Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  The voice was, stupefyingly, still there: evolved from cello into tuba, yes, but swank and rhythmic and witty as ever.

  It was the body that wore out: the heart, of all things. A few sensational medical incidents, then he retreated to seclusion to wait for it, not the last of a breed about to become extinct—the only.

  No one had done what he had for so long and so well; no one had been synonymous with fame and excellence for so many decades; no one had more profoundly changed the way his art was practiced; no one had courted sensation so successfully; no one could touch him or stand beside him or aspire to his throne.

  Even though he’d given up from sheer exhaustion, there was no denying that he had won.

  And to put a capper on it they tore down the Sands.

  Its time had long passed. The tower with the wedding-cake filigree at the top came to look dainty next to the monoliths around it; the high rollers had long since removed across the Strip to Caesar’s and the joint with the volcano; neither a city-within-a-city like the big new casinos nor the sort of swank, exclusive spot it once had been, it faded terribly, its orange stucco exterior more and more garish as the decades mounted.

  The final days were a heart-sinking display of trumped-up nostalgia and bargain-basement scavenging. Longtime employees shared secrets with reporters and spat disdainfully at mention of their bosses, who planned a big new resort that would offer work to none of them.

  Gallows humor; drunken tears; ghoulish camera crews asking insipid questions; low rollers walking through the wreckage scarfing up souvenirs at 80 percent off.

  The very last show in the Copa Room—expanded in size years earlier but still in the very same spot—was a freebie: a girl singer with a lumpy ass, a Welsh comic, a fruity magician, a middle-aged slob singing Elvis songs and doing a lewd striptease.

  Then lights out and the dynamite—not a moment too soon.

  It was the first time the place had made news since Howard Hughes bought it thirty years earlier.

  And every single report talked about them and their incredible moment on top of the world.

  Some people thought the building should be preserved—a historic spot—but it was all over, had been for decades.

  Better to remember that sunny day, that incandescent time, Frank’s voice, the juggling act he pulled off, the miraculous milliseconds when he was the most powerful man in the world and he and his chums were the center and the acme of it all.

  His world, with only the people he deemed worthy around him.

  His song.

  The wrecking balls could never destroy what he’d created, because it had been so fleeting, so impossible, so like a vapor.

  Even while it was happening it wasn’t really real.

  Adult male human behavior

  More than thirty years have dawned and faded since that monumental month when the Rat Pack lorded over the world from a tiny stage in Las Vegas, but the Summit still reigns as a standard of popular culture.

  For the generation that had fought World War II—the people who knocked themselves out to gain admission to the Copa Room—the Summit was the epitome of opulence, confidence, class, the acme of a kind of art that had been evolving throughout the century, a mixture of glamour, popular song, and vaudeville. They would recall the Summit as one of the defining moments of their generation’s glory.

  For their children—who would fight, and fight against, the Vietnam War—the Summit was an emblem of wretched excess and establishment boorishness, its stars a cavalcade of lackeys for the degenerate nightmare of American society, its very locale a synonym for sinful consumerist culture. For them, the Summit was a sickening, elephantine fraud.

  But for their children, bizarrely, a generation whose notion of war was Jay Leno versus David Letterman, the Summit was symbolic of surfaces: swanky nightspots, sharp outfits, neat haircuts, stiff drinks, and cigarette packs free of Surgeon General’s Warnings—vestiges of the glory days of their favorite city and a uniquely American brand of grown-up hip. They saw it as both glorious and phony—an originating moment of pop irony.

  And they were right. The poseurs of the Cocktail Nation stumbled onto the essence of why the Rat Pack was so attractive to their grandparents and so repulsive to their mothers and fathers. More than any song that they ever sang, any movie they ever made, any joke they ever told, it was the posture of sophisticated maturity—masking an indulgent immaturity—that made the Rat Pack so powerful. Its members were, at one and the same time, everything they said they were for and everything they said they were against; they meant everything and nothing; they gave it their all and couldn’t care less; they embodied all that had happened in showbiz before them and all that was to come; and they did it all without ever letting a single hair get out of place.

  Put it in a pop context: 1960: Rock ‘n’ roll had happened—heck, it looked like it was over, what with Elvis enlisted, Buddy Holly dead, Jerry Lee Lewis ostracized, Chuck Berry imprisoned, Little Richard in the ministry. Still, rock’s early performers had opened something that no one before them had dared, a kind of plain sexuality and bald rebellion that entertainers of the Rat Pack’s vintage never dreamed of expressing.

  Oh, sure, plenty of older performers had lived that way; they might even have been said to have invented it: Frank was inciting strange new feelings in teenage girls while Elvis was still in short pants. But their art was always decorous within its self-imposed limits. Offstage, they screwed and drank and gambled and slapped around parking valets and paparazzi; but there was always a prim gauze of reserve between their acts and their appetites, between their life and their work.

  Yet, while they certainly detested and may well have feared rock ‘n’ roll, Frank and his chums were canny enough at the showbiz game to recognize that it had changed their world, however subtly. Things were looser; they could get away with more. They could adopt some of the Young Turks’ erotic and amoral postures without necessarily subscribing to them—the sort of parody that allows a performer to both partake of and dismiss its object. They never stopped making regular visits to their barbers, but rock ‘n’ roll had granted them the privilege of letting down their hair.

  Still, if teenage mass culture had opened certain moral doors for traditional entertainers, they still had to marshal the personal fortitude—or develop the indifference—to walk through them. Some—Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett—never did.

  But something had gotten under Frank’s skin by the end of the fifties—call it Time’s Winged Chariot or the Forty-seven-Year Itch—and he began to feel as if there was no need to hide his most primal urges behind a dinner jacket and a string section. His music was jazzier, his love affairs briefer and more public, his language more coarse, his tantrums more outrageous, his visits to Las Vegas more frequent.

  If he’d been a glutton and rogue and boor in the past, he’d been sufficiently held in check by publicists, lawyers, and bosses not to flaunt it. But by the time he gathered the Rat Pack around him, he owed obeisance to no one—not to the corporations that proved so disloyal to him when his career crashed a few years earlier, not to the fans who’d deserted him, not to a wife. He was a self-made god, and he would comport himself in a manner consistent with that stature. And anyone he asked to join him took his cue and did the same.

  So for the first time on such a visible platform, American entertainers acknowledged their adultness. They smoked, drank, caroused, talked of their sex lives, their ex-wives, their politics; they used jazzy slang (never profanity: “mutha” was as close to wicked as they got); they made fun of their own professions; they carried on as if they were alone and the audience had paid to see what they were really like.

  Maybe there’d been glimmers of this in the past—performers like Mae West, W.C. Fields, Joe E. Lewis, and Jackie Gleason whose acts bore the spoor of the burlesque hall and the after-hours club—but the Rat Pack was bigger than any of them: movies, TV, records, the stage. They commanded the world’s attention,
respect, and money; they encouraged a universe of imitators. And they didn’t bother to hide the fact that they thought the moral strictures by which everyone else lived, the great common truths to which entertainers, like timid jesters, had always paid fealty, were just so much schoolish pap.

  Their headstrong iconoclasm spoke to men who had survived privation and war and congratulated them on the size of their bank accounts, the security of their jobs, the modernity of their homes, the voluptuousness of their women, the dazzling technology they invented and harnessed. They came to an isolated place in the desert, far from the prying eyes of neighbors, auditors, cops, and clergymen—a place where A-bombs exploded, drinks were free, and whores were legal—and acted out every middle-aged salaryman’s fantasy: a few romantic songs to get the broads in the mood, a few stiff belts, a wad of cash to blow or parlay into a bigger wad, and a few rascally chums to share it all with. It was technically show business, but you couldn’t quite tell whether it was more show or business with them: Who wouldn’t, after all, have wanted to move among them? There was simply no question that this was the utter apogee of adult male human experience as the mid-twentieth century could conjure it.

  Which is why its brevity was so astounding.

  There you had them—a group consisting of the nation’s greatest and most popular entertainers, with the blessing of a dynamic political star and fearsome crime lords, the favors of gorgeous women, an enviable playground, all the money in the world—and within four years of commanding the world’s attention they were deposed. That blip of teen culture that they’d mocked and derided but secretly envied and aped? It echoed back off the far side of the abyss and overwhelmed them. What seemed like high-spirited fun in the winter of 1960 came to look like pathetic lechery and debauchery by the summer of 1964; the high hopes of one generation—a delusional sham which obscured a corrupt, licentious core—were replaced with the simple adolescent cheeriness of the next.

  The kids looked at the Rat Pack, the undisputed kings of the last great moment of showbiz consensus, and saw old farts with a style and attitude more laughable than desirable. Their parents wanted things to stay the same long enough to encourage Frank and the others to carry on, to wear tuxes, sing standards, and make jokes about booze and dames for another decade or so, but nobody could pretend it was the same.

  The Rat Pack yielded the main room to the kids and was relegated to the lounge; eventually, as in the real Vegas, the lounge was replaced with a keno parlor and the whole thing was either entirely forgotten or remembered with a campy veneer of faux nostalgia.

  They were the last redoubt of old-time showbiz against the hordes of teen culture; the acme of traditional performance based on vaudeville, burlesque, and Tin Pan Alley; the final moment during which adult entertainment could be said to have the undivided attention and undiluted respect of the world.

  If anyone grew nostalgic for it, if it ever seemed like a more innocent time, that was because it was the last moment of cultural unanimity.

  For the first sixty years of the century, save a couple dozen months after Elvis made the scene, everybody in every house in America found pleasure in the same type of comedy, music, movies. The Rat Pack bunched it altogether at an unprecedented height and pitch—and for the last time.

  And nobody seemed to agree about anything ever again after they were toppled from their golden aerie.

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