Still, there was a bond between the two: father-son, mentor-acolyte, king-pretender—somehow the dynamic was agreeable to them both. They both reviled the traditional cant and decorum of Hollywood protocol, they both had deep political concerns for the everyman, and they both loved to needle people, especially the thin-skinned twits their lives as famous performers gave them so many chances to meet. Frank was always welcome in the Bogart home; the Bogarts, in turn, accepted his hospitality when he would want to scoop up a gang of pals and run off for a weekend in the Springs or Vegas.
In June 1955, for instance, he gathered a dozen or so chums, rented a train, and took off to catch Noel Coward’s opening at the Desert Inn (yes, that Noel Coward and that Desert Inn; Vegas was always great with novelties). During that particular spree, legend has it, the group had gotten so deep into its cups that Bacall was startled by their debauched appearance when she caught a gander of them ringside in a casino showroom. She looked around at all the famous flesh—Frank; Bogart; Judy Garland; David Niven; restaurateur Mike Romanoff; literary agent Swifty Lazar and his date, Martha Hyer; Jimmy Van Heusen and his date, Angie Dickinson; a few well-oiled others.
“You look like a goddamn rat pack,” she muttered.
It broke them up. A few nights later, back in Romanoff’s joint in Beverly Hills, she walked in and declared, “I see the rat pack’s all here.” Again, a big hit, but this time the joke picked up momentum of its own: They founded an institution—the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. They drew up a coat of arms—a rat gnawing on a human hand—and coined a motto: “Never rat on a rat.” And they assigned themselves ranks and responsibilities: Frank (and you can just see him standing there excitedly conducting the whole sophomoric enterprise) was named Pack Master; Bacall, Den Mother; Garland, Vice President; Sid Luft (Garland’s husband and manager), Cage Master; Lazar (so full of pep they gave him two jobs), Treasurer and Recording Secretary; and humorist Nathaniel Benchley, Historian.
Bogart was named Rat in Charge of Public Relations, and the next day he spoke about the whole silly business with movieland reporter Joe Hyams. “News must be pretty tight when you start to cover parties at Romanoff’s,” Bogart responded when asked about the Rat Pack, but, assured that the story would be treated with such overblown pomp that it would obviously be seen as a goof, he acceded to an interview. The Rat Pack, he declared, was formed for “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.” They’d briefly considered adding some absent friends to the roster, he said, but the requirements were often too high: When Claudette Colbert, for instance, whom they all liked, was nominated, Bacall insisted that she not be admitted because she was “a nice person but not a rat.” Hyams dutifully jotted it all down, agreed once again when Bogart insisted that “it was all a joke,” and reported it the next day in the New York Herald Tribune.
Hyams’s scoop was true enough: There was indeed a group, centered around Bogart, that hung out together to the exclusion of the remainder of Hollywood, which, though they were part of it, they had no qualms about mocking. “You had to be a noncomformist,” said Bacall, “and you had to stay up late and drink and laugh a lot and not care what anybody said about you or thought about you” (one last criterion: “You had to be a little musical”). But the idea of an organization and a creed and all that, that was strictly a lark, another of Bogart’s beloved practical jokes taken to an absurd height.
Nevertheless, the publicity incited a reaction that revealed that Bogart’s attitude wasn’t necessarily laughed off by the world at large. Hollywood was an extremely cliquish society, and Bogart’s clique had always taken the perverse ethical stand that the local social mores—and the cliques it spawned—were bullshit. The notion of such a disdainful group legitimizing itself into an honorable cult, even in jest, struck some in the movie colony as an affront.
The poor schmucks didn’t get the joke: There was no such thing as the Rat Pack, not really. The principals might all get together at Romanoff’s or Bogart’s house and carry on like a drunken fraternity, but that’s all they really were: There were no dues or meetings or minutes or rules; there were just nights together in a company town of which they were all valued—and jaded—assets. If they wanted to pretend they were wild rebels, fine; they still all showed up on movie sets and in recording studios bright and early the next morning with their material prepared and their bodies and voices ready to perform. The whole Rat Pack thing was like bowling or square dancing or watching TV—the things they would’ve done together if they’d been squarejohns living between the coasts and not movieland royalty.
The subtle caste system out of which the Rat Pack arose became somewhat more manifest in 1956 when Bogart was diagnosed as having incurable throat cancer. A parade of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances spent the ensuing year paying fealty to this man who neither wanted nor acknowledged their sympathetic indulgence. “Haven’t you people got anything better to do than come over here and bother me?” Bogie would admonish his guests. “How am I supposed to get any rest with the likes of you coming every day?” It was the sandpaper wit they’d come to expect from him, and they cherished it.
Despite his crusty bravery, though, the last year of Bogart’s life was a horror of weight loss, discomfort, incapacity, depression. Bacall, still in her early thirties and an established star in her own right, bore it as well as she could, but she needed occasional escape from the traumatic scene unfolding in her home. Bogart insisted that she continue to go out on the town, and he was grateful whenever she took him up on the offer, most frequently escorted by Sinatra.
Frank had determined to remain steadfast during his idol’s illness, visiting regularly even though he was mortified by Bogart’s condition. “It wasn’t easy for him,” Bacall remembered. “I don’t think he could bear to see Bogie that way or bear to face the possibility of his death. Yet he cheered Bogie up when he was with him—made him laugh—kept the ring-a-ding act in high gear.”
More than that, it has been suggested, he filled the loneliness in Mrs. Bogart’s life with more than just suppers at Romanoff’s. Intimates of the group whispered about a budding love affair between Sinatra and Bacall—“It was no secret to any of us,” said one—and they pointed to a Rat Pack trip to Las Vegas for Bacall’s birthday which Bogart skipped, preferring to take his young son, Stephen, to sea on the Santana.
Bacall was aware of the dynamic, admitting that Bogart “was somewhat jealous of Frank. Partly because he knew I loved being with him, partly because he thought Frank was in love with me, and partly because our physical life together, which had always ranked high, had less than flourished with his illness.”
When the end finally came, Frank, a fixture in the Bogart household, was nowhere to be found. Bogart died on January 14, 1957, when Frank was in New York working a club date at the Copacabana. He canceled three days’ worth of shows (Sammy, who was starring on Broadway in Mr. Wonderful, and Jerry Lewis, who was in the midst of a successful solo run at the Palace, subbed for him), but he didn’t return to California for the funeral, holing up instead in his Manhattan hotel.
Even if he didn’t have any reason to feel guilty, he couldn’t have been too comfortable back on Maplewood Drive. Bogart’s house had become a kind of shrine to his final days: His favorite chair, his clothes, his photos, his very aura hung about the place unaltered. Bacall couldn’t bring herself to change a thing, even though she, too, found it difficult to live amid it all. Frank—always indulgent of widows—gave her and her children the run of his Palm Springs estate for as long as they needed it.
By the end of 1957, the time had arrived when he could offer her more. His Mexican divorce from Ava Gardner, a mere legal technicality in their shattered relationship, had coincidentally come through that June. Frank and Bacall began seeing one another socially, with all observers assuming they were intimate. When Frank entertained at his homes in Coldwater Canyon or Palm Springs, Bacall was hostess, and she was his date for the Las Vegas premiere of Pal Joey and the L.A. premiere of