Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [264]
Sometimes, miraculously enough, it wasn’t. But the image of Sinatra as an aggrieved innocent to whom trouble came unbidden was no truer, then or later, than the image of him as a thug. He was more complicated than that, even if the world didn’t know it yet.
Astonishing to think that only a couple of months before, he’d been languishing in Africa, cooking spaghetti and sweating bullets. Now he was back in action—not quite clicking on all cylinders, but busy. Hedda Hopper spotted him dining with Judy Garland and Sid Luft. “Could they have been talking about getting Frank to play opposite Judy in the musical version of ‘A Star Is Born’?” the columnist wondered. (If indeed that’s what they were discussing, Frank might have found the role of the alcoholic fading movie star Norman Maine a little too close for comfort.) The television columnist Hal Humphrey noted that “Sinatra appears to be almost set to star in a TV series to be produced by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The story would deal with the trials and tribulations of a musician and is called ‘Blue in the Night.’ ”
Also a little too close to the bone.
Frank was talking to all kinds of people. Amazingly, given the state of his finances, not to mention his situation with the IRS, it was reported in March that he was seeking a Nevada gambling license and a 2 percent share in the brand-new Sands Hotel & Casino, in Las Vegas, at a price of $54,000. Where did a man who barely had a pot to make pasta in intend to get $54,000? A lot of people, including the Nevada Tax Commission, were interested in that one. “The singer said in his application that the money would come from his own assets and that he has no liabilities,” reported the Associated Press. “But the tax commission said it wants to investigate, among other subjects, Sinatra’s federal tax status.”
The seventh casino on the Strip, which had opened on Frank’s thirty-seventh birthday, December 12, 1952, was a natural foothold for Sinatra. With its ultramodern Googie-style architecture by the Desert Inn designer Wayne McAllister, its seventeen-story main tower looming in lonely splendor over Route 91, the Sands was a signpost of the new Vegas, a spaceship that would transport the town from its spurs-and-tumbleweed past into a neon-bright future. A big-time Houston gambler named Jakie Freedman had founded the place, but unlike the Flamingo’s Billy Wilkerson and the DI’s Wilbur Clark, who had run out of money while constructing their dream palaces and had to let the Mob muscle in, Freedman came to town loaded (after it got too hot for the quasi-legal casino he owned in his native Houston) and stayed loaded. Freedman was also connected. He had important friends in Vegas, and in New York and Miami, friends who were eager to tap into the cash cascades that were flowing from the Sands, but shy about seeing their names in cold type in the newspapers and on legal documents.
Sinatra and Freedman had friends—or, as the expression went, friends of friends—in common. Possibly some of the men who had looked kindly on Frank from the beginning were now extending him a favor, fronting him the money to buy into a dream? Or was he being asked to return a favor, by putting his name to a contract in their stead?
Suffice it to say that Frank had nothing like $54,000 lying around, that the money he wasn’t sending straight to Nancy’s lawyers he was paying to William Morris, and that Las Vegas—and the Sands in particular—had suddenly become a very friendly place. Jakie Freedman had even persuaded the guy who’d been running the Copacabana for its real owner to bring a little New York west and run the Sands for him. Jack Entratter was the guy’s name: a former bouncer—a big, heavyset fellow with dark slick hair and a ready grin on his tough moon face. In honor of Jack (and of Frank Costello, too), Jakie decided to name the main showroom at the Sands after the Copa. It was a room Sinatra would soon