His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [223]
Howard Hughes had bought the hotel in July 1967, adding the Sands to his long list of casinos, including the Desert Inn, the Castaways, the Frontier, and the Silver Slipper, prompting Johnny Carson to greet his audiences: “Welcome to Las Vegas, Howard Hughes’s Monopoly set. You ever get the feeling he’s going to buy the whole damned place and shut it down?” Frank, too, poked fun at the eccentric billionaire’s 1967 buying orgy of casinos, hotels, airports, and television stations. “You’re wondering why I don’t have a drink in my hand,” he said to his audience one night. “Well, Howard Hughes bought it!”
Frank’s animus toward Hughes stretched back to 1945, when the billionaire first courted Ava Gardner with extravagant presents, putting limousines and chartered jets at her disposal whenever she wanted to go shopping in Mexico or see bullfights in Spain. Frank remembered bitterly how Hughes had hired detectives to follow him and Ava in 1950, but he seemed to have forgotten that when MGM had dropped him, Ava had gone to Hughes to get him movie work at RKO, Hughes’s studio.
Expecting to make a killing, Frank made it part of his contract renewal with the Sands that Hughes buy the Gal-Neva Lodge from him, which he had leased to Warner and others for the last four years because he was prohibited from running it himself. But Hughes was not interested in the Lake Tahoe property and refused Frank’s calls to discuss the matter. Unaccustomed to such a rebuff from the Sands, where his every whim had been indulged for the past fifteen years, Frank began negotiating with Caesars Palace, the newest, most luxurious casino in Las Vegas. Still, he considered the Sands his domain, and no one—not even the richest man in America—could dismiss him so casually.
Frank exacted retribution over Labor Day, the casino’s largest-grossing weekend, by pleading “desert throat” at the last minute, claiming that he was unable to perform. He flew to Palm Springs with Mia, and Sammy Davis, Jr., substituted for him. He returned a few days later, but by the weekend he was in a frenzy, lashing out at pit bosses, cursing at cocktail waitresses, and frightening other employees, including the security guards.
“I built this hotel from a sandpile, and I can tear the fucking place down, and before I’m through that is what it will be again,” he said.
Hughes’s top aide, Robert Maheu, wrote a memo to his boss about Frank’s behavior: “Last night, he drove a golf cart through a plate glass window and was disgustingly drunk. In an effort to protect him from himself, Carl Cohen [the Sands’s executive vice-president, in charge of the casino,] stopped his credit after he had obtained thirty-thousand-plus in cash and had lost approximately fifty thousand dollars. Sinatra blew his top, and late this afternoon called me to tell me that he was walking away from the Sands and would not finish his engagement. One of the reasons Cohen cut off his credit is that this SOB was running around the casino stating in a loud voice that you had plenty of money and that there was no reason why you should not share it with him since he had made the Sands the profitable institution it is.”
Frank signed a three-million-dollar contract with Caesars Palace on September 11, 1967, that guaranteed him $100,000 a week—the highest salary then paid a performer in Las Vegas. He returned to the Sands and went on a drunken rampage at five A.M., slamming his fist on the bell clerk’s desk and demanding to