The truth about Ocean's Eleven Rat Pack

They might have been the epitome of cool - hence the remake of Ocean's Eleven - but the truth about the Rat Pack is nastier, says DAVID THOMSON.

Anything close to an honest movie about the Rat Pack, made without glamour but which explained the workings of modern America, could give fresh meaning to the word "horror".

The movie Ocean's Eleven harks back to the grand old days of the Rat Pack. Don't be fooled. The picture is fatuous junk - the history remains.

Take Francis Albert Sinatra. Sinatra was America's singing rage by 1940. He had been with the Harry James band and the Tommy Dorsey band, and he was a freelancer in the early 1940s, beginning to think of movies. The first film in which he appeared with the Dorsey band was made in 1941, and it was called Las Vegas Nights.

In 1941 not many Americans had heard of Las Vegas. In 1940 there were only 8500 oddballs in the Vegas area. The biggest town in Nevada (total population 110,000) was Reno, with 21,000 people.

Las Vegas was a place for prospectors, crazies, ranchers, cowboys, Indians and a few Hollywood mavericks - those who liked the idea of a desert getaway, drivable from Los Angeles, but so unknown as to be discreet. In brief, Hollywood's gay crowd used Las Vegas. And that is why a Polish piano-player named Liberace played there before other entertainers.

Sinatra, meanwhile, was all contradictions: he was tiny, scrawny and with a voice that could melt hearts. A lot of women wanted to take care of him. But Sinatra was also foul-mouthed, bad-tempered and so vicious that he often beat people up. Until the end there was always this mix, and you either tolerated it, or you got out of his way.

But Sinatra was a smart guy, and when he went to the desert to shoot Las Vegas Nights he looked around and said: this is waiting to happen. If you could get air-conditioning and water in here, for sure, you could bring Angelenos out for a racy weekend.

There were pluses: Las Vegas allowed gambling and prostitution. And the water and power were a possibility, thanks to the building of Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Frank Sinatra had a plan for a hotel-casino just outside Vegas around 1943. He used to talk about it to his chums, one of whom was Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, a Mob man in Los Angeles, revered by Frank and his good friend Phil Silvers (later to become Sergeant Bilko).

Sinatra and Silvers were always latching on to Siegel - another handsome guy, well dressed and sweet as could be until he lost his temper. Sinatra and Siegel - they understood each other. And Siegel stole his idea.

There is argument over that, but no one was ever struck by Siegel's ideas, and no one doubted that Sinatra had actually broken ground before Siegel's big dream, the Flamingo, took off.

Not that Sinatra was bitter. He had friends in the Mob. You don't have to believe in that story about the horse's head in The Godfather. But when Sinatra wanted to be released from his contract with Harry James to go with Tommy Dorsey, James just let him go because something persuaded him it was a good idea.

There's a lot of detail that could be plugged in here if you wanted it, like Sinatra flying to Cuba in 1947 to sing at a meeting of Mob leaders called by Lucky Luciano. And it's quite all right with me if you want to believe Sinatra's line about how, if anyone cared to come back to his dressing-room and say, "Great singing job, wop", why, Sinatra would shake his hand and have a drink with a music-lover.

The Flamingo opened in 1947. It was a disaster at first, because the whole thing was 100 per cent over estimates, with Siegel or his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, pocketing the extra. So the guys who funded it put a bullet in Siegel's eye, which killed him.

After that, Vegas began to take off, and by the early 1950s it was a gambling haven, where you could buy a girl and take her to the floor show that had Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Judy Garland, or Sinatra.

So what was the Rat Pack, you're asking? It was a small private society organised around Humphrey Bogart. Bogart was another of those guys Sinatra really looked up to: call it the natural affinity of little men with mean tempers, an alcohol habit and insecurity about their toupee slipping.

For years, Bogart cultivated a hard-drinking, fast-talking clique that specialised in cruel practical jokes and the affectation of taking nothing seriously. Bogart's young wife Lauren Bacall called them the Rat Pack some time in the late 40s, when the group included Bogart, David Niven, John Huston sometimes, Mike Romanoff the restaurateur, Swifty Lazar the agent, Jimmy van Huesen the songwriter. And Sinatra.

And Sinatra was around because, once Ava Gardner had dumped him, he started going after Bacall. The Bogart-Bacall bond is one of those legends we all cherish. But in the name of history I have to break it to you that Sinatra was going around with Bacall, taking her off to Las Vegas sometimes, a few years before Bogart died but when he had cancer. You see, sexually, Bogie wasn't quite the same after the cancer.

Sinatra liked to go to Vegas, not just because he often sang there, but because he owned a significant piece of the Sands Hotel casino as well as a part of the Cal-Neva Lodge up on Lake Tahoe. That old urge to be in the Vegas business himself had come through, but Sinatra had a problem sometimes with the Nevada State Gaming Board, because he seemed to have had a drink with so many made men.

Bogart died in 1957. And for a year and a bit it was a big bet that Sinatra would marry Bacall, after a suitable period of mourning. Bacall even went so far as to tell that to the press, whereupon Sinatra dropped her. You never took Sinatra for granted.

But Sinatra was very active in show business at this time as a long-playing record genius, as a movie star and a nightclub act, and Vegas was becoming an international tourist spot. Sinatra was making a fortune, which he didn't want to lose.

This is how the Rat Pack became reincarnated, though Sinatra kind of took it for granted that he could hijack the name and the club and use it for his purposes. So he let the idea of the pack hang over the way he and his buddies were in and out of Vegas most of that time.

The buddies were Dean Martin (lately freed from his dazzling but exhausting partnership with Jerry Lewis), Sammy Davis jun (the black entertainer who was a Vegas hit before he was able to stay in the hotels) and Peter Lawford. Even at the time, some people wondered how Lawford got into the club, as his uneasy years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had established that he couldn't act, couldn't sing and couldn't dance.

But Peter Lawford was married to a sister of Senator John Kennedy. And Kennedy had this idea about being President, an office that would have undoubted influence with the Nevada State Gaming Board.

The very late 50s and 1960 (the year of the original Ocean's Eleven) were the high point of the new Rat Pack, and there were nights when Sinatra, Dean, Sammy and Peter Lawford were together at some casino floor show, ad-libbing for hours, hilarious sometimes, but then flat-out nasty.

Again, Sinatra was an odd mixture: a famous Democrat, he was a big public defender of blacks and other minorities. He stood up for Davis, but sometimes if he was drunk or triumphant enough he claimed the right to make vile jokes about Davis, in front of him, at which Davis was expected to fall over laughing.

Sinatra was very powerful. He sometimes attacked visitors in the casinos, or humble croupiers, if they crossed him, or looked at him with something less than awe. The fights were generally hushed up, because Sinatra knew Kennedy and people like Mob boss Sam Giancana.

This is the very nasty tangle that affected America as JFK won the presidency - and that 1960 election depended upon a little influence on the machinery in Illinois and West Virginia, an influence the Mob helped with and thought they were owed for.

There is also the fact that a woman named Judith Exner (at least) was in and out of bed with Sinatra, the President and Giancana. It was an embarrassment that brought J. Edgar Hoover into the game, and it all ended with Sinatra being very publicly dropped by the Kennedys.

This tangle is too intricate to be dealt with thoroughly in an article of this length. There is still a meeting ground for what is known and what can be speculated over. But Sinatra changed - he became a Republican.

The Mob felt especially aggrieved (they saw themselves as businessmen) when Kennedy's brother, Robert, launched a vindictive campaign against them. And then John Kennedy was shot in circumstances that oddly resembled a little film Sinatra had made in the 50s called Suddenly, where he is the hired hitman who means to kill a president.

I don't know who shot JFK. But I'm not easily persuaded that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all on his own.

That intrigue isn't even the point. For what happened in 1963 and in so many ways has kept happening is part of the poisoned dream that a guys' club, a little band of bullying, privilege and swagger, with strings to pull, can run the country and run it into the ground.

So when you recollect the Rat Pack, don't fall for the nostalgia, or the charm. Just think of rat behaviour.

- INDEPENDENT