Rat Pack Confidential

Dean didn’t want to be worked to death when they were doing so well; he mocked Jerry’s aspirations as “Chaplin shit” and was less and less concerned with keeping a happy public face on their relationship. After a few well-publicized snubbings, Jerry grew haughty enough to shove Dean, and Dean shoved back—harder, and with no little relish. It got ugly, and by July 1956, on the Copacabana stage that was their first great showcase, they played their last gig together.

Everyone in show business knew that Jerry would do great, but most predicted a dire future for Dean. And when he debuted as a single, it was disastrous. His first picture, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, was numbered for years among the great movie turkeys of all time. Cynics were predicting he’d be out of the business altogether within months.

Like Frank, though, he was rescued by fate in the form of a new singing persona and a World War II movie. Actually, Dean didn’t so much change his voice as what he did with it. Always languid, he became frankly indifferent; without Jerry around to interrupt his singing, he began to act the drunk and interrupt himself. It suited him; audiences loved it.

Another break: In 1957, his agents got him cast in a key role in the screen version of Irwin Shaw’s best-selling novel, The Young Lions. Playing a roguish Broadway singer miscast as a G.I., Dean held his own against Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando and was suddenly a hot commodity once again.

He might have drifted into anything, but he never really got the chance to go it purely alone; probably he didn’t want it; he might have even been scared. Within two years of splitting with Jerry, he found himself teamed, unofficially but semipermanently, with Frank, starting with a trip to some sleepy town in the Midwest.

Of course, Frank knew that Dean would be a perfect choice for the role of Bama Dillert, a honey-drippin’ card shark in the upcoming film Some Came Running. A gambler, roué, souse, and cynic with a southern accent just like the one Dean sported as a bit of shtick, he was capable of being played right by no other actor in the world. If it took till mid-’58 for Frank to offer Dean the role, the likely reason is that he was waiting to see how The Young Lions turned out.

It turned out fine; the role was Dean’s.

Like Frank’s career-saver, From Here to Eternity, Some Came Running was based on a big fat book by James Jones (even at twelve hundred pages, it had been cut in half by editors at Scribner’s). Frank was cast as Dave Hirsch, an ex-G.I. with a literary bent who drunkenly wanders back to his small Indiana hometown, where he does battle with his respectable older brother, falls for a priggish schoolmarm, and is in turn fallen for by a big-city floozy who has floated into town in his wake. MGM production head Sol Siegel had bought the book for $200,000 before it was published, then assigned it to in-house auteur Vincente Minnelli, who’d almost entirely abandoned the gaiety of his classic musicals for broody, atmospheric melodrama. The $2-million production (not counting Frank’s $400,000 guarantee against a piece of the gross) would be shot throughout the late summer and fall of 1958, with eighteen working days scheduled for location in Madison, Indiana, population 10,500, a wee bit of Americana just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, where mob-run casinos such as the plush Beverly Hills Club flourished.

Dean signed on to play Bama, an itinerant gambler who befriends Hirsch, and the cast was rounded out with Arthur Kennedy as the banker, Martha Hyer as the prig, and Shirley MacLaine as the floozy (“the pig,” as Bama calls her), Ginny Moorhead. MacLaine knew Dean from having worked with him and Jerry on Artists and Models, her second film, three years earlier; she’d met Frank soon after on the set of Around the World in 80 Days—his one-shot in that dull parade of cameos came when she popped into a Barbary Coast saloon where he was playing the piano.

MacLaine was a kid when she showed up in Madison—just twenty-four, with a two-year-old daughter and a husband who spent most of his time on business in Tokyo. She’d worked in Hollywood for three years, but nothing in her green, bubbly life prepared her for the world in which Frank and Dean lived. For two weeks in Indiana, she got a glimpse of the strange, intoxicating lives to which powerful men entitled themselves.

For starters, each of them made an abortive visit to her hotel room, trotting over for a quickie from the house they’d rented next door. Rebuffed but nevertheless taken with her spunk, they adopted her as a mascot—the only woman who’d be allowed to enter their confidence without sexual payment in return. They dragged her along when they went on trips to gambling joints near Cincinnati; she was allowed to sit with them while they gussied themselves up for an evening’s leisure. “Their white shirts were crisp and new,” she recalled, “the ties well chosen, the suits expensive and impeccably tailored.… Their shoes were uncommonly polished and I was certain their socks didn’t smell. Underneath it all, I sense their underwear was as white and fresh as soft, newly fallen snow.”

There was nothing so pristine, though, about some of the people they hosted on the set. Frank didn’t get to the Midwest too often, and his presence there occasioned visits from the region’s hoods—Sam Giancana, top man of the Chicago Outfit, among them. If the sterilized grace of Frank and Dean descending a hotel staircase in fedoras hadn’t convinced MacLaine that they were privy to things she’d never even imagined, then a few days around Giancana did the trick. He cheated her in meaningless games of gin and pulled a real .38 out of his jacket when she menaced him with a water pistol. “I knew he was a hood of some kind,” MacLaine recalled, “but at that point it was all so theatrically dangerous and amusing to me.”

Less amusing was the behavior of her costars around Madison and on the set. MacLaine had been bred with southern manners and was a fresh enough actress to still defer to her directors. Frank and Dean didn’t particularly care whom they offended. They were, naturally, besieged by local gawkers throughout their stay, and they treated them with beastly crudeness. Riding the film company bus to and from work, Frank would sit by the window and disparage the fans who lined up outside for a glimpse of celebrity flesh; smiling and waving, he’d mutter deprecations under his breath: “Hello there, hillbilly!” “Drop dead, jerk!” “Hey, where’d you get that big fat behind?” Seized by hunger early one morning, he woke a hotel manager demanding a meal; the frazzled man arrived with food and beer, only to find himself in a shouting match with Frank that devolved into a fistfight—which Dean complained blocked his view of an old movie on TV.

On the set, Frank was just as bearish, walking around between takes grousing repeatedly, “Let’s blow this joint.” Many evenings, he’d go to such lengths to amuse himself in the small town that he was in no shape—or mood—to work the next morning. “His eyes would be like two urine spots in the snow,” said one crew member, “and when I saw his hangover look I would keep walking.”

Minnelli, of course, didn’t have that luxury. A notorious perfectionist, he continually rankled the cast with requests for additional takes of scenes that Frank felt had already been filmed satisfactorily. Dean and Frank began to mock Minnelli’s fussiness, his pursed lips, his aesthetic ambitions.

Not long into the production, with the town dressed up for the film’s climactic carnival scene, Minnelli was taking, Frank thought, an inordinate amount of time setting up a shot. The director circled around the camera several times, sizing up various angles; he closed his eyes and fell into deep concentration; around him, extras made merry with the free rides and snacks, and his principal actors stood waiting for direction. MacLaine could feel Frank tightening up. Finally, Minnelli came to a solution to whatever was troubling him. He turned to his crew: “Move the Ferris wheel!”

That did it. Frank left the set, left the town, left the whole state. They found him at home in L.A., adamant that he would put up with not one whit more of artsy-fartsy bullshit. Sol Siegel, the budget ticking away, made Minnelli promise to compromise the purity of his vision for the sake of getting the damn film made.

They finally did it—only 10 percent over budget. When the picture finally came out, to so-so reviews and big box office, MacLaine got her first Academy Award nomination (Minnelli, ironically, swept the Oscars with his other film of the year, Gigi), and Frank walked away with at least a half million.

But Dean might’ve made out best of all: Not only did he prove that The Young Lions was no fluke, that he really could pull off a dramatic part, but he had a new best-friendship, sealed in booze, broads, gambling, and Italian food. Some Came Running premiered in January 1959; that same month, Frank served as conductor for Dean’s album Sleep Warm, and the two of them screwed around together for the first time on the stage at the Sands. It was almost like the Martin and Lewis days all over again.

If Frank and Dean shared a natural kinship, it was also a curious one. Their talents were so disparate: Frank manly and passionate and artistic; Dean flippant and lazy, and, well, a little fruity.

Take Bama: Amid all this hot-blooded James Jones hooey, with Frank boozing and writing and chasing tail and being chased by it, there’s Dean listlessly bridging a deck of cards in his hands, talking in a hokey cornpone accent, fussing about his wardrobe, tsking at the world and the way Frank’s character reacts to it. Sure he gets a couple of broads as the thing unfolds, but they’re nonentities compared to the full-blooded chicks Frank’s involved with; even though Bama’s girls are made to seem promiscuous, you don’t imagine that he actually screws them—and certainly not that he does any of the hard work if he does.

Same with Sleep Warm. Dean always did queerer material than Frank in the studio: novelty records, Italian-language numbers, country-western songs. Dean’s approach was always practically a lampoon, but it was a lampoon of masculinity and the troubadour pretensions of performers like Frank as much as it was of showbiz and the fact that he was actually getting paid so much to do something so easy.

Listen to the effeminate little spin he gives his sibilants on numbers like “All I Do Is Dream of You” and “Sleepytime Gal.” Jerry liked to do all that nance shit onstage—the critics gave him hell for it—but Dean put it to another use: He wasn’t parodying a gay man, he was parodying a straight man. He sounded at least as contemptuous of his beloved as solicitous.

It was a con: Sicilian Frank strove and suffered and made art; Abruzzese Dean chuckled a little bit to himself and did what he had to do to keep the whole shuck-and-jive afloat. If Frank wanted to conduct, produce movies, and host big events, he just had to tell Dean when and where and he’d be there—so long as he wasn’t expected to bring anything with him or stick around after to clean up.

He had had Jerry already. If Frank wanted him as a brother, fine, but it would be on Dean’s terms.

Sonny boy

For someone who would take orders, Frank could always count on Sammy.

Sammy Davis Jr. was the kind of guy about whom God seemed not to have been able to make up his mind. On the face of things, by his own reckoning, he had more strikes against him than you could count—he was short, maimed, ugly, black, Jewish, gaudy, uneducated. But he could do anything: song, dance, pantomime, impressions, jokes, and even, in a manner of speaking, drama. He overcame so much that his merely being there among them was an epochal triumph: He was the Jackie Robinson of showbiz.

And yet when he saw himself in a mirror he was disgusted: “I gotta get bigger,” he’d implore himself. “I gotta get better.”

He was so used to being excluded that he was willing to kill himself with work to be let in. He’d suffer all manner of indignities: Frank’s clumsy racial jokes; years of Jim Crow treatment in theaters, hotels, and restaurants; the nigger-baiting of high-rolling southerners in Vegas casinos; a patently bogus marriage to a black dancer intended to quiet journalists about his taste for white girls; the explicit disdain of mobsters and other bosses. But he kept at it, convinced that sheer will and talent would stop the world saying no.

Who was he trying to impress? His mother, a showgirl, was a cipher in his life, a ghost whose approval he never seems to have missed; his father, a small-time song-and-dance man, he eclipsed when still a boy. All the know-it-alls, naysayers, and bigots who’d ever discouraged him he’d silenced with sheer talent, guts, and drive. The gods themselves nodded with pleasure upon him: “This kid’s the greatest entertainer,” declared Groucho Marx at Hollywood’s Jewish mecca of leisure, the Hillcrest Country Club, one afternoon, “and this goes for you, too, Jolson” (to which Jolie merely responded with a smile). He was not only the first black man through the door but one of the all-time greats, regardless of origin.

Yet he felt hollow: All the money and fame and sex and sycophants in the world still couldn’t squelch the nagging inner sense that he was a nothing—and that if he could only rouse a little more out of himself, he could finally be a something. He sang that he was “133 pounds of confidence,” that he was “Gonna Build a Mountain,” that he had “a lot of livin’ to do,” and he sounded like he meant it. But each garish boast gave off a vibe of whistling past a graveyard; in his heart of hearts, he could never vanquish the sense that all the work he’d done to get so far could be snuffed out by a mere wave of Fate’s lordly white hand.

Sammy was the baby of the Rat Pack, born four days before Frank’s tenth birthday, and that banal fact—more than race, size, taste, line of work, personal habits, common friends, political leanings, money, sex, or power—was the single governing factor in their relationship. Frank was always the big brother allowing the kid, Sammy, to hang out with the older guys; Sammy was always the precocious little brat tugging feverishly at his idol’s sleeve. Neither had actual siblings, but they filled those roles for each other: Frank needed to be the patron as much as Sammy needed to be patronized. Everything about their mutual solicitude, affection, and trust, every aspect of their difference and of their symbiosis, lay in germ form in the simple age difference between them.

Uniquely among his peers in Frank’s circle, Sammy was a showbiz brat. His mom, Puerto Rican-born Elvera “Baby” Sanchez, was so committed to her career as a chorus girl that she worked until two weeks before her child arrived; as soon as she was able to return to the stage, she left the kid with relatives in Brooklyn and hit the road along with Sammy Sr., who was the lead male dancer in Will Mastin’s vaudeville act.

After that, there was barely a whiff of Elvera in her son’s life. She and Big Sam split for good not long after their son was born, which might have made Sammy’s story another “deprived baby beats the world to win his mama’s love” yarn but for the fact that Big Sam and Mastin, with the approval of Sammy’s extremely protective grandma, Rosa Davis, took the boy on the road with them from the time he was three and provided him with as big and loving a family as most children ever have. Chorus girls, singers, comics, and musicians were his society; dressing rooms, boarding-houses, and buses his playgrounds. He never attended so much as a day of kindergarten in his life—Big Sam and Mastin hid him from child welfare authorities by gluing whiskers on him and billing him as a midget—but he was steeped in a showbiz curriculum virtually from birth.

In later years, Sammy looked back on his tender introduction to showbiz as an idyll, but it was a terrifically difficult era. The Chitlin Circuit, as the route of black vaudeville and burlesque houses was known, never paid what the white theaters did; moreover, Sammy broke in when all forms of live entertainment were taking a hit from talking movies, radio, and recorded music. Scuttling back and forth between sporadic, low-paying jobs, Big Sam and Mastin frequently went without food so that their little protégé might not go hungry—and even then his supper might consist of a mustard sandwich and a glass of water. With grim regularity, they all returned to Harlem to sit waiting for new offers of work, which became even less steady with the advent of the Depression.

This was hell for Mastin, by all accounts a decent, intelligent, gifted man who’d risen to a position of respect within the narrow world of black showbiz. Although he never crossed over to broad white appeal, Mastin was a success, able to keep dozens of people on the road with him throughout the twenties. When he had to dissolve his traveling show to a two-man act featuring just himself and Big Sam, he surely felt as though he’d shrunk in the world; trouper that he was, though, he never let on, least of all to Sammy, that there was anything small about the small time.

And Sammy would’ve noticed if he had, because he was watching. He spent his early years studying acts from the wings, then imitating what he’d seen for the backstage entertainment of his makeshift family. He was a natural, and Mastin and Big Sam quickly realized it would give the show a lift if they put the little ham onstage. They slathered him in blackface and sat him in a prima donna’s lap while she sang “Sonny Boy,” the Al Jolson hit; mugging and mimicking during her sober reading of the song, Sammy brought down the house.

In time, he would master little comic bits, dance steps, vocal impressions, and songs of his own, and his skills grew along with his exposure. From special billing—“Will Mastin’s Gang featuring Little Sammy”—he became a full-fledged part of the act, the Will Mastin Trio, with all three sharing equally in the profits. They were flash dancers: Cat-quick and athletic, they could do time steps together or improvise wild solos, all energy, all arms, legs, and deferential smiles; for six or eight minutes a night, they could wring an audience limp with their sheer gutty bravado.

It was as a member of the trio that Sammy found himself in Detroit in the dog days of 1941, a substitute opening act for the Tommy Dorsey band. As he wandered backstage marveling at the size of Dorsey’s operation, Sammy was offered a handshake by a skinny white guy in his twenties: “Hiya. My name’s Frank. I sing with Dorsey”

“That might sound like nothing much,” Sammy recalled later, “but the average top vocalist in those days wouldn’t give the time of day to a Negro supporting act.” And Frank did more: For the next few nights, until the regular opening act returned, he would sit with Sammy in his dressing room shooting the breeze, talking about the show life. The kid couldn’t believe his luck.

But if meeting Sinatra was a glimpse of a raceless Eden, the next few years were a crushing racist hell. Sammy was drafted into an army that was a cesspool of bigotry. He felt it the moment he arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for basic training.

“Excuse me, buddy,” he asked a white private he came across while trying to find his way around. “Can you tell me where 202 is?”

“Two buildings down. And I’m not your buddy, you black bastard!”

It was a slap in the face, but it was only the beginning. For two years, Sammy was denigrated, demeaned, and, truly, tortured. He was segregated by a corporal who created a no-man’s-land between his bed and those of white soldiers. His expensive chronograph watch (a going-away gift from Mastin and Big Sam) was ground into useless pieces under a bigot’s boot. He was nearly tricked into drinking a bottle of urine offered to him as a conciliatory beer; his tormentors reacted to his refusal to imbibe it by pouring it on him. He was lured to an out-of-the-way building and held against his will while “Coon” and “I’m a Nigger” were inscribed on his face and chest with white paint.

And there were the beatings. “I had been drafted into the army to fight,” he remembered, “and I did.” He was goaded frequently into using his fists as a means of settling the score with the pigs who abused him, breaking his nose twice, scoring his knuckles with cuts.

Only when he was asked by an officer to take part in a show for the troops could he lift his spirit above the dreadful situation. At first, he didn’t want to expose himself on a stage and entertain the very people who’d been mistreating him, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to perform. George M. Cohan Jr. was also stationed in Cheyenne and convinced Sammy to help him create a touring production that would visit a number of military installations. Sammy threw himself into the work with a kind of violence, seeking release, vindication, and even revenge by being the best song-and-dance man anyone had ever seen.

“My talent was the weapon,” he recalled, “the power, the way for me to fight.” For the last eight months of his service time, the show was continually on the road, far from his most virulent antagonists. It kept him sane, maybe even alive.

But when he got out, his eyes having been opened to his situation as a black man with grand aspirations in America, he found himself increasingly crushed by the gap between his ambitions and his opportunities. He was befriended by Mickey Rooney, who, though still one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, was unable to get him movie work. He winced at the ebonic clichés employed by performers on the Chitlin Circuit. In reaction, he adopted a stage manner so patently artificial that he sounded, in his own words, like “a colored Laurence Olivier.” Even the tone-deaf Jerry Lewis was to encourage him to forgo his “with your kind permission we would now like to indulge” routine, but Sammy only did so after, typically, listening for several self-lacerating hours to tape recordings of his own inflated persiflage. And he reacted with despair and self-loathing whenever he was confronted with the insidious—and frequently overt—limits placed upon him in the Jim Crow era.

Nowhere were these barriers more painfully imposed than in Las Vegas, where the Will Mastin Trio debuted in 1944. Vegas was still a cowboy town, “the Mississippi of the West,” as blacks unfortunate enough to live there called it. The black population, whose members swelled the ranks of janitors, porters, and maids at the emerging hotel-casinos on the Los Angeles Highway (which had yet to be christened the Strip), was restricted to living, eating, shopping, and gambling in a downtrodden district known as Westside—a Tobacco Road of unpaved streets bereft of even wooden sidewalks, lined by shacks that lacked fire service, telephones, and, in many cases, electricity and indoor plumbing.

Sammy ought to have been used to segregation. The trio arrived in Vegas not long after a stint in Spokane, where they were forced, for lack of a black rooming house, to sleep in their dressing room. But Vegas galled him more than anything he’d experienced before, in part because of the appalling contrast between the glamour of the Last Frontier hotel and the shack in which he was forced to spend all of his offstage time, and in part because the gaiety and glitz of the casino—which he wasn’t allowed to walk through or even see—had an almost visceral allure for him.

As in the past, the only time he ever felt lifted out of himself and his miserable situation was onstage—“for 20 minutes, twice a night, our skin had no color.” As in the past, he fought off his frustrations and the indignities of racism with ferocious performances—“I was vibrating with energy and I couldn’t wait to get on the stage. I worked with the strength of 10 men.” But never, as he dreamed might happen, did a casino manager or owner grow so enamored of his performance that he broke the color line by offering him a drink and a chance to try his luck at the tables.

And so it went. He forced himself higher and higher in the ranks of showbiz, garnering accolades, cutting records, standing out a bit more from Big Sam and Mastin with each performance, getting paid a little better with each gig. At the same time, he was hustled by cops to the backs of movie theaters, snubbed at the doors of the Copacabana and Lindy’s, barred even from men’s rooms in some of the theaters he packed with paying customers. If he grew to hate himself in some twisted fashion, he could hardly be blamed.