Pestory: How the ‘Rat Pack’ got its name
By Michael Moran
As a proud New Jersey boy – even in my rebellious punk and garage rock drummer years – I was always partial to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the Rat Pack. My dad, an Irish immigrant, would come home from date night with mom, an Italian American beauty, pay the babysitter, push his four kids up the stairs to bed and drop a needle on a Sinatra album. Then he and my mom would dance into the night. (They coulda danced, all night, coulda danced, all night …). You know how it goes.
They danced well, too. There were jumps and lifts and, "boom," the record would skip a few measures as we kids listened from upstairs. When dad passed a few years back, I inherited these scratched up, skipping discs, and I love every jump and crackle. And with those classics of Sinatra's own Reprise label came the oeuvre of the rest of the Rat Pack, some Sammy David, Jr. albums, a few raucous "Live in Vegas" bombs, a ton of Dino (thanks ma), and even a ridiculous Joey Bishop record called "Joey Bishop sings Country & Western."
Dad was fond of saying 'you can't take it with you.' In the case of this album, dad, it's a damned good thing.
So, with that ode to my dad ahead of the US celebration of Father's Day, let's get down to the Pestory aspect of the story: Where did the term "Rat Pack" come from?
Well, unlike Taylor Ham, which was invented in New Jersey and is the proper name for a food that Philadelphian's mislabel as "pork roll," Rat Pack was not born along with Sinatra in Hoboken. In fact, it actually traces back to Humphrey Bogart and an earlier Hollywood social circle in the 1950s.
According to Stephen Bogart, the great man's son, the term "rat pack" started when Bogey's wife, Lauren Bacall, walked in on a group of his friends after a long night of drinking and gambling in Vegas and said they looked like a Rat Pack. This became the "Holmby Hills Rat Pack," named after the LA neighborhood where Bogart lived. Besides Rick of Casablanca, it included Sinatra (no surprise) and the British actor David Niven, among others.
Bogart died in 1957, and by then Sinatra had become arguably the most famous celebrity in America. As such, he inherited the Rat Throne and his own group of pals – Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop – picked up where Bogart left off. Some people include their favorite gal, too, Shirley McClaine, in the pack, but those who go deep on this kind of things say there wasn't a sixth member, but if there were, she'd be it. (A good dive into this particular heart-shaped pool can be found here, along with some choice images of the Rat Pack that I'm not about to pay for).
There have been copycats, of course – or should I say, Copy Rats. The Brat Pack of the 1980s, a term was coined by New York magazine journalist David Blum in a cover story about up and- coming Hollywood pals Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, and Judd Nelson. It wasn't meant to be flattering, according to Blum, and many of the actors resented it for years because they felt it trivialized their work. The article speaks for itself.
The Brat Pack is associated with both the male and females casts of films like The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire, and members grew to include Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, and Demi Moore, with names like Tom Cruise and Sean Penn thrown in occasionally, too. They may have hated the name at first, but by the late 1980s actors were lining up to get in the club.
Beating the rat to death
It gets just stupid from here – if it weren't already stupid. The Frat Pack is a loose group of actors who frequently appeared together in comedies in the early 2000s – Ben Stiller, Owen and Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, Jack Black and Steve Carell (See: Anchorman, Wedding Crashers, and Old School).
The Splat Pack is about slasher film directors: Eli Roth, James Wan, Rob Zombie, and Alexandre Aja.
Then, (oh kill me), there's the "The Pack / "Young Hollywood" grouping of self-promoting party girls Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie and I'm sure there are others. But I'm now thoroughly bored and need to move on.
None of these latter day "packs" can hold a candle to mid-20th Century Rat Pack led by Sinatra, who, trust me, as a Hoboken boy, knows from rats. But to each their own. One way or another, it's another way rodents have shaped our history – and the end to another edition of Pestory.
Check out previous Pestory episodes on the Pestory blog page, including the once unknown tale of how field mice that helped the Soviets win the Battle of Stalingrad: "How field mice changed the course of WWII."