by Paul Anka
Vegas was such an irresistible place and it all revolved around Frank. Everyone—movie stars, business moguls, and women, of course, were magnetically drawn to him. Even future presidents wanted to hang around with Frank because at that time—late ’50s to early ’60s—he was the hippest, coolest cat around. Frank was king of the hill. JFK and Frank got very tight, so tight that Sinatra started building guest quarters for JFK at his house in Palm Springs.
In 1961, Frank spent an enormous amount of time and money creating a compound specifically for JFK, building new cottages, putting in new phones, buying new furniture, and installing a fancy specially built bed above which hung Frank’s little in joke: JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE … from which he had diplomatically omitted WITH NUMEROUS WHORES. The walls were covered with photos of Frank, Jack, and Peter Lawford. Frank was therefore utterly humiliated when in the spring of 1962, JFK, on a visit to California, ignored Sinatra’s invitations and never saw the sumptuous quarters Frank had built for him in Palm Springs and had hoped would become the Western White House. Instead, JFK chose to stay at Bing Crosby’s home, which threw Frank into a rage. He began smashing pictures of the Kennedys and took a sledgehammer to the heliport he’d had built for JFK to land on.
After JFK became president, he wanted to put some distance between himself and Frank because of Sinatra’s connections to the mob, and the compound sat empty. That hurt. Frank felt it was a slap in the face, and went nuts. Whatever Sinatra’s ties to JFK’s father, Joe Kennedy, or what his obligations were to JFK as a friend, Kennedy had to sever the connection. JFK, of course, loved the ladies and the situation played right into the whole sexual circus. I saw the reality: Kennedy and the hookers, the women who hung around Frank, and the mob. It was a shop window. The media at that time was controlled, so they wouldn’t write about it. But never doubt the intensity of it. The things that I saw and witnessed, it was all part of show business, but it was pretty wild. All the JFK escapades with showgirls happened in Vegas.
* * *
Back in the day, the airport was tiny, the size of a forty-by-forty-foot room. It was a wood shack, actually. You walk across the tarmac, come in the door—it was just like an old-fashioned railway station: wooden benches, lockers, a big old clock. Nothing fancy, nothing glamorous about it.
You didn’t need a glitzy airport lounge, you went to Vegas to be entertained. You had the best of everything: best-looking women, the greatest artists in the world. You went back to meet them and there was no arrogance, self-importance—they were very touched at your compliments, and would introduce you to whoever was in the dressing room: politicians, movie stars, other singers. It was a town of tight little showrooms and was still very quaint when I first went out there. It was also intimate, as if you were right up there with them. You’d see Count Basie and Sinatra performing twelve feet away from your table. It was the biggest thrill of my life meeting Martin, Sammy, and the whole Rat Pack—all there together, hanging out, telling jokes, spinning wild tales. There was something uniquely theatrical about Vegas—there were all these layers, all this stuff going on. There weren’t really tourists in Vegas the way there are today, but the visitors in general were oblivious to what was really going on. The performers, on the other hand, were somewhat clued in, but the staff, the call girls, the pit bosses, the showgirls—all knew the real behind-the-scenes stuff. They saw what was going on in the showrooms on the floor and quite a bit about the murky world that controls them. And then there were the mob guys—that’s a whole other underworld that no one but they knew.
Everybody who worked there knew what was going on. Couldn’t keep secrets like that down. I think for a while they were running a coke factory out of the backroom of Caesars Palace. All kinds of deals went down there—everything from real estate to contract murder—all courtesy of the management.
With all that interconnectedness of the mob and the Vegas scene, how did I avoid not becoming involved with these people? Nobody ever threatened me; no, nothing like that. You can’t threaten a nineteen-year-old kid, and who ever heard of a nineteen-year-old being killed? Especially one who had the number one record all over the world. Yeah, if you’re Sinatra or you grew up with these people and you’re asking them for favors and you want people to get beat up, sure, they’re going to threaten you if you don’t keep your word.
So, here’s me—I’m young, I’m making money for the mob, my songs are on jukeboxes. When you’re that young, you’re, “Yessir, yessir!” These guys are taking me under their wing because I worked hard at being the little gentleman. I’m this young kid walking in their world and they’re going, why the fuck not?
From all that I’ve told you about the crooked noses, as we called the mob guys, you might get the idea that it would be dangerous to your health to hang around guys like that—not exactly the kind of friends your mother would want you to make. But these guys didn’t threaten anybody unless you crossed them. And even then, it was almost always between themselves. They really didn’t need to threaten people, people were already very wary of them.
Not only did nobody ever threaten me, no one ever said to me, “Kid, I’m gonna take you over, you’re our property, capisce? Their attitude was, leave the kid alone. “Whatta ya gonna talk to him about? Gonna go to the police? Naw, he’s a kid!”
Sinatra was a different story. Sinatra was a guy who was fascinated with the Mafia. He liked hanging out with them and thus maybe he got the bad rap that he was owned—and there probably were some ties there because of favors they’d done him and what have you.
With me, they knew I was bringing in business and that was it. It’s very simple; to the mob, business was business, and though their business was different from other people’s, the same rules applied. It’s somewhat of a fallacy to think of Vegas as this film-noir landscape with bodies in the alley, bodies thrown down elevator shafts. People along the periphery make assumptions and these perceptions become reality.
Nobody ever walked through the door and said, “You’re making this and doing that and now we own you.” Never. They kept their end of the deal and I kept mine. Anyway, I was never the kind of a guy who needed the mob to bail him out. I never got into the kind of trouble where you needed these guys—gambling debts, deep into drugs, abusiveness.
You start out in a mob-owned business in one part of the country—and the USA’s not a homogenous nation, by any means—you’re going to keep things separate. This isn’t like Soviet Russia where at one point they’d break down your door and drag you out to the firing squad. I worked within a system where I had no choice as to the kind of the people I would be dealing with. They were gangsters, but they were American gangsters. They functioned in a system that followed the pecking order of American society. We were a country where the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians had a lower place in the pecking order, and they all eventually figured out a way to overcome that. Some were connected, some weren’t, but they all functioned within that system.
Sure, I heard about bodies in the desert, guys that cheated at the tables, guys who disappeared, but I was never directly in the line of fire or frightened of anything—never, ever. There were hundreds of artists performing in Vegas, talent agents, managers, etc. who had no mob connections whatsoever. By and large the mob guys were just worried about their own.
But I loved being around these guys, I loved the security of it. If they respected you, they protected you. I worked for them and there were perks that went along with that. I’ve had them say, “If you ever need anything, you want somebody taken care of, Paulie.…” But I knew better than to take them up on any of that. You do that once and you’re in their pocket for life. With the mob in control, Vegas was the safest place to be. Even walking around in the middle of the night you didn’t have to worry about being mugged. In fact there was a rule among the families that no one was to be killed in Vegas. They didn’t want gang wars, bodies on the sidewalk—bad for business. A lot of guys who had contracts on them would hang in Vegas bec
ause they knew they were safe as long as they stayed there. But once you left Vegas you were in trouble.
During this time, let’s say during the ’50s and the ’60s, you soon learn what’s going on. The town was controlled by the boys. Back then you had all these different fiefdoms in Vegas—the colorful larger-than-life characters who ran the various casinos. I mean, you start out with the Desert Inn, which was one of the cleaner ones of the bunch. That was operated by Moe Dalitz. El Rancho was Beldon Katleman’s place. I believe that was the place where Presley played and didn’t make it—the first time he came to Vegas. He played the Venus Room at the New Frontier from April 23 to May 6, 1956 as an “extra added attraction.” But, on the other hand, it was in Vegas that Elvis first heard Freddie Bell and the Bellboys rehearsing a comedy burlesque version of Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s song “Hound Dog” that had the line in it, “You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine”—or at least that’s what he thought he heard. Elvis started playing it on TV shows and in concert and by July it was a hit record, with “Don’t Be Cruel” on the flipside. So even though it took him another dozen years to make it in Vegas, Vegas did him a solid.
The New Frontier was run by the Detroit guys, the Flamingo was owned by Al Parvin and Paul “Red” Dorfman, an Outfit guy from the Chicago mob (and stepfather of Allen Dorfman, who owned the Stardust Casino—featured in Casino as the Hotel Tangiers). The Dorfmans had a big furniture company back then. He worked for the boys at the Copa—started out there as a waiter actually. From there Eddie Torres eventually went down the line to end up running the Riviera.
The fans, the help, the mobsters, the entertainers, the pit bosses, the showgirls, the waiters, the call girls, the bartenders, the cocktail waitresses, the guys who ran the casinos, the tourists—were all part of the pageant.
There was this guy Jack Entratter, who’d been a waiter and bouncer at the Copacabana, moved out to Vegas where he became the entertainment director at the Sands. Tall, good-looking guy. We used to call him slue foot, because he couldn’t walk normally—he wore these funny shoes because his feet were square. He had all kinds of problems, and they weren’t all confined to shoe problems, believe me.
All the casino managers were more or less controlled by the boys. That was pretty much the landscape. The entertainment directors came and went, but the mob or “the boys,” as they called them, stayed the same. People like Eddie Torres and Jerry Zarowitz.
B.H.H.—before Howard Hughes—was the golden era in Vegas, the early fifties through ’66. It was like a family thing then; if you were performing at the hotel, they made you feel like you were part of the family. If you left and performed somewhere else, you stayed loyal to your casino, you did it the right way.
Vegas was a community, it was a family environment—not exactly the family on Leave It to Beaver, or today’s family entertainment in Vegas, but a family nevertheless. If anybody got sick we’d fill in for them. It was that kind of tight situation. In those days we had entertainers like Louis Prima, Harry James, The Mills Brothers—people of that caliber. That was when the lounge business was very big.
It was a time when nobody locked their doors. Who’s going to steal anything when the mob’s running the store? Back then, in its quaintness, in its feeling of control, there was this unilateral sense of dress and behavior and calmness.… Until, that is, somebody stepped out of line and got caught and murdered, and put in a car, and dumped in the desert. Who knows how many bodies are buried out there?
You’d have guys come in who you’d read about in the papers. They were wanted for this or that crime, and they were like, “Ahhh, fuggetabawtit! It’s just an aggravation, I’ll be okay, whaddya need, let me send you some cannolis.” The next day the three guys would walk in with boxes of Italian pastries, cannolis or whatever you wanted. It’s funny, you’d watch these guys gamble, and see how meaningless money can be to some people, to where they’re losing half a million, a million, two million dollars. And the way some people played at those tables was just mind-boggling.
At the Sands there was Carl Cohen, the manager and mob’s point man, and this one little guy whose name was Charlie Kandel. We used to call him Toolie. He was a mob guy, but the sweetest man imaginable. He was always so impressed that I wrote the theme song for The Longest Day because, aside from being a mobster, he was also a decorated war hero. Used to show me his little parade hats and occasionally give me one of his medals. He always slept with a baseball bat next to his bed in case somebody came in and threatened him.
He would look after me. He’d meet me in a coffee shop after the show and eat coffee ice cream and tell me little bits of mob protocol: “Just don’t you ever do this or that, that’s a no-no, stay away from that.” He would always tell me, “Walk in the shadows.” He’d sit in the back of the show every night, have a coffee ice cream, and a cup of hot lemon juice before he went to bed. Everything he did, he did very meticulously, methodically, all his little routines. Maybe he had OCD—like Howard Hughes. All these guys had their eccentricities. Every time he’d eat, he’d bring his own utensils, put them under boiling hot water, clean them as if he were sterilizing them for an operation. He wouldn’t touch a knife or a fork unless he’d first cleaned them himself in boiling water.
It was at the Sands that I first met Marvin Davis, an oil guy, one of the richest in the world. One time or another he was the head of Davis Petroleum, bought Twentieth Century Fox (with his partner Marc Rich), and owned Fox Plaza, the site of the Nakatomi Plaza building in Die Hard. He would come in frequently to gamble at the Sands. That’s where you began; everybody started at the Sands. I made so many friends at the Sands.
* * *
The year 1967 wasn’t very good for blue-eyed crooners—and things only got worse for Sinatra. It’s true he’d had a number one song that year, even if it was that “Something Stupid,” recorded with his daughter Nancy. He got named chairman of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League, an institution he wryly referred to as the “Dago NAACP.”
One of the things that bugged Sinatra was rock ’n’ roll, especially the British Invasion. At first he thought it was just a fad, like hula hoops, but by the late ’60s it was clear it wasn’t going away anytime soon. The Beatles, he said, weren’t as bad as Elvis—“at least they’re white.” He developed an irrational loathing for Barbra Streisand and any number of other things.
During this period Sinatra seemed to be constantly angry and frequently flew into rages. The problem was that Sinatra was no longer the god he had once been. Rock ’n’ roll had eclipsed his fame and notoriety, and worse, he was now considered schmaltzy and unhip by the new hip generation of the sixties. By the late 1960s Las Vegas itself had become uncool and tacky. Once the Mafia had sold Vegas to Howard Hughes the sense of danger and decadence that made it luridly attractive was gone—it was just “a Disneyland, with slot machines.”
But his big bête noir was the Howard Hughes organization. After Howard Hughes settled in in 1966, a new infrastructure got established. Things were becoming more and more uptight, more rules, more lists, more people running around checking on things. When Hughes took over, his people wouldn’t work with him. The mob didn’t own all the casinos anymore. When things began to change Sinatra got massively pissed off. The Hughes situation was getting intense and it impacted nobody more devastatingly than Frank. There was a new code in town—Frank never got the picture.
In 1967, Sinatra was the headliner at the Sands. He ran up $500,000 in gambling debts at the casino and then disappeared over Labor Day weekend. A few days later Frank was back with his teenage bride, Mia Farrow. Drunk and showing off, Frank grabbed one of the golf carts used by the bellhops to transport luggage and began crashing around the casino with Farrow in the passenger seat, eventually smashing into the glass entrance to the casino. It wasn’t, as has often been told, intentional, nor did he drive through it. He was just so drunk the golf cart got out of his control and the window shattered
. Fortunately neither Frank nor Mia were injured in the crash. He then tried to set fire to various couches and curtains in the lobby, but was unsuccessful in getting them to catch on fire.
Then there’s the big blowup. Frank’s been performing at the Sands, say, for a week. It gets down to where they won’t give him any more markers. Markers are chips. Frank would cash them in and keep the money and not pay off the markers he owed on. The boys let Frank do that, let him have markers for, say, $50,000, and, let’s say he’d make $75,000 (meaning $50,000 would actually belong to the casino), he’d keep it all. When Hughes came in, he said, “No more of this. Give us back our fifty grand, keep your twenty-five.” That’s what started the problem between Sinatra and Hughes. So the resentment starts building up.
I’m sitting at the bar of the Sands hotel, next to the casino with Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra’s friend and bodyguard. He told me Frank was in a rotten mood. From what I understand, Sinatra’s rage about the markers situation had started a night earlier. Frank got so pissed off he called Jimmy Blue Eyes, who was the mob connection in New York, connected to the Genovese family. Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo got his name from this game that they played in New York where they’d get on each other’s shoulders and then you’d hit each other with their elbows. But because of his small size Jimmy got hit in the eyes so much they’d be black and blue. That’s how he got the name Jimmy Blue Eyes.
Now Jimmy Blue Eyes was one of the guys that got things done in Vegas. Sinatra would call him whenever he got pissed off at anybody. He was Frank’s rabbi in the closet. “The fuckin’ morons, Jimmy, you’re not gonna believe what these schmucks did to me,” blah, blah, blah. “The fuckin’ morons! You gotta fix it for me, Jimmy.” He wanted Jimmy to fix it then and there, but Jimmy said, “Frank, go to Palm Springs and relax, we’ll try and do something.” But Frank’s not going to Palm Springs to cool off. It’s Frank, King Frank, so what do you expect? Frank’s not going to chill out. Sinatra, being the personality that he was, when he got boozed or got heated, he turned into this … other guy.