Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes, and Ty Cobb

They all played poker with George Whittell in the '50's and '60's.

George didn't go across the lake to the Cal-Neva to play cards; they all came to his house. Specifically, his card house. Which was connected to the main house via a 600-foot long tunnel, which is also how he would leave the card game without announcement if he was losing.

Sometimes it was just the boys and the cards, sometimes it was booze and showgirls that boated over from the hotel; occasionally he put out the red light to let the party crew know that his wife was home and not to come over.

George never worked a day in his life. He probably never so much as made toast, since he had butlers and maids and other staff. He didn't like other people very much if they weren't serving him; he bought the 40,000 acres -- including 27 miles along the shore of Lake Tahoe -- in order not to have neighbors. He installed sirens that screamed loudly if boaters on the lake stopped to gaze at his estate.

Rather than attend college he disappointed his parents and ran away to join the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which is how he developed a lifelong passion for animals. His best friend was an African lion, but he also owned an elephant and a polar bear and a cheetah and other exotic wildlife, which had free reign of his place. He lived to to be 87 years old despite the fact that he drank and smoked and caroused through all of it. He did spend his last ten years in a wheelchair because he was afraid to have surgery on the broken leg caused when one of his pet lions fell on him.

Today George's little Thunderbird Lodge is a national historic site, and is maintained by a fully funded preservation society.

Frank Sinatra probably learned how to party from George Whittell, because across the lake he and his Rat Pack managed a few good times. This story is best told by others, so what follows is some disjointed excerpts:

On July 13, 1960, the day Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles, it was announced to the newspapers that Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Hank Sincola, a Sinatra pal and business partner in a gossip rag, and Skinny D'Amato, a convicted white slaver, had applied for permission from the state of Nevada to take over the lodge.

What didn't make the papers about the deal, was that Sam Giancana and the Chicago outfit would own a secret percentage in the Cal-Neva and that it was Giancana's influence that persuaded Wingy Grober to sell the place off for the extremely reasonable price of $250,000. What also didn't make the newspapers about the deal, was the FBI assumption that Sinatra was nothing more than a front in the Cal-Neva for New York's mob boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno.

As for Giancana's interest in the money-losing casino, he was probably only in the deal to keep next to Sinatra, who was trying, desperately, to keep next to Kennedy, which everybody in the Chicago outfit wanted.

...

(O)n opening night, Sinatra's personality guests included Marilyn Monroe, Joe Kennedy and his son John. Also there that weekend was Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Uninvited and hiding up in the hills around the casino lodge, was Hoover's FBI. ...

But Sinatra's troubles with the Cal-Neva weren't over yet. A few days after Anderson was murdered, and one week before her own death, Marilyn Monroe flew to the Cal-Neva at Frank Sinatra's invitation. Sinatra told Monroe that he wanted to discuss their upcoming film together, "What a Way to Go". Monroe didn't want to go, but someone told Marilyn that Bobby Kennedy would be there. It sounded logical to Monroe, since it had been in the papers that the attorney general was in Los Angeles on business.

Sinatra flew Monroe out on his own plane along with Peter Lawford, although the crooner was no longer speaking to Lawford after the Kennedys dumped him, and Lawford's wife, Patricia Kennedy Lawford.

Exactly what happened that weekend at the Cal-Neva, isn't known and may never be known. Louis McWillie, an outfit-related gambler who worked for Sinatra at the Cal-Neva said: "There was more to what happened up there than anybody has ever told. It would have been a big fall for Bobby Kennedy."

What is known is that there was dinner with Sam Giancana, Peter and Pat Lawford, Sinatra and Monroe. Giancana, of course, had no business being in the Cal-Neva since he was listed in the State's black book of persons forbidden to enter a casino, in fact, he was at the top of the list of restricted persons, but, as San Francisco's new columnist Herb Caen said: " I saw Sinatra at the Cal-Neva when Sam Giancana was there. In fact I met Giancana through Frank. He was a typical hood, didn't say much. He wore a hat at the lake, and sat in his little bungalow, receiving people."

During the dinner, Monroe got uncontrollably drunk and was led to the cabin where, while she was passed out, several hookers, male and female, molested her while Sinatra and Giancana watched, with Giancana taking his turn with the actress as well.

While the female prostitutes had their way with Monroe, someone snapped photographs of the entire thing and before the night was over, Sinatra then brought the film to Hollywood photographer Billy Woodfield, and gave him a roll of film to develop in his darkroom.

The next morning, Peter Lawford told Monroe that Robert Kennedy was in Los Angeles and that he didn't want to see her, speak to her or have any contact with her in the future. When she protested, someone showed her the photographs from the night before. That afternoon, she tried to commit suicide with an overdose of pills and had to have her stomach pumped.

Everything at that link is worth reading. Here's some more from elsewhere:

Frank Sinatra and the Mob

Frank's Place

A bit from that last:

The doors to the showroom are locked now, the music long since gone. Outside, the mountain air is as clear and sweet as it must have been forty years ago, when this place briefly felt like the centre of the world. Sunlight still sparkles on the lake, although on this afternoon a thin mist veils the far shore, drifting in from some distant forest fire. Mountain jays come and go between the tall pine trees with a flash of blue-green plumage while the dark lines left by speedboats stripe the lake and the unhurried drone of a piston-engined seaplane fills the sky.

This is where a certain idea of America began to come apart, although the young couples don’t know that as they self-park their Chevy pickups and Japanese SUVs under the pines. Carrying their luggage to the entrance of the Cal-Neva Resort, checking in at the desk, their minds are on an act of union. These days, the Cal-Neva specializes in weddings and honeymoons. For their nuptial rites, the couples can choose between a broad terrace, with a white wrought-iron gazebo and a marquee holding about a hundred guests, and a smaller indoor parlour where the chairs are covered in white satin bound with gold sashes. Clustered on the slope beneath the main building, where the pine bluff descends sharply to the water, small wooden bungalows await the honeymooners.

Once this was the setting for a grander dream. It was here, in a location overlooking Lake Tahoe, 8,000 feet above sea level and ringed by the peaks of the High Sierra, that the most celebrated entertainer of his time had glimpsed an illusion. In this retreat, the most glamorous and notorious and powerful figures in America would come together—his friends, under his roof. And that was exactly how it seemed to be, until the autumn evening when he looked across the water at the lights on the southern shore, and knew that the world he had made was over.

Frank Sinatra sang his final encore in the showroom of the Cal-Neva Lodge, as it was then known, on the evening of September 5, 1963. It was the last night of the season, before the place closed up for the winter. Three years earlier he had bought a share of the hotel and its casino, and he had worked hard and put a great deal of money—some of it his own—into improving its features, trying to create an environment in which he could entertain his friends and attract customers who wanted to share a life in the upper atmosphere. The place had a history, even then. Jack Kennedy knew it well; his father had supplied liquor to a previous owner, and received hospitality for himself and his family in return. Marilyn Monroe had been there many times, and would later stay there the weekend before her death, when Sinatra gave her sanctuary while she avoided an ex-husband. Sam Giancana, the boss of the Chicago Mafia, who shared a girlfriend with Kennedy, was a silent partner in the syndicate which, with Sinatra as its front man, had taken control of the hotel in 1960.

All the old joints in Vegas that the mob owned and the Rat Pack sang at are gone -- blown up, torn down, paved over. The Cal-Neva however still stands, a silent sentinel on the lake, monument to a by-gone era.

Carson City, the state capital

In the Nevada state assembly hall there hangs, behind the speaker's dais, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. If you know as little about its history as I did before visiting this week, then you don't know that Lincoln managed to get Nevada certified as the nation's 36th state in 1864, as the Civil War was drawing to its inexorable conclusion, despite the fact that the territory did not meet the necessary population requirement. Lincoln did this for two reasons: in gratitude for the significant funding of the the war effort (see previous posting on Virginia City and the Comstock Lode) and also because he had to have Nevada's three votes in order to ratify the Emancipation Proclamation 13th Amendment.

The names of dozens of precious minerals and ores taken out from beneath the state's soil and mountains, and the scenes portraying their excavation and commercial employment, are displayed in a mural ribbon that adorns the top of each hallway in the old Capitol building. There don't seem to be any pictures of the thousands of abandoned mines that litter Nevada's landscape, still claiming lives of curiosity-seekers who venture in and are suffocated by methane (the least painless of the possible and various accidental deaths).

What also gets no tribute in art in the halls of government is the state's current revenue stream, gaming. There are casinos large and small, plush and dingy, within walking distance up and down the street from the Capitol, the state supreme court building and the state assembly. Max Baer, whose singular claim to fame was portraying the ignoramus Jethro Bodine, nephew of hayseed-turned-oil tycoon Jed Clampett in TV's "Beverly Hillbillies", is building an new casino on the outskirts of Carson City themed after the television show. It is to feature a two-hundred-foot oil derrick as landmark.

No word on whether the enterprise will include modern-day salutes to US soldiers killed in Bush's War for Oil, to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children who have died in the bombings and violence, or even a nod to American petroleum consumption (say, a bigger-than-lifesize Hummer tearing up the suburban landscape). My guess is no.

Across the street from the Nugget Casino, where our tour bus dropped us yesterday afternoon (with free tickets for the evening buffet) is the Nevada state museum, housed in the old US Mint building. Did you know Carson City minted coinage for a few years in the 1960's? I didn't, but most numismatics know if you have a coin with "CC" near the president's head then you've got a rare and worthy collectible.

Much like the Texas Legislature, Nevada's 21 senators and 42 state assemblymen and women meet in the winter and spring of odd-numbered years, but Texans convene for 180 days while Nevadans gather for just 120. Like their Lone Star peers, they are paid small stipends and as such most of the members have comfortable incomes from primary employment and entrepreneurship. They also spend the first month reading proclamations and bestowing honoraria on constituents, semi-celebrities and causes, and the last month furiously writing, amending, and voting on thousands of pieces of legislation, leaving much of the work to die at the end of their session. They are also frequently summoned into special session to address unfinished business or pet concerns of the governor (and corporate lobbyists).

The speaker of the Nevada state assembly is a woman, as is the state's attorney general. Nevada, like so many other Western states, is purple and trending blue, in their case because of the economic growth from Californians fleeing high taxes and congestion, a burgeoning population of Latino immigrants, and the organization of the state's casino laborers. The influence of Nevada's early primary election day -- January 19, between the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary --was initially expected to have greater influence on the Democratic nominee's selection, but it appears that will be diminished because of the land rush by other states to move up their presidential primaries to Feb. 5th, creating a quasi-national primary on that day.

Today: a cruise across the lake to the North shore to see the old Cal-Neva resort hotel, where Frank and Dean and the rest of the Rat Pack palled around for a few years in the '60's, and the Thunderbird Lodge.