2015.030

Purchase

Purchase

Museum Collections.

1960 - 1960

Date(s) Created: 1960 Date(s): 1960

Good

Notes: Archives 2015.030.0407 Playboy, Volume 7, No. 6, June 1960. ==== Page [34] [pg 34 photo: Bob Willoughby] MEETING AT THE SUMMIT Sinatra and his buddies bust ’em up in vegas article by robert legare THE LOBBY WAS ROILED with cops, cables and klieg lights. Behind the desk a harried, gray-skinned man perfunctorily took the calls: "Sands Hotel; sorry, nothing at all. Try us next month.” A few feet away the fabled casino was smoky-hot, jangling and thick with humanity. Outside, a neon blaze took over for the dying green-gold wisps of dusk, and Director Lewis Milestone trained his camera on the marquee billing Red Skelton and Danny Thomas in the Copa Room. A jostling passel of show-w’ise tourists was held back by cordons of police guards trying to explain that Red and Danny weren’t really playing the Sands, but the sign was vital to a scene in a Hollywood movie. It hardly mattered that nobody listened, for by now there were almost no show-biz savants west of Hoboken who didn’t know that Frank Sinatra’s film, Ocean’s Eleven, was being shot in Vegas, with Frank’s real-life buddies, as well as himself, in leading roles: Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford. What it all amounted to was a Meeting at the Summit, a gathering of the hard-core members of a very special gang of Hollywood rebels. Among the qualities that give the group of show-biz folk who gather around Frank Sinatra its glamor and romance is the fact that they not only like to play together, but also get a giant clout out of working together. "The Clan,” as they’ve been dubbed by others, possess talent, charm, romance and a devil-may-care nonconformity that gives them immense popular appeal — so much so that today they sit at the very top of the Hollywood star system, with Sinatra king of the hill. The point is not, however, that this occasion saw five very big names assembled. This has happened before; it happens frequently on location shootings of big-budget films. But this particular group, and this group alone, has cohesiveness in work, friendship, fun — and a wild iconoclasm that millions envy secretly or even unconsciously — which makes them, in the public eye, the innest in-group in the world. The cryptic title — Ocean's Eleven — derived from the quasi-comic efforts of eleven wartime buddies, corralled by Danny Ocean (Sinatra) to rob five Vegas casinos simultaneously — with military [end page 32] ==== Status: OK Status By: dw Status Date: 2015-06-03