Shawn Levy - Rat Pack Confidential

Frankenstein, though, or Nosferatu? Because, though everyone got rich, got famous, got laid, Frank got more. They made movies; Frank was the producer. They cut records; Frank owned the company. They played Vegas and Tahoe; it was Frank’s hotel. Everyone did good work; Frank was Michelangelo.

They called him the Leader; they asked him to be their best man; they named their kids after him, their daughters , even. And when it all spun out of control, when the precious, delicate balance came undone, when the merry-go-round stopped with a jerk, everyone got thrown on their ass—or worse—except Frank, who stood there in the middle, unfazed.

Divorce, drugs, bankruptcy, death, irrelevancy: Every single one of them took a major hit.

Frank didn’t get so much as a scratch.

But that would all be later. That would be after the golden time, when, for a while, no matter what they did, it would sell. No matter how many broads, no matter how much booze, no matter who they got mad at or cozied up to, it had reached a point where Frank could simply do no wrong.

The press knew the story. They didn’t write it, but they knew it. They didn’t rat him out because they needed him more than he needed them, and except for a few he’d chosen as whipping boys, they lined up to do whatever he wanted them to do.

He was drinking with this one or that one or fucking this one or that one—who was gonna talk?

And anyone he wanted around him, the same thing: You hiding from the G? You don’t need to hide around Frank. You got a wife back home who reads the gossip page? Frank’ll see that you’re not in it. You running for president? Frank’ll throw a little juice your way and make sure everything looks on the up-and-up.

Up close, the whole thing was not to be believed. You wanna talk about rebellion? Those rock ’n’ roll punks had no idea what a real rebel did in private. They couldn’t begin to understand the power and the appetites and how little you had to care. La Dolce Vita nothing: This bunch made Nero look like a Cub Scout.

But outside, from far away, it didn’t look like ego or license or indulgence. It looked like a big, beautiful party in the desert, with laughs and music and cars and clothes and incredible women, and no one ever ran out of money, and no one ever got tired, and no one had to answer to anyone, and no one ever grew old, and you would just die unless you could be there—even if the closest you ever got was a movie theater or a record player.

Wherever they went, they drew a crowd. And not just yokels, but Friars and sex symbols and made men and the president himself. They made Vegas Vegas, Miami Miami, and Palm Springs Palm Springs. And they made and broke people like they were pieces of toast.

For a while, everything took a backseat. For a while, the whole world was like a gyroscope, spinning so fast that it looked like it was standing still, with Frank and his cronies smack-dab in the middle of it, smiling at you, making you think you could do anything.

The world wasn’t big enough for them to bother with so they made it bigger and took it over.

And instead of resenting it, people loved it.

And there was never anything like it before or since.

Between 1957, when his hero Humphrey Bogart died, and 1963, when his friend Jack Kennedy died, Frank Sinatra was the biggest star in all of showbiz.

There was Elvis, of course, and John Wayne and Danny Thomas and Ray Charles and Marlon Brando and Bob Hope and Pat Boone and Tony Curtis and Frankie Avalon and Jerry Lewis and a whole lot of other people who were Kings of Pop, or certain quadrants of it, at the time.

But nobody was so sheerly supreme as Frank as an icon, artist, or draw, none held his mighty sway over the mass imagination, and none was so ascendant for so long.

With his stunning LPs for Capitol Records— Songs for Siwingin’ Lovers, In the Wee Small Hours, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely , a good dozen more—he was releasing classics at the rate of several a year and moving big numbers in the record stores.

With a string of commercial hit movies—and good ones, frequently, like The Man with the Golden Arm, The Joker is Wild, High Society , and the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity —he ranked among the era’s top-grossing movie stars.

He had regular specials on television (though rarely very good, they always drew well); he was the top act in nightclubs from Miami to Chicago to Las Vegas; he performed with ceremonious duty at charity events, Academy Award telecasts—all the orthodox showbiz sacraments.

Arguably no single entertainer had ever held the top spot in so many media for so long—Bing Crosby, maybe , back in radio days.

No, Frank was It.

And It in ways that nobody ever had been.

Because as big a deal to the popular American mind as Frank’s considerable musical and cinematic lives was his private life.

Flitting from gorgeous bedmate to gorgeous bedmate, rubbing elbows with tough guys, throwing punches, pounding back whiskey, romancing in a cigarette’s glow, he was the envy of every American male who had left off worshiping Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams for more grown-up pursuits: the rakish kid brother-in-law they’d all secretly give their left arms to trade places with.

There was nothing, it seemed to the average working stiff, that Frank didn’t have.

But Frankie—and who could have guessed it?—didn’t like to be by himself: He got antsy. He liked to have entourages of like-minded he-men around him, guys to drink and schmooze and play cards and go to the fights and hit the bars with: chums.

He wanted an accumulation of bosom fellows around him, and he thought it would be wonderful if they could work together. He began to play with his buddies in nightclubs, to make films with them, to pop in on their TV shows and invite them onto his.

He started smallish—a picture with one or two here, a spontaneous walk-on there—but then his horizons expanded. Various threads in his personal and professional lives began to merge in ways that no one would ever have predicted: his affectations toward politics and the Mafia, for instance, his ownership of film and record companies and shares in casinos, his friends and debtors and vassals.

At the end of 1959, he concocted an intoxicating brew of money, power, talent, romance, gall, a nexus of showbiz and muscle, politics and glamour, a brilliant netherworld spinning at 33⅓ with himself stock-still at the center, conducting it all with his mind.

They alit in Las Vegas for a month to make a movie and play a historic nightclub gig that they called the Summit; they hit Miami, the Utah desert, Palm Springs, Chicago, Atlantic City, Beverly Hills, Hollywood back lots, illegal gambling dens, saloons, yachts, private jets, the White House itself.

It was what a good portion of America was about for a few remarkable years.

It was sauce and vinegar and eau de cologne and sour mash whiskey and gin and smoke and perfume and silk and neon and skinny lapels and tail fins and rockets to the sky.

It was swinging and sighing and being a sharpie, it was cutting a figure and digging a scene.

It was Frank and Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin and Peter Lawford for a while and Joey Bishop when they asked him and Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana and tables full of cronies and who knew how many broads.

It was the ultimate spasm of traditional showbiz—both the last and the most of its kind.

It was the high point of their lives and a midlife crisis.

It was the acme of the American Century and a venal, rancid, ugly sham.

It was the Rat Pack.

It was beautiful.