Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  “Joey was like a man in shell shock,” recalled Joe Flynn, who’d been cast as the star’s brother-in-law. “He was the press’s darling and he’d never been attacked before. He began taking the script home at night to ‘fix it.’ I remember once he was supposed to tell Madge Blake to ‘Shut up!’ He changed it to ‘Mom, please!’ That’s how desperately he wanted to be loved. Then when he began to explain to me what a joke was I knew we were in trouble.”

  Like Frank, he started showing a temper around the studio: “When he first came around and hollered, we got scared and resentful,” said a crew member. “Now we know that when he hollers, five minutes later he won’t be hollering, so we let him holler.”

  Soon enough, wholesale tinkering: Characters were jettisoned, writers, the director; Joey’s character went from an L.A. P.R. man to a New York talk show host. Danny Thomas couldn’t take the aggravation anymore so he quit overseeing it—only to discover that there wasn’t exactly a line of guys waiting to take over the job: “I guess I’ll have to get my brother-in-law to produce this show,” he sighed.

  Joey found somebody to take on the assignment—Eddie Rio, an old vaudeville buddy who’d been driving a truck during a protracted career lull. He also sent to Florida for his brother Freddie, who was hired on as dialogue coach direct from a stint as a Miami Beach headwaiter. Other ghosts from the past appeared on-camera: his former Bishop Trio cohort Rummy Bishop and his older brother, Morris Gottlieb, a handbag salesman, who turned up on the show one night playing the mandolin and doing an imitation tap dance with his teeth.

  No one who watched exactly forgot the Summit; eventually, NBC gave up on the show and it switched over to CBS.

  Absent Frank’s company, Joey drifted listlessly along. He could still draw in nightclubs—Vegas, Miami, Chicago, New York, L.A.—but never with anything like the old sizzle. He formed an entourage of his own hangers-on, and he bade them surround him in an effort to cheer himself up, but he was too much the loner to pull it off. “He hardly ever talked to us,” whined one of his lackeys.

  In the spring of ‘65, the plug was finally pulled on the show. “I feel like someone who has been in an auto accident,” he told a reporter. “And I don’t know what the hell happened, except that I’m bruised. I don’t know what hit me.”

  He finally reconciled with Frank. After that near-drowning in Hawaii, he sent him a telegram reading, “You must have forgotten who you were. You could have walked on the water”; it went over well. In April ‘66, he was back at the Sands with Dean and Frank for a mini-Summit reunion. At around the same time, he made a doofus western with Dean, Texas Across the River; stone-face Joey played an Indian—an idea funnier in concept than execution.

  It was his last real Rat Pack gig.

  Too bad, too, because he missed a doozy. In June of ‘65, Frank had summoned Dean and Sammy to St. Louis to play a benefit for a favorite charity of his (and of his pals over at the Teamsters), Dismas House, the halfway house for ex-cons founded by Father Dismas Clark, the inspiration for the gritty little exploitation film of 1961, The Hoodlum Priest. The novelty would be that they’d broadcast the thing—via closed circuit—to movie houses in New York and L.A. so as to augment the money raised in St. Louis.

  Joey had been invited too, but he was replaced by Johnny Carson after he hurt his back: “He slipped a disc,” Carson quipped, “backing out of Frank’s presence.”

  The show was yet another Summit reprise, the old format cold, from Dean’s “When you’re drinkin’…” through the ensemble finale of “The Birth of the Blues,” with only the novelty of a different emcee up there to keep anyone onstage awake.

  The broadcast was filled out with performances by Trini Lopez, Kaye Stevens, and the Step Brothers, a tap dance act that had once upon a time towered over the Will Mastin Trio. The Count Basie orchestra, with which Frank was making records and playing club dates at the time, provided the music. (At show’s end, Father Clark, bestowing tokens of Dismas House’s esteem on the performers, mistook the rotund Mr. Basie for a Step Brother.)

  The performance became famous three decades later when a kinescope of it was discovered in a closet in St. Louis; it was shown to great huzzah at museums on both coasts.

  But it was actually kind of sad. Compared to a show taped surreptitiously at the Sands three years earlier, or to the unreleased Villa Venice recordings, there’s something perfunctory about it, something tepid and canned and routine.

  Maybe it was the presence of Carson—that avatar of late-night, middlebrow Coziness Unto Sleep.

  Maybe they were on their best behavior in front of the good father.

  Or maybe they had simply stopped being dangerous and dynamic and thrilling.

  It was perfect that no real recording of the Summit ever surfaced, after all: What they did, exactly, was never really the point of who they were or what they meant. They’d been a majestic triumph of style and attitude over content. And now that they’d stopped really mattering …

  1965: Marriage on the Rocks: the last Rat Pack movie and a damned ugly way to go.

  Frank is a straitlaced guy with two teenage kids (one played by his own daughter, Nancy) and a wife (Deborah Kerr) who’s thinking about divorce. Through inane comic mix-ups, the couple winds up in Tijuana and she accidentally gets her wish: The marriage is off. Before they can tie the knot again, Frank hies home and asks his pal (Dean) to go back and fetch the missus. Then another string of idiotic coincidences results in her marrying him. Meanwhile, Frank is getting into the groove of the single life and enjoying it; he even frugs in a go-go cage. What larks!

  With material like this—better suited to Rock Hudson or Dick Van Dyke—it was clearly all over. There had been something dangerous and sexy and rebellious in Ocean’s Eleven, even though it wasn’t much of a movie, even though the rebels were all millionaires. But this—this was beneath everyone. And nobody paid money to see it.

  Dean, frankly, didn’t need it. He was more popular on his own in movies than ever before—he’d just started making some campy action movies about a mock James Bond named Matt Helm—and he’d been given his own variety hour on NBC. The Dean Martin Show debuted in September 1965, the very same day that Marriage on the Rocks slunk into theaters. The first episode featured Bob Newhart, Diahann Carroll, Joey Heatherton, and, surprise, surprise, Frank, who stomped all over the host’s rendition of his monster hit “Everybody Loves Somebody”—which Dean had already mangled during the show’s opening.

  For the next decade, Thursday night at ten belonged to Dean—to his schmoozing with pianist Ken Lane; to his bevies of dancing girls, the Golddiggers and the Ding-a-Ling Sisters; to the little bar on the side of the set and the firehouse pole that he would slide down to make his entrance and the swinging doors through which celebrities sauntered to make “surprise” appearances.

  He came through the tube easy, laid-back and nonabrasive in a medium that was better to Johnny Carson than to Jerry Lewis, to Andy Williams than to Frank.

  And it was no act. The way he worked it with producer-director Greg Garrison, Dean did the whole thing in a single day: no meetings with writers, no casting sessions, no extra rehearsals, nothing. “I don’t even breathe hard,” he said. “I go to the studio at one on Sunday afternoon and I’m out of there by nine. That’s all there is to it.”

  Sometimes it looked like there was a bigger hand than even Frank’s directing them all.

  In the summer of 1948, Martin and Lewis made their Hollywood debut at Slapsie Maxie’s, a Wilshire Boulevard nightspot named after the punchy-old-pug-turned-minor-celebrity Maxie Rosenbloom; the real owners were clothiers Sy and Charlie DeVore and, behind them, Mickey Cohen. Dean and Jerry were riding high from their debut at the Copacabana, and they were thrilled to discover that the house band at Slapsie Maxie’s—the Dick Stabile orchestra—had a similar energy to their own. They were a sock sensation, blew everyone away, became movie stars overnight. Among their admirers—Slapsie Maxie’s bartender, an aspiring young co
mic so enamored of Dean’s presence and personality that he started a comedy act just like it. And why not? He had the perfect name, after all: Dick Martin.

  In 1952, Martin teamed up with Dan Rowan, another young comic, to form a kind of swingy George and Gracie act: two hedonistic sharpies, one (Rowan) cool and smart, the other (Martin) cool and dumb. They debuted at Hymie’s Bar-B-Que in Albuquerque and made a total of six grand the first year, but soon they caught Walter Winchell’s eye, and he promoted them in his column and broadcasts throughout the decade. People liked them; they rose.

  In 1960, Rowan and Martin were playing the Riviera Hotel on the bill with the McGuire Sisters when Sam Giancana had Rowan’s room bugged. That was the farce that began with Giancana jealous of Rowan’s proximity to Phyllis McGuire and ended with Sinatra snubbed by Jack Kennedy in Palm Springs, the crazy little flitter of a butterfly’s wing that set into effect the cosmic catastrophe that put the kibosh on Frank’s Rat Pack party.

  In 1966, Rowan and Martin had a summer replacement show on NBC in the slot that Dean Martin’s hit show occupied throughout the rest of the year. It was called The Dean Martin Summer Show, even though Dean never appeared on it. It hit, and it gave birth to a full-fledged Rowan and Martin series a year and a half later.

  In 1970, Peter, still in his Swinging London phase and well on his way to becoming a desiccated zombie, showed up at a TV studio for his semiregular gig on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, the hip, smash TV show that was peppered with, among myriad delights, cameos of well-known stars doing little unbilled bits of shtick. (Sammy made such a hit with “Here come da judge” that Bobby Kennedy once quoted it back at him.) Peter had been on the show once or twice a season since 1968, grooving at a party in one of the show’s regular sequences and squirting out swingy one-liners. At one taping, he noticed a pretty young dancer. They met, they partied, they got married. She was twenty-one; he was forty-eight. Peter knew her dad: Dan Rowan.

  And one of her bridesmaids at the denim-and-flowers Puerto Vallarta wedding ceremony: Toni Stabile, niece of Dick Stabile, the bandleader from that long-ago Slapsie Maxie’s engagement at which the groom’s old Rat Pack buddy Dean so impressed the bride’s dad’s future partner Dick.

  Wild.

  Sammy’s phone rang, waking him from the fog: Bobby Kennedy was going to run for president; could he help?

  Bobby: the good one, who fought to keep him invited to the inauguration, who listened when he spoke, who wasn’t impressed with celebrities.

  Sammy had worked for Bobby in 1964 when he was running for the Senate from New York. The most famous black Jew in the world, he was uniquely qualified to introduce him at rallies in both the Garment District and Harlem. Now, with Frank still forgiving nobody for Palm Springs, with Peter utterly on the outs with his ex-in-laws, with Dean still not giving a shit and nobody caring who Joey voted for, Sammy was the only warrior still in the arena, the Last Rat Packer for Kennedy.

  He visited Bobby and Ethel in Virginia: Of course, he’d help.

  He was in London that spring of ‘68. First came the morning his valet woke him, weeping, with the news about Dr. King. Then that other morning: Peter with the news about Bobby.

  If he was going crazy, he wasn’t alone in the world.

  Racial politics got militant all of a sudden, it seemed to Sammy.

  Or was it—as the radicals who viewed him with naked suspicion said—that he was too distracted by his own place in the white world to notice?

  He tried to talk to kids; they scoffed him. He gave money to radical black organizations; they scoffed him. He had sit-downs with hard-core guys; he supported Bobby Seale for mayor; he wore a “Free Angela” button, dashikis, and, finally, a natural haircut—no more greasy whiteboy stuff.

  It made black and white audiences uncomfortable: If he was down, why was his stuff so white? If he wasn’t trying to scare people, why was he doing all this weird stuff? Black kids seemed to want nothing to do with him, to loathe him. He felt their disdain like a slap—a pioneer passed over by people who followed the trail he’d blazed, and forced to endure their catcalls and jibes.

  There was a new lady, Altovise Gore, a leggy dancer from the London production of Golden Boy. She toured with Sammy as part of his act for a while (he had this notion, he said, of building up his reputation as a swinger, he said, by getting a bunch of gorgeous girls to fawn and fight over him onstage, strictly as a commercial move, he said). A year or two later, he asked her out on a Bahamian cruise with the Quincy Joneses and the Sidney Poitiers, and suddenly they got serious about spending all their time together.

  It was good for him: a tall, outgoing Nefertiti whose showbiz ambitions went hand in hand with his, a girl who swung and partied and wasn’t gonna start in with the baby food. One day in Philadelphia, after he’d taped The Mike Douglas Show and it was too rainy to golf, they got married.

  Soon after, Altovise made her Hollywood social debut at a dinner party hosted by Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone: She and Sammy wore matching tuxedo hot pants custom-made by Sy DeVore. Milton Berle answered the doorbell when they arrived and his cigar nearly fell out of his mouth: “How does an old Jew like you get such a gorgeous young wife?”

  Strange bedfellows. Another call: Would Sammy like to meet President Nixon, join a commission looking into economic opportunities for blacks? It was more than Jack Kennedy had ever asked of him—even just the visit to the White House would be a first.

  He asked around—Jesse Jackson, the SCLC, the Urban League, the NAACP: Everyone said do it. He flew to Washington, visited the Kennedys’ graves, then went to meet the man he’d postponed his own wedding to defeat back in 1960.

  During the coming years, Sammy went to Vietnam at Nixon’s request, he spoke to urban groups, he was chauffeured by Air Force One to attend Mahalia Jackson’s funeral, and he got some quid pro quo when Nixon addressed certain black organizations for the first time at his request. Nixon used him, of course, but no more so than the Kennedys had a decade earlier—and a damn sight more equitably, to be honest.

  Sammy was right to feel proud, even if, typically, it overwhelmed him: During the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, he performed at a big outdoor concert near the convention hall; when Nixon came up onstage to say a few words to the crowd, ebullient little Sammy engulfed him in the Hug Heard Round the World.

  Blacks attacked him, editorialized against him, shunned him to his face in the very Sands casino that he had fought to open to them. The good lefty Democrats in Hollywood didn’t know what they were looking at, but they shunned it, anyway: Sidney and Harry wouldn’t even return Sammy’s calls. Of the old gang, only Shirley MacLaine even bothered to ask what it all meant. He had never, ever, been able to please everybody, but the anger he felt now made him weep.

  That same year, he bought 8 percent of the Tropicana for $720,000, becoming the first black man to own a portion of a Las Vegas Strip hotel. A few months later, he entertained at a state dinner and spent the night at the White House.

  It was 1973; he was forty-seven. He owned a piece of a casino and he broke bread with the president.

  Just like Frank.

  Dean, on the other hand, never tried to be like anyone. Compared to Frank, whose every showbiz moment seemed some epochal assault on Olympus itself, Dean’s lackadaisical mien was soothing; as their audience aged, he was much easier to swallow than the gaudy shit Sammy and Peter were into or Frank’s ugly temper. Through the late sixties, his TV show grew so big that within two years NBC offered him a three-year extension at $283,000 a week—$34 million in total. He was worth every penny: The show was in the Nielsen top fifteen all three of those years.

  He kept making movies—three Matt Helm pictures in all, plus a never-ending stream of awful westerns (he always loved westerns) and Airport. He spent the money on land all over Southern California: acreage, rental properties, office parks; he even tried to launch a country club in Beverly Hills. Frank’s wealth may have seemed greater, but that was becaus
e he flaunted it; Dean was reckoned by many in town to be among the richest men in Hollywood.

  Rich enough to tell Frank no.

  In 1968, after Frank began a blood feud with the Sands and bolted to Caesar’s Palace, Dean extended his deal with his longtime Vegas home; later, still ignoring Frank’s summons, he moved up the road to the Riviera, where he was made part owner (ten points for eighty grand) and given his own private barroom, Dino’s Den.

  For several years, he’d outsold Frank at record stores on Frank’s own label; now his was the highest-priced show on the Strip: $15.50, four bits more than Frank’s.

  But he acted like he was above it all—or not so much above it as apart. He’d always been reserved, even withdrawn, but he could always snap right out of it and join in the squirt gun fights, the carrying-on, the parties. In his fifties, though, he seemed more content to sit and let it come to him, and the hell with it if it didn’t. He did what he pleased, swearing in Italian on network television, singing only three songs all the way through during a show in Vegas, walking off movie sets because he felt like an ass playing cowboy at his age.

  His remove from the world became noticeable, making him something of a laughingstock to people who hadn’t already tired of his booze-and-sex shtick. The TV audience began to dwindle; the movie offers came less frequently. He didn’t care.

  In December 1969, he had been running around so openly with some beauty pageant queen from Virginia that Jeannie, the beauty pageant queen he’d married nearly two decades before, couldn’t stand the shame; she tossed him out and they began a lengthy, final separation that Dean would make permanent by filing for divorce on Valentine’s Day, two years late (“I know it’s the gentlemanly thing to let the wife file,” he quipped, “but everybody knows I’m no gentleman”).

  Another end came in September 1970: NBC, declaring to the world that the Rat Pack days were dead and gone, removed the bar from the set of The Dean Martin Show.