NINETEEN

“When Sinatra, the king of Hollywood, makes a movie,” Tom Allen wrote in 1960, “he is producer, star, and — as self-appointed casting director — personnel man for his pals.” Sinatra’s influence in the casting of Peter Lawford in Never So Few is a good example of the kind of power he wielded in Hollywood.

The picture was a World War II adventure set in the Burma theater. The ravishing Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida provided Sinatra’s love interest, and Frank wanted Peter to play the relatively small part of Captain Grey Travis, a medic. Peter was eager for the role and told Milt Ebbins, “Go make a deal.” Ebbins and Peter Shaw, who worked with Peter’s agent at William Morris, set up an appointment with Benny Thau, a vice president and head of talent at MGM. “Thau was a low-key executive,” Ebbins recalled. “Very soft-spoken. He’d say, ever so gently, ‘How are you, Milt? Is everything okay? How’s Peter doing? Is he all right?’ But you had to watch out for guys like that, because they’re the ones who’d kill you in a negotiation.”

When Ebbins and Shaw were ushered into Thau’s office, Thau sat behind his huge desk and made amiable small talk with his two visitors, never broaching the subject of the meeting. Finally Shaw said, “Listen, we want to talk about Never So Few and Peter Lawford.”

A gentle sympathy inflected Thau’s voice. “I must tell you — this is a very low-budgeted part.”

Ebbins’s eyes grew ingenuously wide. “Really? How low?”

“Well, it’s three weeks of work and we think it’s worth about fifteen hundred dollars a week.”

Ebbins was aghast. “What? You’ve gotta be kidding!” he cried. Shaw sat dumbfounded.

When Ebbins told Thau that that wasn’t nearly enough, Thau asked him, “What do you want?”

“We want seventy-five thousand,” Ebbins replied.

Without another word, Thau pressed a button on his desk. “In a flash, in came Eddie Mannix,” Ebbins recalled. “Mannix used to be a bouncer at Palisades Park in New Jersey, and Nick Schenck had brought him out here in the forties to take care of trouble at the studio and he became a top executive. He was a terrific Irishman — Gable and all the male stars loved him because he was a man’s man and one of those real outgoing guys. He was a wonderful man — but a tough son of a bitch.”

Mannix looked at Shaw and Ebbins and said in his gruffest voice, “What’s going on here?” When Thau told him, he said, “What the hell do you want that part for? Jesus Christ, it pays nothing!”

Ebbins said, “What do you mean? It’s a good part — it goes all through the picture. We think it’s worth seventy-five thousand dollars.” Mannix blanched and looked at Thau. “I’ll tell you what,” Thau said finally. “We’ll pay you twenty-five thousand.”

Ebbins held firm for seventy-five thousand, and Thau grew impatient. To him, Peter Lawford was a two-thousand-dollar-a-week contract player the studio had let go and who had made just one movie since. Now he wanted seventy-five thousand dollars for three weeks’ work? “I think you’re nuts,” Thau said. “You’re crazy to risk losing this picture. This is a Frank Sinatra picture, with Gina Lollobrigida.” “Well,” Ebbins said, “I guess I’ll have to go back to Frank and tell him we can’t do the picture.”

“What do you mean?” Mannix asked.

“Eddie, Frank Sinatra told me to come here and see you guys. He wants Peter in the picture. And now I gotta go tell him Peter’s not gonna be in it.”

“How are you gonna tell him?”

“I’m gonna tell him that you won’t pay the money he wants.” Mannix sat silently for a few seconds, then said quietly, “Well, let’s discuss this again — later.”

Ebbins reported the details of the meeting to Sinatra, who told him, “It isn’t such a big part, but fuck ’em. Hold out for more money — you’ll get it.”

“So we held out,” Ebbins recalled, “and we got something like forty or fifty thousand dollars, which was really pretty good. Mannix and Thau weren’t too happy, but we were pleased as hell.”

Never So Few was filmed on the MGM lot without incident, and it opened in New York in January 1960 to mixed reviews. Arthur Knight summed up the general reaction in Saturday Review: “What might have been an explosive and searching drama turns out to be just another war adventure film.” Peter received no special attention from the critics, who saw the movie as Sinatra’s and Lollobrigida’s show, something for which Peter was grateful, since Never So Few was a box-office bomb. It cost $3.48 million to make and left MGM with a net loss of $1.15 million.

LONG BEFORE NEVER SO FEW was released, Peter and Sinatra had already signed to do another picture together, and this time it was Peter who initiated the project. In 1955, he had run into Gilbert Kay, an assistant director, on the beach in front of his house. “He told me the story of Ocean’s 11,” Peter explained. “He had acquired it from a gas station attendant, who was one of twenty-five men to dismantle some valuable radio equipment in Germany during the war and carry it piece by piece out of the country. We thought the idea could be applied to a fictional story for a movie [about a group of war veterans who] rob six gambling casinos simultaneously in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve when the lights go out.”

Peter was interested, but Kay wanted to direct the film, and Peter told him he couldn’t guarantee that. So Kay shopped the script around Hollywood. He was unsuccessful, and he returned to Peter four years later willing to sell the property outright. Peter was confident he could interest Sinatra in making the movie, so he and Pat paid five thousand dollars apiece to purchase an option on it.

When Peter told Sinatra the story — Frank would play Danny Ocean, the leader of eleven men who pull off this intricate Vegas heist — “he flipped,” Peter said. Sinatra envisioned it as a vehicle for the Rat Pack, and his interest in the project gave it new life. He owed Warner Brothers a picture, and when Jack Warner read the script, his reported reaction was, “Let’s not make the movie — let’s pull the job.”

Warner agreed to pay fifty thousand dollars for the script, ten thousand of which went to repay Peter and Pat. Once Warner Brothers bought the movie it became Frank Sinatra’s film, and he stood to make the most money on it. But it had been Peter’s baby, and Sinatra appreciated that. Once again, he saw that Peter was well taken care of financially.

“Peter and I went to Burt Allenberg, who was Sinatra’s agent,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He was one of the greatest agents of all time — he had handled Gable, Lombard, Cary Grant. A big-time agent. Brilliant. He was putting together the deal for Ocean’s 11. He had a commitment from Warner Brothers, so he could do anything he wanted — he and Frank could cast the film, decide who got what salary, decide who got what percentage of the profits.

“Allenberg was shrewd. Peter and I sat there and listened to him bad-mouth the movie. He said, ‘What do you want to do this picture for?’ He was trying to downgrade Peter’s position so we wouldn’t ask for as much money as we might have.”

Peter remained silent while Ebbins did the talking, saying that since Peter was the one who had found the property, he should be compensated for it. Then he grandly asked for one third of the film’s profits. “It was a real shot in the dark. I had no strength at all. I was fighting a losing battle. Warner had no obligation at all to involve Peter in this picture.”

But Ebbins acted as though his position were much stronger, and he further told Allenberg, “I want you to consider Peter to act in this picture with the other guys.”

Allenberg’s reply was chilling. “Is that a deal breaker?”

Ebbins remained stone faced and avoided Peter’s gaze. “Let’s not say it’s a deal breaker. Let’s just say Frank wants Peter to do the picture.”

Allenberg replied, “Let me talk to Frank about this,” and ended the meeting. A few days later, he called Peter and Milt back into his office and offered them 16 2/3 percent of the film’s gross profit (after only its negative costs were deducted) and agreed to hire Peter to act in the picture for a fee of fifty thousand dollars — “a great deal,” Ebbins recalled. And indeed it was: the film was a big hit, and Peter and Pat netted a $480,000 profit, out of which they gave Ebbins two points in appreciation.

Ocean’s 11, as Peter’s friend Roy Marcher put it, was “a ten- million-dollar home movie.” In addition to Frank, Peter, Sammy, Dean, and Joey Bishop, the film featured old Sinatra friends like Cesar Romero, Richard Conte, and Henry Silva, and the latest Rat Pack “broad,” Angie Dickinson. The director, Lewis Milestone, was suggested by Peter and was an excellent choice, in Joey Bishop’s opinion: “It would have taken a great director to have been able to take this gang of people and get a good picture out of them. He had to be as little a director as possible and still get his points across when the time came.”

He also had to good-naturedly tolerate a great deal of unprofessionalism.Sinatra’s cool, laid-back style and aura of disinterest created an extremely casual air on the Ocean’s 11 set. It seemed at times that the motion picture took a backseat to other considerations. None of the Rat Pack was ever available for shooting before noon, because every night they held what they called their “summit meeting” at the Sands Hotel — a performance in the Copa Room in which the five of them sang, told jokes, danced, kidded each other, and generally acted like carefree fraternity brothers.

Frank Sinatra owned a piece of the Sands, and the Copa Room had been built for him. Every night twelve hundred people bought tickets, and eight hundred more were turned away, for shows that were, one reporter said, “of gaping brilliance.”

“I couldn’t wait to get to work,” Peter later said. “Everybody was flowing on the same wavelength. It was so much fun. We would do two shows a night, get to bed at four-thirty or five, get up again, and go to work on a movie. We’d finish filming, go to the steam room, get something to eat, and start all over again — two shows. They were taking bets we’d all end up in a box.”

Most nights, all five performers appeared on stage, but sometimes one or two might be too tired to make it. On rare occasions, only one performer would show up. One show began with the Copa’s MC asking over the loudspeaker, “Who’s starring tonight?”

Joey Bishop’s world-weary voice replied, “I dunno. Dean Martin is drunk, Sammy Davis hadda go to da temple, Peter Lawford’s out campaigning for his brother-in-law.”

“What’s Frank doing?”

A knowing snicker. “Just say — somebody will go on.”

The shows were never exactly the same; although they were carefully prepared, a good deal of the material was thought up at the last minute by Bishop, the comedy writer of the group, or improvised by the others onstage. Always there was booze and booze jokes; a typical show at the Sands would begin with Dean and Sammy wheeling out a bar full of drinks while Joey announced to the audience, “Here they are, Haig and Vague.” In the middle of a routine Sammy might turn to the audience and say, “You can get swacked just watching this show.”

There was a lot of mutual ribbing. Frank would take a drink and launch into a song, then Joey would interrupt him. “Don’t sing anymore, Frank. Tell the people about the good work the Mafia is doing.” “Nobody could get away with that but me,” Bishop recalled, “because I looked as though if Frank just looked at me I’d wither.” In one show, while Dean was singing, Peter, Sammy, and Joey walked onstage wearing tuxedo jackets and boxer shorts — with their pants folded over their arms. “We walked across the stage as if we were discussing business,” Bishop says. “It got a scream — three guys in their shorts.”

Oftentimes one or two of the group would stand offstage and heckle. Robert Legare in a Playboy article on the shows wrote, “Without fail, the Summiteers tried to break one another up with off-stage heckling and ad-libs that were often funnier than the on-stage material. When they succeeded, which was often, the audience lapped it up . . . every gag, every gesture, every amble across the stage by a star, had the whole place rocking with wild glee.”

The Rat Pack’s self-deprecating humor was often hard-edged — as when Dean Martin picked up Sammy Davis, Jr., and announced, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this trophy,” or when Sammy told Peter, “I know your kind. You’ll dance with me but you won’t let your kids go to school with me.”

Still, only once did Joey Bishop feel they’d crossed the line into bad taste — when Frank and Dean, improvising, started to call each other “dagos.” Bishop walked off the stage, and after the show Sinatra asked him, “What the hell happened to you?”

“Frank, what happens after you leave the stage and somebody calls you a dago?” Bishop replied. “You’re not gonna like it and they’re gonna say, ‘Well, I heard you say it yourself onstage.’ I don’t know how to act out there when you start that stuff. Am I supposed to think it’s camaraderie? I can’t stand out there on that stage while you’re doing dago, dago, dago.”

Martin and Sinatra never used the word onstage again. “If you tell Frank something and you’re right,” Bishop said, “then you’re home free.”

One of the reasons the “summit” shows were so popular was that audiences sensed they were seeing the Rat Pack as they really were, that they had been made privy to how these men behaved with each other offstage. In many respects that was true. Dick Livingston recalled spending a few days in Vegas and catching the shows. “The morning after every show, we’d all get into the sauna at the hotel, and Sinatra would order twenty gin fizzes that the waiter would bring right into the sauna. Dean would wander in with a hangover and say, ‘Even my hair hurts.’ Then Sammy would come in with a white towel wrapped around his middle and Frank would say, ‘Sammy, you can’t come in with that towel. There’s a brown towel out there for you.’ It was like they were still onstage, and it was fun, really fun.”

The Rat Pack shows were Las Vegas’s biggest draw for the two months of Ocean’s 11 filming in the winter of 1959-1960. Sinatra and Martin, who both owned a piece of the Copa Room, made between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand dollars a week for their labors. The rest of the Rat Pack pocketed about twenty-five thousand a week — a lot more money than Peter could have made doing virtually anything else.

Peter, of course, was the odd man out in this high-powered talent pool. A joke around Vegas at the time had a group of conventioneers headed for the Sands and wondering which of the Rat Pack would be onstage that night. “With our luck,” one of them grumbles, “it’ll be just Peter Lawford.”

“Peter held his own,” Joey Bishop recalled, “but he was well aware that a lot of people wondered, ‘What is he doing up there with those four guys?’ I mean if you could take anybody away from the show without hurting it, it would be Peter. He must have sensed that the only reason for his being there was his relationship to Jack Kennedy. And that would make anyone feel ill at ease.”

On February 7, Jack attended the show. A month earlier, he had announced his candidacy for president and he was gearing up for the first few primary showdowns. When Sinatra introduced Kennedy to the audience, Dean Martin watched the handsome young candidate as he stood and acknowledged the crowd’s applause. Then Martin turned to Sinatra and asked, “What did you say his name was?”