While I was performing in The Boy From Oz in Naples last winter, I got a call from the Bemus Bay Pops asking whether I would be interested in doing the Garland portion of a Frank Sinatra & Judy Garland symphonic pops concert.  How very interesting, I thought, because although there are only a handful of recorded Frank and Judy duets, they had performed together regularly on wartime radio programs, then decades later on a 1962 television special along with Dean Martin — and for my money, they were the two finest pop singers of the 20th century.  Moreover, they were close friends for nearly three decades — a friendship that also included two brief romantic affairs: in 1949 while Judy was still married to Vincente Minnelli, and in 1955, while she was briefly separated from Sid Luft and Frank’s marriage to Ava Gardner was on the skids. 

But perhaps most interesting and not widely known, is that Judy and Frank were members of the original “Rat Pack,” a social group of fun-loving, hard-drinking night owls who would convene at the home of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the tony Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles.