The Rat Pack's Final Curtain

Joey Bishop Was The Last of the Entertainers Who Did It Their Way

They were such wonderful merchants of entertainment. Five hepcats carousing on a Las Vegas stage. The marquee outside the Sands Hotel would sometimes stack their names upon each other: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop. At other times it said only: "They're here."

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The hotels would be booked solid. It was as if even the mountains in the distance knew that the Rat Pack was in town.

Wit and savoir-faire were their stock in trade. There wasn't a miser among them. They each knew showbiz had more sad stories than happy ones and therefore would tip splendidly. They didn't run from waiters and dishwashers. They each could spare a dime and did so happily.

With the passing Wednesday of the slyly quiet Joey Bishop, they're all gone now. At least in the flesh.

The group's emergence in the '50s as both friends and co-headliners was all so spontaneous that it is hard to imagine now how their charm and silliness -- seasoned with a bit of social activism -- became so popular so quickly, defining a time before Vietnam and the sexual revolution changed America and its entertainers.

Steve Blauner, a former Hollywood movie producer, saw the Rat Pack in person as many times as he could in Las Vegas. He was enraptured. "They were the three greatest entertainers living," he says of Dean, Frank and Sammy. "Everybody wanted to be Dean. Dean was the coolest. He was like your big brother. Everybody wanted to sing like Frank. And Sammy happened to be the world's greatest entertainer."

No longer will writers troop up to Bishop's California home pleading for one more morsel about those days: Anything, Mr. Bishop, about Frank and the fellows? Did you ever see Sammy hanging out with Kim Novak? What can you say about Frank and the mob? Joey mostly wouldn't talk about the other members of the Rat Pack; he had no dark stories to share. He found nostalgia sweet and wished to keep it private. He liked each member. It's that ephemeral thing called showbiz love.

Bishop had long worked as a stand-up comic. Sometimes he opened for Sinatra. Jess Rand -- who traveled with Davis and his 1940s vaudeville act -- once caught Joey opening for Frank at the Copacabana. Joey walked onstage and the place was jampacked. He leaned into the microphone, Rand recalls, and talked about the overflow crowd. Then he raised his voice quite loudly and said: "Hey, Frank. And you thought I couldn't draw a crowd!"

Would stars of today risk such a group undertaking? Would clashing egos survive such a thing? It hardly seems likely.

Rudi Eagan, a piano player, got to Las Vegas in 1955, a struggling kid from back East, full of music dreams. He got himself over to the Sands Hotel, and there, goofing onstage -- the cigarette smoke like a see-through curtain -- was the Rat Pack. "They had a unique thing going," says Eagan, who wound up playing gigs with Frank and Sammy. "They made you feel like you were in somebody's living room."

Eagan, who still lives in Vegas, recalls the town as being quite small then -- "less than 30,000 people" -- and everyone was crazy about the Rat Pack. After the shows -- after Dean had sung "Sittin' on Top of the World," and Sammy and Frank had sung "Me and My Shadow," and the last view of mink coat had slid beyond the door -- the guys would climb down offstage and head out to the casino, tossing the dice, sipping drinks. "They'd be trying to help people win," says Eagan. "They'd drive the pit bosses crazy."

As freewheeling as they were, they were still familiar with the politics of the day.