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all their friends were going to see him in Vegas and not taking me with them.) In Vegas the group debauched for about four days straight, drinking, dancing, partying, and gambling. Apparently they didn’t get much sleep, and after a while they all looked like hell. On the fourth day my mother said, “You look like a goddamn rat pack.” The name stuck.
    “We had a dinner later at Romanoff’s,” my mother says, “and we elected officers.”
    The first official notice of the Rat Pack appeared the next day in Joe Hyams’s column in the New York Herald Tribune.
    The Holmby Hills Rat Pack held its first annual meeting last night at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and elected officers for the coming year. Named to executive positions were: Frank Si natra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice presi dent; Lauren Bacall, den mother; Sid Luft, cage master; Humphrey Bogart, rat in charge of public relations; Irving Lazar, recording secretary and trea surer; Nathaniel Benchley, historian.
    The only members of the organization not voted into office are David Niven, Michael Ro manoff, and James Van Heusen. Mr. Niven, an Englishman, Mr. Romanoff, a Russian, and Mr. Van Heusen, an American, protested that they were discriminated against because of their national origins. Mr. Sinatra, who was acting chairman of the meeting, refused to enter their protests on the minutes.
    A coat of arms designed by Mr. Benchley was unanimously approved as the official insignia of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack for use on letterheads and membership pins. The escutcheon features a rat gnawing on a human hand with a legend, “Never Rat on a Rat.”
    Mr. Bogart, who was spokesman, said the orga nization has no specific function other than “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of indepen dence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.”
    He said that membership is open to free- minded, successful individuals who don’t care what anyone thinks about them.
    A motion concerning the admittance of Clau dette Colbert was tabled at the insistence of Miss Bacall, who said that Miss Colbert “is a nice person but not a rat.”
    My mother says that Spencer Tracy was only an honorary member because this was not really his scene. Tracy led a qui eter life.
    “You had to be a nonconformist,” she says, “and you had to stay up late and drink and laugh a lot and not care what anybody said about you or thought about you.”
    Bogie came up with the motto, Never Rat on a Rat. They made rules, such as they were. One was that no new member could come in without the unanimous vote of the char ter members.
    Though my father was elected as director of public rela tions, people I talk to seem to feel that he was the spiritual leader of the group. Of course when Bogie died, the real leadership of the Rat Pack went to Frank Sinatra and its center moved from Hollywood to Las Vegas.
    The press made a big deal of the Rat Pack, of course, and even today when a group of celebrities hang out to gether they often get labeled with some version of the title, such as the Brat Pack of a few years ago.
    You wouldn’t think that forming a group of friends to have fun would be controversial, but it sometimes was. William Holden, who had already had a few run-ins with my fa ther, didn’t care for the Rat Pack. Holden said, “It’s terribly important for people to realize that their conduct reflects the way a nation is represented in the eyes of the world. That’s why the rat-pack idea makes our job so tough. If you were to go to Japan or India or France and represent an entire indus try, which has made an artistic contribution to the entire world, and were faced then with the problem of someone asking, ‘Do they really have a Rat Pack in Holmby Hills?’ what would you say? It makes your job doubly tough.
    “In every barrel there’s bound to be a rotten apple. Not all actors are bad. It may sound stuffy and dull, but it is quite possible for people to have