The Brat Pack

During the early 1980s, Hollywood put dozens of young men on display, more at the same moment than ever before in history, a core of twenty-three plus innumerable minor lights, space fillers, imitators, and wannabes. To a great extent 1980’s teen culture, its movies, music, fashions, and fads, derived from this group, dubbed the Brat Pack after Frank Sinatra’s hell-raising Vegas Rat Pack. ¹ They were amazingly homogenous, all masculine, athletic, attractive, at least marginally talented, heterosexual (not one publicly gay, and very few the subject of gay rumors), white, or closet Hispanic, and amazingly affluent: Matt Dillon was the son of a stockbroker, Tom Cruise Mapother IV the son of an electrical engineer, and the others sons of architects, actors, filmmakers, college professors, and politicians. Only Patrick Dempsey, son of an insurance agent and a secretary, might be considered vaguely middle class. They mugged for the camera or trod the boards while still in diapers, attended fancy prep schools, and studied drama at University of Southern California or New York University. They were very lucky: their big-screen debuts came not after years of walk-on parts and yogurt commercials, but when a talent scout visited their high school, or one of Daddy’s friends agreed to an audition, or when they happened to be visiting a celebrity buddy on the set and the director yelled “Get me that boy!”