Word: sinatras
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Until not so long ago, Sinatra's notion of cool was deader than an imploded casino in Vegas. Bourbon on the rocks and snap-brim hats were your parents'--no, worse, your grandparents'--idea of hip, stuff that looked quaint beside the bug-eyed alienation of the 1960s. Hippies wore blissed-out smiles and ponchos. Sinatra wore cuff links, roughly $30,000 worth in the mid-1950s, when that kind of money bought a house or two. In the Oedipal drama of the counterculture, Frank was the daddy-o who must die. He could swing his raincoat over his shoulder...
...Sinatra was not to be undone so easily, and not just because anyone with taste in music never let go of him in the first place. His explosive inner life, which he wore on that cuff-linked sleeve, connected him from the first to the big feelings that the '60s passed along to the decades that followed. We just didn't see it at the time. And by now, baby boomers who once turned away from him are old enough to recognize how he created the Rat Pack in part as a defense against his own aging...
...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...
...middle class of the postwar years, all this was strangely captivating. The working guy and his wife were discovering prosperity. Sinatra ushered them into cafe society on their own terms: dinner jacket but no top hats. First class all the way but nothing fancy. Ordinary guys were anxious--and anxious is the word--to show that they understood the bits of nightclub chivalry that Frank knew all about, like how to light a lady's cigarette. All the same, they wanted to cut loose, the way Sinatra wore his tie--undone, a sign of his narrow escape from a workaday...
...wasn't always a lot of fun to be a woman in that set, where the ladies could be called tramps at a moment's notice. Or to be Sammy Davis Jr., who had to endure Sinatra's cornball racial jesting at its worst. But for Sinatra, the sumptuous early '60s were a Golden Age, when gambling was still glamorous, smoking had charm and "dapper" was something you might actually want to be called. Naturally he was infatuated with J.F.K., just 18 months younger, an Irishman born to the Ivy League credentials and Establishment credibility that Sinatra never...