Leaders of the ‘Pack,’ Pals Gather for a Sin-City Soiree

The Scene: Tuesday’s premiere of HBO’s “The Rat Pack” at the Motion Picture Academy. The portrayal of Frank Sinatra’s dysfunctional Family of Cool as martini-sipping, pre-PC gods of Vegas debuts Saturday night.

Who Was There: Stars Ray Liotta, Joe Mantegna, Don Cheadle, Angus Macfadyen and Bobby Slayton; director Rob Cohen; producer Neal Moritz; and 1,000 guests including Ving Rhames, James Caan, Robert Wuhl, Kevin Pollak, Robert Culp, Djimon Hounsou, Mark Canton, Tom Pollock, agent Doug MacLaren and HBO’s John Matoian and Ellen Collett.

The Buzz: The film’s portrayal of JFK’s affairs inspired comments about “timely irony.” Combine this with what one guest called “a plethora of bimbettes displaying their investments” at the party and life once again reflected art.

Quoted: Liotta, who plays Sinatra, said, “We didn’t want an exact imitation of these guys. We wanted a semblance of how they looked, how they moved, some of their mannerisms, but mostly we wanted the human quality of how they would have reacted to these situations. We could have done the movie as booze, broads and butts, but I don’t know how interesting that ‘would have been.”

Noted: Bobby Slayton, who played Joey Bishop (and compared the comic’s peripheral Rat Pack position to “being like Tito in the Jackson Family”), said the best analysis of the group’s dynamic he’d heard was, “Sammy wanted to be Frank, Frank wanted to be Dean, and Dean wanted to be home watching television.”

The Party: The theme, said designer Chris Yeager, was “having fun and not feeling guilty about it.” To this end, the spacious Wilshire Ebell (one of L.A.’s finest but underused party venues) was done over with a basketball court-sized casino, a “Levittown meets Las Vegas” lounge and a nightclub with a 15-piece swing band, neon lights and sleeper-sized banquettes. In keeping with the film’s tone, one guest was heard asking, “So where’s the bedroom with the babes?”

Observed: Who knows what it says about Hollywood, but the line of dialogue that got the biggest laugh was Mantegna as Dean Martin saying, “I just want to act and cheat on my wife.”

Overheard: “Stars today hang out with a higher class of thug.” . . . “The thing about this movie is if you get it wrong, you have to deal with Frank in the afterlife.” . . . And, “We knew we were in the right place when we saw guys in the parking lot drinking martinis.”