(here's a recent article from USA Today.  Just so you know -- 'cause it pissed me off to NO END!  They wanted to interview me for the article, but when they found I wasn't in my 20's, they decided not to because they wanted to talk to "young" folks.)

4/20/98- Updated 12:20 AM ET

Rat Pack back for another round

Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford, the original bad boys of swank and swing, have regained their swagger.

But their new audience was born decades after the Pack's hey-hey day.

''I like their music, their style, their sense of humor,'' says Jason Spadaro, 20, of Moorpark, Calif. ''This has a lot to do with the  state of the music today. People are finally realizing that that was kind of a good time in history. . . . They were talented entertainers, not just something old people like.''

Though Sinatra is 82, Joey Bishop is 80, and the others have gone to the big casino, the Rat Pack is back.

Tonight, the TV Land cable channel presents Frank, Dean and Sammy: An Evening With the Rat Pack, a never-before televised 1965 benefit concert for a Teamsters charity, at 9 p.m. ET/6 PT.

And get all this, gassers:

• There are dueling Rat Pack books. Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey and the Last Great Showbiz Party by Shawn Levy (Doubleday), a well-researched tale from the acclaimed biographer of Jerry Lewis, arrives in May. Already in stores is the more casual overview The Rat Pack: The Hey-Hey Days of Frank and the Boys by Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell (Taylor Publishing).

• There is a cable movie. HBO has just finished shooting The Rat Pack, starring Ray Liotta, Don Cheadle and Joe Mantegna as, respectively, Sinatra, Davis and Martin. It was written by Kario Salem (Don King: Only in America) and will air this year.

• There is a big-screen movie. Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi, who collaborated on GoodFellas and Casino, are writing a screenplay about Dean Martin. Pileggi dreams of Tom Hanks as Dino, John Travolta as Frank, Hugh Grant as Peter, Adam Sandler as Joey and Jim Carrey as Lewis, Martin's partner.

• And more movies. The American Movie Classics cable channel plans to bring back its successful Martini Months film series this summer. Rat Pack films will be heavily featured.

There also are Rat Pack Web sites, compact discs and theme nights at bars. As Frank might say, things are getting coo-coo crazy.

Credit the continuing health of the lounge subculture — the cigar-smoking, cocktail-drinking lifestyle that sneers at mainstream restraint.

''The '90s is a decade with a condom over it,'' Salem says. ''We look back at the sheer liberty that these guys enjoyed, the brazen defiance of convention — and the language of irreverence that they coined is now enormously attractive.''

It is to Vanessa D'Amelio, 27, a marketing specialist in San Francisco who recently threw a Rat Pack party.

''For the past 10 years we've had safe sex and Mothers Against Drunk Driving and all the politically correct things that we should do,'' D'Amelio says. ''I think it's a natural progression for people in my generation to rebel against those ideals — in a safe context. In those atomic years, it was great fun to be young and to be American.''

D'Amelio digs the Pack's sexist way with women and ethnic humor (a black guy, an Englishman, two Italians and a Jew: They were a joke waiting to happen).

''They represented true bachelorhood,'' she says. ''Even if they were married.''

That view amuses Rat Pack author Quirk, who hung out with the ''boys'' on the sets of the films Ocean's Eleven and Robin and the Seven Hoods.

''The young people today are more self-conscious about it,'' says Quirk, who is 74. ''They are watching themselves being free and wild. But the Rat Pack were hedonists.''

The term ''Rat Pack'' was coined by actress Lauren Bacall to describe an earlier gang of buddies that included her husband, Humphrey Bogart, and Sinatra (they looked like rats after a night of carousing).

When the new crew inherited the title, they took it to the stage. They danced, sang and cracked jokes — and tossed it all off with a boozy insouciance. They gambled, chain-smoked and drank heavily.

''You're not drunk,'' Martin would joke, ''if you can lie on the floor without hanging on.''

In addition to being Lewis' straight man, Martin was a solo film star and a singer of love ballads. His trademark was booze, his demeanor aloof and detached.

Davis was a professional vaudeville tap dancer by the age of 3. His many talents broke down show-biz color barriers, and he headlined at nightclubs, on Broadway and in movies.

But it was Frank's world, and the others just lived in it. Sinatra was the biggest star in the show-biz galaxy, a crooner-turned-swingin' pop singer who was also a movie icon.

When this trio of big-leaguers teamed with deadpan comic Joey Bishop and actor Peter Lawford (whose main claim to fame was that he was ''the brother-in-Lawford'' to John F. Kennedy), the fun started.

They walked through movies and fractured audiences in Las Vegas. Occasionally accompanied by ''mascot'' Shirley MacLaine, they cavorted with gangsters, gamblers, call girls and JFK. They were infamous for using ''broads'' like Kleenex: throwing them away after ''a little hey-hey.''

''That is one of the proofs of how great their art was,'' says Rat Pack Confidential's Levy. ''They produced it at times when they were involved in behavior that was poisonous. Their work was something they did, and their lives were something else.''

Their story was an intersection of politics, the mob and Hollywood, screenwriter Salem says. And no one was what he seemed — especially Davis.

''Sammy was more than all the thigh slapping, smiles and prodigious talent,'' Salem says. ''He was an extraordinarily complicated and courageous man.''

With the assassination of Kennedy and the invasion of the Beatles, the Rat Pack began to fade, its type of cool turning cold — and old.

But old fashions come back.

''The Rat Pack is an idealized group of friends hanging out together,'' says Todd McClintock, 27, a shipping manager at a Boulder, Colo., video editing company who finds himself dressing down for work and dressing up for a drink after work.

''A lot of guys would enjoy doing that: going to Vegas, hitting the town,'' McClintock says. ''For many years, men in this country were not allowed to act like men. We went through a period when . . . smoking was bad for you, drinking was bad for you.
''I think it's a cyclical thing, but all of a sudden people enjoy dressing up a lot more, they enjoy the extravagant things in life — the martini bars — that for a long time people deprived themselves of.''

The Rat Pack's rediscovery can thus be seen as a reclamation of our past.

''Their music looks almost like roots music to some young people,'' Levy says. ''It's not amplified, and it's touch dancing. Sure, they were fuddy-duddies to hippies and their children — but in retrospect, it looks like a pretty good time.''

By Andy Seiler, USA TODAY