Lauren Bacall named them. Humphrey Bogart led them first. And by the time Sinatra took over, the Rat Pack was about to become the most mythologised group of men in entertainment history — for reasons that were only partly to do with talent.

The name came from Lauren Bacall, who surveyed the wreckage of a five-day Las Vegas bender in 1955 and told the assembled group — Bogart, Sinatra, Judy Garland, David Niven and others — "you look like a goddamn rat pack." After Bogart died in 1957, Sinatra reconstituted it around Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. Peter Lawford was in the group largely because he was JFK's brother-in-law. The Pack performed at mob-connected venues as favours to organised crime figures who had helped fund Kennedy's presidential campaign. When Kennedy won, Sammy Davis Jr. — who had campaigned hard for him — was quietly barred from performing at the inauguration because his marriage to white Swedish actress May Britt was considered politically toxic. Sinatra never fully forgave the Kennedys. The 1988 reunion tour lasted six nights before Martin walked off, reportedly after Sinatra threw a plate of spaghetti at him.

The Rat Pack's coolness was real. So was its contradictions. Sammy Davis Jr. broke the colour barrier in Las Vegas largely on his own talent — not, as myth has it, through Sinatra's influence. He did it in 1954, years before the Pack coalesced. He was then subjected to segregation laws that meant he couldn't always share a hotel room with his own bandmates.