‘PACK’ OF TROUBLE
Dino’s daughter: #MeToo might smell a ‘Rat’ with gang!
Dean Martins’s daughter isn’t sure the Rat Pack would have survived the #MeToo era. Deana Martin, who will be honored at the Friars Club on Monday, wavered when asked if her dad, along with his pals Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, could have stayed clear of controversy in the modern era.
“I think they would have only because they were so cute at it, they were cool . . . ” she said before changing her tune a bit. “Well, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if they would have survived.”
According to Martin, 69, her legendary father’s swinger act ended when the spotlight was turned off. That may not have been the case for the whole gang.
“Dad came over every night . . . . He wouldn’t stay up with Uncle Frank and Uncle Sammy. He didn’t want to do that,” she said.
“The cigarette, the womanizing, that was his shtick. I really don’t know (how that would be received) these days.”
As the stor y goes, actress Lauren Bacall coined the term “Rat Pack” when her husband, Humphrey Bogart, came home with a handful of rough-looking pals after a night of partying. It was in the 1960s that the quintet came to be known as the Rat Pack.
While Martin says it was her father’s style to go with the flow, she doubts Sinatra would have made an effort to be politically correct in 2018.
“Frank would have said what he wanted to, and he would have gone on with what he wanted to do,” Martin said.
When Martin is made a Friars Club “trobairitz” on Monday, she will join Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick and Kristin Chenoweth as the only women to have received that honor.
“Tell you what, we could be the Cat Pack,” she joked. “I’m going to coin that phrase.”
Martin plans to wear a medal her father was honored w ith by his fellow Friars in 1951 to the ceremony. She’s also following in her famous father’s footsteps by hosting a series of celebrity roasts that started last month in Las Vegas with an event honoring actor Joe Mantegna. Next up is singer Frankie Valli, who will be skewered in Sin City around the end of summer on a date yet to be determined. Martin is aware of the controversies comediennes Roseanne Barr and Samantha Bee got themselves into this week with off-color language, but doesn’t anticipate her roasts will be singed by all the fuss. “I’ve been to these Friars Club roasts, and some of those people get pretty vulgar, but that’s private, those aren’t aired,” she said. “For the Deana Martin celebrity roasts, they’re funny and use a little bad language, but they’re not vile or vulgar, or I would say racist, or anything like that, just like with the Dean Martin celebrity roast. “T he wor st it would get would be Don Rickles,” she said, referring to the comically caustic rants of the beloved funnyman who died last year.