Williams recently decamped to the famed Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, where Sinatra recorded classic albums such as Songs For Lonely Lovers and In The Wee Small Hours. Then there is the imminent release of Swing When You're Winning, by Robbie Williams, a collection of classic songs from the big-band era. Or, more recently, the success of the Music To Watch Girls Go By series, which revisits the golden age of the crooner.
The signs have have been in the air for some time: remember the Reservoir Dogs ' poster, a pastiche of Sinatra and his gangster buddies strolling the boardwalk like they owned it (they probably did). Now, 40-odd years on, the showbiz spirit of the Rat Pack is being resurrected with next month's release in the US of Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh's updating - 'it's not a remake' insists the studio - of Sinatra and Co's implausible heist caper-cum-glorified home-movie. In retrospect, it is easy to see how that kind of celebrity - unbridled, narcissistic, venal - reflected nothing so much as the desires of the culture that produced it but, back then, the Rat Pack were signifiers of all that was carefree and cavalier about that brief halcyon time before political assassinations, Vietnam and civil strife laid bare the country's dark heart. You had to have something Frank had, or something he wanted to have more of.' Hell, for a while, even the President of the United States, a womaniser with a track record of conquests to equal Sinatra's, felt thrilled to be an honorary member.įrank, Deano and JFK were the ultimate symbols of a bright new postwar America, their iconic status based on a heady synthesis of success, sexual attraction and the illusion of celebrity as a form of unlimited freedom. Talent, money, power: none of these was quite enough. 'This was a group that Frank hand-picked,' writes Shaun Levy in his book, Rat Pack Confidential, 'gliding through the world, sizing people up, then giving them the golden tap on the shoulder and bringing them in. For a while it seemed, at least to a mesmerised public, that they had it all: the broads, the booze, the moolah the swagger and sass that came with imperial power and the arrogant cool that Sinatra, more than anyone, flaunted with impunity.Įven by the strictly hierarchical standards of contemporary celebrity this was an ultra-exclusive star club whose mysterious conditions of entry often precluded even the famous. Sinatra was King Rat, Las Vegas was his palace of earthly delights, and the rest of the pack - Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop - was his courtly inner circle. In the end, though, the press just wouldn't let go and the term Rat Pack stuck - perhaps the only time that anyone ever pulled rank on Frank.įrom the start, it was his gang. Then someone pointed out that a similar brand name was already employed by a much bigger rat pack, one whose core membership didn't include a black Jew. Initially, not wanting to be seen as simply an heir apparent to Bogie, he christened his new gang the Clan.
From then until 1964, when The Beatles announced the dawning of the modern pop era, signalling a cultural shift that suddenly consigned Frank and his cronies to squaresville, Sinatra ruled supreme as the king of old-school showbiz. When Bogart died in 1957, Sinatra took the Rat Pack ideal and refashioned it in his own image. 'You look,' she hissed, 'like a goddamn rat pack.' The label stuck, not as a term of disparagement, but as a badge of identity. Legend has it she came home to find her husband, Humphrey Bogart, entertaining Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and David Niven, all of them sozzled and bedraggled after another marathon bender. T he name came from Lauren Bacall, a woman who wouldn't have been seen dead in a pack, Hollywood or otherwise.
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