Rat Pack Confidential by Shawn Levy

Hell hath no fury like a hustler
with a literary agent.

September 2021…. I’m catching up!

I can’t help but feel this blog would be better if I wrote as I read, my immediate thoughts captured and a true to life reading experience recorded for posterity. But that’s work, isn’t it? And if I was writing I wouldn’t be reading, so it is, as they say, what it is, take it as you find it.

I sound like my mother.

So, um, Shawn Levy’s second celebrity exposé then. Let me think. What did I feel when I was reading it?

Okay, the verifiable facts – I didn’t know a lot of the background to the Rat Pack, as Frank’s little drinking gang of Sammy, Dino, Joey and Peter was dubbed by Lauren Bacall. I could pick Sammy and Dino out of a lineup of actors who starred in The Cannonball Run, alongside Corporal Max Klinger from M*A*S*H, and Frank I knew from the one worn-out Christmas album we had at Waterstone’s (back when it still possessed its possessive apostrophe). Peter Lawford something something someone Kennedy, and Joey Bishop…. I dunno.

Ah, oh yes, Vegas baby, Ocean’s Eleven (the first one), That’s Amore, Mack the Knife, Mr Bojangles, um, was one of them in the Mafia? And one of them probably shagged Monroe at some point I’m guessing. Not so much a fact, verifiable or otherwise, but honestly, I didn’t give two tuppenny bits.

Of course, then Frank went and died, almost exactly six months before this book popped up and into the best-sellers list, Christmas 1998, my… second Christmas as a bookseller? It was every-fucking-where, and suddenly any wannabe dickwad was into all that Hollywood jive, the sleaze and glamour, the Vegas parties and JFK’s-a-mobster bullshit – he probably was, but just fuck off and keep fucking off until you’ve fucked all the way off. If a man’s death and prolonged eulogy ever turned someone off someone’s music and life-story, this was the doozy, the big enchilada.

I was so far off, it took me a while to work my way back.

Nearly 23 years.

When I finally got around to picking up a copy, I have to say, I enjoyed it. I got back (ha, yeah, right) into Sammy Davis Jnr’s big time showbusiness showstoppers, I even got a copy of a ‘best of’ Dean Martin album. And I forgave the perpetrators of the Rat Pack Christmas album we played in the shop on repeat from 1^st November to 1^st January, 1997 through to around 2009 or 10 – I can’t seem to confirm this – when Waterstone’s got themselves some absolutely terrible in-house radio channels.

It's a fun biography (if you can biograph – that’s a word, right? – a group of people).

I won’t rehash the decades-old stories – that’s Levy’s job anyway – but did you know that the Rat Pack was originally Bogart’s own drinking group? Did you know Frank took over when Bogie died, and also took over Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall at the same time? I didn’t. Did you know over the years it included Mickey Rooney, Lena Horne, Robert Mitchum, Jerry Lewis, Rex Harrison, David Niven, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, and of course, Rat Pack mascots Shirley MacLaine and the one and only Norma Jeane Mortenson? I do now! And did you know that, frankly, Frank was a bit of a cunt? I guessed as much to be fair to the me of back-then, and Levy confirms as much.

But the one thing I didn’t enjoy, the one overly tight ligature to choke-off my fun, is Levy. He writes like some sort of proto-hipster in the Golden/Jazz-era meaning, a peeping tom, a crawling, guttersnipe weirdo who talks like a 50s wise guy and gets off on trashy gossip and thrives in the light reflected by the tarnished gold stars on Hollywood & Vine. He properly creeps me out. I saw he’d written a De Niro biog, but, nah, I won’t be bothering.

(Paid link)