At least Entratter was still there. The Sands’ longtime entertainment chief, a friend to Sinatra and so many of the hotel’s top stars, was given a five-year contract to remain with the Sands when Hughes took over. But even Entratter couldn’t prevent the inevitable clash between the hotel’s new management and the Sands’ most valuable asset.
Frank Sinatra and Howard Hughes had crossed paths before in Hollywood and once competed for the affections of Ava Gardner. But the mogul’s acquisition in 1967 of the hotel where Sinatra had reigned for fourteen years was not something the king of Las Vegas could easily swallow. It came at a vexing time in Sinatra’s life and career. Now past fifty, with the rock revolution in full swing and his classic pop style decidedly out of favor, Sinatra was hitting both a career slump and a midlife crisis. In 1965 he began dating Mia Farrow, a child of Hollywood twenty-nine years his junior. After keeping the gossip columnists busy for months, the couple got married on July 19, 1966, in Entratter’s suite at the Sands—in a ceremony just as secretive, perfunctory, and devoid of romance as Elvis and Priscilla’s vows at the Aladdin would be a year later.
The marriage was stormy from the start—Sinatra quickly grew jealous of his bride’s budding film career—and only seemed to exacerbate Sinatra’s volatile moods and sense of dislocation. In November 1966 he appeared at the Sands for the first time since his marriage. Mia was in the audience, and the two gazed lovingly at each other as he opened the show with “Strangers in the Night,” his latest hit single. “Yeah, I sure got married,” Frank said after introducing Mia from the stage. “I had to—I finally found a broad I can cheat on.” The crowd gasped, Mia hung her head in embarrassment, and Sinatra knew he had made a faux pas: “I guess I’d better sing. I’m in a lot of trouble.”
His troubles only seemed to mount. “During this period Sinatra seemed to be constantly angry and frequently flew into rages,” Paul Anka recalled. “The problem was that Sinatra was no longer the god he had once been.” There were ugly incidents. In June 1966 Sinatra was having dinner at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills with some friends to celebrate Dean Martin’s birthday. The group got loud, and two businessmen seated nearby asked them to tone down their language. Tempers flared, and one of the men, Hunt’s Food president Fred Weisman, wound up in a bloody pool on the floor—clubbed by a house telephone, wielded either (accounts vary) by Sinatra or by his pal Jilly Rizzo. Weisman was rushed to the hospital and lingered in critical condition for days, before recovering. He declined to press charges.
Jackie Mason was another alleged target of Sinatra’s anger. One night at the Aladdin Hotel, with Sinatra in the audience, the acerbic comedian made several jokes about the singer’s May-September romance (“Frank soaks his dentures, and Mia brushes her braces”), and Sinatra didn’t appreciate them. Afterward, the comedian got a threatening phone call, and a few days later three gunshots were fired into his hotel room. The police found no evidence linking Sinatra to the attack, but Mason remained convinced the singer was behind it. “I don’t think he actually shot the gun, but there is no doubt that someone was mad about the incident,” Mason said years later. “He was heckling me and interrupting my act; I abused him back from the stage. He was mad that I fought back. I don’t think other comedians at the time dared to do that.”
All this was mere prelude, however, to Sinatra’s infamous blowup at the Sands.
He was opening there for a four-week engagement on Labor Day weekend in 1967, just a few weeks after Hughes’s acquisition of the hotel. Opening night was a relatively good-humored affair: Sinatra made some mild jokes about the mogul (“You’re wondering why I don’t have a drink in my hand? Howard Hughes bought it”) and gave a playful twist to the lyrics of his song “Young at Heart”:
Fairy tales can come true,
It can happen to you,
If you’re Howard Hughes.
But Sinatra wasn’t laughing the following weekend, when he ran smack into the new hard-line policies of the Hughes regime at the Sands.
Sinatra had long enjoyed privileged status at the Sands. He was always given unlimited credit in the casino; he rarely paid off his losses and typically kept his winnings. After Hughes took charge, however, a new edict was handed down: Sinatra was to be given no more credit until he paid back what he owed the hotel.
On Friday night, September 8, Sinatra was at a baccarat table with six Apollo astronauts, who had come to see his show. When he asked for a marker, Sinatra got the bad news: no more credit. With guests present, he swallowed the insult, but it gnawed at him all night. Sometime near dawn, angry and drunk, Sinatra was driving a golf cart back to his hotel suite, with Farrow in the passenger seat, when he suddenly swerved the cart around, headed back to the casino, and smashed it into a plate-glass window. Neither he nor Farrow was injured, but Sinatra wasn’t finished. “He was already out of the cart and striding into the casino as I trotted after him, clutching my little beaded evening purse,” Farrow recalled in her memoir. “He threw some chairs into a heap and with his golden lighter he tried to set them on fire. I watched the rising commotion as people gathered around and casino guards rushed over. When he couldn’t get a fire started, he took my hand and we walked out of the building.”
Sinatra canceled the rest of his Sands engagement and left for Los Angeles the next day. But that night, still fuming over the incident, he abruptly flew back to Vegas (without Farrow this time) and stormed into the Sands at five in the morning, demanding to see casino boss Carl Cohen. “He threatened to kill anyone who got in his way, used vile language, and said he would beat up the telephone operators if they did not connect him with Cohen,” Maheu reported to Hughes later. Cohen was roused from his bed, grudgingly got dressed, and strode into the Sands Garden Room to meet with Sinatra. There the aggrieved star launched into a torrent of abuse—culminating, in some accounts, with a Jewish slur. Cohen, a formidable 250-pounder, but a well-liked boss not known for his temper, threw a punch that knocked out the caps on Sinatra’s two front teeth.
The fracas was headline news. “Singer Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco, and Frank Sinatra left his teeth—at least two of them—in Las Vegas,” began the Review-Journal’s story. Much of the town secretly cheered that Sinatra, whose high-handed antics had been tolerated for years, had gotten his comeuppance.
Jack Entratter was angry the next morning that no one had awakened him. (His DO NOT DISTURB sign was on for the night—but it didn’t apply when Sinatra was in town.) Yet it’s doubtful even Sinatra’s old friend and patron could have averted the disaster. “Frank picked a fight,” said Corinne Entratter. “He wanted an excuse to leave.” Two days later Sinatra announced that he was ending his fourteen-year relationship with the Sands. He was going to Caesars Palace.
For all that Howard Hughes did to transform Las Vegas, he was only a buyer, not a builder. The most important new addition to the Las Vegas Strip in the 1960s came a few months before his arrival, with the opening of Caesars Palace in August 1966. It was the first entirely new hotel to open on the Strip in eight years (the other major newcomer, the Aladdin, was an expansion of the defunct Tally Ho), and the one that launched the city’s modern era—Las Vegas’ first “themed” resort.
Caesars Palace was the brainchild of Jay Sarno, a builder from St. Joseph, Missouri, who thought Vegas hotels needed a fresh approach. Rather than copying the desert-resort style so prevalent on the Strip, Sarno conceived of a hotel that would have the opulent decor and luxury accoutrements of ancient Rome. Architecturally, it broke with Vegas tradition in a number of ways. The hotel was set far back from the street, with a palatial entryway lined with fountains and Roman statuary. The egg-shaped casino was a grand space with a high domed ceiling and a crystal chandelier in the center, in sharp contrast to the densely packed, low-ceilinged casinos in other hotels. The Roman motif was carried throughout the hotel, from the swimming pool shaped like a centurion’s shield to the Bacchanal restaurant, where beautiful servers fed patrons grapes and gave the
m back rubs. The hotel cost a record $25 million (mostly financed by loans from the Teamsters Union pension fund), had twenty-five thousand square feet of meeting space for conventioneers, and boasted a lavish eleven-hundred-seat showroom, the Circus Maximus.
The hotel’s entertainment aimed for the wow factor too. Dave Victorson came over from the Thunderbird as entertainment chief, and he opened the checkbook for big names. Some were familiar Vegas stars like Andy Williams (the hotel’s opening headliner), Tony Bennett, and Harry Belafonte. Others were newcomers to Vegas, among them Broadway star Anthony Newley, comedian Woody Allen, TV favorite Andy Griffith, and even the campy, falsetto-voiced phenom Tiny Tim. Victorson brought in Broadway shows, like Sweet Charity and Fiddler on the Roof; filled the hotel’s 250-seat Nero’s Nook lounge with top names like Eartha Kitt and Sarah Vaughan; and even scored with a popular afternoon girlie show, Bottoms Up. Landing Sinatra—as well as his Rat Pack pal Sammy Davis Jr., who followed Sinatra to Caesars Palace a little later—sealed the deal: Caesars Palace would quickly become the premier star showcase in Las Vegas.
The arrival of a deep-pocketed new hotel on the Strip—along with fresh competition from arenas around the country, which were paying big bucks for concert performers—helped ratchet up the Vegas salary wars once again, after a period of relative stability. Sinatra got a record $100,000 a week to jump from the Sands to Caesars Palace. Dean Martin finished out his contract at the Sands and then moved to the Riviera, also for $100,000, plus a 10 percent share of the hotel and the title of entertainment consultant. (Riviera shows would henceforth be advertised as “Dean Martin presents.”) The Frontier even offered $100,000 to an act that had never played Vegas, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, but they turned it down, figuring they could make more money doing one-nighters.
When Sinatra finally made his debut at Caesars Palace on November 27, 1968, more than a year had passed since his departure from the Sands, and it seemed like a new era was at hand. He agreed to do only one show a night, except on the weekends, and the $12.50 minimum was the highest yet for a Vegas show. His opening acts—no fewer than four of them—included José Feliciano, singing “Light My Fire,” and the pop-soul group the 5th Dimension. Sinatra ditched his usual tuxedo for a trendy white turtleneck and medallion underneath a dark suit. He sang old standards like “I’ve Got the World on a String,” but also new numbers that reflected a more sober mood of middle-aged reflection, such as “That’s Life” and “It Was a Very Good Year.” Some thought his Caesars shows lacked the electricity of his appearances in the more intimate Sands Copa Room. But the critics were glad to have him back. “A virtuoso display of Sinatra at the top of his form,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin, “the kind of evening which comes along only now and then. It was very now, but also splendidly then.”
Just a few weeks after his Caesars opening, Sinatra was in a Los Angeles studio, recording a new song written for him by Paul Anka. It was inspired by a conversation the two had had months earlier in Miami Beach, in which Sinatra told Anka he was thinking of retiring. The younger star, who worshipped Sinatra and had long wanted to write a song for him, was so upset at the notion that he spent a sleepless night writing new lyrics to a French song called “Comme d’habitude,” for which he had bought the US publishing rights. When he finished a final draft of the song, he brought it out to Sinatra in Las Vegas. A few weeks later, on December 30, 1968, Frank recorded it, and “My Way” went on to become his signature late-career hit—his anthem of survival in a town where he still ruled in name, if no longer in spirit.
Las Vegas never knew quite what to do with rock ’n’ roll. In the early years, when even Elvis Presley couldn’t excite a staid audience at the New Frontier, the music was either dismissed as kids’ stuff or treated as comedy material. Nat King Cole, the revered jazz singer and balladeer who appeared regularly at the Sands, had a number in his act around 1960 called “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock ’n’ Roll,” in which he poked fun at the trendy new music—
One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock rock
You gotta sing rock or you go in hock
—and went on to do rock ’n’ roll parody versions of some of his best-known songs, like “Mona Lisa.” When the Twist dance craze was sweeping the country in the early sixties, Vegas made merry. Dick Shawn introduced his own Twist-like dance called the Cockamamie. Gogi Grant sang “When They Begin to Twist the Beguine.” Peter Lawford joined Jimmy Durante at the Desert Inn in what Variety described as “a beatnik Twister routine.” (Chubby Checker, who recorded the song that launched the craze, made it to Vegas himself in 1964, when the fad was largely spent.)
Several of the early rock ’n’ roll singers—the clean-cut white ones—showed up on the Vegas Strip in the late fifties and early sixties. But far from trying to change Vegas, they wanted to be Vegas. Frankie Avalon, the pretty-boy teen idol who had a No. 1 hit with “Venus,” made his Vegas debut at the Sands in 1961 as Joey Bishop’s opening act, singing classics like “Ol’ Man River” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” Connie Francis, perhaps the leading girl singer of the early rock era (“Who’s Sorry Now?,” “Lipstick on Your Collar”), was a popular headliner at the Sahara for much of the 1960s. She would sing her American Bandstand hits during the week, when ordinary folks—“the hayshakers”—made up most of the audience, but sprinkle in Italian love songs and “Hava Nagila” on the weekends, for the high rollers.
Brenda Lee, a four-foot-nine-inch sprite from Georgia who became a teenage hit machine with songs like “I’m Sorry” and “Break It to Me Gently,” made her debut at the Sahara in 1961, at age sixteen, in a conscious effort to remake her image. “My manager’s vision was to coif me over gently, from my rockabilly/rock roots, into a more adult audience and situation, for longevity,” said Lee. A lover of big-band music, she hired conductor-arranger Peter Matz to do orchestrations and choreographer Richard Barstow (who had worked with Judy Garland on A Star Is Born) to stage her show, which included tributes to Sophie Tucker and Jimmy Durante. “It’s too early to know just how a teenage femme chirp whose records sell mainly to teenagers will affect the population of a casino,” said Variety, “but Brenda Lee had the adults in her opening night audience on her side from the first song.”
Paul Anka made his Vegas debut at the Sahara in 1959 as Sophie Tucker’s opening act and got such a raucous reception on opening night that the old vaudevillian asked him to close the show for the rest of the engagement. But Anka didn’t want to remain merely a teen sensation. “A lot of us had a good run as teen singers in the ’50s, but we weren’t going to be teenagers forever,” said Anka. “Those of us who wanted to survive knew we had to do something else to prove ourselves.” Within a couple of years Anka was palling around with Sinatra, recording an album of standards, and headlining at the Sands.
The arrival of the Beatles, and the British invasion that followed, was initially viewed in Vegas with a mixture of amusement and disdain. “If the rock ’n’ roll craze ever ends,” Paul Anka quipped of the Beatles in 1964, “they’ll be stuck with four lousy haircuts.” When the Rolling Stones appeared on the Hollywood Palace TV show in 1964, guest host Dean Martin could hardly have been more dismissive. “They’re going to leave right after the show for London,” he cracked. “They’re challenging the Beatles to a hair-pulling contest.” Frank Sinatra found the Beatles only slightly less objectionable than he had Elvis Presley. “At least they’re white,” he would joke to friends.
Elvis Presley liked the Beatles, especially their hard-rocking early songs, which reminded him so much of his own music in the early, groundbreaking years. But as their popularity skyrocketed, he felt threatened by them—the hot new phenoms who were making teenage girls scream the way he used to, while he drifted further into irrelevance as a force in the rock world.
They met one time. John Lennon and his bandmates idolized Elvis, acknowledged his profound influence on their music, and wanted to meet him. After some delicate negotiations, their manager,
Brian Epstein, and Colonel Parker worked out a plan to bring them together during the group’s second US tour in 1965. The Beatles, paying deference to the former king, agreed to meet Elvis on his turf. Following their concert at the Hollywood Bowl on August 27, 1965, the foursome scheduled a drop-in at Elvis’s Bel Air home for a strictly private (no photographers, no reporters) get-together.
Most of Elvis’s entourage, along with wives and girlfriends (including Priscilla), were on hand when the Beatles arrived in their limousine, a little after 10:00 p.m.; despite elaborate security precautions, hundreds of fans were crowding the gates of Elvis’s Bel Air home. When the four were shown inside, Elvis was sitting on the living-room couch, watching TV with the sound turned down. (Paul was impressed; it was the first time he had ever seen color TV.) There were several minutes of strained chitchat and awkward silences. Then Ringo adjourned to play pool with some of Elvis’s pals, George went off to smoke dope, and John and Paul finally got Elvis to pick up a guitar and join them in a jam session.
For the Beatles, the evening was something of a letdown. “To be honest, I’d describe Elvis on that showing as a boring old fart,” their press agent said later. But when three of Elvis’s friends paid a reciprocal visit to the Beatles a few days later, at their rented house in Benedict Canyon, John made a point of telling them how much the meeting with Elvis had meant. “If it hadn’t been for him,” John said, “I would have been nothing.”
Elvis was pleased to hear it, but he couldn’t disguise a certain wistful envy. “There’s four of them,” he said. “But there’s only one of me.”
As the culture began to shift, concerns grew that Vegas entertainment was not keeping pace, or doing enough to attract younger audiences. Many of the top headliners who had dominated the town for years—Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, George Burns—were getting old and waning in popularity. Where were the younger stars who would replace them? Virtually none of the hard-rock bands or singer-songwriters who were transforming popular music in the late sixties would come anywhere near Las Vegas. “The hotels didn’t want them, and the acts didn’t want to play Vegas,” said one agent. “If you played Vegas, you were selling out.” Lamented Variety in early 1968, “Only a handful of new acts and groups are making the transition by having that ‘older appeal.’ ”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 15