Dean lifts Sammy in his arms and says, “I’d like to thank the N.A.A.C.P. Sammy mentions something about getting Martin Luther King Jr.’s permission to appear.
The racial ribbing, though not as crass or persistent as the kidding on the Villa Venice CD, conveys the edginess of the civil-rights era. Dean amuses, Sammy is mahvelous, but only Sinatra, with his Manhattan-skyline voice, conjures a mood and a spell.Īfter Sinatra’s set comes the usual Rat Pack foolery, some at Dean’s expense (“The only reason he’s got a good tan, he found a bar with a skylight”), but with Sammy as the primary butt. At one point, alluding to Sammy’s set, he says that the song he’s about to perform makes for “a slight duplication here, but I don’t think you’ll mind too much,” launching into his own rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” which he contours and tattoos as if romancing for the first time. Frank Sinatra has been called great for so long that it’s easy to forget how great he is. And then there’s Sinatra, confident, not the Adam’s apple on a stick he was or the barrel-chested belter he would become, cruising inside the luxury-limousine sound of the Count Basie band, not so much singing the up-tempo numbers (“Fly Me to the Moon,” “You Make Me Feel So Young”) as riding them home, his rabbit jabs providing the punctuation to his cagey phrasing and eased-off vowels. There’s Dean Martin with his sleepy power, like a leopard in a smoking jacket, finishing his few songs with the words “I’d like to do some more for ya, but I’m lucky I remembered these.” There’s Sammy Davis Jr., a gleaming revolver of a man, belting out a maudlin Anthony Newley torch song as if he means it, goofing around with “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (“it’s a little lumpy, but you’re under my skin”), demonstrating the latest go-go dances (the monkey, the jerk, the frug, the mashed potato), and, in a final tour de force, doing quick carbon copies of Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, and Dean himself. It’s an opportunity to catch three of America’s greatest showmen in their tigerish prime (with Carson along for the ride), before they became total legends and turned into leather. It has the glamorous wham of a championship prizefight. (A two-volume compact disc exists of the Rat Pack performing at the Villa Venice club in Chicago in 1962-a gig they were strong-armed into doing by the mobster Sam Giancana.) The Rat Pack kine-scope, found in a closet at the Dismas House, is more than a historical curio. The edited 90-minute version of the benefit-featuring Frank, Dino, Sammy, and Johnny-represents the only known full-length video of the Rat Pack in performance. A recently discovered kinescope of this bash-under the new title, The Rat Pack Captured-will be screened this month at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York and at the Los Angeles branch, and will also be broadcast later this year on “Nick at Nite”’s cable channel. Joey Bishop was listed on the original program, but had to bow out when he “slipped a disk backing out of Frank’s presence,” according to Carson, his replacement, who was only three years into his tenure as host of The Tonight Show.
Sinatra said, “Be there,” and they were there-Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Trini Lopez, Kaye Stevens, and an amalgamation of two different bands, including members of the Count Basie Orchestra, conducted by a lean cat named Quincy Jones. The year is 1965 the event, billed as a “Frank Sinatra Spectacular” and broadcast on closed circuit to theaters across the country, is a benefit for Father Dismas Clark’s Half-Way House for excons. ” With these words of mock homage, an astonishingly young and lanky Johnny Carson introduces Frank Sinatra to the stage of the Kiel Opera House in St.
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