The wild bunch

A rhapsody for the Rat Pack

by Scott Duhamel

RAT PACK CONFIDENTIAL. By Shawn Levy. Doubleday, 344 pages, $23.95.

In the wee small hours of my disturbed youthful sleep, I used to dream vivid, but typical, teen dreams in which I would inhabit, or sorta miraculously become, my rock 'n' roll heroes of the time: Jimbo Morrison (those leather pants!) or Keith Richards (the epitome of wasted cool). Sure, I got past it, only during early adulthood I lurched into more wackadoo night visions -- allowing my stiff, whiteboy self to dig under the skins of smart-aleck Lou Reed (the wordsmith) or that runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb Iggy Pop (the performer as frontal assault).

Well, I managed to struggle past those fever dreams, too, entering a swel(l)egant period of blank bliss. Until recently, that is. Suddenly, without warning, my dreams are populated again. Yep, square into middle age I find myself jerking through some type of epileptic dream watusi. Despite the logistics of time and place, despite the fact that I am a true rock 'n' roll manchild, the dream state finds me wistfully, longfully hoping to inhabit the very minds and souls of Frankie, Dino and Sammy. That's Sinatra, Martin, and Davis Jr., the very nucleus of one of the entertainment world's strangest but hippest phenomena, the so-called Rat Pack (which also included deadpan comic Joey Bishop, and British actor and bon vivant Peter Lawford).

The laugh-out-loud part is that Rat Pack Fever is a shared contemporary thang, blowing into the pop culture airwaves even before Sinatra's recent passing. A whole lotta hepcats my age, and younger (hardy-har) wish they could be one of the boys: swinging, drinking, dancing, singing, falling down, and doing it all brashly, comically, but also deftly; fully tossing the dice into one fabulous, continuous, floating crap game; a game author Shawn Levy entitles "The Last Great Showbiz Party," in his concise and knowing new book Rat Pack Confidential.

Levy, who last wrote a Jerry Lewis bio that almost equalled the levels of that ultimate showbiz bio, Nick Tosches's Dino), doesn't make the mistake of trying to encompass the excess of thrice-told tales surrounding these five disparate Rat Packers -- he encapsulates neatly, all the while understanding his thesis that the brief time period in which these boys blew hard, loud, and sweet (the late '50s through the mid-'60s) was both unique and telling.

The Rat Pack -- the name, the concept -- actually started in 1955. Lauren Bacall, after entering a room filled with inebriated showbiz majors and minors palling around with her then-husband Humphrey Bogart, exclaimed, "You look like a goddamned rat pack." Bogie ran with the idea, inventing a coat of arms (a rat gnawing on a human hand), dubbing them officially the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, calling together a tongue-in-cheek press conference, and conferring official titles to Sinatra (Pack Master), Judy Garland (Vice President), Bacall (Den Mother), super agent Swifty Lazar (Treasurer and Recording Secretary), humorist Nathaniel Benchley (Historian), and Bogie himself (Rat in Charge of Public Relations).

Sinatra idolized Bogart -- his wit, his acting ability, his drinking prowess. When Bogart died in January 1957, Sinatra (having just received a Mexican divorce from Ava Gardner)became a shoulder for the widow Bacall to lean on. And in the eyes of many, they leaned a little too close and a little too fast. Recoiling from bad press, Sinatra hooked up with Jerry Lewis's ex-partner Dean Martin in a decent movie drama,Some Came Running. The two singing and swinging Italians also ran at night, as Sinatra was wont to go deep and hard into any evening, making two days out of a short night. Sammy Davis Jr. had long been a Sinatra pal and protege; with his multiple performing abilities and laff-a-minute persona, he fell quickly in with the other two shining stars. Sinatra became attracted to Lawford for two cold, hard reasons: he was a first-class ladies' man, and because of his marriage to Patricia Kennedy, he was a direct link to the wunderkind wannabe presidential candidate golden boy (and ladies' man) John F. Kennedy. Joey Bishop became the last member of Sinatra's new version of the Rat Pack simply because he was both ballsy and self-effacing, the perfect characteristics for a living, breathing master of ceremonies.

The chairman, the leader, the rattiest of the Rat Packers chose to pull some of his heavy Hollywood strings and the loosely formed group creaked out a few slapdash, but cooldaddy movies (Ocean's Eleven, Sergeants 3, Robin and the Seven Hoods), a wild and wooly nightclub act, TV appearances in various mutations and combinations, even recordings for Sinatra's new Reprise label. They managed to be both performers and representative figures -- sure, they were talents, no kidding -- but they were also the cocktail-swiggin' sharp daddies, poking fun at their own showbiz kingdom and partying like it was 1999.

Like the Beatles ahead of them, there was enough diversity within the group to please all the rubes -- the smart, arrogant one (John or Frankie Boy), the cute, dreamy one (Paul or Dino), the secret talent (George or Sammy), the plain but lovable one (Ringo or Joey). Hell, there was even a sophisticate (Lawford) thrown in for a bonus.

Levy is clearly pointing out the obvious -- the pre-rock 'n' roll Rat Packers were as nose-thumbing, as vain-glorious, as outrageous on- and off-stage as any rock jester that ever followed them. (Why do you think Sid Vicious took on Sinatra's "My Way" one-on-one, baby?) During the infamous 1960 TVpairing of the new guy, Elvis, and the old guy, Frankie, Sinatra drop-kicks Presley's ass -- it's the stuttering country hick versus the swaggering, multi-moved champ.

All of the Rat Pack boys combined cockiness, juvenile hijinks, and a strange mixture of political correctness and incorrectness as well as any diaper-wearing, genital-exposing rocker boy or girl ever strived to. On top of it, the Rat Packers were hopelessly mixed up with the Mob, with politics, with causes (Sammy and Frankie singlehandedly pushed Las Vegas toward integration). They balled, they drank (heavily), and they laughed and danced right in the face of tightass America. For a few brief, shining years they grabbed what they wanted and spit out the rest -- with the shiniest of shoes, the hippest of patter, and some heavy-duty eyewinking. You either got the grand joke, or you were the joke.

Today the Rat Pack, and its attendant culture, looms larger than ever, a Zeitgeist presaging the about-to-bust rock 'n' roll era; even fast-forwarding to the same familiar finales -- broken dreams, wallets and hearts. Peter Lawford died isolated, exiled, drunk and bleeding from the nose. Dean slouched his way right out of Hollywood Bethlehem, padding around his house glancing at shadowy Westerns on the tube, passing with the barest hint of a whimper. Sammy, for one, was cleaned up and mind-healthy, but his battered body and smoke-filled lungs went down as might be predicted, still trying desperately to entertain with one last clenched effort passing as a soft-shoe routine.

The one and only Clanmaster, the balls and brains behind the Summit, died slowly and painfully, bedridden and attended to by a swarming group of family and toadies, still bowing down to the weird popcult royal figure he made himself into. Thank God he was buried with dignity -- a lovingly placed Zippo, pack of Camels, roll of dimes, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's slipped into his deadman clothing.

Ironically, strangely, that leaves Joey, the wallpaper man, the weasel, the non-dancer, the non-singer, the average Joe, the perennial MC, the guy who boasted that his autobiography would be titled IWas a Mouse In the Rat Pack, as the last man standing. Goddamn, son-of-a-gun, Joey outlasted them all! The pretty Brit boy, the colored Ball of Fire, the Teflon Prince, the King of Swing -- all gone. Maybe, just maybe, he's easing back at the moment, sipping a vibrant cocktail, watching aging Kinescopes and listening to crackling recordings, laughing out loud at yet another viewing of Ocean's Eleven. Ring-a-fucking-ding.