The original 'RAT" Pack
Hate to disappoint you but John Wayne and Bob Hope were never part of the Rat Pack.
The original Rat Pack, also known as the Holmby Hills Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra (pack master), Judy Garland (first vice-president),
Lauren Bacall (den mother), Sid Luft (cage master), Humphrey Bogart (rat in charge of public relations), Swifty Lazar (recording
secretary and treasurer), Nathaniel Benchley (historian), plus David Niven, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Cukor, Cary
Grant, Rex Harrison, and Jimmy Van Heusen. (The original name was in honour of Bogart and Bacall's neighbourhood.) They even had
a coat of arms: a rat gnawing on a human hand. "We're against squares and for having fun and being real rats," said Bogart
about the group. The name is said to have come from Lauren Bacall, who'd come home to find Bogie and the gang freshly
returned from a jaunt to Las Vegas and looking appropriately stewed, and pronounced, "You look like a g@ddam rat pack!"
The group dissipated when Bogart died, but Frank Sinatra and his clique of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, and
Joey Bishop became known as the Hollywood Rat Pack or just the plain Rat Pack, when their friendship was seen solidified after
they made the original
Oceans 11. (Wags knowing their preferred nickname called the film a Clanbake.) They made
other films and did stage shows (Bishop wrote their comedy material) until the group began to splinter after the incident in
which Sinatra built a helipad at his Palm Springs digs to accommodate President Kennedy but---after brother Bobby advised
the President to duck Sinatra and stay with Bing Crosby, over Sinatra's alleged Mafia ties---found it gone for nothing, blamed
Lawford for not using more pull with his then in-laws, and ran him out of the Clan. Bishop drifted away from the group
gradually in the years to come.
They never referred to themselves as the Rat Pack. In fact, when Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. toured in
1987, Sinatra rebuked a reporter for referring to them as the Rat Pack---"that stupid phrase," the Chairman of the Broads (er,
Board) called it---during the press conference where they announced the tour.
I never saw Frank, Dean, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag! And do you believe these guys
had to chase broads? They had to chase 'em away!---Joey Bishop, remembering his days with the original Clan.
Bishop outlived all the Clan and was the only member to live into the 21st Century. He wrote their comic stage material and
is rumoured to have written this monologue for Sinatra:
Frank Sinatra, The Tea Break
