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#When did the rat pack start full#
played solo at Caesars and occasionally teamed up with Jerry Lewis over at Bally's.Īt 9:00 pm (PST) on June 30, 1996, under a full moon, the lights where switched off and the doors closed of the infamous Sands Hotel. Frank played Caesars into the 1970s, while Dean held court at The Riviera and later Bally's until he retired. The Rat Pack continued to appear throughout Vegas over the following decades. In 1969 Dean was persuaded to move to the Riviera, where tickets for his new show cost more than tickets for Sinatra's show's over at Caesars. But without Frank and Jack Entratter, who soon also left, the Sands would never be the same. But Dean, ended up signing another year with the Sands - his friendship with Frank didn�t require such macho displays of loyalty. It was expected that his friends would follow suit - especially Dean Martin, the Sands biggest draw. Cohen simply got up and punched Frank out. The very next morning, Frank drove his gold golf cart through the window of the hotel restaurant then stomped up to Carl Cohen, who'd been responsible for cutting him off.
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Shortly after Howard Hughes bought the Sands Hotel in 1967, Frank Sinatra had a falling out with the Sands management after they cut off his credit in the Casino. As the crowds flocked to Vegas to see their shows, the Rat Pack turned it from slightly seedy gambling Mecca to playground of the stars. It was not just his fellow celebrities Frank lead to Vegas. "He was the King and we were the princes. 'They had more sex than they drank,' Silva recalled. If the Rat Pack were pretending to drink more than they actually did, they certainly weren't pretending when it came to sex. Frank was such a perfectionist that he kept a pretty strict reign to keep the show under control. They drank, but they weren't falling down drunks.'Īccording to people there at the time, their performances were so good you knew they weren't really drunk - they'd just play at being drunk. But the guys didn't drink as heavily as you read in the press. 'The drug of the moment was booze, and Frank drank Jack Daniels exclusively. Not surprising, they were the most popular dealers in town, encouraging gamblers to hit on 20, and then paying them off when they went bust. Other times at the Sands, Frank, Sammy and Dean would get behind tables and start dealing. 'It was the crown jewel of Las Vegas at that time." "The Sands was the magical point where everything began and ended," Silva recalled. The Sands was the Mecca, the hotel." Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald - all the top singers of the day performed there. Silva reminisced "If it wasn't the Sands, it wasn't happening. 'They knew it was a moment that wasn't going to be repeated.'ĭuring that time, the now vanished Sands was the place to be. People lined up for hours to get in,' Silva said. The Sands' club only seated a couple of hundred, miniscule by today's standards. 'There wasn't any sleep - but who the hell needed to sleep? The whole town came alive - everybody wanted to see these guys perform.
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'We filmed by day,' actor Henry Silva recalled in an interview with Los Angeles magazine (October 2001) 'and Dean and Sinatra and Sammy Davis and Peter Lawford did their acts by night at the Sands.' Frank produced it and starred as Danny Ocean, the mastermind of a five-casino heist carried out with his World War II buddies. Although the rest of the pack frequented Vegas for pleasure, it wasn't until over ten years later, when the whole pack blew into town for work and pleasure.įrank had decided to make Ocean's Eleven with parts for his entire gang in January 1960. Rat Pack' she remarked, the name stuck.ĭean Martin was the first to perform in Vegas in 1949, with his then partner Jerry Lewis at the Flamingo Hotel. The nickname was changed to the Rat Pack after Lauren Bacall saw the gang lying around like the living dead after a five day bender in Vegas. , Peter Lawford, and Shirley McLaine to the group, which he named 'the Clan'. After Bogart's death, Sinatra took over the group, introducing his own friends, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr. As spectacular as Las Vegas has grown to be over the years, with its grand casinos and themed hotels, very few could argue against it's coolest era were the days when The Rat Pack ruled Sin City.įrank Sinatra had been a part of a Hollywood drinking group that hung out at Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall's Hollywood home.