That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (10 page)

One indication of his changing fortunes was that in December 1950 when
Mr. Music,
the latest Bing Crosby vehicle—it also featured Nancy Olson, Charles Coburn, Peggy Lee, and Groucho Marx—opened at the Paramount Theater in New York, headlining the stage show was Louis Prima and his orchestra. Two years later, when the Bob Hope, Jane Russell, and Roy Rogers oater
Son of Paleface
opened at the Paramount, Prima and his band were listed as the last of three acts, behind the Five DeMarco Sisters and Los Gatos.

In between, in September 1951, “Louis Prima and his Orchestra featuring Keely Smith,” as the act was billed, was booked into the Paramount, but not as the headliner. That honor went to a twenty-five-year-old who had scored two hit records that summer, “Because of You” and “Cold, Cold Heart.”

“The greatest thing about that gig was getting the chance to work with Louis Prima, another of my show business heroes,” Tony Bennett remembered in
The Good Life.
“He was terrific. Prima was a genius of a showman, a wild man on stage that you just couldn’t take your eyes off … by the time I got on stage the crowd was wide awake and on the edge of their seats. They’re all thinking, ‘What’s going to happen now? How can anybody follow what we just saw?’ ”

Prima did some whistling past the graveyard, telling reporters that he was contemplating retirement and would devote himself to his horses and playing golf. (Several years earlier he had announced that he was retiring to become a treasure hunter in the Florida Keys, but that had been strictly a publicity stunt.) He would wait out this drought, and when the big band sound made a comeback, he would be ready.

But Prima could be stubborn for only so long, especially with alimony and child support to pay. He had to lose the orchestra and go back to basics. It was like starting out all over again.

“[Prima] was near to hitting professional bottom,” wrote James Ritz, a jazz historian, about the singer’s situation. “He was a 43-year-old has-been with few prospects on the books.”

“If the big band thing wasn’t going to work, go back to the formula that worked for him earlier in New York,” said Joe Segreto in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.

“He really didn’t want to let the big band go,” said Keely. “It’s when the big bands couldn’t be supported any longer, he had no choice. For a long time, we worked just him and I, and we would work with little groups and really dump clubs in upstate New York, every anywhere that we could find work.”

Keely told Garry Boulard in 1986, “We started to work the dumps, really. Things got bad rather quickly. We worked at all sorts of Godawful places. And we’d go in and work with whatever house band was available—two pieces, three pieces, six pieces, whatever. Just the two of us.”

Recalling those difficult years in a 1958 interview with the
Los Angeles Times,
Keely said, “In those days Louis had plenty of
delusioni.
Know what it means? Means aggravations in Italian. So we decided to get married—and Louis lost his
delusioni.”

In a scenario reminiscent of the hit 1937 movie
A Star Is Born,
with Fredric March as the fading leading man and young Janet Gaynor as the newcomer about to break through, Keely didn’t let Louis’s declining fame and earning power prevent her from being in love with him and staying committed to him and his music. She still had a whole career ahead of her, while he had already burned through two or three.

Where was Tracelene in all this? For a short time she had continued to travel with Louis and the band, often with Keely in the car with them. The birth of her daughter put her on the sidelines and spared her the humiliation of watching her husband grow fonder of her replacement as he spent less time at home and more time on the road, which was a financial necessity.

The attraction between Louis and Keely was clear to all, and no doubt Tracelene received reports of this. She accepted pretty gracefully that she had become history. She divorced Louis on June 18, 1953, with her residence by that time being Volusia County, Florida. She was awarded seventy-five dollars a week in child support. The paltry amount that he could afford may well have embarrassed Prima more than being a three-time loser in marriage. It also indicated how low his income had fallen since his previous divorce.

He and Keely were married where they had officially first met, in Virginia Beach, on July 13, 1953. Audiences and any press that bothered to report the news were led to believe that she was now twenty-one when in fact she was twenty-five, and Louis was forty-two. The greater age disparity was better for the act of aging lothario trying to appeal to the virginal ingénue.

And Louis designed their act to appeal to a younger audience. He was beginning to hear and read in the trade papers about the music that would be called rock ‘n’ roll. He already knew plenty about swing, jazz, and the Dixieland of his native New Orleans. He incorporated all of these when he wrote and arranged songs. In addition, as he and Keely got closer and she acquired more stage experience, the rapport between them was obvious—his clowning and her sort of resisting him until he won her over was a novelty.

People loved them together—but still not enough people. For another year they continued to play to small audiences in dismal, cheap clubs. This allowed them to further develop the dynamic of their act, but playing backwater towns did not get them into the spotlight that Prima, especially, craved. He began to pay attention to items in newspapers about Las Vegas.

“He was one of the first people to realize the potential of Las Vegas,” says Bruce Raeburn.

“Louis finally put a call in to the Sahara Hotel to a very good friend of his named Bill Miller,” Keely recalled. “This was the same Bill Miller from the Riviera in New Jersey that was a big nightclub back there. Louis told him the truth. He said, ‘Bill, we’re on our rear, and we need a job.’ Bill didn’t know who I was, naturally. He said, ‘Bill, I think I’m going to go home and put together a small group like I used to have in New York. What do you think about that?’ And Bill told him, ‘Hey Louis, I don’t have anything.’ And Louis called him a few times, and finally he gave us two weeks in November.” Opening night was to be the twenty-fourth—six days later.

They were living in a small apartment in New York City. There was no time to go to New Orleans. Louis and Keely and five musicians jumped into cars and headed west. This last gasp to keep his career afloat had to work—Louis was about to become a father again.

“Being pregnant, I got sick all along the way—it felt like in every state—and with each stop our caravan came to a halt,” Keely remembered in the foreword to
Fabulous Las Vegas in the ‘50s,
published in 1999.

But the caravan pushed on, needing to reach the Sahara.

Bill Miller was the entertainment director of the Sahara Hotel in the fall of 1954. It had opened on October 7, 1952, and was dubbed the Jewel of the Desert by Milton Prell, the principal owner. (The term
owner
was used loosely in Las Vegas because most of the money and power behind the large hotels came from the mob.) It had a whopping 276 rooms and was the sixth major hotel to be built on the Strip. Its Middle East theme was easily apparent thanks to the two huge statues of camels that bookended the entrance.

When Miller told Prima that he “didn’t have anything,” he meant there were no open dates in the hotel’s main showroom, where well-known stars performed regularly. With some reluctance, because he thought he was insulting Prima, Miller offered the two weeks in the Casbar Lounge, essentially a side room that fit only 150 people. It contained a bar, and it was where people went for a drink and a smoke between bouts of gambling. There was no cover or minimum. Entertainment—actually,
good
entertainment—could be a disadvantage, because if people lingered in the lounge, they were spending less time losing money at the gaming tables.

The last time Prima had performed in Las Vegas was pre-Keely, and he had been the headliner at the El Rancho. Now he was given the favor of trying to entertain drunks and people who were focused on that next rush of adrenaline from the clanging slot machines and clicking roulette wheels.

“We had no lights to speak of, just a little thing you stepped under, a tiny spotlight,” Keely wrote about the couple’s first look at the lounge. “The sound was one microphone and whatever speakers they had in the room. No monitors either. There was really no sound of any kind.”

It has often been reported—incorrectly—that the Prima-Smith act began the tradition of having live music in a Las Vegas hotel lounge. They made it nationally popular, but the Strip already had very good acts established in lounge settings—such as Freddie Bell and his Bellboys, and especially the Mary Kaye Trio.

That group had first formed in St. Louis as the Mary Kaaihue Trio, reflecting her Hawaiian heritage. With her brother Norman and comedian Frank Ross, the renamed trio made its debut in Las Vegas in the Horn Room of the Last Frontier Hotel in 1947. Their spontaneous, freewheeling style attracted bigger crowds, and by the time Louis and Keely arrived, the Mary Kaye Trio had played to appreciative audiences at several lounges along the Strip, including in the Sahara.

In the Casbar Lounge, people sat at tables drinking and smoking and re-energizing for their next round of gambling. Until acts like the Mary Kaye Trio and Louis Prima and Keely Smith came along, the stigma was that you played the lounge because you weren’t enough of a headliner to attract an audience to fill the main showroom. As Miller had intimated, for many other performers the lounge was a venue for those on the way down, not the way up.

A lot of entertainers would have balked at making the trip to Las Vegas from New York for a two-week gig in a lounge—to practically end up playing for free—but Prima knew that he had no choice but to roll the dice and hope for some good reviews that could lead to better offers. He and Keely were living hand-to-mouth by this point (even the horses had been sold off), so any payday was welcome. And yet, even with the stakes so high, Louis almost blew the opportunity.

When he and Keely arrived in Las Vegas, they went to the Sahara Hotel to scope out the lounge. Keeping the Casbar warm that night was Cab Calloway. His fortunes had picked up a bit because of playing the role of Sportin’ Life in the 1950 Broadway revival of
Porgy and Bess,
which was appropriate because, according to Calloway, “George Gershwin used to spend a lot of time in the Cotton Club during the thirties and the characterization of Sportin’ Life was drawn directly from my performances. In fact, in 1935, when
Porgy
was first produced, I was asked to play the part of Sportin’ Life but I turned it down because I was too busy with the band and the club.” However, as a live musical act in Las Vegas, he was just another struggling ex–big-band leader hoping to hang on.

Louis knew Cab from Apollo Theatre and Cotton Club days, and when his Sahara show was over, Calloway came to sit with Louis and Keely and have a drink. Prima was astonished to be informed that blacks were not allowed to sit at the tables in the Casbar Lounge.

According to Keely’s recollection, her husband “went into a rage and wanted to quit right then. We were both deeply offended, but thank goodness Bill Miller was unavailable somewhere in Mexico, and we were forced to open.”

However, before that could happen, they had to rehearse and figure out what would work in the close confines of the lounge. And let people know that they were in town. Though he had been down on his luck, Louis figured his name still meant something. He took out quarter-page display ads in the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
and the
Las Vegas Sun
announcing “Louis Prima and His All-Star Quintet” at the Hotel Sahara. This was at a time when it was unusual for a lounge act to advertise.

The musicians Louis and Keely brought with them had shared some of their travels and travails. The act opened and they were good—not great, but good enough that Miller, still seeing how desperate Louis was, offered him the opportunity to continue in the lounge the week after Christmas. It wasn’t the most promising gig, but Louis took it.

“We opened in Las Vegas on November 24, 1954,” recalled Keely. “We went there with a two-week contract, and we stayed six years.”

But that was after something important that had been missing in the act those first two weeks was injected. After six years of performing together, Louis and Keely had formed a strong stage, as well as personal, collaboration. But they weren’t getting all they needed from the band.

According to Joe Segreto, “Louis went to his brother in New Orleans. Leon had a fabulous young saxophone player playing at his place who had gained some renown down there known as Sam Butera.”

Butera had been born on August 17, 1927. His father owned the Poor Boy’s Grocery & Meat Market in a black section of the city, and in his spare time Joe Butera Sr. played the concertina and guitar. Sam saw a saxophone played for the first time at a wedding when he was seven, and he was immediately smitten. Though he learned the clarinet too, he was devoted to being a sax player. It could be said that at the age of fourteen he became a professional because he began serving as a sort of human jukebox for stripper clubs on Bourbon Street. “I worked every joint on that street,” Butera told an interviewer. “You name it and I worked it. All those girls wanted to do was mother me.” He rebounded—or progressed from—that experience at eighteen to win a contest at Carnegie Hall and was profiled in a
Look
magazine feature on the top young jazz players in the United States.

Sam couldn’t finish high school soon enough, and when he did he was hired to play in a band headed by Ray McKinley. By this time his major influences were Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Gene Ammons, and Lee Allen, who occasionally invited the young saxman to play with a band headed by Paul Gayten, one of his father’s meat-market customers. Sam had made his recording debut on McKinley’s versions of “Celery Stalks at Midnight” and a recent national hit, “Civilization,” which would continue to get mileage years after Prima’s version.