Daylight hours you’ll find them rummaging through used CD shops for rare Sinatra and Martin records. And there are thousands of these slick-looking, wanna-be Rat Packers who trail to Swing clubs and prefer to groove to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the Brian Setzer Orchestra. (I have attended numerous parties and clubs where the drink of choice is a martini, and even those who don’t actually enjoy its taste are eager to nurse a cool-looking martini glass, and nibble on the olives, instead.) The modern touch to this drink is that now it’s offered in a variety of blends: you can actually even order a “cappuccino” or “chocolate” martini these days.ĭepending on the city, martini bars are frequented either by well-groomed, successful, conservative-looking professionals who simply have acquired a taste for the drink, or more interestingly, by the Rat Pack and Swing aficionados who are eager to revive the music and lifestyle of those yesteryears. Martini bars started cropping up in droves all around the country a few years ago, serving that oh, so chic and swanky drink to those who could actually stomach it. It’s been five years since Sinatra died, and it’s safe to say that now, in his great Martini Lounge in the Sky, the chairman of the board and his fellow Rat Packers are laughing about the everlasting impressions they have made, as we’re amid a full-force revival of that “make me a Martini and put on a Sinatra record” era of the Rat Pack years.
In recent years, we witnessed the return of the hippie ’60s and the retro ’70s, a brief homage to the turbulent punk-rock infested years. But history, particularly in the entertainment genre, often repeats itself, and the greats always make a comeback beyond the grave. From the hip-swiveling Elvis to the bad boy Rolling Stones to Punk to Grunge to Hollywood’s eternal offerings of glam actors, the world is consistently bombarded with images of what and who is hot and what and who is not, and we try to adjust accordingly, depending on our tastes. The world is a fickle place, and given the barrage of styles and entertainers that the entertainment industry offers in huge doses, we are always on the lookout for the next great fad. Trends, and more specifically, trendsetters, are a dime a dozen. And as one after another died, leaving Bishop by his lonesome, the world realized that an important part of cultural history died with them.
They had elegance, panache, glamour, and an allure of je-ne-sais-quois recklessness.
And what a life he and his fellow Rat Packers led, indeed. Sinatra said you only live once, but that if you had lived as he had, once was quite enough. Sinatra, the “chairman of the board” bid the world farewell in 1998, at the age of 82. Wonderful” was perhaps the most talented of the lot. The mighty Sinatra was the “Voice” Martin was the happy-go-lucky, dashing crooner and resident wit Lawford was a handsome Hollywood leading man and brother-in-law of JFK Bishop was the comedian and song-and-dance man “Smokey” Davis “Mr. At the height of their success and popularity in the ’50s and ’60s, the Rat Pack (an offshoot of Humphrey Bogart’s Holmby Hills rat pack) dominated the airwaves, the entertainment circuit, TV, the music industry, and films. They were the Rat Pack: comprised of leader-of-the-Pack Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop.Īh, those were the days: when they owned Vegas specifically, their stomping ground, the Sands hotel and Hollywood, and everybody who was anybody wanted a part of the Rat Pack allure. They were handsome, wore flash suits, chain-smoked, drank swank martinis like there was no tomorrow, gambled, cavorted with crime bosses and politicians alike, had a slew of fleeting paramours, said and did as they pleased, feared no one, and ruled the entertainment world with their formidable talents.
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