Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [136]
But then, unpredictably, the tension would return. He was less graceful with nightclub hecklers than he’d been before. “You must be glad the war is over—now you can get parts for your head!” he shouted at one. Another time he walked off the floor in the middle of a song. Something was eating him. In early December he issued an edict barring fans under twenty-one from his radio broadcasts. The public outcry was noisier than anything he’d had to endure in the studio. Frank quickly reversed his decision. He often seemed whipsawed at the end of that year. It wasn’t just the rising pressures of fame: he was also secretly making time in his busy schedule for Lana Turner, whose similarly busy schedule, as fate would have it, had brought her to New York City.
Bugsy Siegel, the jaunty sociopath, was uncharacteristically nervous. He was millions of dollars in the hole for cost overruns (and skimming) on the still-unfinished Flamingo Hotel, and the men who had fronted him the money, Meyer Lansky among them, were not patient people. These men already suspected Siegel of stealing from them, but if the Flamingo’s opening, scheduled for the day after Christmas, was a success, promising rivers of revenue, all might be forgiven. The key to a big event, then as now, was stars. If major Hollywood talent came to the desert, the public would follow.
Bugsy knew everyone in Hollywood, and the week before Christmas he flew to L.A. to call in some chits. He had extended friendship, protection, and business help to some very important people, and now he needed their help back. He called on the biggest names in his address book: Sinatra, Lana Turner, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Jimmy Durante, among others. The response was not enthusiastic.
Worse, December 26 was cold and rainy and the airports in Los Angeles and Vegas were socked in. The Flamingo opening was a gloomy, under-attended event: the stars, to put it mildly, did not turn out. Gable, Hepburn, Tracy, Cooper, and Dietrich all came up with excuses—a mother was very sick, an ankle had been sprained, a cold had been caught. Durante and George Raft, always friendly where the Boys were concerned, somehow made their way to the desert, as did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Xavier Cugat, and George Jessel. It wasn’t enough. “There can rarely have been a more cheerless scene,” wrote Otto Friedrich in City of Nets, “than the newly opened casino at the half-empty and half-finished Flamingo, standing alone in the Nevada desert on the night after Christmas.” Cheerless, and snakebit: though Raft compliantly lost $75,000 at the crap tables, the Flamingo’s gaming coffers were $200,000 in the red after its first night of operation.
Maybe Siegel stole that, too. It didn’t matter: his fate was sealed. The process had begun four days earlier, at the great conference of American mafiosi at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, organized by the plush hotel’s co-owner Meyer Lansky (his silent partner, the Cuban president Fulgencio Batista) and presided over by Salvatore Lucania, a.k.a. Charles “Lucky” Luciano.5 Luciano had been released from prison in return for protecting New York City’s docks during World War II, but had had to accept permanent deportation to Italy; now he was back in the Western Hemisphere, hoping to set up a permanent base of operations just ninety miles from Florida. Lucky Luciano had a mesmerizingly cold face, with pitted cheeks, a piercing gaze, and a strangely beautiful mouth—up-curved at the corners, and with a sensual lower lip—that was virtually the double