Joey at the Summit

On every table in the big nightclub at Las Vegas' Sands Hotel, a card announcing the night's entertainment carried as after thought: "Oh yes . . . and Joey Bishop." Joey's thin, sad face glooms out of the card's corner as if he felt the same way. Theoretically Joey has bottom billing --fifth man after the show's four stars. But happily, as soon as he starts talking, he is recognized as top banana in a newly assembled comedy act that is breaking up Vegas. His fellow performers: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford. "Who's starring tonight?" asks the M.C. as he opens the five-cornered show.

Joey's voice is heard answering quietly from backstage: "I dunno. Dean Martin is drunk; Sammy Davis hadda go to da temple; Peter Lawford's out campaigning for his brother-in-law." Hopefully, the M.C. asks: "What's Frank doing?" Joey's answer is a wise snicker. Then he makes his entrance.

Big Wheel. Among the newer comics, from sickniks to social satirists, Joey stands alone. His wry, deadpan comments raise even the obvious to the realm of high comedy. At the Sands, in the midst of chaos and pure corn--Sinatra beating a bass drum that advertises his L.A. beanery, or Dean Martin drinking Scotch from an ice bucket--Joey can still be funny.

When Sammy Davis swings into She'd Live in a Tent, Joey worriedly pretends to detect an Arab influence, announces: "Jewish people don't live in tents. We don't even smoke Camels." When Senator Jack Kennedy caught the show last week, Joey told him: "If you get in, Frank has to be Ambassador to Italy and Sammy to Israel. I don't want too much for myself--just don't let me get drafted again." Turning to the medical profession, he muses: "My doctor is wonderful. Once, in 1955, when I couldn't afford an operation, he touched up the X rays."

Joey's quips are delivered with a warmth that never wounds. Even the self-protective Sinatra loves them. The "summit session" at the Sands was made possible because all of its stars are in Vegas for the filming of Frank's new movie, Ocean's II. But the nightly "meetings," says Frank in a masterfully mixed metaphor, "could not have come off without the Speaker of the House--Joey Bishop, the hub of the big wheel."

Another Name. At 42, Joey has been waiting a long time to get to the center of things. Born Joseph Abraham Gottlieb, he grew up in Philadelphia. "My folks were poor," he remembers, "but I didn't mind poverty. They always played games. For instance, when I'd come home, they had moved." He quit high school, formed the Bishop Brothers Trio with two pals named Reisman and Spector (Bishop was the name of another friend who promised to drive them to auditions). Through the late '30s, they played the Eastern burlesque circuit.

After the war, Joey went back to the small clubs until Sinatra caught him one night in Greenwich Village. At Frank's suggestion, he was booked into the big time. Stints on Jack Paar's TV show and CBS's freewheeling Keep Talking got him national attention and a chance to be the kind of comedian he likes--a sad-faced funnyman whose effortless humor seems spontaneous but is the product of endless preparation. "People don't guffaw just looking at me," says he. "I have to compensate for that. I read obituary columns. I call hospitals and ask how things are in surgery. Little things that keep me sad. I shy away from people who say good morning. What we need is not sick humor but healthy adversity."

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