LOS ANGELES — The Rat Pack, the legendary circle of mid-century entertainers whose martini-soaked mystique still defines American cool, was a brotherhood built on talent, glamour and loyalty — and, according to a sweeping new account of the group’s history, torn apart by betrayals so bitter they followed its members to the grave.
At the center of it all stood Frank Sinatra, the self-appointed chairman of the board, a man who ruled his famous friends with an iron fist and, when crossed, exacted a price that none of them could have anticipated.
The story of the Rat Pack’s unraveling begins not with Sinatra’s famous quintet but with Humphrey Bogart, the original ringleader of a loose Hollywood circle that gathered in the 1950s. It was Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall, who reportedly took one look at the actor and his disheveled cronies returning from a Las Vegas trip and declared they looked like “a rat pack.”
Sinatra, who ran with Bogart’s group alongside figures like Errol Flynn and Jerry Lewis, later appropriated the name for his own younger, flashier ensemble — Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford — a group that would become synonymous with Las Vegas nightlife, sold-out shows and the landmark 1960 heist film “Ocean’s 11.”
But the bond that made them famous was also the bond that broke them. The first casualty was Lawford, whose marriage to Patricia Kennedy, sister of future President John F. Kennedy, made him valuable to Sinatra — until it made him expendable.
In 1962, Lawford arranged a rendezvous between Sinatra and JFK, prompting Sinatra to build a helicopter landing pad at his Chatsworth estate for the president’s arrival. Kennedy instead stayed with Bing Crosby, and a furious Sinatra tore the pad down and turned his wrath on Lawford, firing him from the film “Robin and the Seven Hoods” and replacing him with Crosby.
Sinatra’s fury ran so deep, the account states, that he once refused to perform until Lawford had left the building. Yet when Sinatra’s son, Frank Sinatra Jr. , was kidnapped in 1963, the chairman came crawling back to Lawford for his connection to Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy — a plea that helped save the younger Sinatra’s life.
Joey Bishop, the group’s resident comedian, met a similar fate. When Sinatra asked him to fill in at a gig at the Cal Neva Lodge, Bishop — treating the request as business rather than friendship — demanded a $50,000 fee. Sinatra cut him from the pack and from “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” and NBC canceled Bishop’s television series shortly afterward.
Sammy Davis Jr. , the only Black member of the group, endured the cruelest blows. His interracial romance with actress Kim Novak so enraged studio boss Harry Cohn, according to long-circulating accounts, that the mob intervened, pressuring Davis into a paid marriage to dancer Loray White.
On their wedding night, a despondent Davis drank heavily, tried to strangle White and later was found by his assistant holding a revolver to his own head, crying, “Why won’t they let me live my life?”
When Davis backed JFK’s presidential campaign, his relationship with Swedish actress May Britt became a political liability, and Kennedy distanced himself — leaving Davis off the guest list at his victory gala. Only Dean Martin refused to attend in protest.
Martin, the pack’s resident drinker, was in fact its most sober member — the scotch in his hand was usually apple juice. But tragedy found him anyway. In 1986, his son, Dean Paul Martin, vanished during an Air National Guard training mission and was killed.
Sinatra, who had lost his own mother in a plane crash near the same area, tried to save his friend by taking him back on tour. The audiences saw a broken man, and Martin soon quit.
Dean Martin died of lung cancer at 78 on Christmas Day 1993, having refused surgery. Lawford had died on Christmas Eve 1984 of cardiac arrest, and when he passed, his own children refused to pay his funeral bills; his widow asked the National Enquirer to witness her scattering his ashes into the Pacific.
Davis, a heavy smoker, died of throat cancer on May 16, 1990, at 64, after declining surgery that would have cost him part of his voice. His widow inherited not a fortune but crippling debt. Sinatra followed in 1998, after a heart attack and the words, “I’m losing.”
The Empire State Building glowed blue, and for one minute, the Las Vegas Strip went dark.
Bishop, who stayed married to the same woman for 58 years, outlived them all, dying at 89 in 2007. His ashes, too, went into the Pacific — closing a chapter on a brotherhood whose glamour, and whose wounds, proved equally unforgettable.