3 Answers
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The Rat Pack starred in Las Vegas as a team at the Sands Hotel in Vegas. Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jnr, Dean Martin and Peter Lawford. they also made a film called “Oceans 11.” They were professional singers and entertainers, and when you preform on stage, it is mostly at night. I personally thought that they were one of the most talented groups. You could not beat Sinatra, for performance and timing,( I saw him live at Sun City), and Davis and Dean Martin were wonderful performers and singers. Being in showbiz, working at night goes with territory. Their anctics off stage may have left a lot to be desired, but that was their private lives. I don’t think their children were alone at home. They had wives, and enough money to make sure their children were well looked after.
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The era in which the Rat Pack came to prominence was one where people, were expected to conform to a certain type of expectation. The workin’ nine to five, come home to your wife and 2.5 kids day in and day out grind was not most men’s idea of livin’ life to it’s fullest. They couldn’t buy into the younger generations notions of what constituted non-conformity, their way of life being totally foreign to them. But when they saw men their own age or close to it livin’ life like the world was one big adult playground, they could live vicariously through them.
And who wouldn’t want live like that–dressin’ in tux’s, drinkin’ like fish, swingin’ from one good lookin’ broad to another, singin’ to adorin’ audience’s and getting paid to do it!
The Pack represented a time when you didn’t have to worry about people giving you grief if you fired up a square, had one drink too many or cracked an ethnic joke. They represented something we don’t have enough of today– complete unadulterated raw freedom. Was the Pack chauvenistic? Damn straight. Did they sometimes cross the line with the racial comedy bits? Hell yeah. Women? Love ’em and leave ’em. But they had the freedom to make asses of themselves, something the homoginized “please everybody and offend nobody” entertainers of today wouldn’t consider attempting. And let’s be honest–a lot of the “insensitive” routines they preformed were pretty damn funny, baby.
EO-11 was a verse in a song sung by Sammy Davis Jr.