Las Vegas, January 1960. The pool behind the Sands Hotel sat empty for 3 days in the middle of a desert winter. The water had been drained on a Tuesday morning on the order of a man who had not asked for permission and had not explained himself to anyone. The maintenance crew who carried out the order told people afterward that they had assumed it was a routine cleaning.
It was not a routine cleaning. And everyone at the Sands Hotel who understood what had happened, and there were perhaps a dozen people who understood exactly what had happened, did not speak publicly about it for years. What Frank Sinatra did to that pool in January of 1960 was not reported in the newspapers.
It was not mentioned in the press releases that the Sands issued that week about the filming of Ocean’s 11. It was not the kind of thing that appeared in the gossip columns because the gossip columns in 1960 did not report on the mechanisms by which black men were excluded from swimming pools in Las Vegas hotels.
And they did not report on what happened when a man with enough leverage decided to make that exclusion cost something. It cost the Sands 3 days of pool revenue in one of their busiest booking periods. It cost the casino manager a conversation he had not wanted to have. And it cost Frank Sinatra nothing, which was precisely the point.
But to understand what the empty pool meant, you have to understand what Las Vegas meant to Sammy Davis Jr. in January of 1960. And to understand that, you have to go back further than the pool. You have to go back to what it looked like to be the most talented performer on the Las Vegas strip and still not be allowed through the front door.
The Sands Hotel and Casino opened in 1952 on the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and what would become the center of the American entertainment universe for the next two decades. By 1960, it was the address, the hotel where Sinatra performed, where the Rat Pack convened, where the highest earning nights in the history of live entertainment were happening in a room called the Copper Room that held 700 people and turned them away by the hundreds every weekend.
The Sands was glamour and money and power arranged into a single building in the Nevada desert and Frank Sinatra was its most important resident. Sammy Davis Jr. had been performing in Las Vegas since 1945. He had been performing since he was 3 years old, had been on stage for his entire conscious life and by 1960 was widely considered by critics, by peers, by the musicians who had worked with every significant performer of the era to be among the most complete entertainers alive.
He could sing, he could dance in ways that made other dancers stop and watch, he played multiple instruments, he did impressions, he acted, he had a quality on stage that the people who tried to describe it eventually gave up describing and simply said you had to be there. He was not allowed to stay at the hotels where he performed.
This is the sentence that requires a moment. Sammy Davis Jr. performed at the Sands Hotel. He performed in the Copa Room to sold-out crowds who had paid significant money for the experience of watching him perform. He was paid for that performance and when the performance ended, he was required to leave the hotel.
He could not eat in the restaurant, he could not drink at the casino bar, he could not sleep in one of the rooms, he could not use the pool. The Sands was not unique in this. The Flamingo, the Desert Inn, the Riviera, the entire Las Vegas Strip in 1960 operated on a version of the same policy.
Black performers could generate revenue for white-owned establishments. They could not be guests in those establishments. They crossed the stage and then they crossed back to the West Side, which was the part of Las Vegas where black residents and performers lived in hotels and rooming houses that were not on the strip and were not in the brochures.
Everyone knew this. The performers knew it. The hotel owners knew it. The white performers who shared bills with Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole and Lena Horne knew it. Most of them did not do anything about it. It was the arrangement and the arrangement had been in place long enough that most people had stopped examining whether it was an arrangement that should continue.
Here is what you need to know about Frank Sinatra’s relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. in January of 1960. They had been performing together in various configurations for more than a decade. Sinatra had watched Sammy work. He had watched him work in rooms that did not deserve him, in front of audiences that did not fully understand what they were seeing, and he had formed an opinion about the gap between what Sammy Davis Jr.
was owed and what he was being given. That opinion was not sentimental. It was specific. And it had accumulated over years. And by January of 1960, it had weight. The filming of Ocean’s 11 began in earnest the second week of January. The production had been designed around the Rat Pack’s performance schedule at the Sands. They filmed during the day and performed at night, a schedule that should have been impossible and worked partly because of adrenaline and partly because of Sinatra’s absolute refusal to acknowledge that anything was impossible. The Copa Room shows during those weeks became events inside events. Audiences knew they were watching the filming of a movie and a live performance simultaneously. And the energy in that room during January and February of 1960 was unlike anything that had existed in that space before or would exist again. Sammy Davis Jr. was central to both. He was in the film. He was in the shows. He
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was by every account from people who were present operating at the peak of his abilities, which meant he was operating at a level that most performers never reach at any point in their careers. And every night, when the show ended, he left. The morning the pool was drained, a Tuesday, Sammy Davis Jr.
had gone to the pool deck at approximately 9:00 in the morning. This detail comes from a conversation he had with his road manager, Arthur Silber Jr., which Silber described in an interview conducted for a documentary in the 1980s. Sammy had been awake since before 6:00. He had not slept well. He wanted to swim.
It was January, but the desert air was clear, and the pool was heated, and it was 9:00 in the morning, and there was nobody else there, and he wanted to swim. A hotel employee told him he could not use the pool. The employee did not explain. He did not need to. Sammy Davis Jr. understood. He had understood since 1945. He turned around and went back to his room, which was not in the Sands, but in a hotel on the West Side, where he had been staying for the duration of the shoot, and he called Frank Sinatra.
The content of that call has never been reported in detail. What is known is that it lasted less than 5 minutes, and that Sinatra’s response was not a long speech. He thanked Sammy, said he would handle it, and ended the call. The casino manager at the Sands in January of 1960 was a man named Carl Cohen.
Cohen was a large, careful, practical man who had been in the casino business long enough to understand that the most important thing in a casino was the prevention of disruption. Problems were solved quietly. Decisions were made in offices, not on pool decks. He was not a man who invited confrontation. Frank Sinatra went to Carl Cohen’s office at approximately 10:00 that Tuesday morning, and told him, in terms that Cohen apparently found difficult to misinterpret, that if Sammy Davis Jr.
could not use the pool, then the pool would not be used by anyone. He did not raise his voice, according to the two people who were present. He stated what he intended to do, and he waited for a response. Cohen told him that the policy was not his decision. Sinatra told him that the pool was going to be drained regardless of whose decision the policy was.
The maintenance crew began draining the pool at 11:15. It took most of the day. By early evening, the pool behind the Sands Hotel was empty, a large rectangular absence in the middle of the hotel grounds. The tile at the bottom visible and pale and dry at the edges. Hotel guests who asked about it were told it was scheduled maintenance.
The maintenance crew said nothing. Carl Cohen said nothing. Frank Sinatra said nothing publicly at any point, but the pool stayed empty for 3 days. And on the fourth day, after conversations that took place in offices that have no documented record, after phone calls between Carl Cohen and the Sands ownership that were not logged and were not intended to be logged, after a series of decisions made by people who understood that the man responsible for the largest portion of their revenue had made his position clear, the pool was refilled, and Sammy Davis Jr. used it. You did not give a press conference about this. He did not speak about it publicly for nearly two decades. When he finally described it in a 1979 interview that was published in a small entertainment trade publication and largely ignored at the time, he said, “Frank didn’t make a speech about it. He didn’t ask them to make a speech about it. He just made it cost something.
That’s the only language that Place understood. He made it cost something.” The pool was one moment in a longer sequence of pressure that Sinatra applied, not in press statements, not in public campaigns, but in the specific quiet economically consequential language of a man who knew exactly how much leverage he had and was willing to use it.
The Sands began over the course of 1960 to change its policies. Black performers were allowed to eat in the restaurant. They were allowed to stay in the hotel. The mechanisms of exclusion that had operated as background infrastructure for 15 years were dismantled one by one, not by legislation, not by protest, but by a man who had decided that the arrangement was unacceptable and had enough power to make that decision matter.
None of this was announced. The Sands did not issue a press release in 1960 declaring that it was desegregating. The change happened the way most real changes happen, incrementally, without fanfare, in the space between what was explicitly said and what was simply allowed to become different. By 1961, the Sands was operating on terms that would have been unrecognizable 2 years earlier.
By 1963, several other major strip properties had followed. He and Sinatra had a complicated subsequent history. There was an incident in 1967 that resulted in Cohen punching Sinatra in the face and knocking out two of his front teeth, a story that deserves its own accounting. But in January of 1960, on a Tuesday morning, Cohen made a phone call that allowed a pool to be refilled, and that decision, quiet as it was, is part of the sequence of events that changed the infrastructure of an entire city. Died in 1990 at the age of 64. In the last years of his life, he spoke more often about the early Las Vegas years, about what it had cost to perform in rooms that did not consider him fully human, and about what it had meant to have someone in his corner who understood that cost without needing to be told. He did not use the word gratitude. Specifically, he used the word witness. He said Frank saw it, not the
performance, the rest of it. He saw the rest of it, and he didn’t look away. Frank Sinatra was a man of significant contradictions about this. History has never needed much convincing. His personal conduct was frequently difficult. His professional relationships were complicated. His power was often wielded in ways that served his interests as much as anyone else’s.
He was not a simple man, and the story of the pool is not a story about a simple act of heroism. It is a story about a man who understood in January of 1960 that the only currency the Sands Hotel truly respected was cost, and he made the discrimination cost something. Not with a speech, not with a walkout, with 3 days of empty tile at the bottom of a heated pool in the Nevada desert, and a maintenance crew that followed his orders without asking why. Feisty.
The city changed around that pool over the following years, slowly and imperfectly, and not nearly far enough, but the pool was part of it. The empty pool on a Tuesday in January was part of the mechanism that made what came after possible, and Frank Sinatra went back to his suite and did not speak publicly about it because in his understanding, speaking publicly about it would have made it about him, and it was not about him. It never was. Feisty.
There is one more thing. Carl Cohen never publicly confirmed the details of the conversation that took place in his office on that Tuesday morning. He died in 1967, but a member of the Sands cleaning staff, a woman named Dorothy Reyes, who worked the hotel for 22 years, gave a single interview to a Las Vegas community newspaper in 1988.
She was asked about the pool. She said, “I watched them drain it. I watched it go empty, and I thought somebody finally made it cost something. That’s all. Somebody made it cost.” Frank Sinatra never recorded a song called The Pool. He never made a speech about Las Vegas in January of 1960.
What he left behind was a city that looked different in 1963 than it had in 1959 and a maintenance crew that had once been asked to drain a swimming pool and had done so without being told why and the quiet durable knowledge passed between the people who were there person to person decade to decade that it had mattered.
Carl Cohen and Frank Sinatra had one more significant encounter after January 1960. It happened in 1967 in the Sands Casino and it ended with Sinatra losing two teeth. What Carl Cohen said in the 48 hours before that encounter and why according to three witnesses Sinatra did not press charges, that story we haven’t told yet. Subscribe if you want it when it comes.
