Obituaries

The deadpan comic who was the last member of the Rat Pack

Joey Bishop was a doleful, soft-spoken comedian whose favorite target was himself. “I flunked sand pile,” he would say of his grade-school days. When he appeared in the 1958 film The Naked and the Dead, he remarked, “I played both parts.” But it was as part of the quintet of wisecracking, smooth-talking Hollywood hipsters known as the Rat Pack that Bishop achieved immortality; pack leader Frank Sinatra called him “the Hub of the Big Wheel.” He died last week at 89, having outlived all his fellow Rat Packers. The son of a poor bicycle-shop owner in Philadelphia, he was born Joseph Abraham Gottlieb, said the Orange County, Calif., Register. A natural mimic, he dropped out of school to join a comedy trio called the Bishop Brothers, whose name he took as his own. He first made a name playing the Jewish resorts of New York’s Catskills circuit before branching out to clubs nationwide. He was already earning a respectable $1,000 a week when Sinatra made him his warm-up act at New York’s Copacabana in the early 1950s. “My opening line stole the night,” Bishop recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t believe the size of this crowd. I sure hope Frank’s fans show up, too.’” Their partnership culminated “in a legendary three-week stint at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in 1960, when they were joined by Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford,” said The Washington Post. “Performing in the hotel by night, they filmed the caper movie Ocean’s Eleven during the day.” Taking the name the Rat Pack from a drinking circle associated with Humphrey Bogart, the five tuxedoed entertainers embodied “a swanky, high-roller style that emerged as an enduring definition of male savoir-faire.” Bishop was one of the few people who could insult Sinatra and get away with it. “He would interrupt Sinatra onstage saying, ‘That’s enough singing, Frank. Why don’t you tell them some of the good things the Mafia has done?’” Bishop also distinguished himself as the group’s “least glamorous member, the one whose personal life never made the gossip pages.” A non-drinker, he was married for 58 years to Sylvia Ruzga, who died in 1999. Bishop appeared in numerous movies and hosted two shows of his own, said Time. But to his perpetual distress, he couldn’t escape the Rat Pack. He was “often portrayed as the expendable member, the one who was lucky to be along for the ride, the Ringo.” When Bishop was hospitalized in 1965, Johnny Carson said that he’d strained his back bowing to Sinatra. “One guy wrote that I worked with the Rat Pack occasionally,” he complained. “Occasionally!” In later years, he sought to downplay the group’s mystique. “Everything you’re hearing now is hearsay,” he said after Sinatra died in 1998. “I never saw Frank, Dean, Sammy, or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag! And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase ’em away!”

The British actress who was a proper leading lady

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In 1953, Deborah Kerr was already an accomplished actress, but she was dissatisfied with her prim typecasting. “I came to Hollywood to act,” she complained, “but it turned out all I had to do was be high-minded, long-suffering, white-gloved, and decorative.” That changed when she appeared in From Here to Eternity. Kerr projected a seething passion that surprised audiences everywhere; the torrid embrace she shared with Burt Lancaster on a surf-tossed Hawaiian beach became one of the cinema’s most famous love scenes. The movie also won Kerr the second of six Academy Award nominations. Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer, the daughter of a Scottish World War I naval officer, trained in dance and drama as a child, said The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her first film appearance was opposite Wendy Hiller in Major Barbara in 1941, and two years later she played three different characters in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Louis B. Mayer of MGM brought “the alabasterskinned redhead” to the U.S. and, hyping her as “Deborah Kerr—The Name Rhymes With Star!” cast her opposite Ava Gardner and Clark Gable in The Hucksters (1947). That same year, she played a rigid nun in a Himalayan mission in Black Narcissus; she also earned her first Oscar nomination as Spencer Tracy’s alcoholic wife in Edward, My Son, in 1949. But for the most part, she was considered “decorative and unmemorable in prestige pictures such as King Solomon’s Mines (1950) and Quo Vadis (1951).” Then her new agent, Bert Allenberg, convinced Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures to cast “that English virgin from Metro,” as he called her, in the war drama From Here to Eternity, said the Los Angeles Times. Kerr, who said her parts were usually “about as exciting as an oyster,” played against type as the adulterous Karen Holmes, a sexually frustrated Army wife who has an affair with a virile sergeant. “For the role, Kerr took voice training to sound American. She also dyed her hair blond.” An unsuspecting public swooned when Kerr, embracing Lancaster, breathlessly declared, “I never knew it could be like this!” She later remarked, “I don’t think anyone knew I could act until I put on a bathing suit.” “Kerr looked 35 years old for about 20 years, a key advantage to her long and successful Hollywood run,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Among her other memorable roles were a compassionate headmaster’s wife in Tea and Sympathy (1956) and Cary Grant’s love interest in the tearjerker An Affair to Remember (1957). Her other Oscar nominations were for The King and I (1956), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Separate Tables (1958), and The Sundowners (1960). “She left movies at age 48, saying she was either too old or too young for every role offered her.” In 1993, in her last public appearance, she received an honorary Academy Award. In a trembling voice, she told the assembled, “Thank you for giving me a happy life.” Kerr is survived by her husband of 47 years, Peter Viertel, and two daughters. She died of Parkinson’s disease.