The story goes that when Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall, saw the drunken crew all together in the casino, she told them, “You look like a goddamn rat pack.” In 1949 Sinatra had moved his family from L.A.’s Toluca Lake to Holmby Hills, just blocks from Bogart’s house, and the Hollywood rookie was inducted into a group of the film star’s drinking buddies. Postwar Americans had learned to take their popular culture spiked with a touch of risk, and Sinatra had molded his adult image on the sensitive tough guys portrayed in the movies by Humphrey Bogart.īogart in fact is central to Rat Pack history. Sinatra and Martin and the Rat Pack exuded machismo and danger, a style lent authority by their known associations with powerful and violent men. It was a giddy version of multiethnic American democracy in which class was replaced by “class.” The Rat Pack were more than entertainers, and the Summit was more than a stage act. Successful, self-assured, casual, occasionally vulgar, they were sign and symptom of what the war had done to the American WASP class system. The Rat Pack announced that a new generation was laying claim to American tradition and to the right to define American Cool: one black, one Jew, two Italians, and one feckless Hollywoodized Brit, three of them second-generation immigrants, four raised during the Depression in ethnic city neighborhoods.
FOUR MEMBERS OF THE RAT PACK MOVIE
Billed, with intentional swagger, as “the Summit” (a reference to the coming conference of Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and Khrushchev), their stage act took off like a rocket, its momentum carrying them beyond the three-week club date into movie and record and business deals, reprises in Miami, Atlantic City, and Palm Springs - power and influence unusual even for movie stars. In 1960, an unlikely group of entertainers, all loosely gathered around Frank Sinatra, went to Las Vegas to shoot a movie and do two nightclub shows each evening, spending most of the hours in between at all-night parties.
0 kommentar(er)
