Thursday, April 16, 1998 | 11:22 a.m.
HOLLYWOOD - The time is 1959. The setting is Ciro's nightclub on Sunset Strip, a smoky hangout for stars, starlets and hangers-on. Sammy Davis Jr. is onstage after a sizzling tap dance. Swallowing back tears, he lifts a whisky glass and begins a round of thanks.
"And last but never least," he says, "a man who picked me up when I was so very down, the most generous human being I have ever known, my leader, my friend: Frank Sinatra." And Sinatra enters from the wings, pausing to light a cigarette.
Moments later, Rob Cohen, director of a new Home Box Office film, "The Rat Pack," watched as the actors, Don Cheadle as Davis and Ray Liotta as Sinatra, left the stage at a theater in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles. "This is about an era that has never been explored in quite this way," said Cohen, who has directed films like "Daylight" and "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story."
"These guys, the Rat Pack, were of that moment. They were men behaving badly and being loved for it. They broke society's rules in a way that most men fantasized about breaking the rules. And they were ethnic. They were Italians and a black and a Jew. They didn't look like Tab Hunter or Rock Hudson. They said, 'Love us or don't love us, but we're here.' "
Cohen's film is one of two current Hollywood projects about the Rat Pack: Sinatra, Davis, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and the one nonethnic member, Peter Lawford. They may have been paradigms of cool in the late 1950s and early 60s, or the members of an unfunny Las Vegas lounge act who treated women, and each other, with veiled contempt. But the Rat Pack's private dramas and complexities - including friendships with Mafia chiefs, high-class call girls and John F. Kennedy - were more compelling than their bad boy act: drink in one hand, cigarette in the other.
And it is these private dramas that dominate "The Rat Pack," a two-hour film now being completed for showing later in the year. The movie, written by Kario Salem, who also wrote HBO's acclaimed "Don King: Only in America," cost about $9 million. It also stars Joe Mantegna, looking eerily like Martin, and the British actor Angus Macfadyen, as Lawford, depicted as a pathetic courtier shuttling between the Kennedys and the Rat Pack, a man who is seen as desperately groveling before Sinatra and finally discarded by him.
The making of "The Rat Pack" coincided with plans by Warner Brothers for a Martin Scorsese theatrical film about Dean Martin, being written by Nicholas Pileggi, based on several biographies. Production is tentatively set for October, with Tom Hanks playing Martin.
Bill Gerber, president of production at Warner Brothers, said, "The fact is, you don't meet a young writer, director or actor today who isn't fascinated with 'Oceans 11,' 'Robin and the Seven Hoods,' " two films that featured Sinatra and his friends, "as well as the 50s and 60s icons like the Rat Pack.
"It was a totally different esthetic. You're talking about tuxedos and martinis and show girls. They said and did things that were of that time. It was the Rat Pack. Today you'd be sued for sexual harassment."
Executives at HBO began discussing a Rat Pack film two years ago, and after Salem handed in his script the project moved into high gear. The script covers the trajectory of the Rat Pack from the late 1950s to 1963, when President Kennedy was killed and the group split up, except for a charity appearance or two.
With the death of Kennedy, who seemed fascinated by the entertainers, "the air went out of the balloon of the Rat Pack," said Salem, 42, a former actor. "People grew tired of their movies. Their last film, 'Robin and the Seven Hoods,' was their least successful. And Frank grew sick of his image as a partying bad boy, at least publicly. Besides the joy, the sense of possibility that they conveyed: all that ended with J.F.K.'s death."
Beyond this, the ascendency of the Beatles made the Rat Pack seem like a group of paleolithic figures. So why the renewed fascination?
Standing near the nightclub set, Neal Moritz, the film's producer, said: "It was the ultimate male bonding. It seemed like these guys were having a great time, excess was the name of the game, and there weren't that many worries really. It was actually kind of an innocent time."
Nearby, Cohen, the director, said the social conventions of the nightclub world of the late 1950s and early 60s may seem almost quaint now.
"Men opened doors for women, stood up when a woman stood up at the table, held chairs out," he said. "Women who were cool were called broads. People had sex without fear of death. Glamour and chivalry were part of this mix of sex and night life."
Yet, as depicted in the film, the members of the Rat Pack were not quite what they seemed onstage. Each of them was far less cool and more tormented than they appeared.
Perhaps the most tormented was Davis, the entertainer who not only broke the color barrier, with Sinatra's help, in Las Vegas and elsewhere but defied convention by marrying a Swedish actress, Mai Britt. At the same time Davis paid a bitter price for his stardom, allowing himself to be humiliated by the Rat Pack.
Sitting at a table during a lunch break, Don Cheadle, who plays Davis, said he was uneasy at first about taking the role, partly because Davis was the butt of so many racial jokes by the Rat Pack. "He always came off kind of laughing and taking it and he had a real kind of 'Tom' image," said Cheadle.
So Cheadle asked the writer and director to create a scene in which Davis sought to explain his behavior to Ms. Britt. Later, when Cheadle read books dealing with Davis' career, he felt that Davis was in a painfully difficult situation.
Cheadle said: "We have a scene where I say, 'Yeah, these guys sometimes go too far, and sometimes it hurts, I admit that. But I'm rounding the bases so that the people who come after me have an easier time. Like Jackie Robinson did in baseball.'
"Sammy was, after all, the first black to headline in Las Vegas, the first to make the kind of money he made, one of the first blacks to actually look at a white audience, tell jokes to the audience, do impressions, and they connected with him."
Cheadle acknowledged that he was daunted by dancing as Davis. The choreography for the Davis routines is by Savion Glover, who won the Tony award for his choreography for "Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk."
"How did I do?" Cheadle said with a laugh. "You rehearse, you rehearse. Savion didn't give me any air to say, 'I can't.' He didn't want to hear it."
Martin is depicted, in the film, as something of a Greek chorus, a man who stood aloof from the rest of the Rat Pack commenting on the action.
"The fact is, there wasn't whisky in Dean's glass, and that was a metaphor for his whole life," said Salem. "He was a much different guy than people realized. He had this marvelous detachment that other men, especially Frank, revered."
Of course, the most famous and dominant member of the Rat Pack was Sinatra, depicted in the film as a complex and sometimes bullying figure with a hunger for respectability, a supreme entertainer who idolized gangsters as well as Kennedy. As shown in the film, Sinatra was ultimately humiliated by Kennedy when, shortly after being elected president, Kennedy made a last-minute decision to spend several days in Palm Springs as a guest of Bing Crosby, not Sinatra. The reason: Sinatra's friendships with gangsters.
Liotta, who plays Sinatra, grew up in Union, N.J., not far from Hoboken, where Sinatra was reared. Liotta said he was intimidated at first when offered the role, largely because of Sinatra's iconic stature.
Liotta, who has appeared in films like "Goodfellas" and "Field of Dreams," said: "Finally I said to myself: 'Wait a second. Why did I want to be an actor in the first place?' I should want to take these kinds of risks, I shouldn't act out of fear."
He spoke with many people who worked with Sinatra, read books about him and watched videos of his films and performances. He also studied Anthony Hopkins' performance in Oliver Stone's "Nixon," in which the actor didn't actually resemble the president but convincingly depicted him.
"How many times do you get to play somebody who's talking to the president of the United States or up there singing, 'One for My Baby'?" asked Liotta as the film crew began setting up a shot of him and Cheadle performing onstage. "You can't beat that."
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