Sinatra plays Blackjack with Dean Martin before his row with the Sands’ management
YOU’VE HAD YOUR CHIPS DOING IT YOUR WAY, HUGHES TELLS SINATRA
THE DAY in 1967 that eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes bought the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, marked the end of the road for king of the gambling tables Frank Sinatra.
As Hughes wrote his cheque for $14.6 million ($135 million today) he drew a line in the Sands ending the power of Ol’ Blue Eyes as he took control of his first ever hotel, according to reports in the Desert Sun and other newspapers of the day.
No longer could the millionaire singer and friend of the mobsters, treat the place as his own and take $50,000 a night in Roulette chips from the cashier’s cage to play the tables for free.
It was payback time by Hughes. And a woman star was at the centre of their dislike for each other, sex goddess Ava Gardner. He and Sinatra had an intense dislike for each other, largely stemming from the love triangle with Ava, who left him to marry the singer.
The billionaire recluse also hated the Rat Pack … and the mafia. He was going to clean up Vegas.
Word on the Strip was that no one crossed Sinatra. The Sands was his Palace. He even had his own free apartment of luxury rooms there, where he took his women and pals after his shows.
Hughes was his neighbour, who lived up the road as a recluse in the 9th floor penthouse suite of the Desert Inn, never leaving his 250-square-foot bedroom, where he often sat with windows covered and doors sealed.
Things quickly came to a head when Sinatra was finally refused credit by the new management on the orders of the billionaire.
The iconic millionaire singer went on a bender for days, seething about losing his power. He drove a golf cart through the hotel, breaking windows and overturning furniture and wrecking his penthouse suite. A spokesman for Sinatra said: “We can’t deny any of what happened. There are too many witnesses.”
Then Sinatra played his last cards. He headed for a for a table in the far corner of the Sands Hotel coffee shop. The hotel’s Gambling Executive, Carl Cohen, stood up in anticipation of what was to come.
Sure enough, Sinatra hurled a handful of betting chips into Cohen’s face, picked up the coffee table and threw it at him, followed by a chair. People screamed and ran.
Cohen, 54, vice-president of the hotel, ducked and threw a punch straight into the singer’s famous mouth – and knocked out his two front teeth. Blood poured from Sinatra’s nose all over his mohair suit.
“You’ve broken my teeth!” the singer roared.
“I built this hotel from a sand pile, and I can tear it down! Before I’m through, that is what it will be again.”
He stormed out of the hotel dragging his wife of the time, Mia Farrow by the hand and went home in his private jet, where his dentist replaced his shattered teeth caps.
The singer at one time owned 9 per cent of the hotel but was ordered by the state in 1963 to sell the interest because he had associated with underworld boss Sam (Moe) Giancana.
Far from being condemned, Cohen became a local folk hero for standing up to the singer. Mocking posters even appeared in Las Vegas featuring Sinatra with blacked-out front teeth and the slogan ‘Carl Cohen for Mayor’.
But Sinatra signed a contract with the rival Caesars Palace, where he performed for much of the remainder of his career. His leaving resulted in significant financial losses for the Sands, as many high rollers followed him to his new venue.
Hughes went on to own the Desert Inn, Frontier, Castaways, Silver Slipper, and the Landmark as well as the Sands. By the end of 1967, he controlled nearly 20% of all hotel rooms on the Strip.
In a later private conversation with his close friend, actor Kirk Douglas, Sinatra reportedly quipped: “Kirk, I’ve learned a lesson — never fight a Jew in the desert.”
The two frequently hung out together in Las Vegas, particularly enjoying time in the steam room at the Sands.
They shared meals, including spaghetti dinners at Sinatra’s house and Sinatra often made homemade chicken soup and spaghetti for Douglas’s second wife, Anne, whenever she was unwell.
THE TIMES GOES BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE
Did you know?
That in 1860, when Mary Tealby launched the Battersea Dogs Home in London, The Times newspaper fought against it. On October 18 that year it growled: “This is a step too far. From the sublime to the ridiculous – from the reasonable inspirations of humanity to the fantastic exhibitions of ridiculous sentimentalism – there is but a single step. When we hear of a ‘Home for Dogs’, we venture to doubt if the originators and supporters of such an institution have not taken leave of their sober senses!”
ARTIST DEGAS HAS BRUSH WITH
CRITICS OVER QUEEN OF POISONS
IN 1876 the artist Edgar Degas painted this woman and a man sitting in a French café, appearing lonely, defeated, and intoxicated with a glass of green liquid.
The painting caused a furore in the pages of the Press and society across Europe and Britain. The woman was branded a “disgusting whore” in the Westminster Press and art critics in Paris and London wrote that the work was immoral, repulsive, and scandalous.
The work displayed a sordid depiction of social decay and alcoholism, they said. For the woman was drinking the “queen of poisons” known as absinthe or ‘la fée verte’ (the green fairy).
Her eyes tell the story, she has a faraway look coupled with an expression of despair as she sits at a table in the artist’s local Parisian café, a popular haunt of painters at the time.
Next to her is a man on hard times who seems to care little about his appearance and looks equally unhappy and ‘gone.’ The couple are an actress and model Ellen André and bohemian engraver Marcellin Désboutin.
The painting seemed so realistic that Degas was forced to release a statement that the pair were models and not actual alcoholics. And he painted it in his studio, not the café.
In London when the painting was shown in 1893, the Victorian Press headlined it: ‘A Blow to Morality’ and largely interpreted the scene as a dangerous warning against alcohol, and shameful and immoral.
And yet absinthe was widely consumed in England in the late 19th century and early 1920s, especially among journalists, writers and authors. It was available in hotels like the Café Royal and The Savoy, particularly in the American bar where wealthy politicians drank.
Some of its biggest tipplers included Ernest Hemingway; James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and Toulouse Lautrec, even though it was often portrayed as a dangerously addictive, psychoactive drug and highly dangerous.
Unlike many other countries, Britain never banned absinthe and yet the row about the painting and the drink went on for years. Irish author and critic George Moore famously described the woman in the picture as a “slut” and a “whore,” in the Press, arguing that “a life of idleness and low vice is upon her face.”
Perhaps that is true. Degas captured the facial expression and eye-look of someone who has been pictured under the influence of this potent drug.
Absinthe is derived from botanicals, primarily the “holy trinity” of grand wormwood (artemisia absinthium), green anise, and sweet fennel.
It is created by macerating these herbs in a neutral spirit, which is then distilled to produce a clear, alcoholic base, often coloured green via a second herb infusion.
By the early 20st century, nearly 200 brands of absinthe were being produced in a dozen countries, most notably in France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the Czech Republic.
The painting called simply ‘L’Absinthe’, went on to become one of the artist’s most famous works at a time when Degas was beginning to lose his sight. When he reached his seventies, he was nearly blind and had to stop painting.
He was said to find relationships with women difficult, although he painted them as ballerinas and laundry girls. He was believed to be celibate.
Sadly, he was forced to vacate his long-time studio on the rue Victor Massé because the building was being demolished and he spent his last days wandering the streets becoming a grouchy hermit. He died in Paris on September 27, 1917, at the age of 83, from a stroke and is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the Impressionist era.
His painting, ‘Danseuse au Repos’ (finished in 1879), which shows a ballerina at rest, sold for £17.6 million in 1999 and his canvas ‘L’Absinthe’ is currently housed in the Paris Museum.
CONAN DOYLE STORY OF GHOST SHIP MARY CELESTE BECAME FACT IN PRESS
In January 1884, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a short story anonymously in The Cornhill Magazine under the headline ‘J. Habkuk Jephson’s Statement.
It was the story of the world-famous ghost ship Mary Celeste, the yacht that became a 19th-century maritime mystery and historic phenomenon when it was found drifting near the Azores off the coast of Portugal. The crew of 12 had vanished.
Doyle’s fiction story was so strong that readers believed it was a report of the real event, which it partly was, except that he invented a story line and spelled the vessel ‘Marie Celeste’ and that was the name some people call it to this day, even in the Press.
The Mary Celeste set sail from New York on November 7, 1872, laden with more than 1,700 barrels of alcohol. It was destined for Genoa and had 10 people on board — Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their two-year-old daughter, and seven crew members.
Early in December the brigantine was spotted by the British ship Dei Gratia. It was sitting in the middle of the ocean, spookily quiet.
When they drew alongside and boarded, they found it was entirely abandoned but contained six months’ worth of food and water, and the belongings of the crew and passengers were still folded and packed.
A sounding rod for measuring the amount of water in the hold was found abandoned on the deck and the sails were partly set.
Aside from some water in the hold and a missing lifeboat with the rope cut, there were very few clues as to what could have caused all the crew and passengers to disappear.
The last entry of the captain’s logbook was dated November 25 and stated that the ship was around 11km from the Azores. However, it had been discovered 500 miles from there.
With no sign of the crew, the Dei Gratia’s captain ordered some of his men to sail the ship to Gibraltar 800 miles away.
In the days and months that followed, the Press abroad and in London carried stories of sea monsters like giant squids, pirates and even alien spaceships, being responsible for the strange event.
Into the pot were thrown stories about alcohol fumes and even a sudden waterspout in the ocean. Later they even used bits of Doyle’s short fiction story as the truth behind the discovery of half-eaten meals left on the table and warm tea in a teapot.
In London, the authorities suspected that the crew of either ship may have been involved in the disappearance by murdering the captain and his family in an insurance fraud.
However, this theory was largely disproven when stains around the ship were discovered not to be blood, and nothing valuable had been taken.
Another claim was that everyone disappeared after being eaten by sharks in a swimming contest off the plank.
After three months of deliberation, a court found no evidence of foul play. But although the salvagers did receive a payment, they only received a sixth of what the ship and its cargo had been insured for, which cast doubt about what happened.
The New York ‘Shipping and Commercial List’ on December 21 said: “The inference is that there has been foul play somewhere, and that alcohol is at the bottom of it.”
The court of inquiry chairman wrote his own unproven conclusion that the crew had got at the alcohol and murdered the Briggs family and the ship’s officers in a drunken frenzy.”
Doyle’s fictional plot to his short story was that the ship’s inhabitants fell victim to an ex-slave seeking revenge who wanted to divert the ship to the shores of Western Africa.
What happened to the Mary Celeste in the end?
In 1885 a new captain deliberately sailed it into a reef near Haiti to claim insurance on it. But it failed to sink, and the authorities discovered his scheme. The ship was left on the reef to rot. Spooky.
TERRY MANNERS
6 April 2026
