From Rat Pack to the 90s, Las Vegas was Sinatra’s kind of town

Friday, May 15, 1998 | 2:33 a.m.

From his first appearance while trying to revive his singing career at the Desert Inn in 1951 to his final shows more than four decades later, Sinatra and Las Vegas were inextricably linked.

During his prime, he would make movies during the day, play the Sands' Copa Room at night and then cavort with the Rat Pack into the early morning hours. Sinatra not only owned the town, he brought in the high rollers that helped it grow into the gaming mecca it is today.

"Las Vegas was Sinatra during that period," said Joe Delaney, a longtime entertainment columnist for the Las Vegas Sun. "He was the visualization of the town. Elvis came later, but during the 1950s and 1960s it was all Sinatra."

Friday night, the town that Sinatra helped build remembered the singer by dimming the glittering lights of the Las Vegas Strip for a minute in tribute. It was a gesture made earlier for fellow Rat Packers Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., in a town where sentimentality rarely wins out over the pursuit of a buck.

On the marquee outside Caesars Palace a huge picture of Sinatra towered over the Strip on Friday. It read simply "Frank Sinatra, 1915-1998."

"He helped to make Las Vegas," said singer Phyllis McGuire, a Las Vegas resident. "He drew the serious players and that is what this town is all about."

Like his life outside of Las Vegas, Sinatra's relationship with the town and the state was stormy at best. He berated casino dealers, got into fistfights and lost his gambling licenses for allowing mobsters into a Lake Tahoe casino he controlled in 1963.

But he was also a generous benefactor who raised tens of thousands of dollars for city charities and donated even more himself.

"The guy never said no," said Davey Pearl, a boxing referee and former fundraiser for UNLV. "He was the greatest guy I ever met in my life."

Sinatra appeared at a number of Las Vegas resorts over the years, but it was his 15 years holding court at the Sands Copa Room that live large in the stories of a once small gambling town just in the process of starting to grow up.

With buddies Martin, Davis, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, they were dubbed the Rat Pack - though Sinatra preferred to call the group "The Summit." They made movies together, sang together and partied through the night. Along the way, they became show business legends.

The Sands Hotel was the swingin' place to be in the 1950s and '60s - Martin and Jerry Lewis dropping by to work the craps tables, gorgeous showgirls dancing for the likes of Elvis Presley, the Rat Pack holding court on stage, and Don Rickles slinging insults at everyone but Frank Sinatra.

"You never hassled Frank Sinatra," Rickles recalled recently, "if you wanted to see your family again."

Rickles was a lounge act appearing in the early morning hours, and Sinatra would bring the gang by after his shows to catch the comedian who was earning a reputation for funny insults.

"He literally made Rickles a headliner because they hung out with him every night," Delaney said. "If he liked a lounge act, he could make them into a star."

The Sands is gone, blown up two years ago to make room for yet another megaresort. Sinatra left it himself in the late 1960s to go to a new resort - Caesars Palace - where he filled showrooms and brought in big gamblers for more than a decade.

It was at Caesars on Dec. 12, 1979, where two huge photos of Sinatra were draped across the hotel highrise for an elegant bash celebrating Sinatra's 64th birthday and 40th year in show business. Forgotten, for a moment, was his altercation with the hotel's casino manager in 1970 that saw him storm out of the resort vowing never to return.

It was also at Caesars Palace that Sinatra gained some redemption when he was awarded a Nevada gaming license in 1981 to work as a consultant for the resort. He had to sell his pieces of the Lake Tahoe club Cal-Neva and the Sands in 1963 after reputed mobster Sam Giancana got into a fight at the resort.

Sinatra, whose career had stagnated when he first played Vegas in 1951, performed here well into his 70s, with his last permanent show at the Riviera in 1992. By then, critics groused, he was forgetting words and no longer able to hit the notes of his heyday.

Still, he continued to pack them in, no longer the Sinatra of old but enough of a vintage to give a new generation of fans respect for his singing talents.

"There will be no artist in this lifetime like Francis Albert Sinatra, but he has left all of us with a treasury of music and memories that is, incredibly, almost equal to the gentleman himself," said Mirage Resorts Chairman Steve Wynn, who starred with Sinatra in a collection of television commercials in the early 1980s.

Sinatra's death comes two weeks before a planned gala to celebrate his life at Bally's resort. At his wife Barbara's request, it will go on as a tribute to the late singer. Arranger Quincy Jones will direct performances by Paul Anka, Wayne Newton, Vic Damone and others doing Sinatra numbers.

For now, though, McGuire said Sinatra is probably back with his friends.

"There's probably a big powwow going on for the Rat Pack now," she said.