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After Jack Entratter’s death, Howard Hughes tabbed a longtime friend to take the impresario’s place as his Las Vegas entertainment maven. Walter Kane broke into show business as Fatty Arbuckle’s vaudeville partner playing the Keith and Orpheum Circuit. As vaudeville declined, he shifted to theatrical management, becoming president of Harry Webber Inc. before joining Zeppo Marx’s agency as a partner. In 1938, he founded his own talent agency.
Kane befriended Howard Hughes in the late 1920s and visited Las Vegas with the future billionaire through the 1960s. After Hughes assumed control of RKO Studios in 1948, he installed Kane as the talent director. It was whispered along the Hollywood grapevine that one of Kane’s duties was to procure women for Hughes; whatever the reason, he remained a confidant. With Entratter gone, Kane’s sway over the Hughes properties’ showrooms was unquestioned. He even moved into Entratter’s old suite at the Sands.
In a 1974 Billboard interview, Kane took credit for rebuilding the Sands’ entertainment lineup following the departure of Sinatra. He stressed that one of his biggest priorities was to keep overheard low.
“My weekly entertainment nut for the Sands, Frontier, Desert Inn, and Landmark,” he said, “is less than Caesars Palace,” which was reportedly paying Frank Sinatra $240,000 a week and Johnny Carson $200,000, with Sammy Davis, Jr. a relative bargain at $175,000. Casinos charged their customers accordingly; a Sinatra ticket at the Circus Maximus could cost as much as $35, while no Sands show cost more than $15.
Kane developed a core of performers that he rotated through the Hughes casinos. At the Sands, his roster centered on Phyllis Diller, Bob Newhart, Lena Horne, Diana Trask, and Rich Little, with its undeniable centerpiece a symbol of the new Las Vegas: Wayne Newton, who Kane signed to a multi-year, multimillion-dollar contact in February 1973. In that year, Newton starred in the Copa for nine weeks straight. But this wasn’t enough for Kane, who became so close with Newton that the singer adopted him as his grandfather.
“Next year, we’ll do 12 weeks,” he told Billboard. “No one’s ever done 12 straight weeks.” And if that worked, it might be all Wayne, all the time; Kane mused about giving Newton a 40-week engagement.
Possibly more than Elvis Presley, Wayne Newton defined Las Vegas entertainment in the 1970s. Nothing could match Elvis’s box office appeal, and no one—no one—could approach him in packing the Hilton’s massive showroom during his semi-annual stints. The number of Elvis’s consecutive sellouts is a matter of debate, but his dominance is unquestioned.
But nobody could fill the Copa room, or other Las Vegas showrooms, night after night, year after year, the way Wayne Newton could. No one—not even Elvis or Frank—could end each performance with a standing ovation. In the 1970s, Sinatra was the class of Las Vegas, Presley its heart, and Newton its soul.
Kane would remain in charge of Hughes entertainment until his 1983 death. Newton, Robert Goulet, and Debbie Reynolds were his standbys. Kane kept costs down, kept the showrooms filled, and if there wasn’t the same buzz as there was when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were giving away thousands of dollars, well, maybe that was the price of progress.
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AFTER TAKING OVER FROM Bernie Rothkopf in the aftermath of Hughes’ 1970 exit from Las Vegas, Richard Danner would remain at the helm of the Sands for the rest of the decade, bringing the casino its first stability at the top since its purchase by Hughes in 1967.
Danner brought with him from the Frontier Harry Goodheart, a casino veteran. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, Goodheart had honed his trade at the Beverly Hills Club of Southgate, Kentucky. Like many others when the public turned against illicit gambling post-Kefauver he moved to Las Vegas, where he worked as a craps dealer, rising by the mid-1960s to the role of floorman. In January 1969, he was licensed as a casino executive at the Frontier. In March of that year, he was named the Frontier’s casino manager, replacing the retiring Chester Simms.
Coming into the Sands, Goodheart had the benefit of a robust junket network that he had built up at the Frontier. Ranging across North America, Goodheart’s connections enabled him to keep a steady stream of gamblers in the Sands casino—an important tool given the exodus of high rollers post-Hughes. He was also possibly the first casino executive to use a computer to better understand his customers. Goodheart himself didn’t operate the machine, but he had his secretary maintain a database that could be deployed when he made his prospecting calls.
“Bob,” he might start. “We haven’t seen you since last August. I hope Martha is well. How’s your boy doing in Florida? We’d love to have you back—we’ve got a bottle of Macallan waiting for you.”
Bob, amazed that Goodheart had remembered so much about him, would soon be back. Ultimately, database marketing would become more sophisticated, but Goodheart grasped early on how computers could revolutionize customer relations for casinos.
That regime got a new name in 1972, after Hughes sold the Hughes Tool Company. His core enterprise since the 1920s, Hughes Tool had been the umbrella under which his casinos were organized. Everything left over after the sale of the tool division—mostly the casinos and real estate, with the odd television station and mining operation thrown in—was consolidated under the Summa Corporation. Though the name changed, little else did in Las Vegas.
Similarly, Hughes’ April 1976 death did not much affect day-to-day operations at the Sands or any of his casinos. For the most part, the same executives remained in charge, the same policies in place. Though Hughes was the Summa Corporation’s sole stockholder, he was neither a director nor an officer of the company. With 6,000 employees in Nevada, Hughes was theoretically the state’s biggest boss. But he had long ago given up day-to-day control of his empire. In Las Vegas, a triumvirate of Bill Gay, Nadine Henley, and Chester Davis were in command, with a small staff of increasingly interchangeable executives below them.
Former pit boss Ed Walters, who had laughed along with Dean Martin in the dealer’s lounge, left the property in 1969 when Martin became a part-owner of the Riviera. In 1976, he returned to the Sands. When he came back, there was a new breed of customer.
“Used to be, 60 percent of the people in here were serious gamblers,” he confided to a friend. “The other 40, seriously wealthy people. Where’d they all go?”
It was a rhetorical question. Walters knew that having to sign a counter check for their markers was like giving a vampire a garlic-and-silver-bullet bouquet.
“These TV people,” Walters named the tourists who now filled the hotel. “They’re not here to really gamble. They’re here to see the entertainers they’ve seen on television, to see movie stars.” Now, a guest was more likely to ask Walters where the men’s room was than to talk about blackjack. And when they did gamble, they needed to be held by the hand.
“Excuse me, sir, do I put my money in the circle?” one of them asked, pointing at the blackjack layout. And if someone the tourists had seen on TV walked through the casino, God help them. When Cary Grant came to speak briefly to Walters, the star was mobbed by autograph-seekers who had abandoned their 21 games in mid-deal.
Back in the day, a gambler wouldn’t have looked up if Jesus Christ himself had walked through the pit. The gambler didn’t mind that movie stars frequented the Sands; in fact, it gave the casino additional luster. But he wasn’t there to see movie stars. He was there to gamble. The TV people, not so much.
The Sands wasn’t that different from the rest of Las Vegas. In the 1970s, the town began shifting its appeal. Of course, non-gamblers had been courted since at least the early 1950s, when the Desert Inn opened its golf course, and the shift toward conventions after 1955 had changed the very nature of Las Vegas casino resorts, allowing them to add many more hotel rooms that could now be kept steadily full during the middle of the week, leading to higher capital outlays that, in part, dictated the shift toward corporate ownership in the next decade.
Howard Hughes and Kirk Kerkorian both demonstrated the importance of capital in the new Las Vegas. Hughes, of course, simply opened his wallet and bought as many casinos as he could. Kerkorian, though, took a more strategic approach, using a combination of cash, debt, and equity to finance the construction of the International. Difficulties in the financial markets, rather than operational inefficiencies, forced the International and Flamingo’s sale to Hilton Hotels. Kerkorian, after buying MGM Studios, returned to Las Vegas in 1973 with the original MGM Grand (today, Bally’s). With Carl Cohen, Bernie Rothkopf, and many other members of the old guard, the MGM Grand might have been the last stand of the city’s first generation of casino managers, but its size dictated that it be financed and operated under new models.
This meant a much greater sensitivity to costs than before. Previously, casinos were owned by small pools of investors, some legitimate, some not. Unless the casino was hemorrhaging money, managers generally tolerated lax controls over both cash and complimentaries. They could afford to be generous because the casinos were bringing in more money than the owners could spend; these were men for whom a few thousand dollars a month, plus unlimited RFB privileges for themselves, constituted an earthly paradise. Why not let some cash bleed off to the employees to keep the casino running smoothly? There was no reason to sweat comping policies. With low costs, it made sense to grant freebies even to small-time players who had some promise to develop into bigger fish.
The new owners—mainstream lenders and stockholders—wanted more than middling dividends and comp privileges at the property—they might, in fact, never visit the property in the flesh. Rather, they demanded constantly increasing financial indicators that would lead to higher stock prices, increasing their own net worth. This meant that every dime had to be accounted for. That the casino ran well or did not run well, that customers were happy or not happy, was no longer the guiding imperative for managers: boosting shareholder value was.
Though the privately held Summa was not beholden to the market in the same way as publicly held companies, Hughes’ managers nevertheless had been conditioned to keep an eagle eye on the bottom line. Having not walked a casino floor since, perhaps, the 1950s, Hughes was more concerned with dollars and cents and his own flights of fancy than delivering an optimal customer experience. With an audience of one, the top managers made decisions that would be sure to meet with their boss’s approval, and this attitude rolled downhill. Walter Kane’s focus on financial stability over the raw star power of his headliners wasn’t due to personal cheapness: It was standard Hughes policy.
Despite these constraints, Danner and Goodheart were good executives who launched new programs. They focused, for example, on golf, co-sponsoring the U.S. National Senior Golf Open Championship. In December 1976, Goodheart hired Al Besselink, who had won the first Tournament of Champions at the Desert Inn in 1953, to serve as a casino host specializing in golf promotions. While the Sands did not have its own course, the Desert Inn, also under the Summa umbrella, did, and many decent gamblers also had a fondness for golf.
Goodheart in particular was widely praised. In both 1976 and 1977, Review-Journal columnist Don Digilio, in December columns touting “shopping lists” for various local figures, wished for the Summa Corporation “another casino manager like Harry Goodheart.”
The Sands debuted keno in 1972, a sign of the casino’s new appeal to more casual gamblers. Keno, which has perhaps the worst odds of any casino game, is a far cry from craps or baccarat, which have among the least damaging casino hold, and are favored by big gamblers. The game is played by selecting numbers from a list; the object is to correctly guess the numbers that will be drawn at random. Keno offsets its ruinous odds with the will-o’-the-wisp promise of a possible six-figure payout, appealing mostly to novice gamblers. As keno became popular, casino coffee shops started stocking keno slips, with keno runners (typically attractive young women) picking them up while players ate. Frank Sinatra dealing chemin de fir it was not.
Still, the Sands didn’t totally abandon the high roller hunt. With lavish tower suites and several large Aqueduct suites, Goodheart and his hosts courted well-heeled gamblers who preferred the “shabby elegance” of the Sands to the more modern resorts. In 1976, they rented Hawaii’s entire five-star Manua Kea Beach Hotel as a “thank you” for their biggest players. The 150 lucky high rollers who made the cut had credit lines of at least $25,000. But the all-expense-paid trip was more than a show of gratitude. The festivities started with a Saturday night luau at the Sands, and the plane departed for Hawaii Monday morning, plenty of time for them to gamble plenty of money. After five days in paradise, they returned to Las Vegas with another evening to kill before being flown home. All in, with hotel, chartered airfare, and associated expenses, the event cost the Sands a cool million. It generated, however, $3 million in gaming revenue. The Sands’ competitors soon started offering their own “thank you” trips along similar lines.
The biggest high roller that Goodheart lured to the Sands was Adnan Khashoggi, an infamously wealthy Saudi Arabian businessman. An intermediary in international arms deals whose generous commissions funded an ostentatious lifestyle (12 homes, a private jet described as “a flying Las Vegas discothèque” and a $70 million yacht), Khashoggi was any casino host’s wildest dream come to life: a man with means (he earned as much as nine figures for some of his brokering) and a commitment to spend extravagantly (he reportedly spent $250,000 a day simply to maintain his lifestyle).
Though Khashoggi lost $500,000 on his first trip to the Sands, he took a big enough liking to the casino that, in June 1974, it was rumored that he was looking to buy it. It wasn’t an entirely outrageous scenario; by that point the up-and-coming businessman had already bought two California banks and dabbled in Arizona ranching, California restaurants, New Mexico trucking, and New York-based mutual funds. He ultimately invested heavily in Salt Lake City, but a foray into casino ownership would not have been entirely out of character, although it is doubtful that he would have submitted himself to a suitability investigation by Nevada gaming authorities. His play was big enough that he was given not only Suite 707, in which Ed Nigro had resided while he ruled Hughes’ gaming empire, and Suite 720, where Jack Entratter once lived and where, in 1984, Ronald Reagan would stay, but the entire Aqueduct building. And, as high rollers went, he was good about paying his bills; he paid for all the incidentals charged to his account (though naturally the rooms themselves were gratis) and even paid in full a $1 million birthday party thrown for his daughter. This was a once-in-a-generation rainmaker.
The physical plant of the casino had little to impress the arms dealer, who among his residences boasted a 180,000-acre Kenyan ranch, a Manhattan penthouse created by knocking together 16 apartments, and a 5,000-acre seaside estate in Marbella, Spain, where he threw parties worthy of a king (his 50th birthday party lasted five days). Rather, it was probably the lengths to which Sands executives would go to keep Khashoggi contented. Roger Wagner, who later helmed several casinos, worked several stints at the Sands; in the late 1970s, as the head of Sands purchasing, he was instrumental in the high-stakes scavenger hunts that Khashoggi and his associates seemed to delight sending executives on.
In his first week in his new role, Wagner had to acquire a specific model of electric barber chair. Wagner was able to locate one in a Thousand Oaks, California warehouse, and was able to find an Angeleno with a pickup truck who was willing pick up the chair and drop it off at Los Angeles International Airport, where Khashoggi’s famous jet was waiting. By six that night, the chair was installed in Khashoggi’s suite. Later that same week, Khashoggi, through his associate Bob Shaheen, demanded the largest Snapper lawnmower in existence. Wagner dutifully found the mower and, following Shaheen’s instructions, had it crated up and marked for Nairobi, as it was meant for Khashoggi’s Kenyan estate. A year later, however, the mower remained at the Sands, as Khashoggi apparently never bothered to have it shipped.
From the mid-1970s on, Khashoggi was consistently the Sands’ biggest player. Not even a 1976 imbroglio in which American defense contractors were charged with funneling bribes to Middle Eastern political and military figures through Khashoggi cooled the Sands’ affection for him. Richard Danner spiritedly fought a federal grand jury’s order to turn over the hotel’s records of transactions involving Khashoggi. The billionaire spent several months away from the United States to avoid his possible arrest, but he returned to Las Vegas with a vengeance, losing as uninhibitedly as before.
In early 1979, the management upgraded the Aqueduct building to accommodate their star. A garage housed his fleet of vehicles. A helicopter pad lay barely a football field from his suite’s front door. At the Sands’ expense, a dedicated phone system was installed. This system, with its own switchboard, was disassembled after each of Khashoggi’s visits and reassembled at his return. It was worth every penny: Khashoggi lost $22 million that year at the Sands.
So while the bulk of the Sands’ marketing efforts went to attracting smaller-limit players, the casino remained in the great whale hunt. And yet, as the casino got older and its competitors expanded (Caesars Palace’s Fantasy Tower, which opened in 1979, was designed chiefly to cater to high-limit players), this became a more difficult game to play. Still, the Sands had a seat at the table.
***
THE CHANGES IN THE city and casino demanded some changes to how the Sands was promoted. After Al Freeman’s death in August 1972, Richard Danner brought over Al Guzman from the Desert Inn to helm the Sands’ publicity and advertising department. Guzman was a veteran PR man who had followed his service in the U.S. Army with a stint at the Hughes Aircraft Company’s Radar Maintenance Division while moonlighting as an occasional sportswriter for the Los Angeles Mirror. He then moved to Las Vegas, initially working the sports beat for the Sun before, in 1968, taking a job at the Desert Inn as the assistant director of public relations and advertising. In 1970, he was promoted to director.
Guzman’s marketing philosophy was in many ways similar to Freeman’s.
“Pretty girls sell,” he argued. “Pretty guys don’t sell. You need to do something to get people’s attention. If you don’t get their attention, you’re dead. A pretty girl will get an editor’s attention, then maybe he’ll put you in his newspaper and you’ve got some free publicity.
Indeed, in Guzman’s time, as in Freeman’s, scantily clad women had a suspicious tendency to show up in press photos for which there was, strictly speaking, no logical reason for a scantily clad woman to be present. And Guzman was, the evidence suggests, a leg man.
A 1973 photo, for example, celebrating the opening of the 17th Annual U.S. National Senior Open Golf Championship doesn’t feature a veteran duffer teeing off. Instead, it shows Hotel President Richard Danner and Vice President of Casino Operations Harry Goodheart wearing suits, flanked by professional golfer Vic Ghezzi, wearing a golf shirt, watching appreciatively while the leggy “hostess” Karen Brands holds a club, wearing shorts covering, perhaps, a quarter of her thighs. Another 1973 photo op, this one staged to mark the one-year anniversary of the Sands’ keno program, featured comedian Bob Newhart playing a “human keno ticket” in the form of “Miss Sands ‘73” Kay Brown, on whose bare midriff was painted “an exact duplicate of a standard keno ticket.” In August 1978, a photo accompanying a blurb about the Sands’ renovation of 196 tower rooms and suites (which were, over a decade after the tower’s construction, being given a “modified Louis XVI design”) showcased a snapshot from the official announcement event. Vice President of Hotel Operations Rand Clark, Danner (holding a sledgehammer), and Goodheart, all wearing suits and hardhats, are joined by “greeter” Danielle Hansen, whose hardhat accessorizes a tank top and microscopically short shorts.
Guzman cultivated what he called “the art of getting free and favorable publicity.” A stunt Guzman orchestrated for the Sundance casino in 1984 is emblematic of his approach. Las Vegas had gone nearly three months without rain—a record-breaking drought. In what would later be seen as a buffet of cultural insensitivities, Guzman “rounded up five pretty girls, put them in some scanty Indian maiden costumes, and had them do a raindance in front of the hotel,” backing up Fremont Street traffic for blocks. That a thunderstorm struck the next day helped make the resulting photographs “newsworthy,” but Guzman insisted that the rain dance was effective in communicating that “people are having some good old-fashioned fun in Las Vegas.”
In the 1980s, Guzman reflected that the new breed of Las Vegas PR executives didn’t appreciate the value of stunts like the rain dance, and that they didn’t try to cultivate members of the press, instead directing their secretaries to grind out press releases. This reflected, he thought, the less personal way that the business itself was run.
“They’ve lost the old touch,” Guzman lamented, “which the old regimes held so high, and maybe some work run by the Mafia.” Back then, employees felt they were part of an organization that wasn’t all about profit and loss.
“In the old days, they just went by the overall picture. If they made money, it was great. They didn’t give a damn if food and beverage was losing $100,000 a month, because at the end of the year they were going to make X amount of dollars. Now everything is controlled by accountants who are about as exciting as a dead rag.”
Shortly after taking over, Guzman introduced a new slogan that replaced the original “Place in the Sun,” which had served the hotel since its 1952 opening. “The Sands: Where the Fun Never Sets” highlighted the 24-hour action at the hotel and incorporated the late Freeman-era stylized sun of the Sands’ logo.
The new slogan played up Guzman’s belief that Las Vegas should be promoted, above all, as a fun place. Yet the reality was fun could be had, but somehow the Sands seemed less spontaneous than it had been a decade before.
***
THE SANDS WAS TOO SMALL to operate with the economies of scale that the Hilton and MGM Grand enjoyed, plus it had lost much of its high-end play to Caesars Palace. Summa was itself not quite the picture of financial health in the late 1970s; the company’s far-flung holdings, which included a slew of casinos, a television station, an airport, and large swaths of real estate, were not running profitably. In 1978, Summa sold the Landmark, which had never shown a profit.
Then the global economy slid into recession, and Summa’s problems intensified. In addition, in early 1980, the company transferred over 12,000 acres of property in Las Vegas and Tucson to the Hughes estate so that it could be liquidated to pay the estate’s sizeable death tax liability. Once a juggernaut, the Hughes empire was on the ropes. The Sands was further hamstrung by Richard Danner’s health difficulties: In the summer of 1980, the casino president suffered a massive stroke from which he never fully recovered.
So it was not a tremendous surprise when, in October 1980, Summa’s Chairman of the Board William Lummis announced that the company was selling the Sands.
The buyer was Inns of the Americas, a hospitality firm headed by Jack Pratt and his brothers Edward and William. The company was one of the world’s largest Holiday Inn franchisees, with hotels in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean. With 23 hotels already in its portfolio and another seven under construction, Inns of the Americas was on the upswing. The company had an eye on international expansion, having just contracted to operate La Quinta Motor Inns across Mexico.
While new to Nevada gaming, the Pratt brothers had every confidence that they would succeed. Inns was already a gaming operator, running a casino affiliated with its San Juan, Puerto Rico Condado Holiday Inn. The hotel business was all about filling rooms, and with their experience around the Western hemisphere, they had every confidence that under their watch the Sands would prosper.
All told, Howard Hughes and his successor corporation owned the Sands for about 14 years—from 1967 to early 1981—almost as long as the original group. The Hughes/Summa era seems to be one of consolidation. While managers made strides in improving the efficiency of operations, the resort lost much of its magic. Lummis admitted as much when he said that, in Pratt, the Sands would get “an owner that is committed to modernize and enlarge the property so that it will be able to maintain its prestigious image and competitive edge,” suggesting that the Summa regime did not have the means to do so.
Jack Pratt believed that he could bring the storied Sands into a new era.
“The Sands has long been one of the jewels of the Strip,” he said. “We will continue to operate the property as the Sands Hotel and Casino and have plans that will enlarge it and enhance its position of preeminence among the luxury hotels of Las Vegas.”
Pratt promised a $40 million renovation and expansion, which would include an expanded casino and public space, more parking, and a second guest tower. Within a month, the investment was boosted to $50 million. It was now a three-phase plan, with a refurbishment of the façade and public areas followed by a 450-room tower expansion and, perhaps four years later, another expansion that would bring the hotel to 2,000 rooms.
To lead the Sands, the Pratts hired Neil Smyth, a veteran hotel executive and marketer who had spent the past 11 years working his way up the executive ladder at Caesars Palace, where he was currently senior vice president in charge of operations. The trilingual Smyth (he spoke English, Arabic, and Spanish), a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, was a hall-of-fame table tennis player who would continue winning championships into his 80s. He followed his military service with a stint as an internal auditor for Pan Am, after which he returned to Puerto Rico, where he had been stationed as a naval intelligence officer, to serve as an accountant for the San Juan International Hotel.
Smyth championed using the latest computer advances to improve casino financial management. He held a variety of leadership positions in hospitality accounting professional organizations and co-authored a revision of the collection of industry benchmarks known as the Uniform System of Accounts for Hotels. The soft-spoken Smyth wasn’t one for theatrics, but he knew the hotel business as well as anyone.
Even before receiving their license for the Sands, the Pratts purchased the Brighton, a struggling, undersized casino in Atlantic City. They announced plans to rebrand the Brighton as the Sands, bringing some “pizazz and glamor” to the Jersey shore town. Likewise, the Puerto Rico casino was given the Sands name.
Though Smyth and the Pratts wooed Harry Goodheart, offering him a role as senior vice president overseeing all the company’s growing casino operations, Goodheart begged off. Rather than take on the task of building an international casino brand, the casino veteran opted to move to the Desert Inn as a vice president, where he would work for the remaining 15 months on his contract before retiring to spend more time traveling with his wife and fishing.
“I haven’t been able to go fishing in five years,” he said.
In part because of the added due diligence Nevada Gaming Control Board investigators needed to pursue on Inns of the Americas’ Puerto Rico casino, the official approval for the Pratts to be licensed and formally assume ownership was delayed until April 1, 1981. In recommending that the Gaming Commission grant Inns a license, Board Chairman Richard Bunker stipulated that the company must divest itself of small interests in two Panamanian casinos and that it agree to further investigation in Puerto Rico.
At the hearing, Jack Pratt made it clear that, if push came to shove, his company would sell the Sands, which was losing money hand over fist, rather than the profitable Condado Holiday Inn.
“The Sands today is losing huge sums of money—it’s hemorrhaging,” he said.
Smyth underscored his boss’s point.
“The Sands lost money last year and it looks like it will lose money this year, too,” he said. “It’s difficult to try to work in an older property while everyone around us is modernizing.” The plan was for the steady cash of the Puerto Rican casino to cover for lower income at the Sands, which in the best-case scenario promised to be a construction site for the next several years.
Licensed alongside Pratt, his brothers, Inns of the Americas’ Latin American subsidiary president Luis Ponce, and Smyth were another pair of brothers, Burton and Richard Koffman of Binghamton, New York, who were to own 24.25 percent of the casino each. They were financing Inns’ expansion plans and had agreed to also facilitate the acquisition of the casino that would become the Sands Atlantic City.
So, with a down payment of $25 million, an agreement to infuse $10 million in operating capital into the casino, and a monthly payment plan, Inns of the Americas officially became the Sands’ new owners. At midnight on May 1, 1981, Summa Recreation Division Vice President Phil Hannifin turned over a ceremonial set of hotel keys to Smyth and Ed Pratt, executive vice president of Inns and the Sands’ general manager. The Sands had its third set of owners. They inherited employees and department heads who were on the whole more experienced than their counterparts at other resorts. Although it was more than a decade after the end of the Sands’ glory years, the hotel retained its reputation as a destination for good managers, rather than a stop along the road. This is why a casino manager like Harry Goodheart would move from the Frontier to the Sands, but not vice versa.
Smyth and the Pratt brothers immediately launched into the first phase of their modernization program, but economic headwinds made the $50 million expansion that had been promised in October unfeasible. Instead, the new owners spent $15 million to increase the size of the casino to 30,000 square feet, renovate the lobby, and add two new restaurants: the Mediterranean Room, a gourmet eatery, and the Sands deli, which served humbler fare. Other additions included the new Regency Bar and the Winners Circle Lounge.
The Sands didn’t have a new tower to unveil, but that didn’t mean that there couldn’t be a gala opening. To launch the “new” Sands, the owners turned to Burt Peretsky, who in late 1981 replaced Al Guzman as director of marketing, advertising, and public relations. Peretsky had recently come to Las Vegas from Boston to work in a similar position at Del E. Webb’s corporate offices, but burgeoning economic difficulties forced Del Webb to begin selling off their properties.
Sparing no expense, Peretsky and Ed Pratt hired Tommy Walker to stage the re-opening extravaganza. Walker had a reputation as “Mr. Spectacular,” the man who could deliver an exceptional event. A dual place-kicker/drum major in his years at the University of Southern California, Walker turned down an offer to turn pro with the Washington Redskins to return to his alma mater as director of the marching band. In 1955, Walt Disney hired him to put together Disneyland’s opening ceremonies. From there, he staged progressively more elaborate events; over his career, he directed galas at three Olympics and five world’s fairs.
When Peretsky reached out to him, Walker was fresh off his biggest triumph to date: coordinating the special effects at Ronald Reagan’s inaugural. To the strains of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” red, white, and blue skyrockets and flashing lasers crossed the sky, giving Reagan’s Morning in America a technicolor dawn.
On Friday, January 15, 1982, at 7 p.m., the Sands Hotel and Casino announced its rebirth with “Encore ’82: The Sands Spectacular.”
Peretsky and Walker planned a day/night event that would culminate in a black-tie ball featuring as many celebrities as Peretsky could fly in from Hollywood and, naturally, every high roller who still frequented the Sands.
But before that would come a signature Tommy Walker spectacular. What better way to etch the Sands into history than to have the hotel enshrined in the Guinness Book of World Records? Lacking the tens of millions of dollars it would take to make the Sands the largest hotel in the world, Walker decided on some relatively low-hanging fruit. High school students from around the Las Vegas Valley competed to see which school could blow up the most balloons, with the winners promised scholarships. After several days of exhaling, the Sands ended up with 300,000 balloons, which were deployed in a display that a Guinness fact-checker (flown out to Las Vegas courtesy of the Sands) verified was the largest simultaneous release of balloons in history.
To emcee the event, the Sands needed a figure who could simultaneously deliver star power, wow the audience, and provide a link back to the good old days. Sinatra, maintaining his grudge against the Sands long after Jack Entratter had passed away and Carl Cohen had moved on (and, indeed, Howard Hughes had died and his company had sold the resort), refused. Dean Martin was busy. So Peretsky turned to Sammy Davis, Jr.
There was one problem. Davis was currently under contract with Harrah’s, who refused to let him perform for any other Nevada casino. But Peretsky found a loophole. If the Sands didn’t pay Davis, he was free to perform.
“He’ll never do it,” Davis’s agent to Peretsky.
“Can I just call him and ask?” Peretsky asked. The agent gave Peretsky Davis’s phone number.
Peretsky called and outlined the Tommy Walker spectacular and the critical role that the emcee would play. But there was more than free publicity at stake. This was the Sands, the house Davis had practically built.
“Could you maybe do it...for old times’ sake?” Peretsky asked. There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
“For old times’ sake?” Davis finally answered. “I’ll do it. For old times’ sake.”
The day before the event, Davis came to the Sands to run through rehearsals. As he walked through the casino, a crowd gathered. Davis, always a natural in front of an audience, spotted a dead blackjack table. He walked up and threw a hundred-dollar bill. “Money plays,” announced the dealer, who replaced the bill with a single black chip. The dealer laid down the cards. Davis lost. The singer pulled out another hundred-dollar bill. Same results. He reached into his wallet a third time, and this time won. Although money was tight for him (Davis was on the edge of bankruptcy), the showman slid the chips to the dealer.
“A little something for you,” he said, as the crowd applauded.
The Sands naturally put Davis up in its finest suite, which was promptly renamed the Sammy Davis, Jr. Suite. But Davis’s tastes were unpretentious. For lunch, Peretsky offered to have the gourmet room opened especially for him, or to have room service send anything up to his suite.
“Do you guys have a Popeye’s around here?” Davis asked. Yes, Peretsky replied.
“I’ll have a three-piece box,” Davis said. Peretsky sent a limo driver to Popeye’s to retrieve the meal. Davis enjoyed his chicken sitting cross-legged on the suite’s bed, watching cartoons.
The night of the gala, though, Davis was all business. He emceed the outdoor extravaganza from the top of the Sands’ porte cochere and made, perhaps, the biggest entrance of his career, being flown into position on a helicopter in front of a mass of humanity along the blocked-off Las Vegas Strip.
Seven marching bands, one from each Las Vegas-area high school, set a parade-like atmosphere. Davis presided over the balloon release, a massive fireworks show staged by Grucci, the First Family of Fireworks. Set to a musical backdrop, a relative novelty then, the display climaxed with another helicopter swinging a blazing Sands logo in the evening sky.
From there, the party shifted inside. Davis fronted the Harry James Orchestra at the black-tie, invitation-only event.
Having weathered three decades, the Sands faced an uncertain future. Whether the reborn Sands would reclaim its place at the top of the Las Vegas pecking order, whether it would survive at all, remained to be seen.