B009HOTHPE EBOK (24 page)

Meanwhile Hughes is upstairs in the Desert Inn—or so we hear. We never see the guy. He’s the ghost in the penthouse controlling everything, the invisible man pulling all the strings and very soon we start feeling the change in the town. We knew when Hughes was in town because of the nutty TV programming. You’d get back to your room, turn on the TV at two in the morning and
Ice Station Zebra
would be playing. At 5:00
A.M.
it would start showing all over again. There was limited programming on TV anyway, but this was ridiculous. It was on almost
every night
. In the beginning nobody could figure out what was going on. People were asking, “What the hell is going on?” Eventually we figured out what was going on. Howard Hughes had bought a local TV station—it was just a fifty-by-fifty-foot clapboard shack run by a couple of guys—and any given week he was in Vegas, you’d see
Ice Station Zebra
showing continuously. Hughes loved that movie. What probably appealed to Hughes about the movie was the frantic search for a traitor out to sabotage the mission. He was very paranoid. For instance, the Silver Slipper burlesque theater had a fifteen-foot-tall woman’s high-heel shoe as part of their sign and Hughes believed there was a photographer hidden in the toe, taking photographs of him in his bedroom from there.

Things got nutty pretty fast, not just because Hughes was so eccentric—and he was—but because he had some peculiar employees like Walter Kane, who refused to follow the old codes.

When a guy like Howard Hughes came in he operated strictly through intermediaries. Walter Kane was one of his right-hand men and took over the job of entertainment director from Jack Entratter and therefore had all this power. He not only worked for Hughes, word was he acted as a pimp for him, too; he got the women, he screened them. He was the perfect guy for this job because Walter was gay, so no threat to Hughes in the female department. Kane fancied himself as a kind of superagent who would dispense with all the other talent agents in town. He’d come in with a list of performers. “We wanna get this guy and that guy and bring what’s-his-name in.” He’d treat the agents funny because it was a new regime and Kane was changing the rules. Word soon got out around town that this guy Kane was looking to make direct deals, cutting out agents from the picture. What Walter tried to do was go around these agents and go directly to people like Debbie Reynolds or Wayne Newton, who became his buddy down the road. By making deals directly, he cut all these agencies out of their commissions and they weren’t too happy about that. There were some loyal entertainers who wouldn’t be a part of this because they’d had the same agents for years, and the agent had taken care of them.

My agent Jim Murray had a showdown with him. He was nervous that Kane was going to steal his clients, like Debbie Reynolds, and Kane wasn’t being truthful about it, although he was making deals behind his back. Back then Jim was a pretty heavy drinker. I think it was about two in the morning after a few double bourbons on the rocks that he showed up at Walter’s door—Jack Entratter’s old place—and said, “What are you trying to do, going around me and hustling my clients?” “What do you mean?” Kane said, stalling for time. Jim wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Kane was wearing a nightgown with one of those Santa Claus type hats on his head. Jim got so mad he grabbed him by the throat and said, “You’re lying to me, and you’re lying to Debbie, you son of a bitch,” and he got him up against the wall. And then out of the room next door came another Hughes employee, a guy named Perry Lieber, who must have been Walt’s boyfriend, with the same hat and the same nightgown. And he starts yelling at Jim, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”

You know Walter was kind of a devious guy and that’s when all this kind of shit started in Vegas—when you didn’t have the mob guys with their code of behavior, a whole way of life in Vegas ended. It was the new bureaucratic regime where you had all these rules and lists, and functionaries were running around with clipboards, all obeying the great eye in the sky over there at the Desert Inn. A cold, new impersonal wind was blowing—the mood changed, the people changed, and an era was over. All that funny stuff began with that new regime—the Mormon clique. It wasn’t only among Hughes’s group—Parry Thomas, the banker who advanced loans to many of the casinos was also a Mormon. There was a weird connection to the influx of Mormons in Vegas and Washington—to this day they have a strong presence in Washington.

The mob guys didn’t put up any resistance when Howard Hughes moved in—in fact, they welcomed it because there was a lot of heat on them and Hughes becoming a casino owner took the pressure off them. And in actuality, they still ran the place. They were still running the casinos, still ripping them off with all the games they played with the money. Blatant stuff, outrageous stuff. But it took the feds years to figure it out. There’d be two legitimate crap tables and one that was fixed, siphoning off the money but hiding behind the fact that Hughes owned it.

*   *   *

I’ve seen all the transitions the Rat Pack went through in that environment, so many nuances. Back when I first went to Vegas, it was mob driven, totally. It was a whole different atmosphere than present-day. A handshake meant something. Loyalty was the code of the day—unlike today. It’s a different world with these younger guys where you can shake their hand but you’d better have twenty white-shoe law firms read the fine print.

It’s an era that is totally gone now. There never has been anything like it, and never will be again. It was a time of incredible buzz, of fashion, everyone on display, egos to the max. Frank ruled. He was feared from Hollywood to Vegas to New York, know what I’m saying?

Vegas was such an irresistible place and it all revolved around Frank. Everyone—movie stars, business moguls, and women, of course, were magnetically drawn to him. Even future presidents wanted to hang around with Frank because at that time—late ’50s to early ’60s—he was the hippest, coolest cat around. Frank was king of the hill. JFK and Frank got very tight, so tight that Sinatra started building guest quarters for JFK at his house in Palm Springs.

In 1961, Frank spent an enormous amount of time and money creating a compound specifically for JFK, building new cottages, putting in new phones, buying new furniture, and installing a fancy specially built bed above which hung Frank’s little in joke:
JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE
 … from which he had diplomatically omitted
WITH NUMEROUS WHORES.
The walls were covered with photos of Frank, Jack, and Peter Lawford. Frank was therefore utterly humiliated when in the spring of 1962, JFK, on a visit to California, ignored Sinatra’s invitations and never saw the sumptuous quarters Frank had built for him in Palm Springs and had hoped would become the Western White House. Instead, JFK chose to stay at Bing Crosby’s home, which threw Frank into a rage. He began smashing pictures of the Kennedys and took a sledgehammer to the heliport he’d had built for JFK to land on.

After JFK became president, he wanted to put some distance between himself and Frank because of Sinatra’s connections to the mob, and the compound sat empty. That hurt. Frank felt it was a slap in the face, and went nuts. Whatever Sinatra’s ties to JFK’s father, Joe Kennedy, or what his obligations were to JFK as a friend, Kennedy had to sever the connection. JFK, of course, loved the ladies and the situation played right into the whole sexual circus. I saw the reality: Kennedy and the hookers, the women who hung around Frank, and the mob. It was a shop window. The media at that time was controlled, so they wouldn’t write about it. But never doubt the intensity of it. The things that I saw and witnessed, it was all part of show business, but it was pretty wild. All the JFK escapades with showgirls happened in Vegas.

*   *   *

Back in the day, the airport was tiny, the size of a forty-by-forty-foot room. It was a wood shack, actually. You walk across the tarmac, come in the door—it was just like an old-fashioned railway station: wooden benches, lockers, a big old clock. Nothing fancy, nothing glamorous about it.

You didn’t need a glitzy airport lounge, you went to Vegas to be entertained. You had the best of everything: best-looking women, the greatest artists in the world. You went back to meet them and there was no arrogance, self-importance—they were very touched at your compliments, and would introduce you to whoever was in the dressing room: politicians, movie stars, other singers. It was a town of tight little showrooms and was still very quaint when I first went out there. It was also intimate, as if you were right up there with them. You’d see Count Basie and Sinatra performing twelve feet away from your table. It was the biggest thrill of my life meeting Martin, Sammy, and the whole Rat Pack—all there together, hanging out, telling jokes, spinning wild tales. There was something uniquely theatrical about Vegas—there were all these layers, all this stuff going on. There weren’t really tourists in Vegas the way there are today, but the visitors in general were oblivious to what was really going on. The performers, on the other hand, were somewhat clued in, but the staff, the call girls, the pit bosses, the showgirls—all knew the real behind-the-scenes stuff. They saw what was going on in the showrooms on the floor and quite a bit about the murky world that controls them. And then there were the mob guys—that’s a whole other underworld that no one but they knew.

Everybody who worked there knew what was going on. Couldn’t keep secrets like that down. I think for a while they were running a coke factory out of the backroom of Caesars Palace. All kinds of deals went down there—everything from real estate to contract murder—all courtesy of the management.

With all that interconnectedness of the mob and the Vegas scene, how did I avoid not becoming involved with these people? Nobody ever threatened me; no, nothing like that. You can’t threaten a nineteen-year-old kid, and who ever heard of a nineteen-year-old being killed? Especially one who had the number one record all over the world. Yeah, if you’re Sinatra or you grew up with these people and you’re asking them for favors and you want people to get beat up, sure, they’re going to threaten you if you don’t keep your word.

So, here’s me—I’m young, I’m making money for the mob, my songs are on jukeboxes. When you’re that young, you’re, “Yessir, yessir!” These guys are taking me under their wing because I worked hard at being the little gentleman. I’m this young kid walking in their world and they’re going, why the fuck not?

From all that I’ve told you about the crooked noses, as we called the mob guys, you might get the idea that it would be dangerous to your health to hang around guys like that—not exactly the kind of friends your mother would want you to make. But these guys didn’t threaten anybody unless you crossed them. And even then, it was almost always between themselves. They really didn’t need to threaten people, people were already very wary of them.

Not only did nobody ever threaten me, no one ever said to me, “Kid, I’m gonna take you over, you’re our property,
capisce
? Their attitude was, leave the kid alone. “Whatta ya gonna talk to him about? Gonna go to the police? Naw, he’s a kid!”

Sinatra was a different story. Sinatra was a guy who was fascinated with the Mafia. He liked hanging out with them and thus maybe he got the bad rap that he was owned—and there probably were some ties there because of favors they’d done him and what have you.

With me, they knew I was bringing in business and that was it. It’s very simple; to the mob, business was business, and though their business was different from other people’s, the same rules applied. It’s somewhat of a fallacy to think of Vegas as this film-noir landscape with bodies in the alley, bodies thrown down elevator shafts. People along the periphery make assumptions and these perceptions become reality.

Nobody ever walked through the door and said, “You’re making this and doing that and now we own you.” Never. They kept their end of the deal and I kept mine. Anyway, I was never the kind of a guy who needed the mob to bail him out. I never got into the kind of trouble where you needed these guys—gambling debts, deep into drugs, abusiveness.

You start out in a mob-owned business in one part of the country—and the USA’s not a homogenous nation, by any means—you’re going to keep things separate. This isn’t like Soviet Russia where at one point they’d break down your door and drag you out to the firing squad. I worked within a system where I had no choice as to the kind of the people I would be dealing with. They were gangsters, but they were American gangsters. They functioned in a system that followed the pecking order of American society. We were a country where the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians had a lower place in the pecking order, and they all eventually figured out a way to overcome that. Some were connected, some weren’t, but they all functioned within that system.

Sure, I heard about bodies in the desert, guys that cheated at the tables, guys who disappeared, but I was never directly in the line of fire or frightened of anything—never, ever. There were hundreds of artists performing in Vegas, talent agents, managers, etc. who had no mob connections whatsoever. By and large the mob guys were just worried about their own.

But I loved being around these guys, I loved the security of it. If they respected you, they protected you. I worked for them and there were perks that went along with that. I’ve had them say, “If you ever need anything, you want somebody taken care of, Paulie.…” But I knew better than to take them up on any of that. You do that once and you’re in their pocket for life. With the mob in control, Vegas was the safest place to be. Even walking around in the middle of the night you didn’t have to worry about being mugged. In fact there was a rule among the families that no one was to be killed in Vegas. They didn’t want gang wars, bodies on the sidewalk—bad for business. A lot of guys who had contracts on them would hang in Vegas because they knew they were safe as long as they stayed there. But once you left Vegas you were in trouble.

During this time, let’s say during the ’50s and the ’60s, you soon learn what’s going on. The town was controlled by the boys. Back then you had all these different fiefdoms in Vegas—the colorful larger-than-life characters who ran the various casinos. I mean, you start out with the Desert Inn, which was one of the cleaner ones of the bunch. That was operated by Moe Dalitz. El Rancho was Beldon Katleman’s place. I believe that was the place where Presley played and didn’t make it—the first time he came to Vegas. He played the Venus Room at the New Frontier from April 23 to May 6, 1956 as an “extra added attraction.” But, on the other hand, it was in Vegas that Elvis first heard Freddie Bell and the Bellboys rehearsing a comedy burlesque version of Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s song “Hound Dog” that had the line in it, “You ain’t never caught a rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine”—or at least that’s what he thought he heard. Elvis started playing it on TV shows and in concert and by July it was a hit record, with “Don’t Be Cruel” on the flipside. So even though it took him another dozen years to make it in Vegas, Vegas did him a solid.