Jack Entratter, the top man at the Sands Hotel, was having trouble making a left turn. He was coming out of the Sands driveway and trying to head south on the Las Vegas Strip, but the traffic wouldn’t let him. It was the early days of Vegas, when the few hotels lining the Strip were still separated by expanses of desert, and no one wanted to slow down traffic with anything as mundane as a stoplight. But for the impresario of the classiest, starriest hotel in Las Vegas, the man sometimes called the Ziegfeld of the Desert, it seemed unjust.
“You’re the big man on campus,” said his girlfriend, an LA actress and model named Corinne Cole, who was sitting in the passenger seat next to him. “Why don’t you just tell the city hall you need a light there?” Sure enough, the next time she and Entratter were negotiating the same intersection, a traffic light had suddenly appeared.
Jack Entratter had clout. A beefy six-footer with prematurely gray hair and what Corinne called “electric Paul Newman-blue eyes,” he was a commanding figure, a former street kid who wore custom-made suits and traveled in rarefied circles. “I used to call him crudely refined,” said Corinne, who later married and divorced him, twice. The waters parted when Entratter walked into a room; the Sands shook when he got angry. “He had a physical presence that was just extraordinary—as strong a presence as any of the major stars I’ve met over the years,” said Kevin Thomas, former film critic for the Los Angeles Times and a frequent Vegas visitor in those years. “An overwhelming presence. Yet he was soft-spoken and direct. You knew you were in the presence of a very powerful man.”
He was born Nathan Entratter in Brooklyn, the youngest of eight children of Austrian Jewish parents. A bout of osteomyelitis as a child left him with a bad foot and a permanent limp. (The doctors said he would be crippled for life, but little Nate walked home from the hospital.) At eighteen he went to Miami, where he worked as a reservations clerk at the French Casino, then returned to New York and got a job as host at the famed Stork Club. In 1940 he moved to the Copacabana, the tony nightclub on East Sixtieth Street, where he eventually became a co-owner and head of entertainment. Under his guidance, the Copa became the most famous, star-studded nightclub in America.
In 1952 the Copa’s mob-connected owners (chief among them New York crime boss Frank Costello) were preparing to open a new outpost in Las Vegas, the Sands Hotel, and Entratter, then thirty-eight, was the man they sent to run the place. In Las Vegas, Entratter drew on all the relationships he had established at the Copa to assemble a lineup of stars unrivaled by any other hotel on the strip—including Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (together, when they were the top comedy team in America; separately, after they split up), Frank Sinatra, Danny Thomas, Nat King Cole, and Lena Horne. He added a chorus line of statuesque Copa Girls, handpicked by Entratter and billed as the most beautiful showgirls in Vegas. Among the big-name acts he brought to Las Vegas during his first year at the Sands were Edith Piaf, Tallulah Bankhead, and a double bill of opera star Robert Merrill and jazz great Louis Armstrong.
The Sands was the jewel of the Strip, with its sleek, Sunbelt-modern design, fifty-six-foot-high entry sign (the tallest on the Strip), and sprawling grounds where golf carts shuttled between the guest buildings named for famous racetracks. Entertainment was presented in the Copa Room, an intimate venue that seated just under four hundred, at tables arrayed in a semicircle around a shallow thrust stage. Guests entered just off the casino, through two curtains (to block out all the light from the casino), and were greeted by a tuxedoed maître d’, who needed to be tipped if you wanted a good table. Entratter had his own table, just to the right of the entrance, at the very back so he could survey the whole scene.
A gregarious host, he treated his stars like family and fostered great loyalty in return. “Jack Entratter was the Genghis Khan of Las Vegas,” said Jerry Lewis. When Martin and Lewis, one of the first acts Entratter booked at the Sands, were hit up by the IRS for $400,000 in back taxes, “Jack put it on the table, four hundred grand, cash, and said, ‘Now get busy doing your fucking show.’ He was tough. Put him in a business meeting and he’ll eat your lunch and dinner. But he was a great friend.” When Frank Sinatra altered the lyrics to “I Love Paris” for his Sands shows, it became a different kind of love song:
I love Vegas.
Why, oh why, do I love Vegas?
Because Entratter’s here.
“I cater to the overprivileged,” Entratter liked to say. Yet he always kept two pockets full of money, according to Corinne, one for himself and one for any Sands employee who might need help with a debt or a doctor’s bill. He helped found the first synagogue in Las Vegas and raised money for local schools and hospitals. But his chief project was building the Sands into the premier entertainment venue in Las Vegas. Al Freeman, the savvy publicist Entratter had brought with him from the Copa in New York, came up with newsreel-ready publicity stunts like putting a floating crap table in the Sands swimming pool. Each Sands anniversary in December was a gala event, with the return of the hotel’s opening-night headliner, Danny Thomas, and a barrage of Freeman-supplied statistics. (On December 15, 1955, its third anniversary, the hotel had been in operation for 95 million seconds; hosted 7.4 million visitors; spent $1.63 million on entertainment; and was preparing a birthday cake made with the “five millionth egg purchased by the hotel since it opened.”)
Entratter’s greatest promotional coup, however, came in January 1960, when not one or two but five major stars—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop—took the stage of the Copa Room for a show that broke all the records and all the rules. It was the ultimate in Vegas glamour and star power, and it launched the city’s most glamorous, star-packed decade. It was dubbed the Summit—a reference to the Cold War summit meeting soon to be held between President Eisenhower and Soviet premier Khrushchev. The two world leaders were even sent invitations to the show. They didn’t come, but it seemed everyone else did. In the era of Sputnik, U-2 flights, and the space race, the Rat Pack launched Vegas into orbit.
Frank Sinatra owed a lot to both Las Vegas and Jack Entratter. The singer, born on December 12, 1915, in a working-class Italian American neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, had burst onto the music scene in the early forties, as the swoon-inducing vocalist for Tommy Dorsey’s big band. Striking out on his own in 1942, he was soon America’s top recording artist (replacing Bing Crosby in Downbeat’s poll as the nation’s most popular singer in 1943); an idol of teenage bobby-soxers, who mobbed his shows with a fervor never before seen in American show business; a star on radio and in such MGM musicals as Anchors Aweigh and On the Town. By the end of the 1940s, however, his career was in a slump: his records no longer selling, his movie career at a dead end, his personal life a mess (he divorced his first wife, Nancy, amid a stormy affair with screen beauty Ava Gardner, whom he married in 1951 and separated from two years later), his public temper tantrums and rumored links to mob figures making him one of the most controversial stars in Hollywood.
Las Vegas helped keep his career afloat. He made his Vegas debut in September 1951 at the Desert Inn (where he discovered a lounge pianist named Bill Miller, who became his longtime accompanist) and appeared there again the following July. But when Jack Entratter came out from New York to run the Sands, Sinatra had a new friend in town. Entratter had been one of Sinatra’s champions at the Copa, giving him much-needed bookings even in the depths of his career doldrums, and the Sands’ boss offered Sinatra the spot as headliner for the hotel’s opening night on December 15, 1952.
Sinatra demurred, saying he didn’t want to work during the holidays. But he made his Sands debut the next year, in October 1953. He drew capacity crowds, but only mixed reviews—a reflection of the bumpy career transition he was going through. “As he meanders down memory lane, Sinatra slams the door on his former worshipers to please an older and less exuberant set of applauders,” noted Variety, which praised the “unmistakeable mark of quality,” but faulted his “tendencies to insert dubious gags or parody lines in great established melodies, ennui, and mechanically phrased offerings of humility.” Hank Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun, raved about him in a front-page column—“Oooooh, Frankie, you almost gave me goosebumps last night”—suggesting that Sinatra was back “almost to the point 10 years ago when the world loved you.” A separate review inside the paper, however, griped about Sinatra’s abrasive behavior onstage, calling him “arrogant, ill-tempered, and downright insulting.”
But Sinatra’s debut at the Sands coincided with one of the great career turnarounds in show-business history. Just two months before, Columbia Pictures had released From Here to Eternity, an adaptation of James Jones’s World War II–era bestseller, with Sinatra in the key supporting role of Private Maggio. The performance would win him an Academy Award the following spring and rejuvenate his movie career. In 1953 Sinatra also signed with a new record label, Capitol, and began a career-transforming collaboration with arranger Nelson Riddle. Their first album together, Songs for Young Lovers, released in January 1954, introduced a new Sinatra—his voice fuller and more expressive, his orchestrations more swinging, his emotional investment in the lyrics of America’s great popular songwriters unmatched by any other singer of his generation. “The new Sinatra was not the gentle boy balladeer of the forties,” wrote critic John Lahr. “Fragility had gone from his voice, to be replaced by a virile adult’s sense of happiness and hurt. . . . Sinatra’s sound had acquired the edge that comes with suffering: something gallant, raffish, and knowing.”
Sinatra became closely linked with Las Vegas. Though he appeared only sporadically at the Sands during the mid-1950s, busy with movies and recording work, he was a great booster for the city, and the Sands became his home away from home. He acquired a 2 percent ownership stake in the hotel (increased to 9 percent in 1961) and was there often, taking up residence in a three-bedroom suite in the Aqueduct building. “I’ve been trying for more than a year to get a foothold in Las Vegas, because I believe it has a great future,” he told reporters. “I want to be a part of that future.” He helped open the Dunes Hotel in 1955, riding into the newly built casino on a camel. He starred as Joe E. Lewis—the veteran Vegas comic who survived a brutal throat-slashing by Al Capone’s thugs while performing in Chicago nightclubs during the 1920s—in the 1957 biopic The Joker Is Wild and attended the film’s gala premiere in Las Vegas in August. (When Lewis himself took the stage at El Rancho Vegas and tried to coax Frank out of the audience to sing, Sinatra grabbed his date, Lauren Bacall, and walked out. His deal with Entratter prohibited him from singing anywhere in Vegas but the Sands.)
Sinatra brought something else to Las Vegas: an aura of New York glamour and sophistication, new to a town still emerging from its raffish frontier days. Lorraine Hunt-Bono, who came to Vegas as a child with her family in 1943, recalled the impact Sinatra had on a teenage girl seeing him for the first time in the early 1950s: “The thing that amazed me was the way he was dressed. Because he wasn’t a cowboy; he didn’t have cowboy boots on, as so many of the guys did here. All of a sudden I see this fantastic black tuxedo. And I looked out as a young girl and I’m just staring at his shoes, black patent leather shoes. And I’m going, ‘Wow, this is so cool.’ Sinatra brought New York, that class, to Vegas. And everybody followed.”
But it was Sinatra’s singing—his impeccable voice, his cool stage presence, his masterly way with lyrics—that made him the model for so many of his contemporaries. “Frank was the king, the one who really taught us all,” said Vic Damone, another Italian American singer from back East, who actually made his Vegas debut before Sinatra, at the Flamingo in 1949. “When I was a kid, I used to listen to him. And what I found was that his interpretation of the lyrics was so good—he lived it when he sang it. He told a great story. I recognized that when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. And I used to copy him.” Even many of the younger rock ’n’ roll singers who came to Vegas in the early sixties, like Paul Anka and Bobby Darin, saw Sinatra as an aspirational role model. “He was the number one guy,” said Anka. “He ruined it for anybody that wanted to get up in front of an orchestra.”
Sinatra’s great musical achievement of the 1950s rests mainly in the albums he recorded for Capitol (mostly with Riddle), in which he presented his definitive, deeply felt interpretations of the Great American Songbook. Only when Sinatra started his own record label, Reprise, in 1961, did he get around to recording any of his live performances. In November 1961 he brought in a crew for the first time to record five nights of shows at the Sands, for an album that was never released (Sinatra shelved it when he got distracted by plans for a 1962 world tour). But as reconstructed for a later box set—Sinatra: Vegas, released in 2006—it offers a vivid sampling of Sinatra’s power as a Vegas performer in his classic period.
Accompanied by the Sands house orchestra conducted by Antonio Morelli (with help from two Sinatra regulars, pianist Bill Miller and guitarist Al Viola), Sinatra is in superb voice, energized by the live crowd, and totally at ease in his home venue. He’s a hurtling locomotive on up-tempo numbers like “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else” (with a great Sy Oliver arrangement), yet he caresses ballads like “Without a Song” and “The Second Time Around” with the kind of sensitivity and tonal nuance that one doesn’t usually associate with Vegas bravado. He slows down Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and turns it into a brooding torch song and delivers a parody version of “River, Stay Away from My Door,” with special lyrics by Sammy Cahn that pay tribute, once again, to Sinatra’s patron at the Sands: “Entratter, stay away from my door!”
Sinatra’s patter in between songs is relatively restrained, especially compared with that on some of his later Vegas albums. Drinking, as usual, is topic A: “Fell off the wagon with a boom-bang last night. I woke up this morning and my hair hurt.” He tinkers with some of the lyrics—doing a mocking Italian accent at the end of “You Make Me Feel So Young,” for example, or embellishing the bridge of “The Lady Is a Tramp” with his ring-a-ding-ding flourishes:
She loves the free, fine, cool, wild, cuckoo wind in her hair,
Life without care . . .
Sinatra could go overboard with this sort of thing in later years, especially when he was performing live. But here it is just enough—a dash of spontaneity for a vocal performance that’s as focused and technically fine as anything in his studio albums.
Sinatra was a familiar sight in Las Vegas during these years, even when he wasn’t performing—often in the audience for other Vegas shows, holding court in all-night drinking sessions with an assortment of friends, fellow performers, and hangers-on. “He’d always be there,” said lounge singer Freddie Bell. “You’d never know when you were gonna see Frank. It was a close-knit group in those days. Fly in and fly out, you know? You gotta understand, he partied pretty heavy in those days.” “Frank enjoyed a good time,” said actress and sometime girlfriend Angie Dickinson. “After his shows we would hang out with him and whoever was around in those days. You convened around him, and the table would grow before the night was over, since Frank would always invite people to come and sit at his table.” And from that Vegas revelry came something called the Rat Pack.
It was, more correctly, the second Rat Pack. The nickname was first applied to a band of hard-drinking Hollywood friends who coalesced around Humphrey Bogart in the mid-1950s—a group that included Sinatra, Judy Garland, David Niven, the agent Swifty Lazar, and songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen. Lauren Bacall, Bogart’s young wife, supposedly coined the term one night in Las Vegas, when she walked in on the group as they were sitting around a showroom table, looking the worse for an evening’s wear. “You look like a goddamn rat pack,” she cracked. As a lark, they embraced the name and turned the group into a tongue-in-cheek club—electing officers, creating a coat of arms, voting on new members.
The Bogart Rat Pack came to an end with Bogart’s death from throat cancer in 1957. But Sinatra soon became the center of another circle of hard-partying showbiz friends. Some date its origins to August 1958, when Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine bonded while on location in southern Indiana shooting the movie Some Came Running. The Sinatra-Martin bromance went public when the pair came to see Judy Garland’s show at the Sands in October 1958. When Garland—the former MGM star (and onetime Sinatra girlfriend) who was battling alcohol, drug, and weight problems—seemed to falter during her performance, Martin and Sinatra began catcalling from the audience. Garland played along, bringing them up onstage to chastise them like unruly schoolboys, and the resulting interplay was “a comedy routine that was out of this world,” said Louella Parsons. The following January, Sinatra and Martin traded guest appearances in each other’s shows at the Sands—Dean filling in for Frank at the last minute when he had to cancel a performance because of voice problems, Frank returning the favor a couple weeks later, joining Dean onstage for his own Sands opening night.
Martin—born Dino Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, on June 7, 1917—had much in common with Sinatra. Both came from working-class Italian American families; both were high school dropouts; and both were well acquainted with neighborhood characters of ill repute. (Steubenville at the time of Dino’s youth was a notorious center of illegal gambling and prostitution.) Dino began singing with local bands in Ohio, then moved to New York City and was gaining attention as a nightclub singer when he teamed up with a brash young comic ten years his junior, born Joseph Levitch and now calling himself Jerry Lewis. They made their debut together at Atlantic City’s 500 Club in July 1946, improvising a unique musical-comedy act—Dean playing the cool, crooning straight man, while Jerry, dressed as a busboy, kept interrupting him and causing general mayhem. Martin and Lewis’s madcap stage antics caught on quickly, and they were soon the hottest nightclub act in America, the stars of hit movies, and top-rated hosts of TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour.
Sinatra was initially unimpressed with the singing half of Martin and Lewis. “The dago’s lousy, but the little Jew is great,” he reportedly said when he first saw the team in 1948. But they got to know each other as fellow Capitol recording artists and members of Jack Entratter’s stable of entertainers at the Sands. After his breakup with Lewis in 1956, Martin made his solo debut at the Sands in 1957 and was signed by Entratter to a five-year contract. (Like Sinatra, Martin also got a small piece of the hotel.) He developed a drunk stage persona that became one of the most recognizable acts in Vegas. “And now, direct from the bar,” went the announcer’s typical introduction, as Martin staggered onstage with a cocktail glass in hand (usually filled with apple juice) and delivered woozy comedy patter in between laid-back performances of his hit songs, like “Memories Are Made of This” and “Volare.” Sinatra admired Martin’s ease onstage, his matinee-idol good looks, and his defiantly blasé attitude—such a contrast with Sinatra’s intense, high-strung personality. “Sinatra was enthralled by Dean,” wrote Martin biographer Nick Tosches. “In his eyes he saw the man he himself wanted to be.”
With Sammy Davis Jr., it was pretty much the opposite. Born in Harlem in December 1925, he was a decade younger than Sinatra, and a child of show business unlike either Frank or Dean. His parents were vaudeville performers, and Sammy was a childhood dancing prodigy, starring in a movie musical short, Rufus Jones for President, when he was just seven. Soon he was appearing with his father and veteran vaudeville hoofer Will Mastin as part of the Will Mastin Trio, a song-and-dance act that played the nightclub circuit in the forties and fifties. Sammy loyally remained part of the group (billed as the Will Mastin Trio Starring Sammy Davis Jr.) even as he became one of the most prominent black stars of the 1950s. He had hit records (“Hey There” from Pajama Game put him on the charts in 1954), starred in the 1956 Broadway musical Mr. Wonderful, and played Sportin’ Life in the 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess. On a nightclub stage he was a versatile, inexhaustible performer: he danced, sang, told jokes, did impressions, even played the drums. If you asked a veteran of the golden age to name the best all-around entertainer ever to play Las Vegas, chances are the answer would be Sammy Davis Jr.
But he was also a needy, driven performer, and he felt indebted to Frank Sinatra. Frank had given the Will Mastin Trio a big break in 1947 by requesting them as his opening act at New York’s Capitol Theater. When Sammy lost an eye in a serious car accident, on a drive from Las Vegas to LA in 1954, Sinatra spent days at his hospital bedside, let him recuperate at Frank’s home in Palm Springs, and even invited him to his mother’s house in Hoboken the following Christmas. A longtime opponent of race discrimination, Sinatra was a champion of Sammy’s in the days when segregation still ruled Las Vegas, insisting that he be allowed to stay, dine, and gamble at the Sands when he appeared there. Sammy and the Will Mastin Trio had already broken that color barrier in 1954, when the Last Frontier dropped its all-white policy and allowed them to stay at the hotel during their engagement. Still, Frank’s support meant a lot to Sammy.
Yet he also knew the perils of getting on Sinatra’s bad side. In 1957, during a radio interview in Chicago, Sammy let his mouth run on when asked about Sinatra: “Talent is not an excuse for bad manners. It does not give you the right to step on people and treat them rotten. This is what he does occasionally.” Worse, when asked whether he considered himself “bigger than Frank” as a singing star, Sammy replied, “Oh yeah.” Sinatra refused to talk to him for months and even had him written out of the movie Never So Few—in a part Sinatra had had written expressly for Sammy. “That was it for Sammy,” said Peter Lawford. “For the next two months Sammy was on his knees begging for Frank’s forgiveness, but Frank wouldn’t speak to him.”
Peter Lawford knew well what a Sinatra freeze-out could mean. The British actor (born out of wedlock in 1923 to a couple of lesser members of the English aristocracy) came to Hollywood in 1942, while still in his teens. He got to know Sinatra at MGM, where Lawford was a pleasant if unexceptional supporting player in such films as Easter Parade and (with Sinatra) It Happened in Brooklyn. But the two had a falling-out in 1953, when a gossip columnist reported seeing Lawford having a drink with Ava Gardner, the wife from whom Sinatra had just separated. The jealous Sinatra didn’t speak to Lawford for five years. Only after Peter married Patricia Kennedy, and her older brother Jack was making noises about running for president, did Sinatra see the advantage of reestablishing friendly relations.
Dean, Sammy, and Peter were fully credentialed members of Sinatra’s inner circle by late 1958, when the press began to take notice. Life magazine devoted a feature story to the group in December, dubbing them the Clan and providing a helpful guide for readers, listing the group’s chief members (including a few peripheral figures, like Eddie Fisher and Tony Curtis), explaining their nonconformist ethos (“a public and aggressive indifference, not only to what the customers expect of their movie stars but also to what Hollywood expects of its own citizens”), and even supplying a glossary of their private slang: Charlie was the name they affectionately called one another; women were broads; a good show a gasser; clyde, a catchall noun to replace almost anything they pleased. They were the embodiment of Hollywood cool—what passed for hipsters at the end of the button-down 1950s and the dawn of the New Frontier.
It was Lawford who was responsible for their defining group adventure. In 1955 he ran into a Hollywood assistant director named Gilbert Kay, who was peddling a script about a band of former Army buddies who plot a heist of five Las Vegas casinos on New Year’s Eve. Kay wanted to direct the film himself, but when he couldn’t make a deal after a couple of years, he sold the script outright to Lawford. He took it to Sinatra, who “flipped” for the idea, envisioning it as a vehicle for himself and as many of his Hollywood friends as he could jam into the cast. Warner Bros. agreed to back the picture, which would be produced by Sinatra’s own Dorchester Productions and directed by Hollywood veteran Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front). After multiple script revisions by a battalion of screenwriters, filming was set to begin in Las Vegas in January 1960.
Sinatra was booked for a four-week engagement at the Sands at the same time, and he suggested combining the two events—bringing some of his Ocean’s 11 costars to join him onstage each night after the day’s shooting was finished. Someone, most likely Al Freeman, came up with the idea of calling it the Summit, and the publicity drumbeat began. “Producer Jack Entratter comes up with the show of the year, or for that matter, of the century,” announced Les Devor in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on January 8, “when he presents IN ONE BIG SHOW AT THE SAME TIME—FRANK SINATRA, DEAN MARTIN, SAMMY DAVIS JR. AND PETER LAWFORD.”
Joey Bishop appears to have been a late addition. Born in the Bronx and raised in Philadelphia, another high school dropout (five Rat Packers and not a single high school diploma among them), he had been working as a stand-up comedian for more than a decade. In Chicago, his hangdog, deadpan style got him dubbed the Frown Prince of Comedy. He opened for Sinatra at the Copa in New York, played Las Vegas a few times, and was a frequent guest on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV variety programs. According to Corinne Entratter, Bishop talked his way into the Rat Pack show when he found himself on a flight from New York to Las Vegas with Jack Entratter, buttonholed the Sands boss, and pleaded for the job. Entratter felt the act needed an emcee of sorts, and Sinatra was a fan, so Bishop was added to the cast. By the January 20 opening, the Sands was touting all five stars—though not necessarily all of them all the time: “Which star shines tonight?” read the ads. “It’s a guessing game, and you’ll be the winner of the show-of-shows any night.”
The opening night was a winner all the way around. Lucille Ball, Cyd Charisse, Dinah Shore, Sammy Cahn, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Peter Lorre, and world heavyweight champion Ingemar Johansson were among the many celebrities in the audience. Sinatra opened the show, with a twenty-minute set that included “Pennies from Heaven,” “The Road to Mandalay,” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?” “That was a great opening act,” quipped Bishop, who came out next to oversee the roundelay of singing, dancing, drinking, wisecracking, and general anarchy that followed. Sammy did a few numbers, and Lawford joined him for a soft-shoe routine to “Shall We Dance,” in which Sammy did most of the work. “What a great team,” Sinatra cracked. “One dances, the other applauds.” Martin handled the anchor leg, wedging a few songs in between the heckling and other stage antics around him. The show ran for two hours and closed with the whole crew together onstage, with the Copa Girls and Entratter himself joining in.
“Mr. Entratter, sir, you have a ‘gasser’ on your hands,” wrote Les Devor in the Review-Journal, leading the parade of rave reviews. “The only possible topper to this show is booking of the Civil War and its original cast, and we hear you’re working on that.” Raved Hedda Hopper, “I flew to Las Vegas for what Frank Sinatra called his summit meeting. It sure was, plus New Year’s Eve and Christmas. If Ike has anything like that in Russia, we won’t have to fear their missiles.” The Los Angeles Times called it “an entertainment ball which will be very difficult to match in the future anywhere.”
Twice a night for four weeks, the Rat Pack would reassemble on the Copa Room stage after their day’s filming was done. (Shooting days were rarely taxing, usually requiring only one or two of the stars on set for a few hours in the afternoon.) Every show was sold-out (cover charge: $5.95, which included dinner), and in the first week alone the Sands reportedly had to turn away eighteen thousand requests for room reservations. Seemingly every celebrity in Hollywood turned up in the audience sooner or later; some, like Red Skelton, Bob Hope, and Milton Berle, got up onstage to join in the act. “This is an evening I will never forget,” said Berle. “Because I remembered every joke.”
The myth of the Rat Pack shows has somewhat eclipsed what actually took place onstage—which, judging by the spotty film excerpts available, was a scrappy and self-indulgent affair. Booze was the bonding agent: a drink cart would be wheeled out early in the show and tended to assiduously by the stars for the rest of the evening. “When you’re drinkin’ / When you’re drinkin’ / The show looks good to you,” sang Martin—and apparently it did, at least to them. But the frat-boy antics and wisecracks, both planned and unplanned, were pretty crude. In one bit, Bishop and Lawford parade across the stage in front of Sinatra with their pants off—followed by Sammy, waving a scarf and asking in a fey, lisping voice, “I beg your pardon, did you see two fellas go by here?” They interrupt one another’s numbers and goose each other’s asses. One night a giant birthday cake was brought out for pianist Bill Miller’s birthday, and the show devolved into an all-out food fight.
Bishop did most of the writing, and certain bits and lines would be repeated nightly. “Any old business?” Joey would interject at random moments, poking fun at the group’s clubby reputation. Or he’d needle Sinatra: “Why don’t you tell us about the good the Mafia does?” (Not a bad line, considering Frank’s sensitivity about the subject. “Joey was a ballsy guy,” said Henry Silva, an Ocean’s 11 cast member. “Frank loved anybody who had balls.”) They called Sinatra the Leader, or the Pope, and their fealty to him became a running gag. When Sammy sings “The Lady Is a Tramp,” Sinatra takes mock-offense, and Martin chastises Sam, “You know you shouldn’t sing the leader’s song, boy!” Later, when Sinatra does an impression of James Cagney, Sammy gets offended in return; impressions are his turf.
The racial and ethnic wisecracks are nearly constant, and hard to stomach today. “I tell you, the dagos are taking over the world,” Sinatra says on introducing Martin, the other Italian singer. One night the gang comes out dressed in hokey Indian headdresses, holding tomahawks and talking like Tonto. (Dean: “Me no take single drink all year. Just doubles.”) The dismissive, Mad Men–era treatment of women is also painfully retrograde. Martin trots out lewd song parodies, like “You made me love you / You woke me up to do it.” One night Sinatra spies a female violinist in the all-male orchestra and exclaims, “Hey, look at that—there’s a broad in the band!” On his way offstage, Martin casually swipes his hand across her cheek.
Sammy, a black man and recent convert to Judaism, comes in for most of the ribbing. Frank and Dean—and Sammy too—lapse frequently into minstrel-like Amos ’n’ Andy dialect. At one point Sinatra grabs a white tablecloth, puts it over his head, and announces, “All right, folks, the meeting is on Friday afternoon.” Sammy responds to these antics with hysterical laughter, and occasionally a lame comeback. When Peter wants to join Sammy in a dance number, Sammy bristles, “If I were you, I wouldn’t want to dance with one of the great Jewish Mao-Mao dancers of our time.” In one oft-repeated gag, Sammy leaps into Dean’s arms, and Dean, carrying him like a child out of a burning building, announces, “I want to thank the NAACP for this award.” (Bishop, who wrote the line, originally wanted it to be the B’nai B’rith, but Dean had too much trouble pronouncing the name.)
Sammy’s collusion in all this tomfoolery gives the group some cover, but doesn’t make the racial banter any less disquieting. The Rat Pack members, most of them political liberals, thought of themselves as above prejudice; they were thumbing their nose at societal taboos, satirizing racial stereotypes by making fun of them. But at a time when Lenny Bruce and other stand-up comedians were challenging those taboos with much more pointed satire, the Rat Pack’s juvenile japery seemed more like an outlet for the locker-room banter of four privileged white guys—and one complicit black one.
Not everyone in Las Vegas was taken with the Rat Pack shows. “I hated the idea that people got so crazy about this piece of shit act,” said Shecky Greene, probably the leading lounge comic in Vegas at the time. “I mean, it was nothing. It was grammar-school kids having a good time.” Jerry Lewis called up Martin, his former partner, and complained that the Rat Pack were basically recycling old Martin and Lewis bits. “They were doing our act,” said Lewis, reminiscing many years later. “I told Dean, ‘You want me to come over? Glad to come over and help you out.’ Dean said, ‘No, everything is working great, leave it alone.’ So I left it alone.” Lewis’s take on the Rat Pack’s achievement: “They showed up, is what they did.”
But showing up was enough. For all the juvenile, politically incorrect horseplay, audiences got to see three of Las Vegas’ greatest entertainers—Sinatra, Martin, and Davis—onstage together at their performing peak. (Bishop’s role was simply to manage the chaos, and Lawford seemed there mainly for the booze.) They gave audiences an insider’s peek at how Hollywood stars acted in real life, when they let their hair down. “For the first time on such a visible platform,” wrote Shawn Levy in Rat Pack Confidential, “American entertainers acknowledged their adultness. They smoked, drank, caroused, talked of their sex lives, their ex-wives, their politics; they used jazzy slang. . . . 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.” This was liberating for audiences emerging from the 1950s world of Emily Post and Dale Carnegie—but not so threatening as to bother them when they returned home to their jobs, kids, and PTA meetings.
The Rat Pack, moreover, became closely identified with the coming generational change in American politics. John F. Kennedy, the charismatic young senator from Massachusetts, made a stop in Las Vegas in the midst of his campaign for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination and came to see their dinner show on February 7. Sinatra introduced him from the stage—“the brightest man in the political world, in this country or any country in the world today, and I personally feel that I’m gonna visit himself in that house one day very soon”—as Kennedy stood and took a couple of bows. Sinatra was one of JFK’s closest friends and strongest supporters in Hollywood during the 1960 presidential campaign. Lawford was even part of the family. Never before in America had show business and the nation’s business been so intimately connected.
The Rat Pack show at the Sands Hotel in January and February of 1960 was a once-in-a-lifetime event, never again to be repeated in Las Vegas with the full original cast. The group did get back together a month later in Miami, joining Sinatra for the last few nights of his engagement at the Fontainebleau Hotel. And they had a brief one-night reunion in Las Vegas on August 3, 1960, at the world premiere of Ocean’s 11, attended by a who’s who of Vegas celebrities (Joe E. Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Tony Curtis, Danny Kaye, Louis Prima, and Keely Smith), along with ten thousand fans who jammed the streets outside the Fremont Theater, where the film was screened at midnight.
The movie got only mixed reviews, but it holds up surprisingly well—an enjoyable heist caper that perfectly captures the Rat Pack camaraderie in the early, fun years. More important, it was a box-office hit, one of the ten top-grossing films of 1960. That ensured there would be a second Rat Pack film, and Sergeants 3, a comedy-Western update of Gunga Din, reuniting all five of the Rat Pack principles, went into production in the spring of 1961, shot mostly on location in Utah. Las Vegas was too far away for a repeat of the Rat Pack shows, so the stars made separate forays into town: Sinatra, Martin, Davis, and Bishop each did a week at the Sands, promoted by Entratter as “Jackpot Month.” The group made one trip into Vegas together in early June, dropping in on the shows of Eddie Fisher and Danny Thomas, and celebrating Dean’s forty-fourth birthday at the Sands with a five-foot-tall cake in the shape of a J&B Scotch bottle.
They were the axis of power in Las Vegas, the in-group everyone wanted to be in with. Their clubhouse was the Sands steam room, where they would gather late in the afternoon, to relax and schmooze before their evening shows. Each had a robe with his own moniker: LEADER for Sinatra, DAGO for Martin, SMOKEY for Sammy. After their shows, they would often be found in the casino, dealing blackjack cards (flouting the rules, so that the customers wouldn’t go bust), or in the audience for other shows along the Strip. “There was an electricity when they were in town,” said Bob Newhart. “The whole town just glowed. There was an excitement in the air that was palpable. And everybody benefited from it. Every act benefited from their being in town.”
Their original name, the Clan, was surprisingly persistent, despite its unfortunate echo of that other Klan. Eventually it was retired in favor of the Rat Pack. But under any name, Sinatra always dismissed the notion that it was any kind of organized club. “There is no Clan,” he told columnist Earl Wilson. “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.” Sammy, typically, was more willing to embrace his affiliation with the coolest fraternity in show business. “I am a member of the Clan,” he told an audience at the Copa in New York. “That’s a little group of ordinary guys that get together once a year to take over the entire world.”
Sinatra was the king, Vegas’ undisputed Most Valuable Player. No headliner brought in more high rollers—the big gamblers who could drop thousands of dollars a night in the casinos. (Sinatra, too, could lose thousands gambling, but the Sands would either extend his credit or just forgive the debt. He was a good investment.) He was the star other Vegas entertainers looked up to, tried to copy, or wanted to hang out with. “If Frank went to a tailor, everyone went to that tailor,” said Corinne Entratter. “If Frank drank Jack Daniel’s, everybody drank Jack Daniel’s.” Mia Farrow, who began dating Sinatra in 1965, observed the strange effect he had on people. “I noticed that no matter who was in a room, when Frank entered it, he became the focus,” she wrote in her autobiography, What Falls Away. “And no one was ever really at ease with him, no matter who they were or how charming he was, because there was something about him that made people uncomfortable. He was absolutely without falseness, without artifice, in a world of pretenders. He had a child’s sense of outrage at any perceived unfairness and an inability to compromise. He was tough in his judgments of others, and of himself.”
He was thin-skinned and quick-tempered. “With Frank it was like walking on eggshells,” said Corinne Entratter. “People would come to me and say, ‘Corinne, what mood’s Frank in today?’ And I’d go, ‘Lay low.’ ” Stories of his bad behavior abounded—waiters he abused for fouling up an order, fans who got a rude brush-off for pestering him, reporters he punched out for writing things he didn’t like. Lisa Medford, who worked as a Copa Girl and was dating Sands casino boss Carl Cohen, recalled sitting at a blackjack table with Sinatra one night when a well-dressed woman—“lovely woman, in her late twenties, not a hooker, could have been from Shaker Heights”—rebuffed some of his crude comments and then stormed out of the casino. But not before Sinatra, according to Medford, dropped his gold Dunhill lighter into her purse and then called security to claim that she had stolen it. Sinatra could be generous with friends, modest about his fame, and charming when he wanted to be. “But when he was an asshole,” said Medford, “it was in neon.”
Jack Entratter, Sinatra’s boss at the Sands, was one of the few who could handle him—though some thought it was the other way around. “Sinatra really had Jack wrapped around his little finger,” said Eydie Gormé. “Sinatra in the middle of the casino would pick up a bottle of booze, open the top, and throw it in Jack’s face, and Entratter wouldn’t do anything about it. This man was tough, but he took a lot of crap from Sinatra. I’ll never understand why.” Entratter, who had an impressive temper of his own, knew to keep it in check with Frank; let the man blow off steam, he figured, and reason with him later. Once, when Sinatra was in Italy for the filming of Von Ryan’s Express, his demands got so out of hand that the film’s producer made an emergency call to Entratter: get over here fast. Entratter packed his Turnbull & Asser shirts, hopped a plane to Italy, and helped get Frank under control.
Dean Martin needed no such coddling. He was nearly as valuable to the Sands as Sinatra, one of the few stars who came close to him in attracting high rollers. (“Dean Martin is worth his weight in $100 chips—a star who pulls in the big players to the casino,” Variety noted in July 1960.) But he was as easygoing and laid-back as Sinatra was prickly and high-maintenance. He was affable with friends (everyone was “pally”), polite with fans, more respectful of women. He was the only member of Frank’s circle who didn’t grovel for his approval, and the only one who could bail out early from his late-night partying. (Dean needed the sleep, so he could get up early and play golf.) But he was remote and inscrutable, and few felt close to him. “He was nice to everyone,” said Shirley MacLaine. “He just didn’t want nice to go on too long.” He had seven children with two different wives, but even they didn’t know him well. “The important thing to say about my husband is that I don’t understand him,” said his second wife, Jeannie, after their divorce in 1973. “He is one of the rare human beings who is not comfortable communicating. He’s just not interested.”
Sammy, on the other hand, was as inexhaustible offstage as he was on. He loved the Vegas party scene, always surrounding himself with other show people, screening films he had shipped in from Hollywood, then wrapping up the night with breakfast in the Sands Garden Room. “Sammy always had to be with people,” said Vera Goulet, who was married to singer Robert. “You needed two months rest after two hours with Sammy.” His obsessive partying and showbiz extravagances, along with his white girlfriends—in 1960 he married Swedish actress May Britt—made him controversial in the black community. (“Is Sammy Ashamed He’s a Negro?” read a headline in an African American newspaper in the 1950s.) And his fawning relationship with Sinatra, both onstage and off, was unsettling to many. “Over the years I watched Sammy dress like Frank, walk like Frank, smoke like Frank,” said Cindy Bitterman, a friend of both. “He wanted to be a little Frank, which I thought was pathetic.”
There was, of course, no shortage of people who wanted to be friends with Frank Sinatra. His circle of pals included New York saloon owner Jilly Rizzo, sometime business partner Hank Sanicola, songwriters Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, along with Hollywood friends whom he often cast in his movies, like Richard “Nick” Conte and Buddy Lester. Not to mention a steady stream of girlfriends, a few of them serious (like dancer Juliet Prowse, to whom Sinatra was briefly engaged), along with countless one-night stands. In Las Vegas, performers he liked always got a boost when Frank dropped in to see them—Hank Henry, for instance, a burlesque comic who headlined a show over at the Silver Slipper (Sinatra cast him as the undertaker in Ocean’s 11), or Sonny King, Dean Martin’s former roommate in New York City, who worked the Sands lounge and had bit roles in two Rat Pack films. But no entertainer benefited more from Frank’s favor than a bald-headed insult comic who was causing a nightly ruckus at the Sahara Hotel, Don Rickles.
Sinatra had first seen him at a Murray Franklin’s nightclub in Miami. When Frank sat down at a table, Rickles greeted him with a line heard round the showbiz world: “Make yourself comfortable, Frank. Hit somebody.” Luckily Sinatra laughed. Later, when Rickles became a regular in the Sahara lounge, Sinatra would often come in with friends to see him. Rickles’s barbs became the talk of the town. To Frank: “I saw you in The Pride and the Passion. The cannon was great.” To Sammy: “You tell everybody he’s your best friend. Then you go backstage and bust all his records.” Rickles soon became part of Sinatra’s circle, a regular at the Sands steam room, where he got his own robe (with a rhino head on the back—because that’s what he looked like) and his own share of abuse. Once, as a gag, the gang stripped off his towel and pushed him out into the pool area, in front of all the guests, stark naked. Good times.
The Rat Pack’s triumph in the early 1960s was also a triumph of the Great American Songbook—the pop standards of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, and others that were the core repertoire for nearly all the top nightclub singers of the era. These popular vocalists formed a bulwark against the advancing threat from another kind of music that was dominating the radio airwaves and grabbing the attention of the younger generation: rock ’n’ roll.
Sinatra hated rock ’n’ roll. As a young singer back in the forties he had made the bobby-soxers swoon, but the screaming frenzy that greeted Elvis Presley in the mid-1950s was of a different order. Frank couldn’t understand it. He would sit alone in his den, his valet George Jacobs recalled, listening over and over to Elvis songs like “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up,” “trying to figure out just what the hell this new stuff was.” He would joke to friends about Elvis, “If I want a nigger, I’ll get a real nigger.” (This, too, according to Jacobs, who was black.) In a 1957 article for a French magazine, Sinatra unleashed a scathing attack on the whole genre, denouncing rock ’n’ roll as “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. . . . It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact—dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
Elvis, the sideburned delinquent who was Sinatra’s chief target, was considerably more temperate in response. “I admire the man,” he said when asked about Sinatra’s remarks at a press conference in Los Angeles. “He has a right to say what he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but I don’t think he should have said it. He is mistaken about this. This is a trend, just the same as he faced when he started years ago. I consider it the greatest in music.”
Elvis was in Germany when the Rat Pack took Vegas by storm in early 1960. But he was due to be discharged from the Army in March, and the nation was already gearing up for the most heralded homecoming in show-business history. Few would have guessed that the host for that homecoming—Elvis’s first appearance on national TV after his return from the Army—would be, of all people, the man who had bad-mouthed his music so viciously three years earlier: Frank Sinatra.
Television was the one medium Sinatra could never conquer. He starred in a CBS variety series in the early 1950s, but it lasted only two seasons. He landed another series on ABC during the 1957–58 season, but that one, too, was canceled because of low ratings. He did four specials for ABC, sponsored by Timex, in the 1959–60 season, but they were not exactly setting the world on fire. Then, in the fall of 1959, Sinatra negotiated with Colonel Tom Parker to pay Elvis $125,000 (more than Sinatra himself was getting) to make a guest appearance on Frank’s last ABC special of the season. “After all,” Sinatra rationalized to the press, “the kid’s been away two years, and I get the feeling he really believes in what he’s doing.” The kid’s comeback also promised to be a ratings bonanza.
Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley was taped in Miami in March 1960, just after Sinatra finished up his engagement at the Fontainebleau. Sinatra packed the show with old friends, including three Rat Packers—Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford—as well as his nineteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, who was engaged to marry her own rock ’n’ roll star, Tommy Sands. It may have been Elvis’s homecoming, but Sinatra was going to make sure everyone knew who was still head of the household.
The special, which aired on ABC in early May, is a fascinating glimpse of the culture clash between two generations of American popular music. Sinatra opens the show with Sammy Cahn’s “It’s Nice to Go Traveling,” with special lyrics for the occasion, and Elvis comes out in full-dress Army uniform to intone the final lyric: “But it’s so, so nice to come home.” Elvis then retreats for most of the hour, as Sinatra presents a look back at what Elvis missed in the two years he was away. What he missed, it turns out, was a Sinatra hit single (Frank sings “Witchcraft”), the movie Porgy and Bess (Sammy performs his big number from the film, “There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York”), and the 1959 Academy Awards (Sammy does some impressions, while Frank and Joey heckle him, Rat Pack–style, from the sidelines).
Elvis returns for a mere eight minutes near the end of the show. Now dressed in a tuxedo, hair greased up and standing at attention high on his head, he sings two numbers from his new album: the ballad “Fame and Fortune” and the more rocking “Stuck on You.” He is in good form, a little tense at first, then loosening up with some vintage head- and hip-shaking that draws screams from an audience stocked with teenage girls. “I’m glad to see the Army hasn’t changed you,” says Sinatra, not very convincingly, as he greets Elvis after the number. “First time I ever heard a woman screaming at a male singer,” offers Bishop, in a painfully obvious setup for Sinatra—who responds with a mock-annoyed expression, hands on hips, “Don’t you remember me there, Charlie?”
Bishop then supplies the lead-in for the show’s big number: “Mr. Presley, would you think it presumptuous of Frank to join you in a duet?” “I would consider it quite an honor,” Elvis replies, and they launch into a two-song medley: Frank doing a swinging version of “Love Me Tender,” and Elvis taking a crack at Sinatra’s “Witchcraft,” the two singers alternating verses before harmonizing together prettily on the last couple of bars of “Love Me Tender.” Frank comes off better than Elvis; it is clearly Sinatra’s turf, and Elvis never really seems comfortable. But it was a win for both: the show drew a phenomenal 67 percent of the viewing audience, the highest rating ever for a Frank Sinatra show, and proof that Elvis’s two-year absence had not dimmed his enormous drawing power.
Sinatra and Elvis had relatively little contact after that and were never close. But Elvis had strong ties to two other members of the Rat Pack. He and Sammy had gotten to know each other in Hollywood before Elvis went into the Army; they ran around with the same crowd of young actors and were even once mentioned for the costarring roles in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, a racial allegory about black and white convicts chained together after a prison escape. (Kramer eventually made a wiser choice and cast Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.) Elvis also had much admiration for Dean Martin. “People call me the king of rock,” he told Martin’s daughter Deana, when he met her on the Paramount lot. “But your dad is the king of cool.” One can see the influence—in their sultry, chesty baritones, as well as in Elvis’s song choices after he came out of the Army, which included the Italian-flavored love song “It’s Now or Never,” an anglicized version of “O Sole Mio.”
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 September 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.”
But they needed to leave the stage before a new kind of Vegas entertainment could emerge. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley represented two opposite poles in American popular music: the suave, largely urban, jazz-influenced tradition that dominated radio, recordings, and nightclubs for decades, and the unruly, largely rural, blues-and-country-influenced music that would first catch on in the mid-1950s and virtually take over in the next decade. That seismic shift, in music as well as in the rest of the culture, was mirrored in the changes that would come to the Las Vegas Strip. In a sense, it took the Rat Pack’s breakup and Sinatra’s flameout to make Las Vegas safe for Elvis Presley.
But first, there was a lot of livin’ to do.