Rat Pack Confidential - Hardcover

Levy, Shawn

3.78

1,727 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385487517 ISBN 13: 9780385487511

Publisher: Doubleday, 1998

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

For the first time, the full story of what happened when Frank Sinatra brought his best pals to party in a land called Vegas.

January 1960. Las Vegas is at its smooth, cool peak. The Strip is a jet-age theme park, and the greatest singer in the history of American popular music summons a group of friends there to make a movie.

One is an insouciant singer of Italian songs, ex-partner to the most popular film comedian of the day. One is a short, black, Jewish, one-eyed, singing, dancing wonder. One is an upper-crust British pretty boy turned degenerate B-movie actor, brother-in-law to an ascendant politician. And one is a stiff-shouldered comic with the quintessential Borscht Belt emcee's knack for needling one-liners.

The architectonically sleek marquee of the Sands Hotel announces their presence simply by listing their names:

FRANK SINATRA.
DEAN MARTIN.
SAMMY DAVIS, JR.
PETER LAWFORD.
JOEY BISHOP.

Around them an entire cast gathers: actors, comics, singers, songwriters, gangsters, politicians, and women, as well as thousands of starstruck everyday folks who fork over pocketfuls of money for the privilege of basking in their presence. They call themselves The Clan. But to an awed world, they are known as The Rat Pack.

They had it all. Fame. Gorgeous women. A fabulous playground of a city and all the money in the world. The backing of fearsome crime lords and the blessing of the President of the United States. But the dark side--over the thin line between pleasure and debauchery, between swinging self-confidence and brutal arrogance--took its toll. In four years, their great ride was over, and showbiz was never the same.

Acclaimed Jerry Lewis biographer Shawn Levy has written a dazzling portrait of a time when neon brightness cast sordid shadows. It was Frank's World, and we just lived in it.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

If you're not inclined to read individual biographies of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., Shawn Levy's Rat Pack Confidential is a perfect one-stop resource. Less a group biography than a series of impressionistic snapshots, the book is loaded with can't-miss material--the dirt on the making of Ocean's Eleven, information about Sinatra's wild stint as a casino owner, deep background on Peter Lawford's habit of introducing Jack Kennedy to glamorous starlets, wiretap transcripts of mobsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Formosa discussiong Dean Martin's lack of respect.

Levy, whose previous book, King of Comedy, is a serious consideration of Jerry Lewis's life and career, offers similarly well considered insights into the members of the Rat Pack. He covers Davis's lifelong struggle against racism and the complicated intertwinings of the Kennedy political machine and "the Clan," as the performers preferred to be called (they often denied anything like the Rat Pack even existed and resisted collective references).

The book's debts to its predecessors are often apparent; much of the material on Sinatra's friendship with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, for example, appears to have been gleaned from recent Bogart biographies. The writing style, which tries to capture the ring-a-ding-ding feel of the era, also owes serious debts to Nick Tosches by way of James Ellroy, while only intermittently reaching their level of mastery. But these are minor quibbles. As a synthesis of thirty years worth of journalism and celebrity biography, Rat Pack Confidential succeeds in portraying the supernova blowout of old-school showbiz in all its dazzling glory.

From the Publisher:

Acclaim for Shawn Levy's King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis:

"Superb....Levy's ambitious (and entirely successful) biography is a model of what a celebrity bio ought to be--smart, knowing, insightful, often funny, full of fascinating insiders' stories, always respectful but never worshipful."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Among the finest, most show business-savvy screen biographies ever written."
--Boston Phoenix

"One of the great, clear-eyed showbiz biographies of our time--a book worthy of comparison to the genre masterpiece, John Lahr's Notes on a Cowardly Lion."
--Boxoffice

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.