Word: lawford
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...doesn't much like giving interviews (while graciously agreeing to this one). So, I ask, to what does he attribute the ongoing obsession with his early '60s apotheosis, the nights in Vegas clowning around on stage and off with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford? "Could it be anything else but money?" he snaps, resenting all the new books, the tributes, the upcoming HBO movie, the kids pretending to be swingers. More or less retired, he could have used this interview for an autumnal victory lap, but deflating show-biz pretense was always part...
...first version of the Rat Pack dates to the mid-'50s, when it convened around Humphrey Bogart. But the name entered the collective consciousness only after Bogart's death in 1957, when Sinatra assumed leadership and gathered in new buddies like Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford. Their supreme moment arrived in early 1960, when Sinatra, Davis, Lawford, Dean Martin and Joey Bishop gathered in Las Vegas to film the casino-robbery caper Ocean's Eleven. Every night for three weeks, after the day's shooting was over, they all played--and played!--the Sands, a Mob-connected casino...
...Ocean's Eleven (1960). The Rat Pack. Rat Pack movies are tough. Frank, Dean, Sammy, Lawford and Bishop: you try so hard to love them as much as they loved themselves. Ocean's Eleven is the prototype, and probably the best of them. Good plot (army buddies knock over five Vegas casinos), and Cesar Romero is great icing as kingpin Duke Santos. But it's stiffly paced and self-indulgent. Go ahead and see it anyway...
...life was just as stormy. Her first husband, Harold Nicholas of the dance team, was absent and faithless; their daughter Lynn was brain damaged and had to be institutionalized. Her second marriage, to Las Vegas sharpie Jack Denison, yanked her into bankruptcy. Her trysts with Preminger, Jurgens, Peter Lawford and others left her forlorn. Her nightclub career dipped; after Porgy and Bess (1959), good film offers dried up. Dorothy was yesterday's darling...
...forces Kennedy to break off the affair, which leaves Marilyn so distraught that she takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. The suicide scene is the film's lunatic climax: so many people scurry in and out of Marilyn's house as the actress lies dying (among them Peter Lawford, Bobby himself and an ambulance team that rushes her to the hospital and then back again, under orders from the FBI) that it looks like the stateroom sequence from A Night at the Opera...