Word: sinatras
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...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...
...Kennedy eventually betrayed Sinatra by choosing to stay with the more wholesome Bing Crosby during a visit to California. It was a humiliation that sent Sinatra rightward, into the arms of Nixon, then Reagan, which is where a lot of his audience was going in any case. Years had to pass before he could re-emerge entirely as a lodestar of bipartisan style. "I am," he once said, "a thing of beauty." It was a complicated beauty, but he had a point...
Over the years, more than a few promoters have thought, "Hey, here's a good-lookin' kid who can carry a tune; maybe he can be the next Frank Sinatra." More than a few were wrong. Singers could be very talented and still not be Sinatra. Here's how a few measured on Frank's Ring-A-Ding Rating...