Turn out the lights. The Rat Pack's over.

Comic Joey Bishop, the last surviving member of Frank Sinatra's nightclub fraternity, died Thursday at his Newport Beach, California, home of what his publicist described as multiple causes. He was 89.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Bishop played alongside Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford in the team that became renowned and revered as the Rat Pack.

Founding members of the original Rat Pack, led by Humphrey Bogart, scored no extra fame from their extracurricular activities. Adjunct members, including mascot Shirley MacLaine, drew only passing attention. But the famous five became stuck in the public's imagination—an intoxicating combo of cigarette smoke, cocktails and all-around cool.

Bishop, invariably, was the given last billing in the lineup that people would come to know by its members' first names: Frank, Sammy, Dean, Peter...and the other guy.

According to author Shawn Levy's Rat Pack Confidential, Sinatra never thought of Bishop as anything but essential to his merry band of backslappers. The Chairman of the Board, Levy wrote, called Bishop "The Hub of the Big Wheel," and sought him out for the act in order to have a veteran nightclub performer who could play traffic cop while the other goofs cut each other up.

Bishop was part of the Rat Pack's now-legendary after-hour shows at the Sands' Copa Room—when the gang, which rejected the Rat Pack label, billed itself as "The Summit"—during the filming of the original Ocean's 11, released in 1960.

Bishop appeared alongside Sinatra, Martin, Davis and Lawford in Ocean's 11 and the 1962 western Sergeants 3.

Another major entry of the Rat Pack canon included the 1964 gangster musical Robin and the 7 Hoods, which starred Sinatra, Martin and Davis, but not Lawford and Bishop. At the time, Bishop was busy with TV; Lawford was in exile after his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, passed over an invite to Sinatra's Palm Springs pad to bunk at Bing Crosby's. (A Rat Packer, or at least Sinatra, did not take slights lightly.)

While Lawford remained dead to Sinatra, Bishop remained a Rat Packer in good standing. He especially always seemed on call whenever Martin hosted his Celebrity Roast TV specials in the 1970s.

Born Joseph Gottleib on Feb. 3, 1918, in New York, Bishop worked vaudeville and served in the Army before hitting it big on the club circuit in the late 1940s. When Sinatra caught his act one night in New Jersey, the comic had a powerful new fan.

As a separate entity from Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Bishop starred in the 1961-65 sitcom, The Joey Bishop Show, and joined a long line of personalities who tried, and failed, to unseat Johnny Carson as TV's late-night king with his own 1967-69 night-owl show, also known as The Joey Bishop Show. The latter program is best known today for giving a thirtysomething Regis Philbin, who played Ed McMahon to Bishop's Carson, his first regular network TV gig.

If Carson held a grudge against Bishop for becoming the competition, he didn't show it. Bishop served as a frequent Tonight Show guest host for Carson in the 1970s.

Joey has something going for him that a lot of others don't," Carson told the New York Times in 1961. "He's likable."

Bishop's good-guy, sad-sack routine worked in rooms as small as clubs, as big as the Primetime Emmys, which he hosted in 1967, and as formal as President Kennedy's inaugural gala, which he hosted in 1961.

By the late 1990s, Bishop and Sinatra were the last two Rat Packers standing. Martin died in 1995, Davis, in 1990, and Lawford, in 1984.

When reminded once of his and Sinatra's survivor status, Bishop joked: "Shhh. Be quiet. Frank has connections."

In the end, Bishop outlived them all. Sinatra passed away in 1998 at the age of 82.

In a Time profile after Sinatra's death, then 80-year-old Bishop was portrayed as being unhappy over the Rat Pack revival that spawned books, a Vegas stage show and an HBO movie (in which Bishop was played by comic Bobby Slayton). Bishop's complaint seemed to be that outsiders were trying to judge a members-only club.

"Are we remembered as being drunks and chasing broads? I never saw Frank, Dean, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag!" Bishop said in the magazine. "And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase 'em away!"

And only time caught them.