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SOPHIA LOREN DREW THE champagne bottle back, paused, then smashed it against the gondola’s bow. A hundred doves, released from their cages, soared skyward. The Venetian was officially open.
It was May 3, 1999, nearly three years since the Sands had closed. With construction on the megaresort still ongoing, Sheldon Adelson held a “soft opening,” meaning blue tape and hardhats were in evidence as the black-tie VIPs toasted the new resort. Over the previous weeks, 3,500 construction workers clocked ample overtime to get the canals, bridges, and hotel rooms of the Venetian in working order.
A scramble for occupancy permits meant that many of the 500 journalists invited to cover the opening had not been able to stay in their rooms the night before, but now the doors were open, just in time to host the hotel’s first convention: 6,000 Blockbuster Video managers and franchisees.
Media accounts mentioned the most outstanding elements of the $1.5 billion resort. A few mentioned parenthetically that the new hotel was replacing the Sands, best remembered as the Rat Pack’s haunt, with few other details of its 44-year history.
That history deserves more than a half-sentence.
Billy Wilkerson’s connection to the Sands, which is almost completely forgotten, illustrates just how wide-open Las Vegas was in 1950. A restaurant and nightclub with a few gambling tables and no hotel attached? Why not? The evolution of LaRue into the Sands, with Jake Freedman emerging as the public owner, says a lot about how Doc Stacher and other invisible investors were approaching Las Vegas and how the Las Vegas power structure kept them at arm’s length: Mack Kufferman, as anonymous as he tried to be, was just too close to Stacher. So Jake Freedman, a tried-and-true Texan by way of Odessa, was tabbed to be the casino’s face. Stacher, of course, was actually calling most of the shots, along with a number of other hidden owners, each with a piece of the action.
The Sands, when it opened on December 15, 1952, combined Western hospitality (and a generous allotment of cushy jobs for influential locals and their relatives), underworld gambling savvy, and show business excitement. Thanks to the relentless press relating of Al Freeman, they jibed in the public mind. Only at the Sands could you lounge by the pool during the day, enjoy some of the country’s finest entertainment at night, and gamble to your heart’s content. Other Las Vegas resorts, particularly the Desert Inn, came close, but none of them did it quite as well as the Sands.
Most people think of the “Rat Pack era” when they think of the Sands, but the group of Sinatra, Martin, and Davis didn’t truly come together until 1960 and Sinatra hated the term “Rat Pack,” which didn’t become widely used until the 1980s. True, the 14 years Sinatra spent at the resort were the Sands’ real time in the spotlight. But the Sands didn’t shut its doors when Sinatra stomped out. The resort’s evolution under the Hughes regime into a mid-size, mid-market casino hotel demonstrates just how typical and unglamorous casinos would become. Gambling was no longer something lurid or shameful, and the people who offered it to you were just as upstanding as you.
When Sheldon Adelson bought the Sands in 1989, it was, by consensus, small, tired, and mostly of sentimental value. The opening of The Mirage that year ultimately shook away the last vestiges of the Las Vegas that the Sands had been built for. When your neighbor has a shiny new volcano, nostalgia just isn’t enough. The New Vegas that emerged in the 1990s was no place for a mid-sized, mid-market casino hotel. Adelson might have taken the same approach that Harrah’s did with the Holiday casino, or the Riviera and Circus Circus did, adding a tower here, an amenity there. Had he done that, though, the Sands would still be alive in name only. Already when he bought it, there was little of the original Sands left.
It was probably more respectful to the memory of the Sands to implode it. Las Vegas has never been a place for stasis. When the Sands stopped evolving, it died. Tearing it down just made it official.
So the Sands now remains alive in a way that, say, the Flamingo, doesn’t. Say the word “Copa,” and you are instantly transported back to a smoky night in the early 1960s, a drink in front of you, with Frank, maybe Sammy, maybe Dean, about to take the stage. No other classic Las Vegas hotel provokes such memories so easily—perhaps a testament to Al Freeman’s publicity skills, perhaps a reminder that we will always look for a place in the sun.
Long after the tower had fallen, the dust had settled, and a new resort had risen to take its place, the Sands was fondly remembered as a place in the sun. Courtesy UNLV SCA.