LIFE The Rat Pack

By Life

They weren't the original bad boys of stage and screen, but they were the most famous: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford and so many hangers-on and wannabes, male and female. Revisit the 60s in this reissue of a classic LIFE special edition and invite the Rat Pack back to town. Among the highlights: Rare and intimate photos from the great LIFE magazine photographer John Dominis; Inside the friendship between Sinatra and John F. Kennedy Jr.; The birth of Vegas and how Sin City became the sensation it is today

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Nov 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781547852857

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INTRODUCTION

THE KINGS OF COOL

BY STEVE DOUGHERTY

SID AVERY/MPTVIMAGES

We have Davis, Martin, Sinatra and Bishop engaging in fisticuffs, which might well have occurred with this gang. But it turns out this, too, is playacting, as they stage a scene for their first film together, Ocean’s 11.

As the ’60s dawned that election year—six extraordinary decades of American history ago—an historic convergence of show business and politics occurred in the Copa Room at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. For three weeks in the first months of 1960, the packed nightclub was the glittering center of the showbiz universe, where the combined star power of the performers onstage and the constellation of Hollywood luminaries in the audience outshone the blinding neon blaze that lighted the desert skies outside.

Headlining was the now legendary Rat Pack, starring three of pop history’s great entertainers—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.—and two lesser showmen enjoying the ride of their lifetimes, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop.

In the audience over the course of those three weeks were so many marquee names: Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Cole Porter, Lucille Ball, Gregory Peck, Shirley MacLaine, Kim Novak . . . the list went on.

Taking it all in from a ringside seat one night was the political meteor whose rise and reign and tragic fate would come to define the era. Ladies and gentlemen, Sinatra announced from the stage, the next President of the United States. And Jack Kennedy stood up and took a bow.

He and the rest of the megawatt multitude came to see a sensational show that spotlighted signature songs and shtick by each of the five. And one that broke every showbiz taboo in the book. The Pack men smoked and drank, cracked locker-room jokes and carried on as if they were already offstage and loosening their ties and tongues at the after-party. Their sharp suits, bad-boy camaraderie and off-the-charts charisma, on display later that year in Ocean’s 11, the smash caper flick that spawned today’s franchise, lifted the Rat Pack straight to their place in Hollywood’s pantheon.

One year after Sinatra introduced JFK at the Copa Room, he presided over the festivities celebrating his inauguration. With the new-minted President’s movie star looks, narrow ties, tousled hair and Ray-Bans—and, as the world would only later learn, his own Hollywood swinger’s parade of mistresses—the Rat Pack leader might have been welcoming one of his own to the highest office in the land.

Throughout Jack and wife Jackie’s brief, shining reign as the king and queen of Camelot, Sinatra and his cohorts would enjoy their own finger-snapping, top-of-the-heap rule as the coolest cats in the land. It was a glorious reign that all but came to an end shortly after Camelot’s did. Not to the sound of gunfire in Dallas, but, less than three months later, in February 1964, to the infectious screams of Beatles fans. In the swift, seismic shift of pop geography that followed, the Rat Pack was left looking downright Paleolithic, their music, their look, their lingo, their highballs—even their hair—almost instantly out of style.

Now, nearly 60 years after they made their ring-a-ding-ding debut, the Rat Pack, dipped in the amber of legend, come back to life in these pages. Along with a lively and knowing narrative by James Kaplan, author of the acclaimed 2010 Sinatra biography, Frank: The Voice, you’ll find a treasure trove of photos from LIFE’s archives and elsewhere. Together, in words and strikingly intimate images, we tell the stories of what went on in front of the footlights and behind the scenes in the lives of the five performers and the denizens—from mobsters and screen goddesses to the honorary Rat Pack President—who inhabited their kings-of-cool world.

CBS/GETTY

WHICH PHOTOGRAPH FROM 1960 represents the real Rat Pack? we have the boys behaving well and smiling pleasantly: From left, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop.

THE SUMMIT OF SOMETHING

BY JAMES KAPLAN

BOB WILLOUGHBY/MPTVIMAGES

THE DATES OF MANY OF THE photos on these pages are going to be circa, not least because many of the photographers back then were just shooting, not taking great notes as they bent elbows in various ways, and these days people are still figuring out when the guys pictured might have been together—as here, at the Sands—at a given point in time. So then: Circa 1960, we have cavorting, from left, Dean, Peter, Sammy, Frank, Joey—and (we’re pretty sure) the character actor Buddy Lester, who was part of the gang in that year’s film Ocean’s 11. As well as any, this active, fun-filled moment can be seen as the summit of the Summit.

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

The line is from an old movie about myth and reality in the Old West, but it might as well have been written about a legend that was born a half century ago in Las Vegas, a town whose own myth has shimmered like a mirage on the high Nevada desert for as long as anyone alive can remember. The legend is the sometimes true, often highly imaginative story of the Rat Pack.

We will get to truth and fiction presently, but first, like the newspaperman in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we must acknowledge the very real power of legends. They compel us, they stir us, they fill our dreams and guide our behavior. The idea of the Rat Pack was born at a hinge of time in the American consciousness, a moment between the conformism of the ’50s and the chaos of the ’60s, an eye-blink when the horrors and heroism of World War II were still in recent memory (and nuclear fear underlay every diversion), when compensatory excess, in the form of sex, alcohol and cigarettes, was winked at and 20th-century ideals of manhood hadn’t yet been subverted by the androgynous aesthetic of rock ’n’ roll.

The Rat Pack was an idea even more than it was a reality. And though Frank, Dean and Sammy were three real men, their respective myths tend, to this day, to jostle reality aside. Throw in Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford as window dressing, or ballast, and you’ve got a sharkskin-suited, skinny-tied, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, Dionysian parade float.