Lesson of the Rat Pack

You sit at the console and the screen flickers to life. Within seconds you are transported to a distant place in your own memory, a place you had long forgotten.

But this is no cyberspace trick. It is the power of “old” television.

On the screen, the year is 1965. The Rat Pack makes one of its early concert appearances. Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra croon, chain-smoke and joke about being drunk on stage, their behavior revealing how much we have changed since those pre-Vietnam days.

The camera pans the audience in a St. Louis auditorium, revealing a sea of white faces. Women wear gloves up to their elbows. Men look stiff and corseted in their formal wear. Clearly, a big night.

At one point Davis apparently senses that he is entertaining an auditorium full of--excuse the term--squares, and gives them a hint of the cultural tsunami headed their way. He explains, and then demonstrates, the dances their kids are doing, including the Monkey, the Mashed Potato, the Frug and the Jerk.

The audience looks uncomfortable. Was that the first time they felt the hot breath of the ‘60s on their starched collars?

And what are we to make of the nervous, bad jokes about race that seem to compel the Rat Packers? Halfway through his appearance, Davis is implored to “sing a medley of race riots.” At still another, Martin scoops Davis up in his arms and carries him to the microphone.

“I would like to thank the NAACP for this wonderful trophy,” he says, and everybody laughs.

So it goes. Four days a week, this wacky performance can now be seen at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills. Since it premiered on April 17, “The Rat Pack Captured” has grown into one of the museum’s biggest hits ever, a testimony to our hunger for a recent past that seems to become more mysterious and beguiling with each year.

It also illustrates a paradoxical lesson of television. If new television works as a bad drug that drains the soul, old television works as a curative. It rebuilds a connection to our younger selves and serves as a reminder of all that we have forgotten.

Only a short time ago, the ordinary person had virtually no access to these images from our past. If you wanted to see the original TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination, good luck. How about an early Howdy Doody or “Gunsmoke”? Ditto.

Now we do have that access, thanks to a television industry that finally recognized the cultural value of its stored works and ponied up the money for the museum. The hallways are plastered with the names of sitcom producers who unloaded a few million for the cause.

Sometimes, the viewing can be unsettling. On the day Kennedy was shot, the network anchors are shown without stand-ups from the scene or graphics or even a video feed from Dallas. They simply sit at their plain desks, reading wire copy, taking phone calls, looking gaunt.

Did we really not have satellite feeds in 1963? Was there really a time when network anchors weren’t rich as Croesus and as swaggering as movie stars? Were some of us really alive before McLuhan’s global village took over the world? Yes to all.

Because television more or less initiated the electronic age, its enormous output has been largely self-recorded and safely stored in the network vaults. And from the vaults it has gone onto digitized tape at the museum. But not all of it.

For many years, the pilot for “I Love Lucy” was lost. So were many of the episodes of “The Honeymooners,” as was Johnny Carson’s first appearance on “The Tonight Show” and even the television broadcasts of Super Bowl I and II.

The good news, says museum President Robert Batscha, is that most lost programs are still waiting to be found, somewhere. If not in a network vault, he says, they’re sitting in somebody’s attic or garage.

In fact, “The Rat Pack Captured” has made a big splash in part because it was only recently uncovered and made available for viewing after 32 years. Up to the time of the discovery, it was believed that all video recordings of Rat Pack concerts had disappeared.

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Then television producer Paul Brownstein tracked down a kinescope version of the concert stored at a halfway house in St. Louis. Dismas, the halfway house, had long been a favorite charity of Sinatra and was the major recipient of the benefit concert.

These days, Brownstein makes a living from such detective work. Certain cable television programs--particularly “Nick at Nite”--will pay to broadcast vintage television shows and, thus, have created a new market for a particular form of history.

“No one’s getting rich from this,” said Brownstein. “You do it because you love it. In fact, some artists are amazed at how little they get paid for an airing of one of their old shows. Let’s say the payment is sometimes in the two figures.”

Still, television has found a way to build a museum to itself and make its heritage available to the public. Which is more than can be said for all the studios and all the moguls of the film industry after decades of trying.

At the museum, the big project now involves a search for early James Dean on TV. Dean appeared in all kinds of television shows before he hit the big time on the silver screen.

“Dean played St. Francis of Assisi in one program,” said Batscha. “And another time he showed up in a Pepsi commercial. He played the All-American guy.”

Can’t wait. Looks like history in the making.

’ Since it premiered on April 17, “The Rat Pack Captured” has grown into one of the museum’s biggest hits ever, a testimony to our hunger for a recent past that seems to become more mysterious and beguiling with each year. ‘