Word: rat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...aspiring journalist who goes undercover to write about--you guessed it--high school students. "I'm at an interesting place," explains Barrymore, 23. "I'm numerically and biologically young, but I feel so much older because I've lived a fast life. I've been in the working rat race my whole life too, and that always ages you in a great...
...should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all? --King Lear...
Joey Bishop, 80 years old now, is not at all sentimental about the Rat Pack's renewed cultural currency. Nor is he pleased. On the phone from Newport Beach, Calif., where he lives with his wife of 57 years, Sylvia, he says he 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...
...problem, as he sees it, is that the Rat Pack's story has been corrupted by "so many lies" and a fetishistic--my word--tendency to make too big a deal out of trivia such as Rat Pack slang and haberdashery. "I don't understand this searching for things that weren't there," he says. "It's like a hunger." One senses that being a living legend--the others, of course, are no longer with us--is an awful kind of limbo. It is as if the world were telling him, "Roll over, let go already...
...issue Bishop is particularly sensitive about is his position in the Rat Pack. He was the pro comedian who anchored the group's anarchic stage performances and conceived much of its material--Sinatra called him "the Hub of the Big Wheel." He and Martin were also the only ones who could make jokes at Sinatra's expense. Yet Bishop is often portrayed as the expendable member, the one who was lucky to be along for the ride, the Ringo. In books he usually has fewer index entries than even Lawford. "One guy wrote that I worked with the Rat Pack...