Word: ratted
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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...
...gigantic Sinatra fan. Some people find it hard to believe that a high school student would listen to someone as "dull and old" as he. That was exactly how I felt until about a year ago, when I discovered the hip coolness that Frank and his Rat Pack buddies displayed in their heyday. When I broke up with my girlfriend a few weeks ago, I went into my room, turned out the lights and listened to In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning...for an entire night. Even with the variety of music around these days, such as alternative...
...could see the lingering lure of Astaire art in the reaction to Frank Sinatra's death. That wasn't just Rat Pack nostalgia. It was an effusion of fondness and respect for a fine song finely sung, for vocal connoisseurship, for the ability--the first or the thousandth time he sings a song--to mine the meaning of a lyric...