His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [134]
Frank performed in the Copa Room and opened his show by saying, “Welcome to my room.” Because he filled the house, the casino was his kingdom. If a room service waiter brought him a hamburger that was too well done, there was a good chance that it would be thrown against the wall, and the chef fired. If he didn’t like the color of a telephone, he tore it out of the wall. Bellboys were kept on duty just to take care of his early morning requests for pizza or blueberry pie. He “comped” all of his friends with free food and free drinks for days at a time, and expected each of them to perform at the Sands exclusively. If they didn’t, they were no longer his friends, as Judy Garland found out when she accepted a Las Vegas engagement at another hotel.
“My playing the New Frontier was strictly a business deal,” she said, “but Frank took it as a personal rebuff. His attitude since then, to be polite, has been pretty repulsive.”
Frank made movies at the Sands, recorded albums, sponsored boxing matches, threw glamorous opening night parties, and made it the place to go to on the Las Vegas strip. He frequently flew in Hollywood celebrities, and crowds jammed the casino just in hope of seeing a star having a drink or placing a few bets. Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, wrote a front page editorial saying that when Frank Sinatra was in town, it was the economic equivalent of three conventions.
“I’m very grateful to Frank because he made my husband a great deal of money,” said Corinne Entratter, wife of the president of the Sands. “Of course, my husband made Frank even more, and for a while, everyone benefited from having Sinatra at the Sands. It was after they started making so much money they didn’t know what to do with it that they had problems. In the beginning, everyone pulled together; afterwards, they wanted to kill each other.
“Everyone made more money when Frank played the strip, especially cab drivers and hookers,” she said. “Frank loved hookers, and used them a great deal. He preferred them because he didn’t have to deal with them emotionally. And he always paid them well.”
Over the years, prostitutes became a staple in Sinatra’s life, and not just in Las Vegas. “I remember when Frank and the Rat Pack were doing 4 For Texas … and a whole gang of prostitutes—well, they were call girls, they weren’t actually prostitutes—were shipped up there to the boondocks … they were also going to act as girls sitting at a bar in the movie, and the man in charge, an older gentleman, very moral and proper, who had to handle arrangements was so upset,” said Lor-Ann Land, a secretary on the film. “He had to pay them more than scale and he didn’t know how to figure it all out. How to designate what they were really being paid for. …”
Frank was one of the pioneer entertainers in Las Vegas, along with Jimmy Durante, Joe E. Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Ted Lewis, Tommy Dorsey, Danny Thomas, Tony Martin, Nat King Cole, “Fat Jack” Leonard, and the Will Mastin Trio featuring Sammy Davis, Jr. Of them all, Frank became the star most identified with Las Vegas over the years.
Las Vegas was an open city in the 1950s—open to mobsters, to gamblers, to hookers. No legal apparatus had been established to prevent owners from “skimming” the take: understating the gross receipts from gambling, then reporting as revenue only what was left. There was no law limiting the amount or size of cash transactions, and no requirement that they be reported to the Internal Revenue Service. This made casinos perfect places for criminals to hide or launder illegal money. There were no cameras in the counting rooms in those days. Casino directors regularly took money off the top of the nightly take, and after pocketing their own share, dispatched Mafia couriers, who delivered illegal millions in skimmed money to the real owners—the participating syndicate bosses, who expected a share of the skim