Dean Martin Was Actually Asked to Leave the Rat Pack in 1959 — Why He Stayed Changed Frank Sinatra

Dean Martin was actually asked to leave the Rat Pack in the spring of 1959. And the person who asked him was Frank Sinatra. And the way Frank asked him was not the direct confrontation that the story might suggest, but something considerably more calculated. a series of conversations and intermediary communications that amounted when assembled to a clear and unambiguous message that Frank’s vision for what the rat pack should be and Dean’s presence within it had become in Frank’s assessment incompatible.

Dean received this message on a Thursday. He did not respond on Thursday. He did not respond on Friday. He did not call Frank back over the weekend. He did not contact his attorney or his manager or any of the people in his professional circle who might have been expected to be involved in a negotiation of this significance.

For 72 hours, Dean Martin was entirely unreachable on the subject of whether he was going to leave or stay. And what he was doing during those 72 hours was something that the people who eventually learned about it found more surprising than the original request. Because what Dean was doing was deciding on his own terms and for his own reasons exactly what the rat pack was actually worth to him and what it would cost him to walk away from it.

And the answer he arrived at and the reason he arrived at it were things that Frank Sinatra had not anticipated and that changed in ways neither of them fully understood at the time the entire trajectory of what they built together over the following decade. The Rat Pack of 1959 was not the institution it would become in the public imagination.

It was still in the process of being constructed. Its mythology was accumulating. Its commercial potential was becoming visible. Its specific combination of talent and chemistry and the particular swagger of men who understood themselves to be at the center of American entertainment was generating a kind of cultural energy that was attracting attention from every direction simultaneously.

Frank was at the center of this construction in the most literal sense. He was the organizational intelligence behind it. the person whose relationships and instincts and professional authority were shaping what the group was and where it was going. This organizational intelligence had its limits and those limits were related to the thing that made Frank extraordinary at building things which was his belief in his own vision.

Frank’s version of the rat pack had a specific shape and a specific purpose. And Dean, who had his own shape and his own purpose, and who was constitutionally resistant to being shaped by anyone else’s vision, regardless of how legitimate that vision was, represented a consistent friction within the structure Frank was building.

The friction was not personal exactly, and it was not professional in any simple sense. It was something more fundamental, a disagreement between two people about who had the authority to determine what a shared enterprise was and how it worked. Dean’s position within the rat pack had always been distinctive in ways that were visible to people who paid attention, and that Frank found increasingly difficult to accommodate.

Dean was the only member of the group who appeared to be entirely indifferent to the question of what the group meant or what it was accomplishing. Frank cared about the rat pack with an intensity that was characteristic of how Frank cared about everything he built. Sammy Davis Jr. cared about it because it represented something specific about acceptance and belonging that mattered to him in ways connected to his particular history.

Peter Lofford cared about it for reasons connected to his social ambitions. Joey Bishop cared about it for professional reasons that were straightforward. Dean appeared not to care about it at all. in the specific sense that his investment in the enterprise never showed up in the ways that the other members investment showed up.

In the discussions about direction, the concern about perception, the active maintenance of the group’s identity and reputation. This appearance of indifference was Frank had come to understand by the spring of 1959 not quite accurate. Dean was not indifferent to the rat pack. He simply located his investment in it differently from where Frank located his and the difference was fundamental.

Frank invested in the rat pack as a construction, as a thing being built according to a vision that Frank was responsible for maintaining. Dean invested in it as a collection of relationships, as a set of people he genuinely liked and wanted to spend time with and perform alongside with no particular attachment to the institution that surrounded those relationships or to what that institution represented.

This distinction had practical consequences. It meant that when Frank made decisions about the rat pack’s direction, about where they performed and what they did and how they presented themselves publicly, he was deciding about the construction and Dean was responding to decisions about his relationships.

When the construction and the relationships aligned, which was most of the time, the distinction was invisible. When they diverged, which was becoming more frequent by 1959, the distinction became a source of friction that Frank found increasingly difficult to manage within his vision of what the group should be.

The specific events of early 1959 that precipitated Frank’s message to Dean involved a combination of scheduling decisions and public commitments that Frank had made on behalf of the group without what Dean considered adequate consultation. and Dean’s response to those decisions which was not argument but simply non-compliance. The specific form of resistance that Dean Martin had developed over decades of professional life as his most reliable tool for dealing with situations he found unacceptable.

Non-compliance was effective because it was undramatic, because it generated no confrontation that could be managed or resolved, and because it placed the other party in the position of having to escalate or accept, which were the only two options available when a person who would not argue simply declined to do something. Frank escalated.

The message Dean received on Thursday said in its essence that Frank’s view was that the arrangement was not working and that the group would function better without Dean’s particular mode of participation in it. The message was delivered through a mutual contact rather than directly which was itself a communication.

Frank understood that a direct conversation with Dean would produce the same non-compliance he had been encountering in the scheduling disputes and he preferred to create a situation that required Dean to respond in some way rather than simply to continue not responding. Dean did not respond in the way Frank had anticipated.

He did not engage with the intermediary. He did not call Frank. He did not call anyone. He went home on Thursday evening and he was for 72 hours simply not available on the subject. What Dean was doing during those 72 hours is something he never described to anyone in any detail. What is known comes from two sources.

a brief account by his then manager who received a call from Dean on Saturday afternoon that was about an unrelated professional matter and during which Dean mentioned almost in passing that he was thinking about something and would know what he thought about it by Monday and a somewhat longer account by a musician named Eddie Rento who had played with Dean on several recording sessions and who received a phone call from Dean on Sunday evening that lasted by Rento’s account approximately 30 minutes and during which Dean discussed though

without identifying the specific situation he was discussing the difference between belonging to something because you believed in what it was and belonging to something because you valued the people in it. Rento said later that he had not understood at the time that Dean was describing his own situation.

He thought Dean was talking in general terms about a professional question that many musicians faced. It was only after the events of the following Monday became known in the musical and entertainment communities, they shared, that Rento connected the Sunday phone call to what Dean had been working through. What Dean decided between Thursday evening and Monday morning was not simply whether to stay or leave.

What he decided was what his reasons for staying would be. Because Dean had understood with the particular clarity of someone spending 72 hours with an uncomfortable question that the reasons for staying or leaving were more important than the decision itself. If he stayed because Frank’s influence was too large to walk away from, or because the commercial opportunity was too significant to give up, or because leaving would have cost him more professionally than staying was costing him in terms of the autonomy he valued, then he would be staying as

someone who had been maneuvered into position rather than someone who had chosen his position. And Dean did not stay in places he had been maneuvered into. What he decided was that he was staying because of Sammy, not because of the Rat Pack, not because of Frank’s vision, not because of what the group was or what it was becoming.

Because Sammy Davis Jr. was in it. And because the relationship between Dean and Sammy was one of the most consequential relationships of Dean’s adult life, and because leaving the rat pack would have meant leaving Sammy in a structure with Frank that Dean understood without being able to fully articulate why was a structure Sammy needed Dean inside of in order to remain fully himself.

this reasoning when Dean presented it to Frank on Monday morning directly in person in the specific conversation that the 72-hour silence had made possible because it had removed the possibility of the gradual negotiation that Frank had been expecting was not what Frank had anticipated. Frank had anticipated either capitulation or departure.

He had not anticipated Dean arriving on Monday morning with a clear account of his own reasons for the decision he had made. Reasons that had nothing to do with the power dynamics Frank had been navigating or the professional calculus Frank had been calculating and everything to do with a personal loyalty that Frank both understood and was not in this context in a position to argue against.

Frank said very little in response. The people who have described this conversation and they are few and the descriptions are fragmentaryary agree on one thing that Frank listened to what Dean said and that when Dean finished Frank nodded and the subject was considered closed. Dean Martin remained in the rat pack.

The group continued to build and to perform and to generate the specific cultural energy that made the early 1960s their defining period. The internal dynamics shifted after that Monday morning in ways that were subtle and consistent. Dean’s position within the group became somewhat less contested. Frank’s organizational authority was exercised with slightly more attention to the specific relationships rather than only the institutional shape.

And Sammy Davis Jr., who never knew that his name had been the reason Dean stayed, was present for the decade of work that followed. The musician Eddie Rento put the Sunday phone call together with subsequent events in 1962 when he read a profile of Dean in an entertainment magazine that described his unusual position within the Rat Pack.

He called Dean’s assistant and left a message asking about the Sunday conversation. Dean’s assistant called back and said that Mr. Martin appreciated the message and did not have anything to add to the conversation they had already had, which was finally exactly the kind of answer Dean Martin would give when the question being asked was about something he had already finished thinking about.

The specific quality of Dean Martin’s decision-making in that 72-hour period is worth examining more closely because it reveals something about the particular way Dean’s mind worked that most of the people who knew him professionally had observed without being able to name. Dean’s decisions when they were the decisions that actually mattered were never made in response to the pressure that produced them.

They were made in relation to the question underneath the pressure, which was always a different question and usually a more important one. Frank’s message on Thursday had created a situation with two obvious available responses. Accept the message and leave or reject the message and fight. Dean did either because both of those responses were responses to Frank’s framing of the situation.

And Frank’s framing was not the framing Dean found useful. The framing Dean found useful was not about Frank at all. It was about what Dean was actually doing in the rat pack and whether what he was actually doing was worth continuing to do on whatever terms were available to him.

This reframing was not conscious strategy in any calculated sense. It was simply how Dean’s mind operated. When he was presented with a situation that other people had defined in terms he found inadequate, he set aside their terms and found his own. The 72-hour silence was not a negotiating tactic. It was the actual time required for the reframing to happen, for Dean to move from Frank’s question to his own question, and to arrive at an answer to his own question that he could stand behind without reservation.

What Dean arrived at on Sunday evening in the conversation with Eddie Rento that Rento did not fully understand until years later was the understanding that his presence in the Rackpack was not at its core about Frank. It had never been about Frank, though Frank was the gravitational center of the enterprise and the relationship between them was real and consequential.

It was about Sammy. Specifically, it was about what Sammy needed from Dean that the structure surrounding them could not provide. What Sammy needed was someone inside the structure who was not fully captured by it. Someone who valued the relationships over the institution, who would remain the same person regardless of what the institution required, who represented for Sammy the proof that it was possible to be fully present in something without being fully defined by it.

Dean was that person for Sammy in ways that Frank, despite his genuine affection for Sammy and his genuine commitment to including Sammy in the world he was building, could not be. Frank’s commitment to Sammy was real, but it was expressed through the institution through ensuring that Sammy was present and valued in the structure Frank was building.

Dean’s commitment to Sammy was expressed through the relationship itself, independent of any institutional framework. It was the difference between being defended by someone who controlled the room and being known by someone who was simply there. This was what Dean explained to Frank on Monday morning in the direct, specific, entirely unperformative way that Dean explained things when he had taken the time to understand what he actually thought.

And it was this explanation, this account of a decision made for reasons that had nothing to do with power or money or professional calculation, that Frank found impossible to argue against, and that changed in the quiet way that important things change between two people who understand each other, the terms of their professional relationship for the rest of the decade.

If this story, the 72 hours, the Sunday phone call, and the real reason Dean Martin chose to stay moved something in you, subscribe and hit that like button. Share this with someone who has ever stayed somewhere, not for the institution, but for the person. Have you ever made a decision because of one specific relationship that you couldn’t explain to anyone else? Let us know in the comments and ring that notification bell because the next story is already waiting.

Dean Martin Was Actually Asked to Leave the Rat Pack in 1959 — Why He Stayed Changed Frank Sinatra

Dean Martin was actually asked to leave the Rat Pack in the spring of 1959. And the person who asked him was Frank Sinatra. And the way Frank asked him was not the direct confrontation that the story might suggest, but something considerably more calculated. a series of conversations and intermediary communications that amounted when assembled to a clear and unambiguous message that Frank’s vision for what the rat pack should be and Dean’s presence within it had become in Frank’s assessment incompatible.

Dean received this message on a Thursday. He did not respond on Thursday. He did not respond on Friday. He did not call Frank back over the weekend. He did not contact his attorney or his manager or any of the people in his professional circle who might have been expected to be involved in a negotiation of this significance.

For 72 hours, Dean Martin was entirely unreachable on the subject of whether he was going to leave or stay. And what he was doing during those 72 hours was something that the people who eventually learned about it found more surprising than the original request. Because what Dean was doing was deciding on his own terms and for his own reasons exactly what the rat pack was actually worth to him and what it would cost him to walk away from it.

And the answer he arrived at and the reason he arrived at it were things that Frank Sinatra had not anticipated and that changed in ways neither of them fully understood at the time the entire trajectory of what they built together over the following decade. The Rat Pack of 1959 was not the institution it would become in the public imagination.

It was still in the process of being constructed. Its mythology was accumulating. Its commercial potential was becoming visible. Its specific combination of talent and chemistry and the particular swagger of men who understood themselves to be at the center of American entertainment was generating a kind of cultural energy that was attracting attention from every direction simultaneously.

Frank was at the center of this construction in the most literal sense. He was the organizational intelligence behind it. the person whose relationships and instincts and professional authority were shaping what the group was and where it was going. This organizational intelligence had its limits and those limits were related to the thing that made Frank extraordinary at building things which was his belief in his own vision.

Frank’s version of the rat pack had a specific shape and a specific purpose. And Dean, who had his own shape and his own purpose, and who was constitutionally resistant to being shaped by anyone else’s vision, regardless of how legitimate that vision was, represented a consistent friction within the structure Frank was building.

The friction was not personal exactly, and it was not professional in any simple sense. It was something more fundamental, a disagreement between two people about who had the authority to determine what a shared enterprise was and how it worked. Dean’s position within the rat pack had always been distinctive in ways that were visible to people who paid attention, and that Frank found increasingly difficult to accommodate.

Dean was the only member of the group who appeared to be entirely indifferent to the question of what the group meant or what it was accomplishing. Frank cared about the rat pack with an intensity that was characteristic of how Frank cared about everything he built. Sammy Davis Jr. cared about it because it represented something specific about acceptance and belonging that mattered to him in ways connected to his particular history.

Peter Lofford cared about it for reasons connected to his social ambitions. Joey Bishop cared about it for professional reasons that were straightforward. Dean appeared not to care about it at all. in the specific sense that his investment in the enterprise never showed up in the ways that the other members investment showed up.

In the discussions about direction, the concern about perception, the active maintenance of the group’s identity and reputation. This appearance of indifference was Frank had come to understand by the spring of 1959 not quite accurate. Dean was not indifferent to the rat pack. He simply located his investment in it differently from where Frank located his and the difference was fundamental.

Frank invested in the rat pack as a construction, as a thing being built according to a vision that Frank was responsible for maintaining. Dean invested in it as a collection of relationships, as a set of people he genuinely liked and wanted to spend time with and perform alongside with no particular attachment to the institution that surrounded those relationships or to what that institution represented.

This distinction had practical consequences. It meant that when Frank made decisions about the rat pack’s direction, about where they performed and what they did and how they presented themselves publicly, he was deciding about the construction and Dean was responding to decisions about his relationships.

When the construction and the relationships aligned, which was most of the time, the distinction was invisible. When they diverged, which was becoming more frequent by 1959, the distinction became a source of friction that Frank found increasingly difficult to manage within his vision of what the group should be.

The specific events of early 1959 that precipitated Frank’s message to Dean involved a combination of scheduling decisions and public commitments that Frank had made on behalf of the group without what Dean considered adequate consultation. and Dean’s response to those decisions which was not argument but simply non-compliance. The specific form of resistance that Dean Martin had developed over decades of professional life as his most reliable tool for dealing with situations he found unacceptable.

Non-compliance was effective because it was undramatic, because it generated no confrontation that could be managed or resolved, and because it placed the other party in the position of having to escalate or accept, which were the only two options available when a person who would not argue simply declined to do something. Frank escalated.

The message Dean received on Thursday said in its essence that Frank’s view was that the arrangement was not working and that the group would function better without Dean’s particular mode of participation in it. The message was delivered through a mutual contact rather than directly which was itself a communication.

Frank understood that a direct conversation with Dean would produce the same non-compliance he had been encountering in the scheduling disputes and he preferred to create a situation that required Dean to respond in some way rather than simply to continue not responding. Dean did not respond in the way Frank had anticipated.

He did not engage with the intermediary. He did not call Frank. He did not call anyone. He went home on Thursday evening and he was for 72 hours simply not available on the subject. What Dean was doing during those 72 hours is something he never described to anyone in any detail. What is known comes from two sources.

a brief account by his then manager who received a call from Dean on Saturday afternoon that was about an unrelated professional matter and during which Dean mentioned almost in passing that he was thinking about something and would know what he thought about it by Monday and a somewhat longer account by a musician named Eddie Rento who had played with Dean on several recording sessions and who received a phone call from Dean on Sunday evening that lasted by Rento’s account approximately 30 minutes and during which Dean discussed though

without identifying the specific situation he was discussing the difference between belonging to something because you believed in what it was and belonging to something because you valued the people in it. Rento said later that he had not understood at the time that Dean was describing his own situation.

He thought Dean was talking in general terms about a professional question that many musicians faced. It was only after the events of the following Monday became known in the musical and entertainment communities, they shared, that Rento connected the Sunday phone call to what Dean had been working through. What Dean decided between Thursday evening and Monday morning was not simply whether to stay or leave.

What he decided was what his reasons for staying would be. Because Dean had understood with the particular clarity of someone spending 72 hours with an uncomfortable question that the reasons for staying or leaving were more important than the decision itself. If he stayed because Frank’s influence was too large to walk away from, or because the commercial opportunity was too significant to give up, or because leaving would have cost him more professionally than staying was costing him in terms of the autonomy he valued, then he would be staying as

someone who had been maneuvered into position rather than someone who had chosen his position. And Dean did not stay in places he had been maneuvered into. What he decided was that he was staying because of Sammy, not because of the Rat Pack, not because of Frank’s vision, not because of what the group was or what it was becoming.

Because Sammy Davis Jr. was in it. And because the relationship between Dean and Sammy was one of the most consequential relationships of Dean’s adult life, and because leaving the rat pack would have meant leaving Sammy in a structure with Frank that Dean understood without being able to fully articulate why was a structure Sammy needed Dean inside of in order to remain fully himself.

this reasoning when Dean presented it to Frank on Monday morning directly in person in the specific conversation that the 72-hour silence had made possible because it had removed the possibility of the gradual negotiation that Frank had been expecting was not what Frank had anticipated. Frank had anticipated either capitulation or departure.

He had not anticipated Dean arriving on Monday morning with a clear account of his own reasons for the decision he had made. Reasons that had nothing to do with the power dynamics Frank had been navigating or the professional calculus Frank had been calculating and everything to do with a personal loyalty that Frank both understood and was not in this context in a position to argue against.

Frank said very little in response. The people who have described this conversation and they are few and the descriptions are fragmentaryary agree on one thing that Frank listened to what Dean said and that when Dean finished Frank nodded and the subject was considered closed. Dean Martin remained in the rat pack.

The group continued to build and to perform and to generate the specific cultural energy that made the early 1960s their defining period. The internal dynamics shifted after that Monday morning in ways that were subtle and consistent. Dean’s position within the group became somewhat less contested. Frank’s organizational authority was exercised with slightly more attention to the specific relationships rather than only the institutional shape.

And Sammy Davis Jr., who never knew that his name had been the reason Dean stayed, was present for the decade of work that followed. The musician Eddie Rento put the Sunday phone call together with subsequent events in 1962 when he read a profile of Dean in an entertainment magazine that described his unusual position within the Rat Pack.

He called Dean’s assistant and left a message asking about the Sunday conversation. Dean’s assistant called back and said that Mr. Martin appreciated the message and did not have anything to add to the conversation they had already had, which was finally exactly the kind of answer Dean Martin would give when the question being asked was about something he had already finished thinking about.

The specific quality of Dean Martin’s decision-making in that 72-hour period is worth examining more closely because it reveals something about the particular way Dean’s mind worked that most of the people who knew him professionally had observed without being able to name. Dean’s decisions when they were the decisions that actually mattered were never made in response to the pressure that produced them.

They were made in relation to the question underneath the pressure, which was always a different question and usually a more important one. Frank’s message on Thursday had created a situation with two obvious available responses. Accept the message and leave or reject the message and fight. Dean did either because both of those responses were responses to Frank’s framing of the situation.

And Frank’s framing was not the framing Dean found useful. The framing Dean found useful was not about Frank at all. It was about what Dean was actually doing in the rat pack and whether what he was actually doing was worth continuing to do on whatever terms were available to him.

This reframing was not conscious strategy in any calculated sense. It was simply how Dean’s mind operated. When he was presented with a situation that other people had defined in terms he found inadequate, he set aside their terms and found his own. The 72-hour silence was not a negotiating tactic. It was the actual time required for the reframing to happen, for Dean to move from Frank’s question to his own question, and to arrive at an answer to his own question that he could stand behind without reservation.

What Dean arrived at on Sunday evening in the conversation with Eddie Rento that Rento did not fully understand until years later was the understanding that his presence in the Rackpack was not at its core about Frank. It had never been about Frank, though Frank was the gravitational center of the enterprise and the relationship between them was real and consequential.

It was about Sammy. Specifically, it was about what Sammy needed from Dean that the structure surrounding them could not provide. What Sammy needed was someone inside the structure who was not fully captured by it. Someone who valued the relationships over the institution, who would remain the same person regardless of what the institution required, who represented for Sammy the proof that it was possible to be fully present in something without being fully defined by it.

Dean was that person for Sammy in ways that Frank, despite his genuine affection for Sammy and his genuine commitment to including Sammy in the world he was building, could not be. Frank’s commitment to Sammy was real, but it was expressed through the institution through ensuring that Sammy was present and valued in the structure Frank was building.

Dean’s commitment to Sammy was expressed through the relationship itself, independent of any institutional framework. It was the difference between being defended by someone who controlled the room and being known by someone who was simply there. This was what Dean explained to Frank on Monday morning in the direct, specific, entirely unperformative way that Dean explained things when he had taken the time to understand what he actually thought.

And it was this explanation, this account of a decision made for reasons that had nothing to do with power or money or professional calculation, that Frank found impossible to argue against, and that changed in the quiet way that important things change between two people who understand each other, the terms of their professional relationship for the rest of the decade.

If this story, the 72 hours, the Sunday phone call, and the real reason Dean Martin chose to stay moved something in you, subscribe and hit that like button. Share this with someone who has ever stayed somewhere, not for the institution, but for the person. Have you ever made a decision because of one specific relationship that you couldn’t explain to anyone else? Let us know in the comments and ring that notification bell because the next story is already waiting.