening as his journalist guests admitted they admired the Rat Pack and his celebrity guests listed Frank’s dozens of charitable acts, a bemused Susskind sighed, “You’re making him sound like Albert Schweitzer!”
Such stuff never really sullied the Rat Pack’s name. The public knew there was something wrong about them—hell, that was part of their allure. What it indicated wasn’t approbation but adoration: Interest in the group was at such a fever pitch that the tiniest incident involving them was blown into absurd proportions. When working on the inaugural gala, Frank and Peter landed at National Airport in Washington, where they—and the sweatered dog accompanying them—were met by a military escort and led into town. A Republican congressman from Iowa decried this waste of taxpayer money, and editorial pages across the nation echoed him, ringing the alarm.
The following summer, the press took notice again when Frank showed up at the White House for a visit and was seen talking with presidential spokesman Pierre Salinger, who took pains at a Q&A session with reporters to put some distance between the singer and the president. It didn’t help matters that Frank flew straight from Washington to the Kennedy family home in Hyannis Port for a weekend of sailing. In the company of Pat and Peter Lawford, Ted Kennedy, and Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa and his wife of the moment, Odile, Frank and Jack cruised for hours on the family yacht, Honey Fitz. Salinger was once again forced to throw up a smokescreen of lies between his boss and Sinatra, insisting that Frank had been invited to Hyannis Port by the Lawfords so that he could “confer with Ambassador [Joseph] Kennedy about a souvenir recording of the inaugural gala.” (In fact, that recording had become rather a hot potato, with Frank and the ambassador bickering over plans for its release until Old Joe ordered the director to cut all traces of Frank from the kinescope—a virtually impossible task that became moot when the quarrel was forgotten; besides, nobody outside of the in-group ever saw the thing, anyhow.)
These were little nothings—one-day stories that didn’t change anyone’s mind about the way things were carried on between the Kennedys and their decadent Hollywood friends. Behind the scenes, however, things were much more nefarious and grotesque. There was the little betting pool that Peter and Jack had set up between themselves and some of Jack’s old buddies from Choate and Harvard, the object of which was to reward the first man to sleep with a woman other than his wife in the Lincoln Bedroom. Peter won, but not by getting laid. The stewardess he enticed into the bedroom turned out to be a lesbian, but he prevailed upon her to act with him in front of Jack as if they had been intimate. Handing his brother-in-law the prize money later on, the president muttered, “You son of a bitch! I knew you’d be the one to win.”
Encouraged by Jack’s frequent example, Peter made a habit of bringing pickups to the White House and, as in other things, he could be at least as clumsy as graceful in handling them. There was the time he escorted a Capitol Hill secretary to an intimate dinner at the White House that wound up being reported in a chaste but nevertheless suggestive article in the New York Times, and the time when, at another soiree, his latest pretty young conquest revealed herself to be an employee of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, even then considered a front-runner for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. “For God’s sake, Peter!” Jack stormed afterward. “Don’t you find out who people work for before you bring them up here? Jesus!”
Antics like these were anathema to Jackie Kennedy. True enough, she’d made up her mind to abide her husband’s infidelities, which, alas, were no different from her father’s or her father-in-law’s. But the pranks of her swinging brother-in-law and his depraved Hollywood friends were another matter entirely; she certainly didn’t have to turn her home into an adjunct of the Sands, least of all with the Washington press snooping around. So, since she genuinely liked Peter, she focused her animus on Frank, who, at least by her arithmetic, was leeching privileges from Lawford. Frank became persona non grata in her White House, creating a sticky situation for Peter and Jack, both of whom considered him a pal and, even more, a creditor.
Peter talked the matter through with Jack. “During one of our private dinners, he brought up Sinatra and said, ‘I really should do something for Frank,’ “he recalled.” ‘There’s only one problem, Jackie hates him and won’t have him in the house.’” They joked about smuggling Frank into the White House in a garbage bag or one of John-John’s diaper bundles. Then Jack hit on the idea of waiting for Jackie to leave town and having his sister Eunice Shriver serve as hostess for a dinner with Frank.
According to Peter, Frank “flew to Washington for the day and a car drove him up to the southwest gate. Even without Jackie there, the President still wouldn’t let him come in the front door. I don’t think he wanted reporters to see Frank Sinatra going into the White House. That’s why he never flew on Air Force One and was never invited to any of the Kennedy state dinners or taken to Camp David for any of the parties there.”
Frank was smart enough to sense that he was being kept out of the center of things, however diplomatically, but he wasn’t about to jeopardize his standing with the president by making a fuss over it. Instead, he pointedly scapegoated Peter, usually in ways that wouldn’t leak over into his relationship with the Kennedys.
In the summer of 1961, for instance, Frank, the Lawfords, the Rubirosas, Jimmy Van Heusen, Mike Romanoff, and Bob Neal made plans to rent a huge yacht for a cruise of the French Riviera with Joe and Rose Kennedy, capped by a performance at the International Red Cross Ball hosted by Princess Grace in Monaco. En route, Frank, Peter, Van Heusen, and Milt Ebbins stopped in Paris to see Dean, who was headed off to Germany for a singing engagement. Trouble began when Peter horned in on a young woman Dean had been chatting up. In a climate in which it was considered unchivalrous for one married man to make off with the romantic conquest of another, Peter upset Frank and Dean by leaving a cocktail party with the pretty lass in tow. “Your friend’s a real nice guy,” Frank snarled to Ebbins, while Dean bemusedly asked, “Whatever happened to one for all and all for one?”
Frank grew further incensed the following night when, out at a restaurant in Paris with a large party, he watched from the table as Peter and Pierre Salinger had an extended talk at the bar, out of earshot of their fellow diners. Sinatra swaggered a bit drunkenly to the pair: “You guys having a private conversation? What are you talking about that you can’t say in front of me?” The two tried to explain that they’d simply bumped into one another while ordering drinks and got lost in small talk, but Frank fumed and left.
The next day, when the cruise was meant to commence, Frank called Nice, where Neal had spent several thousand dollars renting a huge vessel. “I’m not going on any goddamn cruise with that lousy bastard!” he hollered.
“Which lousy bastard is that, Frank?” Neal asked.
“Fucking Lawford!” came the thundering reply. “To hell with him! I’m going to Germany with Dean!” And off he went to Frankfurt, adding a dash of Rat Pack spontaneity to one concert but leaving a gaping hole at another: When Dean and Frank turned up AWOL, Sammy performed at Princess Grace’s benefit alone.
Back home, Frank’s temper hadn’t settled. He set about to record Point of No Return, the last of the four albums he had agreed to cut for Capitol in exchange for release from his contract, which still had three years to run. The sessions caught him in an extremely agitated mood. Just the previous year, while working on another of these obligatory albums, he’d thrown several tantrums, finding some minuscule thing to carp about in each take of each song. His petulance was ultimately forestalled by trumpeter Sweets Edison: Catching the look of imminent explosion in the singer’s eye just as one number was ending, he cut him off with “Shit, baby, you can’t do it any better than that!”—at which, however angry, Frank had to laugh.
These final recording dates ought to have had a bit of bittersweetness to them: They’d be Frank’s last in the famous round Capitol tower, they consisted of ballads he’d sung for years such as “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “September Song,” and “These Foolish Things,” and they were arranged and conducted by Axel Stordahl, the elegantly reserved proctor of Frank’s great 1940s solo recordings on Columbia, who was, it was widely known, in the last stages of a battle with cancer.