It's Frank and the boys, baby
by Michael Maiello
I thought Frank Sinatra died last weekend. A local radio station aired an afternoon long retrospective on Sinatra's career, complete with music, interviews, and remembrances. It sounded like Frank had died. A
stranger in the grocery storetalked about the death. I thought Frank had
died, and it crushed me.
Frank Sinatra, ailing in hospital, will soon go the way of Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin, who both passed on in the 90's. Sure, Frank lost his voice long ago (the Duets he recorded with contemporary pop stars are horrible, despite their kitsch value). But a world without the Rat Pack--I shudder. Where are those gin swilling, cigar smoking, black suited men who call women "baby" and make even obscene gestures with style and grace?
When people talk about rebels, they like to talk about James Dean tough guys, and mumbling Marlon Brando. But those guys defined frontier rebel tough. Like John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood. The Rat Pack were a different tough. You never worried that Frank would break your fingers. But if you crossed Frank, someone would threaten your digits in a dark alley.
The Rat Pack had that Mafioso toughness. The toughness of influence. These guys aren't going to trash anyone a la Stallone. But you don't mess with them. Stallone enters a room, and he has to take his shirt off before people say "that guy's tough." Brando has to mumble and crush walnuts in his hand before people say "that guy's tough." Dean needed a motorcycle and a leather jacket.
The Rat Pack does it all with style. They dress well. They're funny. They're arrogant. They can sing, and dance and put on a show from early evening until the wee hours of the morning. They're delightfully abusive to the audience. Last year, my friend Miguel introduced me to a double cd set, a rare recording of Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra performing at the Villa Venice in Chicago, 1967. The three of them are on the cover, laughing and singing, and Frank -- he's flipping off whoever's taking the picture.
It's a wild recording. Perhaps the only live recording I own which makes me wish more than anything that I could have been at that show. The three are obviously drunk through the performance. They're playing, rather than working. Which is part of their appeal. The lives of the Rat Pack are presented as a game. These are the three great players at the game of life. "You wanna hear us sing serious?" Dean asks the audience, "then you go by an album."
The three engage in a bawdy medley that starts with Frank singing "brassieres... I dig a broad with no brassiere." Dean follows up with "nothing could be finer than to shack up with a minor>>" but he explains he means a "John L. Lewis miner, with the gloves and the light on his hat."
In the every over sensitive nineties, it's great to see a trio made of two wops and a black Jew get racial without consequence. Dean sings, "Have you ever seen a Jew jitsu? Well I did." Sammy counters with "have you ever seen a wopsicle? Well I did."
Asked by Frank to explain "wopsicle," Sammy counters, "That's a pizza on a stick." So Frank goes to the food cart for a little mulignon on toast. "That's eggplant, for all you rednecks from outta town." Eggplant, for all you who haven't been to the east coast, is what wops call black people. Leave it to the two races with the biggest noses to start cutting each other down. And I'm a wop, so I can say that with a clear conscience. Later, Frank and Sammy sing "Me and My Shadow."
These guys know that entertainment can't be contained. They performed with complete abandon. They were more reckless than a circus.
But two are dead, and Frank's dying. The trio is loved by the 90's lounge culture. The martini set who buy those brightly colored CD's which feature easy listening singers covering songs like the Theme from Shaft. The cigar set that Newsweek, the media elite, and the health conscious are in such a huff about.
The Rat Pack's celebration of vice is just what our country needed after two world wars and a bout with prohibition. It's just what we need now, as we linger onthe edge of tobacco prohibition. More license. More abandon. More reckless lives!
Sammy and Dean are dead. Frank is dying. but those guys lived. They made movies, and sang, and drank, and danced, and slept with beautiful women, and had wonderful families, and drank, and smoked, and drank some more. They lived.
It's not the end when Frank passes on. It's time put on a good suit, get a martini with three olives, and call the gin. Time to get the $11 cigar. Time to write congress and tell them that I don't want their petty political concerns to get in the way of me and genuine Havana stogie. Time to get trashed, and go home with a girl on your arm. Time to live the hedonism that started not with the Beatles, and not with the sixties, but with three well dressed men, a cart of food, a cabinet of booze, cigarettes and microphones.
It's time to get over this mess of rules and behavior control we call society. But rebellion doesn't lie in a pair of Birkenstocks. Do what you like, but do it with class. That's gonna take us into the next century and beyond. Baby.
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