Rare Rat

Sammy Davis Jr. was always my favorite of member of the Rat Pack – Frank Sinatra was way too capo di tutti capi-ish, Dean Martin’s good-humored alcoholic act makes me impatient, Peter Lawford creeps me out, and Joey Bishop… I’ll tell you what I think of him as soon as I remember who that is, poor man.

Sammy Davis, however, is my idea of an icon.

But one thing they all really did get right was style. Everything the original Ocean’s 11 lacked in terms of cinema, it almost made up with its stars. Here are some previously unpublished photographs from that era, courtesy Life. I do not understand why they were never published because the four of them featured here look way more yumsicle than I have previously seen them pictured.

If you had to click over to just one site today, make it this one.

“Raise your glasses, please, ladies and gentlemen, may we all live to be four hundred years old, and may the last voice we hear be mine.” —One of Frank Sinatra’s favorite ways to say goodnight to an audience.

“Boy, I was so loaded last night that when I fell down, I missed the floor.” —The typical Dean Martin quip.

“Sammy has that young-in-heart attitude, but he’s getting close to 40. He goes to the refrigerator for a snack, opens the door, and when that light hits him, he does 45 minutes of his act.” —Frank Sinatra describing his friend to LIFE in the profile “Sammy Davis,” 11/13/1964.

“Jack was always so grateful to Frank for all the work he’d done in the campaign raising money. He said, ‘Maybe I’ll ask him to the White House for dinner or lunch.’ I said that Frank would love that, but then Jack said, ‘There’s only one problem. Jackie hates him and won’t have him in the house. So I really don’t know what to do.’ Here was the President of the United States in a quandary just like the rest of us who are afraid to upset our spouses. We joked for a few minutes about stuffing Frank into a body bag and dragging him around to the side door so the gardeners could bring him in like a bag of refuse and Jackie wouldn’t see him.” —Peter Lawford, from Kitty Kelley’s 1986 book His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra.

[via ONTD]