The other thing Elvis shared with the Rat Pack was a love of Vegas partying. After returning from the Army, Elvis resumed his regular visits to Las Vegas, always with a retinue of friends and plenty of women. “It was a party like you wouldn’t believe,” said Joe Esposito, a former Army buddy from Chicago who became part of his entourage. “Go to a different show every night, then pick up a bunch of women afterwards, go party the next night. . . . We’d stay there and never sleep, we were all taking pills just so we could keep up with each other.” In June 1960, on a weekend in Vegas after finishing work on his first post-Army movie, G.I. Blues, Elvis and his entourage were such a frequent sight along the Strip, in their black mohair suits and sunglasses, that a local columnist dubbed them the “Memphis mafia.” The name stuck: a country-fried, rockabilly version of the Rat Pack.
But Elvis came back from the Army a changed, much diluted performer. After a benefit concert in Hawaii in March 1961, he withdrew from live performing, either in concerts or on television, for nearly the entire decade. Instead, he churned out movies—which quickly degenerated into sappy, formulaic drivel. His music, too, became slicker and more disposable—a few chart-toppers early in the decade, like “Good Luck Charm” and “Return to Sender,” followed by a string of mostly forgettable movie songs.
It wasn’t just Elvis. After upending the music world in the mid-1950s, many of the pioneers of rock ’n’ roll were, by the early sixties, sidelined or out of the picture. Chuck Berry spent a year and a half in prison; Little Richard turned to religion; Buddy Holly was killed in a 1959 plane crash. In their place were a gaggle of clean-cut, and largely white, teen idols—singers like Frankie Avalon, Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, and Paul Anka—who were more apt to see the Rat Pack as role models, not rivals. “As kids we looked at them and said, ‘We wanna be like those guys,’ ” said Anka, the Canadian-born singer-songwriter of hits like “Lonely Boy” and “Put Your Head on My Shoulder.” “We knew they were the coolest, suavest cats on the planet.” And for a little while longer, they were.
The troubles began with hubris. After they finished filming Sergeants 3 in the summer of 1961, Sinatra and his pals descended on Eddie Fisher’s opening at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. With dozens of celebrities in the audience, eager to support Eddie after his wife, Elizabeth Taylor’s hospitalization for a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, Frank and Dean started heckling him from the audience, then barged onstage, joined by Joey and Sammy. “They took over,” the AP reported, “doing imitations, limericks, racial jokes and songs—while Fisher sat on the bandstand, somewhat forlornly.” For the first time, the Rat Pack got bad reviews. Milton Berle called their antics “a disgusting display of ego.” Hedda Hopper was appalled: “Frank and his henchmen took over and ruined Eddie’s performance.”
Then came a major change in the club’s membership roll.
Peter Lawford always seemed the most superfluous member of the Rat Pack. Unlike Frank or Sammy or Dean (or even Joey), he had no particular talent as a nightclub performer. His importance to the group, as everyone knew, was his connection to the glamorous Kennedys. But once JFK took office—and his younger brother Bobby, the newly appointed attorney general, launched a major investigation of organized crime—the White House began to put some distance between the president and Sinatra. It wasn’t just that Sinatra’s ties to Mafia figures were potentially embarrassing. The Kennedys learned (from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) that JFK and mob boss Sam Giancana were sharing a girlfriend, an LA beauty named Judith Campbell—who, in fact, had been introduced to Kennedy in Las Vegas by Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra noticed the growing chill in his relations with the Kennedys. Still, when JFK scheduled his first trip to the West Coast as president, in March 1962, his itinerary included a one-night stay at Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs. Sinatra, who had hosted Kennedy there once before, in 1959, was excited about the visit and spent weeks getting the place ready, expanding a guest bungalow for the Secret Service and even adding a heliport. But a few days before the trip, Kennedy’s advisers convinced him that staying with Sinatra would be bad optics, and the visit was abruptly canceled. Kennedy would stay with Bing Crosby—a Republican, no less—instead.
Lawford was assigned to break the bad news to Sinatra. It was not a pleasant phone call. Lawford tried to blame the change of plans on security concerns, but Sinatra knew better. First he phoned Bobby Kennedy and tried to get the visit reinstated. When that failed, Sinatra called Lawford back and exploded. “Frank was livid,” Lawford would recall. “He called Bobby every name in the book and then rang me up and reamed me out again. He was quite unreasonable, irrational really.” George Jacobs recalled that Sinatra, after hanging up the phone, went on “the most violent rampage I had seen,” smashing his collection of Kennedy photos, ripping up Lawford’s clothes, and trying (but failing) to tear the KENNEDY SLEPT HERE sign from the guest bedroom. It was hardly Lawford’s fault, but the messenger took the blame. Sinatra cut him off completely.
Bishop, an on-again, off-again participant in the Rat Pack get-togethers, was also subject to Sinatra’s whims. Joey was cast in the third Rat Pack movie, Robin and the 7 Hoods, scheduled to begin filming in the fall of 1963, but after some sort of fight with Sinatra was dumped from the cast, and Sinatra didn’t talk to him for a year. For the rest of its heyday, the Rat Pack essentially boiled down to its three principals—Sinatra, Martin, and Davis. In November 1962 they were back together for a weeklong engagement at the Villa Venice, a new hotel and gambling club in the Chicago suburbs, owned by Sam Giancana. Then, for the first time since the original Summit shows, they brought the act back to Las Vegas, appearing at the Sands in January 1963, and again in September for an engagement advertised, with unnecessary coyness, as “Dean Martin. Maybe Frank. Maybe Sammy.”
Several nights of the September engagement were recorded, for an album that was, once again, shelved and released only after Sinatra’s death. The Rat Pack Live at the Sands is the best account we have of their mature act, which had acquired somewhat more polish and discipline since the 1960 Summit free-for-all. Martin opens the show with his by now well-honed drunk routine (“How long I been on?” he says, just after woozily taking the stage), with a little singing interspersed. Sinatra follows with a half dozen numbers of his own, before Martin returns with a drink cart and some obviously scripted repartee. (Sinatra: “I want to talk to you about your drinking.” Martin: “What happened, did I miss a round?”) Sammy’s role, once again, seems to be primarily to take abuse from the other two. But the gags at least have a little more structure and self-awareness. When Sammy wants to do another song, Dean and Frank tell him no—“It’s over, you’ve had it.” Sammy suddenly gets indignant: “I’m a little sick and tired of being the one that’s always picked on,” he cries. “I like this audience, I like this room, and I’m going to stay out here until I’m good and ready!” After the applause dies down, Frank says, “Are you ready?” Sammy, meekly: “Yeah, Frank.”
There are still plenty of juvenile groaners and painfully racist wisecracks. (Frank: “Better keep smilin’, Sam, so everybody knows where you are.”) But musically, the album is first-rate. Sinatra is solidly on his game with old reliables like “I Only Have Eyes for You” and new additions like “Call Me Irresponsible.” Martin displays his seductive baritone to good effect in a medley of Italian love songs—“Via Veneto,” “Volare,” and “An Evening in Roma.” Sammy ignores the heckling long enough to show off some nifty musical impressions (no one did a better Nat King Cole). The highlight of the show, however, is Sinatra and Martin’s dueting on two songs from Guys and Dolls: the title number and “The Oldest Established (Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York).” They are two such different singers—one puts you on edge, the other nearly puts you to sleep—that it’s startling to hear how simpatico they are on Frank Loesser’s vibrant, street-smart show tunes. It’s the ideal showcase for a unique musical partnership.
Sinatra had some major distractions during that S
eptember 1963 engagement, however. He was trying to fend off a state investigation into the Cal-Neva Lodge, the Lake Tahoe resort in which he had acquired a 50 percent ownership stake the year before. The hotel was drawing scrutiny for a visit that Sam Giancana, a shadow owner of the resort, had made there in July, along with his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire. Giancana’s presence at Cal-Neva was a no-no, since his name was listed in the notorious Black Book of mob-connected figures who were not allowed to set foot in a Nevada casino. Giancana made the visit even harder to ignore when he got into a late-night brawl with McGuire’s road manager—with Sinatra himself present.
Sinatra soon got a phone call from Ed Olsen, chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, asking him to explain Giancana’s presence at the hotel. Sinatra tried to dodge the question and claimed to know nothing about the brawl. But the investigation continued, and when it leaked to the press, Sinatra called Olsen back and invited him for an off-the-record conversation over dinner at Cal-Neva. Olsen declined, saying it wouldn’t be appropriate in the midst of an investigation. That set off Sinatra’s always volatile temper.
“I’m never coming to see you again,” he snapped, in a conversation recorded on tape.
“If I want to see you, I will send a subpoena,” said Olsen.
“You just try and find me. And if you do, you can look for a big, fat, fucking surprise. . . . Don’t fuck with me.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, just don’t fuck with me, and you can tell that to your fucking board and that fucking commission too!”
On September 11, 1963, Olsen formally charged Sinatra with violating Gaming Control Board rules by associating with Giancana at Cal-Neva and gave him two weeks to respond or else have his gambling license revoked. The news was a bombshell in Las Vegas. Some sprang to Sinatra’s defense, including Las Vegas Sun editor Hank Greenspun, who argued in a front-page column that revoking Sinatra’s license would be “a rotten, horrible, mean, and cheap way to repay this man for all the good he has brought this state.” Even President Kennedy, in Las Vegas to give a speech, tried to put in a word for his friend with Governor Grant Sawyer: “Aren’t you people being a little hard on Frank out here?” But rather than fight the charges, Sinatra announced in October that he would sell his stake in the hotel. He spun it as a voluntary business decision, but it was a public humiliation for Sinatra—and a revealing peek, for all the world, into the darker side of Vegas’ most celebrated star.
The incident had a startling coda. A few months after the contretemps, Olsen ran into Sammy Davis Jr. at the Sands Hotel. When Sammy approached, Olsen braced for a tense encounter with Sinatra’s famous friend. But the response was unexpected. “That little son of a bitch,” Sammy said, according to Olsen. “He’s needed this for years. I’ve been working with him for sixteen years, and nobody’s ever had the guts to stand up to him.”
A month later the Rat Pack suffered a much different and more cataclysmic blow. Sinatra and crew were on the Warner Bros. lot, shooting a scene from Robin and the 7 Hoods, on Friday morning, November 22, 1963, when the awful news came in from Dallas: President Kennedy had been shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Work stopped for half an hour, then resumed for the rest of the day. After it was finished, Sinatra retreated to Palm Springs, where he spent the weekend watching TV coverage of the assassination, devastated. His relations with the Kennedys had been deteriorating for a couple of years, but now the entire Camelot connection, so much a part of the Rat Pack mystique, was permanently shattered.
Sinatra didn’t even get a chance to attend the funeral. “It just wasn’t possible to invite him,” said Peter Lawford. “He’d already been too much of an embarrassment to the family.”
Sinatra’s annus horribilis continued a couple of weeks later, when his son, Frank Jr.—who was trying to launch his own career as a singer, accompanied by Tommy Dorsey’s band—was kidnapped in Lake Tahoe. In the tense two days that followed, the kidnappers (a trio of fairly bumbling amateurs) demanded a ransom of just $240,000, and Sinatra agreed to pay it. The episode had a happy ending, with Frank Jr. released unharmed, the money recovered, and the kidnappers arrested. Sinatra appeared at the Sands’ eleventh anniversary celebration the following weekend and got a standing ovation. But even the sympathy generated by the narrowly averted family tragedy was tempered. Rumors circulated that the kidnapping was merely a publicity stunt to help Frank Jr.’s career (which, in fact, was the kidnappers’ defense at their trial, where they were convicted and sentenced to prison). Though surely untrue, it was a testament to Sinatra’s dodgy reputation that some were ready to believe it.
By 1964 the Rat Pack was largely a spent force. Kennedy was gone, and the Beatles had arrived—and with them the first stirrings of a cultural revolution that would make the tuxedo-clad, Scotch-drinking Rat Packers look dated and last generation. There would still be a couple of get-togethers. In June 1965, Sinatra, Martin, and Davis convened for one night at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis, a benefit performance for Dismas House, a halfway house for released convicts. Joey Bishop was supposed to be there, too, but he hurt his back, and Johnny Carson replaced him. (Carson quipped that Joey had “slipped a disk backing out of Frank’s presence.” Bishop resented the joke.) The following year, Joey was back for a last hurrah with Frank and Dean at the Sands, billed as Dean Martin and His Friends. (Minimum tab: $12.50, beating the previous Vegas record of $10, set by Sinatra alone.) The show began with Bishop and Sinatra talking over offstage microphones, wondering where Dean was. Sinatra opened the show in his place, before Martin wandered out, drink in hand: “I heard Dean Martin being announced. You know how crazy I am about him.”
The Rat Packers were managing quite nicely on their own. Martin recorded a single, “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime,” in 1964 that knocked the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” out of the No. 1 spot, and in September 1965 he launched an NBC variety show that would run for nine seasons. His Vegas appearances, meanwhile, became as much comedy act as music showcase. He had a habit of lazily breaking off his songs before finishing them (if you want to hear the whole thing, he’d tell the audience, “buy my albums”) and filled his act instead with drinking gags, jokes about his wife and family, and sheer Vegas foolishness. (“Last night a girl was banging on my door for forty-five minutes. But I wouldn’t let her out.”) His time with Jerry Lewis had not been spent in vain.
Sammy Davis took a two-year break from Las Vegas in 1964 to star in the Broadway musical Golden Boy. He returned to the Sands in May 1966 with a splashy show divided into two forty-minute acts, separated by Lola Falana. His dynamic stage presence is nicely captured in a live album he recorded at the Sands that year, Sammy Davis Jr./That’s All. His crisp, brassy voice never had the subtlety of Sinatra’s, but he could put across a Broadway showstopper like “What Kind of Fool Am I?” or “As Long as He Needs Me” and swing with gusto on an old rouser like “Birth of the Blues,” the number that often closed the Rat Pack shows. Without Frank or Dean lording over him, Sammy came into his own as a Vegas powerhouse.
After suffering through the private and public traumas of 1963, Sinatra also made an impressive career rebound. He began to update his repertoire with reflective, late-career numbers like “It Was a Very Good Year” and “That’s Life.” His fiftieth birthday year, 1965, brought a raft of tributes, magazine covers, and TV specials. Then, in January 1966, he recorded a live album that would serve as a capstone to his classic Vegas period—Sinatra at the Sands, accompanied by Count Basie and his orchestra, conducted by up-and-coming arranger Quincy Jones.
Sinatra at the Sands is justly revered by Sinatra scholars and fans. Pop-music critic Will Friedwald calls it “one of those miraculous moments in American music that explain why so many of us became Sinatra fans to begin with.” Basie and his swinging outfit (who had worked with Sinatra once before at the Sands, in November 1964) obviously inspired and invigorated Sinatra. “Now this man here,” Frank says at the outset, in his Amos �
�n’ Andy cadences, “is gonna take me by the hand, and he gonna lead me down the right path to righteousness, and all that other mother jazz—in the right tempo!” The tempos are always right, as Basie brings out Sinatra’s muscular, hard-charging best on such numbers as “You Make Me Feel So Young,” “I’ve Got You under My Skin,” and (the song from Robin and the 7 Hoods that would become a staple of his nightclub act) “My Kind of Town.” The album is marred a bit by Sinatra’s self-indulgent patter, overfilled with drinking anecdotes, ethnic jokes, and tough-guy attitude. Some alternate takes of the session (released on the 2006 boxed set Sinatra: Vegas) reveal even more of the edge and ego that were starting to afflict his Vegas performances. “When I on dis stage, I da boss,” he says, after snapping at a couple of audience members who have spoken out of turn.
It was, perhaps, a foreshadowing of things to come. A year and a half later, Sinatra would have a blowup at the Sands that would bring an end to his long relationship with the hotel, force the Rat Pack to go their separate ways, and put a final period on the most celebrated buddy act in Vegas history.
It was a great ride—the “Mount Rushmore of men having fun,” as critic James Wolcott put it. To audiences looking for an escape from the straitlaced 1950s, the Rat Pack represented a kind of bent fantasy of what the rich and famous could do when there were no restraints—smoke, drink, make tasteless jokes, get beautiful women. And Vegas was the fantasyland where all that could take place, even for people who weren’t rich and famous. “Their desert hijinks grabbed the imagination of the world, gave Las Vegas more romantic cachet than perhaps it ever deserved,” wrote Bill Zehme in The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’. “They brought a better class of sin to Sin City.”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 9