“That’s Ralph Lamb,” he said. “I’ll introduce ya.”
It would mark the beginning of Kirk’s longest-running Vegas friendship, with one of the most colorful characters in a city of colorful characters. Years later, Lamb would end up the chief law enforcement officer in town with a reputation for fighting the mob. He was also among the last of the cowboy lawmen in the modern West.
Once, when Kirk and Lamb were horseback riding well outside city limits, Kirk was stricken with appendicitis. Doubled over in pain, he could barely stay in the saddle. Ralph strapped Kirk to his horse, grabbed the reins, and rode hard back to civilization for just-in-time medical attention.
Kirk always told friends, “Ralph saved my life.”5
Lamb also helped Kirk land his plane from time to time. Back before Interstate 15 cut through Las Vegas, a large empty lot behind the Stardust Hotel became Kirk’s makeshift landing strip on various nighttime visits. Lamb would prepare for Kirk’s inbound plane by starting a small bonfire at one end of the sandy landing area and then drive his sheriff’s squad car to the other end—turning on his flashing emergency lights and illuminating the landing surface with the beam of his spotlight.6
That June night in 1947, Bugsy and the limo showed up back at the airfield no more than thirty minutes after they left. Kirk was puzzled that a customer would fly three hours round-trip for a half-hour meeting in a car, but mostly he was glad to have the business. Barney Aguer greeted him with questions first thing the next day. “How’d it go? What happened?”
Kirk could only shrug. “The strangest thing . . . but it was nothing.”
Two days after the trip, a special EXTRA edition of the Los Angeles Herald-Express carried the banner headline “‘BUGSY’ SIEGEL MURDERED” and said he had been “Rubbed Out in Beverly Hills in Hail of Bullets.” Page one photos of the crime scene showed Bugsy’s sheet-covered corpse in the living room where he had died reading a copy of the Los Angeles Times.7
The shooting occurred at 810 N. Linden Drive, the mansion residence of girlfriend Virginia “the Flamingo” Hill. It was one of the swankest of Beverly Hills neighborhoods, just off Sunset Boulevard.
In a lengthy news story and related features that jumped to various inside pages, this paragraph may have stood out back at the office of Los Angeles Air Service:
“Siegel, co-owner of the fabulous $5 million Flamingo gambling casino in Las Vegas, flew in from the Nevada resort town yesterday, and went directly to the home of Miss Hill, who had left on a trip to Paris.”
The gangland-style assassination was never solved. And Kirk never solved the mystery behind his last flight with Bugsy.
7
Art of the Junk Deal
Early 1950
Burbank, California
Kirk was especially proud of the latest piece of aviation junk he had picked up in Louisiana. It cost a mere $70,000. He talked like someone who might have found a Picasso at the dump.
It was the gleaming silver aluminum four-engine DC-4 Skymaster parked out in the Southern California sun just outside the new offices of Los Angeles Air Service. The company had moved to the Lockheed Air Terminal in Burbank and made the San Fernando Valley its new home.
LAAS accountant Arnold McGraw was curious to see what such a bargain looked like up close. He knew it was a beauty on the ledger page, an accountant’s dream. Any airworthy Skymaster was easily worth twice what the boss paid for it.
Kirk had negotiated the deal with an export outfit in New Orleans, a company that delivered Mississippi Valley dairy and beef cattle to Guatemala. That’s about all McGraw knew about its history. On this particular afternoon, he was extending his lunch break to inspect the new prize.
A ladder leaning against the fuselage led to an open door. He scampered up eager for his first look. The full import of the plane’s prior service hit the accountant the instant he stepped into the dark cargo hold. He choked, fighting his gag reflex, and steadied himself against the edge of the doorframe. The Skymaster atmosphere was thick with an overpowering odor—extreme barnyard—no doubt intensified by a couple of days fermenting in the sun.
In the bowels of the airship, structural damage was dangerously widespread. The old bell frames, the metal ribs of the fuselage, were so badly rusted from sloshing cattle urine that the plane was unsafe for man or beast. Much of the aluminum skin lining the belly of the plane would have to be ripped out and replaced due to more corrosion from animal waste.
Kirk knew what he was buying. He had factored in repair and retrofitting costs to make it a passenger plane. The boys at nearby Flying Tiger would do the work, making the former cargo plane airworthy and aromatic for a fraction of the cost required for a new DC-4. And Walter Sharp at the Montebello branch of Bank of America agreed to finance the $100,000 acquisition and rehabilitation costs. The amount would also cover the purchase of used passenger cabin seats.
Kirk helped fly his rust-infested gem home from Louisiana. McGraw had to wonder: How did the boss endure the intensity of that choking stench for more than seven hours in transit? Maybe his days mucking out the barn at the Happy Bottom Ranch helped him cope. More likely the foul atmosphere was simply offset in Kirk’s head by the sweet scent of success.
In the end, Kirk’s Skymaster emerged from rehab a bright, shining beauty—the new queen of his fleet. It even smelled new. He christened it the Californian and started service between Burbank and Newark, with stops in Amarillo and Cleveland. And with the launch of transcontinental service, Kirk’s little airline finally joined the big leagues of aviation.1
Life in the nonscheduled airline business remained filled with uncertainties, many from federal regulations intended to protect competing commercial carriers. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), which once encouraged expansion of charter services, came under increasing pressure to crack down on their intrusions into profitable commercial routes.
Kirk figured that his run of good luck wasn’t going to last indefinitely. He started cashing in some of his chips. Over the next year and a half he sold off some of his biggest planes—including the Californian.
His $100,000 cattle scow went to Northeast Airlines for the remarkable price of $340,000—and that was without the used passenger seats. The inveterate scrap dealer sold those separately. That transaction produced a milestone for the thirty-five-year-old entrepreneur. For the first time, Kirk’s annual income broke $100,000. He also learned a lesson: pilots don’t make big money, businessmen do.
With proceeds from his downsizing moves, Kirk was able to pay off his bank loans, buy out sister Rose’s interest, and reorganize the company. Business operations were split into two ventures—the charter service and his used plane trade. The trimmed-down airline could go dormant periodically, subject to the economy’s ebb and flow or the shifting burdens of CAB regulation. But his used plane brokering and bartering business never closed, keeping Kirk especially happy and financially sound.
“We must’ve traded sixty planes” in those days, he once estimated. But few trades gave him greater satisfaction than two deals he brokered in Europe to put together one working Lockheed Constellation from a pair of cannibalized “Connies.”
In January 1951 one of the sleek four-engine planes operated by British Overseas Airway Corporation (BOAC) was being ferried without passengers from London to Bristol. The Constellation, with its distinctive triple tail—three vertical stabilizers like the sails of a clipper ship—was a favorite of long-haul commercial carriers. The plane already held the U.S. transcontinental speed record.
Howard Hughes had met secretly with Lockheed officials just before the war advocating for performance specifications that would revolutionize commercial air travel. He pressed for greater speed, greater range, and higher altitudes. Barely thirty-five years after Wilbur and Orville Wright stunned the world by staying airborne fifty-nine seconds, Hughes was demanding planes that could fly nonstop across the continent. The result was the Constellation.
Even before the new design we
nt into production, Hughes ordered the first forty models for his own airline, Transcontinental and Western (later, TWA). That big purchase order was scratched by Lockheed’s abrupt shift to prewar military production. Postwar the plane maker couldn’t produce the popular Connie fast enough to catch up with demand. BOAC, Air France, and TWA got some of the earliest deliveries.
Coming into Bristol on a cold and blustery day that January, the BOAC Constellation, christened the Baltimore, landed hard on an icy runway. It bounced once, twice, and then lost the centerline, veering off the runway toward a fuel storage building containing fifty-five thousand gallons of aviation petrol. It could have been a disaster for the crew. Instead, it was a photo op.
Newspapers around the world carried a remarkable AP photo that weekend showing the BOAC Constellation perched on the roof of a single-story brick building—looking much like an airplane model mounted on a brick stand.2 Structurally, it looked largely undamaged. Kirk had the same impression. But BOAC insurance adjusters declared the $750,000 plane a total loss.
Given the high demand for Constellations in the open market, Kirk figured a repaired plane could be worth more than $1.5 million. He dispatched his own inspection team to Bristol for an assessment.
They found that the right wing (not visible in the press photo) had been destroyed, but the damaged nose section was repairable. Kirk offered underwriters $150,000 for the plane’s remains. They grabbed the deal.
Kirk insisted on one condition—four, actually: that the insurers throw in four zero-time engines to replace those on the crashed Constellation. (A zero-time engine is a new or refurbished engine that has never been operated in flight.) It was a classic Kerkorian deal. He immediately leased those engines to TWA, pretty much covering his initial expenses.
The Connie’s broken body was lashed to the deck of a cargo ship, the largest plane at that time ever transported by sea, and delivered to Newark for storage. Kirk figured that over time he could scrap other Constellations for parts. It was a smart bet.
That same year, an Air France Constellation of the same model and vintage made a hard landing in Toulouse. Insurance carriers declared it a total loss. But left intact was a right wing and an undamaged nose section, precisely what Kirk needed.
He bought the French parts for $122,000 and shipped them to Newark, where Lockheed raised a makeshift airplane factory for the meticulous reassembly project. The aircraft maker took the lead to ensure that the re-created Connie met the highest factory standards. It was completed in a few months in a tented dockside compound that came to be called “Splinterville.”
His good-as-new plane cost Kirk about $300,000. He hung on it a price tag of $1.6 million. His first sales call was to Howard Hughes. He left a message with Glenn Odekirk—the Hughes aide who bought that C-47 from Hawaii, the one with the yellow rubber raft and barely enough gas. The next night Hughes called back personally. They talked planes and flying. They talked price. Hughes was easygoing, friendly, but a hard sell. They agreed to meet in Las Vegas at the new Thunderbird Hotel, at the casino bar.
Though they had never met, Kirk knew Hughes by reputation, as did most of America. Hughes was a famed aviator, test pilot, and aircraft designer with many speed records and daring flights to his credit. He’d had his own ticker-tape parade through Manhattan. He owned an airline (TWA) and a movie studio (RKO) and was worth millions of dollars.
Kirk had noticed Hughes coming and going from the Las Vegas airport with a mixture of respect and hero worship. Hughes always seemed to be flying interesting planes—a B-17 or B-26, not a workhorse like the DC-3.
On one occasion, Kirk watched Hughes climb down from the cockpit of a B-26 with a newspaper under his arm looking like a swashbuckling flyer right out of Hollywood’s Central Casting catalog. “He was one helluva pilot . . . a real pilot’s pilot,” he recalled.
When Kirk first met Hughes, it was at the Thunderbird’s casino bar to discuss his Connie sale. The famous aviator, twelve years older than Kirk, was gracious and down-to-earth. Again, they talked about planes and flying . . . then about Las Vegas. But when conversation turned to business, Hughes seemed argumentative. He didn’t like the price, but he also didn’t like a litany of other things—including the size of the airliner’s lavatories.
Kirk was always flexible about price, but he was surprised and put off by the nitpicking, especially over the design of in-flight toilets. And though Hughes was always very polite, his stubborn pettiness made Kirk wonder if he might have somehow personally offended the multimillionaire.
After three or four more meetings without agreement, Kirk gave up. He would instead lease the reassembled plane to a Burbank-based neighbor—California Hawaiian Airlines, a charter company serving San Francisco and Honolulu. When that operator ran into financial troubles a couple of years later, Kirk recovered the Connie and sold it to El Al Israel Airlines for $750,000.
His net profit from separate lease deals, both for the plane and its engines, plus the El Al sale, came to $600,000.
Kirk was making a reputation as one of the top aviation brokers in the country. He had a small business on the verge of moving from modest annual revenues into the million-dollar club. He had impeccable credit at traditional banks and at the finest gambling houses in Las Vegas. Life was good.
Then his wife, Peggy, filed for divorce.
Friends and family speculated about Kirk’s many business absences, about too many gambling trips to Las Vegas, about the couple’s disappointment over having no children, about the possible smothering effect of Kirk’s close-knit, old-country family.
Kirk never wanted to talk about it.
Peggy’s divorce filing listed the grounds as “extreme cruelty and grievous mental suffering.” It was standard boilerplate language used throughout California in the era before no-fault divorces. No further details were provided in those documents, but Kirk had a temper that friends said could flare up in harsh—even mean—verbal assaults.
After an evening together that raised Kirk’s hopes for reconciliation, Peggy declined. “I can’t. You’ll only hurt me again,” she told him.3
Divorce proceedings continued. A property settlement simply noted their “unhappy differences.” She got the couple’s two-year-old Ford and all household furniture in the Inglewood residence they rented near the newly dedicated Los Angeles International Airport. Kirk agreed to provide $50,000 in spousal support spread out over seven years.
Their nine-and-a-half-year marriage officially ended on September 27, 1951. Kirk slipped into depression. He stopped working, stopped talking to his family, and holed up alone in a Hollywood apartment. During that same period, he tried to shake his dark mood with electroshock therapy. He later told friends that it worked but the effects didn’t last very long.4
What finally shook him out of his depressed state was his friend Jerry Williams banging on his door. Get out of this lonely apartment, Williams said. Move in with your parents. Get back with people who love you. It proved to be just the tonic. Soon Kirk was also back brokering used plane deals.
He was still lucky, too. He had one legendary streak while shooting craps at the Golden Nugget Casino. Management finally asked him—politely, as the story goes—to please take his hot hand to another casino.5
The remarkable thing about Kirk the gambler was that no one could ever tell from his demeanor whether he was winning or losing, whether the stakes were small or staggering. He always appeared relaxed, like one of the coolest crooners of his day. “He was the Perry Como of the craps table,” a casino exec told the Los Angeles Times.6
That same demeanor, the best poker face in the RAF Ferry Command, was also making Kirk an inscrutable force in business. He was developing a reputation as a highly effective negotiator. But his reaction to Peggy’s rejection revealed that at least in matters of love and romance, Kirk had a vulnerable side, as well.
8
Gambling on Gambling
Mid-1950s
Las Vegas, Nevada
Everyone wanted in on the action—from Midwest mobsters to investment managers at the Teamsters Union pension fund, from real estate developers to car dealers, from actors like the Marx Brothers and Pat O’Brien to an aviator like Kirk Kerkorian.
As a gambler himself, Kirk knew better than most the fundamentals of a casino business model: customers come in all day and night to throw money at the owners. And they love doing it . . . win or lose. Kirk consistently lost more than he won and yet he called his visits to Vegas “the best times” of his life. “I was just overwhelmed by the excitement of the town.”2
He accumulated many friends among casino owners and managers, some of them clients of his Los Angeles Air Service. One of those was Marion Hicks, an energetic L.A. real estate developer who built the El Cortez Hotel in downtown Las Vegas and then the Thunderbird on the Strip. During his many commutes with Kirk, Hicks had opportunities to share some of his hard-earned wisdom. He was uniquely qualified to answer that enduring question: What could possibly go wrong?
Hicks had been on a roll with his early Vegas investments. After selling the El Cortez to Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky for a quick six-figure profit, Hicks and his partner, Clifford “Big Juice” Jones, built the handsome Thunderbird. Their opening-night gala attracted a big crowd, but then things went terribly wrong. The craps table absorbed a $160,000 run of extraordinary good luck—at the casino’s expense. The house could barely scrape together $40,000.
The Gambler Page 7