Rat Pack Confidential. Shawn Levy

and he knew it: “I’m a slow starter. There can never be a big, hitting thing with me … I don’t have the type of personality that shatters you right off. I have to work at being funny. The work is hard. I’m hard sometimes.” That way he had of dismissing things, deflating things—it came naturally to a guy who’d had to fight for everything and even then didn’t quite get it.

      He was born in the Bronx in 1918, the fifth and last child of Jacob Gottlieb, a machinist and bike repairman, and his wife, Anna. He was sickly—the littlest baby, he used to brag, ever born in Fordham Hospital (he told the story to an incredulous Buddy Hackett, who responded with a look of concern, “Did you live?”). At three months, the family moved to Philadelphia, where the slight baby grew into a slight child.

      The Gottliebs never had much money, and the kids learned to tiptoe around Jacob, who was always irritable with the vagaries of his business. He could be nurturing, encouraging Joey and his older brother Morris in pursuing music (Jacob himself played the ocarina and sang Yiddish songs), but he could also terrify them—a kid could get spanked for the mere offense of coming home with a dime, a sum their father believed no child could earn honestly. Joey, who began his schooling as an apt, engaged student, once won a fifty-cent prize in a spelling bee; when he came home, he caught a beating from one of his brothers who, in imitation of Dad, was certain the money was stolen.

      After that spelling bee, Joey did nothing to distinguish himself as a student other than quit altogether after two years of high school to work in the bike shop. It was a dispiriting experience—“What would anyone want with a bicycle during the Depression?” he asked a reporter years later—and being around Jacob all day was no picnic. Joey took on work in a luncheonette and then decided he’d move to New York to try and break into show business.

      Show business? Okay, maybe he was funny around school and the shop, always ready with a cocky, cutting jibe, and he’d won a few amateur-night contests with his patter, his impressions, even a bit of tap dancing. But this wasn’t exactly the sort of ambition Jacob had tried to instill in his sons—“It was a choice of either getting a steady job or getting killed,” Joey remembered. He told his folks he’d stay with relatives in Manhattan and keep a day job; they gave him the green light. For a brief moment, it looked like he might pull it off—he worked in a hat factory by day and got a gig as an emcee in a Chinese restaurant on Broadway at night. But soon enough he was back with the smock and the spokes and the inner tubes in Philly, a flop.