by Steve Fisher
She knelt on the floor and took his hand, and looked up, ready to speak.
“No,” he said, “no more. Tomorrow maybe. I’m too tired. I’m sure it’s a sad story and that you were innocent. You’re too dumb to be anything else. But I just don’t want to talk about it now.” He sucked hard for his breath.
She whispered: “I love you.”
“Well, you’re in for it then. If this is going to be your life. Because I don’t want that boat I talked about—or any trips. Not until I get old. I want Rainbows End. And if you’re going to be Mrs. Rainbow’s End, you’re in for it. Because the big siege can start again anytime. Tomorrow, next week, next month—any time.”
The cigarette dropped from his fingers. She picked it up from the rug and carefully put it out.
Steve Fisher’s No House Limit
AN AFTERWORD BY ONE OF HIS SONS
If you were looking for glamour and excitement, gambling, sex and entertainment, then Las Vegas in the mid-1950s was the place to be. It was an almost magical oasis of hotels and casinos out in the middle of the desert. The Flamingo, Thunderbird, El Rancho Vegas, Tropicana, Sands, Riviera and Sahara. The most amazing part was that less than seven years earlier none of these world-class resorts had even existed. Up until then Las Vegas had just been a dusty little town on the way to Los Angeles. Then one day a murderous, if imaginative, gangster named Bugsy Siegel had an idea and changed all that. And the rest was history. (But as remarkable and eventually as successful as Mr. Siegel’s vision had been . . . success for the Flamingo Hotel and Casino didn’t come in time to save his life. On June 20, 1946, his unhappy partners had him killed at his home in Beverly Hills, just three blocks down from where our family was living at the time.)
By the early 1950s Las Vegas was drawing visitors from all over the world and especially from Los Angeles and Hollywood. Movie stars were to be seen everywhere. Top entertainers were making $30,000 a week. Beautiful showgirls and starlets hoped to be discovered. High rollers won and lost fortunes on a nightly basis. My father, who wrote this book, knew many of these people as they chased their hopes and dreams and coped with their desperations.
My dad loved the excitement of Las Vegas . . . and for that matter just liked to gamble, whether it was horse racing, gin rummy at a nickel a point, or ping pong on the back patio . . . or as he and some other writers working at the studios liked to do, pitching silver dollars to fill out a morning until lunch. And I can remember hot Sunday afternoons and evenings at our house in the San Fernando Valley when he would spread a “Green Crap Table Cloth” with all the markings on the floor. Then he would be the Bank for a crap game with myself and my brother and sister and maybe a dozen or more neighborhood kids (we had the only swimming pool in the area, which made us more or less headquarters) . . . and if we lost our nickels and dimes and quarters and later asked him for more money, he would sigh in mock exasperation and offer us such sage advice as, “You have to stop squandering your money on things like food and rent.”
So the attraction to write a novel about Las Vegas was no surprise . . . and writing is what he did best. By then he had published somewhere between 90 and 100 novels and over 900 short stories and had written 120 or so movies and episodes of television series. In later years other writers would tell me that, because of his output, they used to think Steve Fisher was a corporation and that there had to be at least four or five people writing under that name.
He had no way of knowing, of course, how unique a time it was in Las Vegas. Looking back, one can see it was almost a generational period. The small, dusty town Las Vegas had been was long gone. Bugsy Siegels vision and eventual brutal murder and the hard feelings it generated were finally settling. It was a time when the other (Syndicate-run) hotels were ready to flex their muscles and think about expansion . . . which meant going after the real-world equivalents of Joe Martin’s “Rainbows End Hotel and Casino,” the biggest, the best and most glamorous hotel casinos on the strip.
Again, one can catch a glimpse of the generational change-over. Las Vegas in the early 1950’s was headed for the (yet unseen) future of mega-corporations, resorts and casinos run within a corporate structure. But Joe was in effect a lone wolf. He was like a Bogart character in a movie. He stood alone against the enemy, running the Rainbows End in Las Vegas much like Bogart ran Rick’s Place in Casablanca.
My father wrote two films for Humphrey Bogart, Dead Reckoning and Tokyo Joe. As I recall, they were pretty good friends in the period they worked together . . . and if you look, there are several times in the book when Joe Martin’s dialogue sounds very much like a Bogart line out of a movie . . . page 35, for instance, when he’s in an argument with Sunny, the girl he he’s attracted to but doesn’t trust:
“Joe, I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“Mean what?” he demands.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Nobody hurts me,” he replies.
I know we’ve all seen a lot of Bogart films, but an exchange like that, scalding words in a tense scene between a cynical man and a beautiful woman . . . just feels very Bogart to me. There are at least a half a dozen other spots scattered throughout.
As noted before, my father was a very prolific writer. He was also very disciplined. Whether it was a novel or a movie he would block the story out scene by scene on 3-by-5 cards, which he would pin on the walls around his desk. When they were complete (which might take weeks—but rarely did) he’d pound out at least a chapter a day until done.
On No House Limit his notes would read something like . . .
Chapter l: The book centers around Joe Martin and the “Rainbow’s End Hotel and Casino,” which he owns. The biggest, gaudiest and best casino hotel on the strip. As the story opens, Joe is aware that “trouble” is coming. He’s not sure what it is or where it’s coming from, he just knows that the last few days, people have been watching him.
Chapter 2: Meet Sunny. Unlike the showgirls and hookers . . . Sunny is a schoolteacher from Utah . . . her good looks and innocence attract Joe. “I would trade the casino for her,” he was heard to muse.
Chapter 3: Meet some of the interesting people in the casino including Mai who plays the piano and sings in the lounge.
(Like most writers, my father would at times use real people as the basis for a character. Mai was based on Matt Dennis, a famous lounge singer and composer. He wrote songs such as “Angel Eyes,” “Violets for Your Furs,” and some early Frank Sinatra hits, among many others. He played for years and years in various clubs in Los Angeles. Matt Dennis was a friend of my father’s.)
Chapter 4: Report . . . Counterfeit chips are flooding into the casino. Joe knows that the assault on his empire had begun.
Chapter 6: BELLO arrives. Bello is a legendary gambler. But even he wouldn’t come after Joe Martin alone. Joe quickly understands that Bello is the front man for “someone . . . or some group of people” who want to take over the Rainbow’s End. Bello is in effect their “hired gun.”
Like the character of Mai, the character of Bello had its roots in a real-life person . . . in this case, a world-famous gambler named Nicholas Dandolos, who was known as “Nick the Greek.” Dandolos was a bigger-than-life character who dressed all in black (as does Bello in the novel). In 1951 the real Nick the Greek played one-on-one poker non-stop for four months, during which time it is told he lost a million and a half dollars. Many people believe that game was the inspiration for the World Series of Poker.
I remember meeting Nick the Greek when my father was researching this book. We drove for hours from our home, then in the San Fernando Valley. I’m not sure where we ended up, but it was a desolate house on a patch of dusty, desolate desert land. (I don’t believe it was in Las Vegas.) Once there, Nick the Greek showed us out to the barn where there were boxes and boxes of letters. If the glamour of meeting the legendary gambler hadn’t already started to wear off, it did now. The letters were for the most part sad, desperate pleas from people who
needed money for an operation for their child, or to save their home from foreclosure. They would send five or ten dollars and ask the famous Nick the Greek to gamble with it until there was enough money for their desperate need. What they couldn’t have known, of course, was that on any given day Nick the Greek was probably in one of his “broke times.” He later claimed to have lost at least $500 million over his lifetime, going from rags to riches and back again over seventy times.
In some ways Nick the Greek and his giant wins and losses exemplifies a great deal of what Las Vegas is . . . but then so do the showgirls and the entertainers. The gamblers winning or losing, taking their big chance. It’s a magical place of dreams. Hope and desperation.
No House Limit captures a great deal of this, and I know my father would be pleased to see it back in print.
—Michael Fisher