Frank Sinatra made a lot of nightspots famous. His mere presence—along with that of his Rat Pack—sprinkled gold dust on bars and eateries from end to end of the U.S., bestowing places such as 21, Toots Shor’s, and Chasen’s with fame that lasted long after the Rat Pack had died. That fame helped many of those old haunts survive into the new millennium, but now one of the most magical Rat Pack hangouts—the Cal Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, Nevada—is on the endangered list as it closes its gaming rooms today due to low profitability. Sinatra owned the Cal-Neva between 1960 and 1963, his star power drawing Hollywood’s top celebrities, along with mob figures who he reportedly shuttled back and forth to various points around the property via old bootlegging tunnels. He made the Cal-Neva Lodge the jewel of Lake Tahoe, a piece of Tinseltown in what was little more than an alpine village.

But the Cal-Neva’s fortunes have been in decline for decades due to the proliferation of nearby Indian casinos, and the general dominance of Las Vegas. When the recent recession hit, the current owners—who had laid off about a hundred employees since 2006—finally decided they could not keep their gaming rooms in operation. Officially, at least, today’s closure is temporary, but industry insiders note that Rat Pack chic is not enough to draw modern gamblers to an older casino like the Cal-Neva Lodge. If so, it’s quite possible that not only will the gaming rooms never reopen, but that the entire Lodge has begun its final decline.

The Los Angeles Police Department has apolo- gized to the family of Robert Kennedy and pulled from display items of clothing worn by the Senator the night he was shot in L.A. in 1968. The items—a tie, shirt, and jacket stained with blood—had been part of an exhibit hosted at the Palms Casino, and created for the 2010 California Homicide Investigators Assn. Conference.

The Kennedy family claims to have requested the return of Robert Kennedy’s effects more than ten years ago, to no avail, and called the LAPD’s official apology "insufficient." Department spokesmen claim to have been trying merely to put together a professional and educational display, not a “freakshow.” The exhibit does contain crime scene evidence rarely seen in public, including hundreds of photographs dating back as far one hundred years, but it also features sensational items such as the rope used to restrain Sharon Tate the night of her murder, and various O.J. Simpson artifacts.

Asked whether they would agree to the request made by the Kennedy family and return the items—a move that would comply with California state law regarding personal effects of murder victims—a spokeswoman for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office declined to answer in the affirmative about the potentially valuable collection, instead saying only that they were “looking into it.”

Photo of the nuclear test codenamed Easy, part of the series Operation Ranger, detonated at Frenchman Flat, Nevada Test Site, February 1, 1951. This was the first nuclear blast shown on television—a news program secretly focused a camera on the desert from the top of a Las Vegas hotel and was able to broadcast a distant flash. 

I filibustieri della Martinica, aka Marie of the Isles isn’t really a pulp style movie. It’s a swashbuckler set in 1635, with pirates and swords and elaborate hats. However it has this killer poster, made for its January 1960 release, and it stars British actress Belinda Lee, she of the famously sculpted cheekbones and hawk eyebrows. Lee took European cinema by storm in the late 1950s, but like James Dean and Soledad Miranda, her career and life ended abruptly in an automobile accident. It happened in March 1961 during a trip from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, when a car in which she was a passenger blew a tire and flipped on a winding road near San Bernadino. Lee was thrown from the vehicle and was alive when the highway patrol arrived, but with a fractured skull and broken neck, she didn’t last long. She died in the arms of a California police officer who said she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She was twenty-seven. 

In the U.S. last week, Terrance Watanabe, an Omaha, Nebraska retail king who made millions of dollars selling party favors, filed a lawsuit claiming that two Las Vegas casinos allowed him to gamble away most of his fortune while too drunk to make rational decisions. The arithmetic is astoun-ding. He lost in excess of $125 million, including $5 million during one twenty-four hour stretch in 2007, and his losses represented about five percent of the 2007 profits of Caesar's Palace and The Rio. Watanabe made good on over $100 million in debts, but has balked at paying the rest. In the past he would have ended up in a desert grave with Joe Pesci shoveling sand in his face, but the post-millennial Vegas is a kinder gentler place, and the two casinos instead sicced their legal pitbulls on him, which resulted in his arrest.

Above you see a vintage Las Vegas postcard, from the town's glamour days circa 1965. Collecting these postcards has become a popular hobby for people throughout the world, and you can find hundreds on Ebay. More below.

Are The Cramps punk rock, psychobilly, acid surf, or all of the above? Music critics can decide, but we know one thing—Lux Interior, Poison Ivy and the rest of the mutant gang are pure pulp, an amalgam of sci-fi schlock, Vegas vice, and vintage Times Square sleaze. They formed in a New York City basement in 1976 and went on to conquer the planet. In between they played every venue from CGBG to the Napa State Mental Hospital, always delivering wild shows and album covers that were violent, sexy and funny.

Hitchcock really cranked out films. Vertigo was maybe his fiftieth effort. We’d have to count to more than fifteen to be sure, and we’re way too lazy to try. We just know Parisians first saw the flick today in 1958. By this time Hitch was so famous his films screened in virtually every corner of the globe, which means you can find posters of his movies in Russian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and so forth. When we stumbled across this nice French art we were reminded what a cool film Vertigo is. It has Jimmy Stewart, a great plot, period fx that still work despite their clunkiness, and a Bernard Hermann score. But really the best thing about this movie is Kim Novak.

After only a year in film, her classic beauty turned heads in the 1955 heroin addiction drama The Man with the Golden Arm, in which she played opposite Frank Sinatra. About two years later, when she was arguably the most famous and desired woman on the planet, she embarked upon an affair with brat-packer Sammy Davis Jr., which set off an avalanche of events that eventually resulted in the Mafia forcing Sammy to marry a black Vegas showgirl. Novak’s story is too complex to condense into a blurb—it involves gangland bosses, hush money for secret nudes, obsessive suitors, and all the best staples of pulpdom. Through it all she pretty much told the world to screw itself if it didn’t like her exactly the way she was. And she’s still with us at 75. We’ll write more about this amazing person later on.