Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [215]
I stopped and we both sat there in the darkness … Finally, Reenie said in a quiet, resigned voice, “Come on, Miss G., knock it off. Why don’t we just go home.”
So they did. It was dawn when they reached Pacific Palisades. They walked into the house to find the phone ringing. It was Hank Sanicola, and he sounded desperate.
“Oh my God, Ava—hurry back!” he said. “Frank’s taken an overdose!”
She hurried back.
A car had rushed us to the L.A. airport. A car had rushed us from the Nevada airport to the house at Lake Tahoe. Hank Sanicola met me at the door. He looked as tired out and worn as I felt. I had difficulty speaking.
“How is he?” I said.
“He’s okay,” said Hank.
I thought, Thank God! I ran through into the bedroom. I looked down at Frank and he turned his sad blue eyes to look at me.
“I thought you’d gone,” he said weakly.
I wanted to punch him, I really did. I wanted to punch him as much as I’d ever wanted to punch anybody. Frank had tricked both Reenie and me back to his bedside.
The difference with this suicide attempt was that this time the authorities were involved. Sanicola had called a doctor, and though he had tried to divert suspicion by identifying the patient as himself, the doctor had been obliged to file a police report. By Labor Day weekend, the newspapers had a juicy new Sinatra story.
Frank and Ava sat down, hand in hand, to meet the press once more.
“I did not try to commit suicide,” Frank said. “I just had a bellyache. What will you guys think of next to write about me?”
“So what really happened, Frank?” a reporter called.
Sinatra looked around the room, making a visible effort to hold his temper. “Tuesday night, Miss Gardner, my manager Hank Sanicola and Mrs. Sanicola dined at the Christmas Tree Inn on Lake Tahoe,” he said. “Ava was returning to Hollywood that night. We came back to the Lake and I didn’t feel so good. So I took two sleeping pills. Miss Gardner left … I guess I wasn’t thinking because I am very allergic to sleeping pills. Also, I had drunk two or three brandies. I broke out in a rash. The pills felt kind of stuck in my chest. I got worried and called a friend who runs the steak house here. He sent a doctor who gave me a glass of warm water with salt in it. It made me throw up and I was all right. That’s all there was to it—honest.”
Honest.
Nevada Route 91, the Arrowhead Highway, was a two-lane blacktop snaking southwest across a vast expanse of sand, mesquite, and sage. The road didn’t look much less desolate in Las Vegas than it did anywhere else in the Silver State, even along the four-mile stretch known optimistically as Las Vegas Boulevard or, more popularly, the Strip. Sand blew across the macadam; scorpions scuttled among the desert weeds. In the early 1940s, the first casino-hotels began to pop up in this unpromising landscape: El Rancho Vegas opened in 1941; the Hotel Last Frontier debuted the following year. The Flamingo came to its problematic completion in 1946; the Thunderbird opened in 1948; and the fifth gambling resort on the Strip, opening in 1950, was the Desert Inn.
The DI was the brainchild of one Wilbur Clark, a onetime San Diego bellhop and Reno craps dealer who, much like the Flamingo’s Billy Wilkerson, found himself strapped mid-project for the cash necessary to bring his dream to fruition. As with Wilkerson, the Mob—this time in the person of the Cleveland syndicate boss Moe Dalitz—stepped into the breach. Dalitz’s good friends at the Teamsters Union’s Central States Pension Fund provided the cash—unbeknownst to most of the teamsters. The Cleveland gangster, who had run gambling operations throughout Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Michigan, had western ambitions. Unlike Bugsy Siegel, however, the businesslike Dalitz chose not to muscle out the casino’s originator but to retain him as an agreeable front man. “Wilbur Clark,” after all, had a more congenial ring to it than “Moe Dalitz” out in these parts. And so Dalitz, a big-nosed, six-foot tough Jew, graciously allowed the place to be christened Wilbur