That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (12 page)

Everything changed in 1931 when the Nevada divorce laws were loosened and gambling became legal in the state. Immediately after the legislature acted, a casino featuring gaming and entertainment was opened by Tony Cornero, who made little attempt to hide his Cosa Nostra connections. Another Italian American, Frank Detra, opened the Pair-O-Dice (the club was purchased from a former Los Angeles vice squad captain), and a third, Pietro Silvagni, opened the Hotel Apache to accommodate those coming from out of town to gamble. Another significant event in 1931 was the beginning of construction of the Boulder (later Hoover) Dam thirty miles to the south. This project brought thousands more people to the area during the decade. “Helldorado Day” was first held in 1935 and evolved into a four-day festival celebration targeted specifically at entertaining the tourists and attracting more of them to the city.

Las Vegas truly began to grow during the 1940s because of World War II and the mob’s increasing interest. A military base nearby enticed workers who rented and then bought inexpensive housing and began families there. In 1941, the El Rancho Vegas hotel and casino was built on Highway 91. It was a beachhead on the four-mile stretch of highway within the city that would become known as the Strip. That same year, the El Cortez Hotel opened in the downtown area.

Because of his flamboyant reputation and, decades later, the film directed by and starring Warren Beatty, Bugsy Siegel has received most of the attention for creating Las Vegas as a gambling hot spot in the 1940s. The gangster did play a pivotal role, but his Flamingo casino was only one of four resort hotels built on the Strip during the decade.

By the time he was eighteen, in 1923, Siegel had an extensive criminal record in New York as a member of the notorious crime organization Murder Incorporated. By his late twenties, even he had forgotten how many people he had murdered. When Prohibition ended, it was time to send him west, to take over the horse-racing wire and other gambling operations in Los Angeles on behalf of Meyer Lansky, one of the most powerful gang bosses in the country, who had a paternal fondness for the young sociopath.

Siegel was wildly successful. It was estimated that by the late 1930s he was overseeing a five-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-day bookmaking operation. In addition to that, Lansky, with Siegel’s assistance, grossed a billion dollars a year on heroin sales in the United States. There was so much money, it became necessary to find a new outlet to launder and stash some of it while sending the rest to overseas accounts. Siegel was dispatched to check out Las Vegas. He liked what he saw, and reported that to his boss.

With an investment of $245,000, the El Cortez, the first major downtown resort, was built in 1941. Within four years, among its owners were Siegel and Lansky, who liked to say, “The only man who wins in a casino is the man who owns the place.”

Bugsy Siegel wanted to own his own place, or at least be at the top of the ownership heap. In November 1945, at a dinner at actor George Raft’s house in Los Angeles, Siegel put together a consortium of people, including Lansky, who would put up one million dollars to build the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. With 195 shares total in the new Nevada Projects Corporation, Siegel had seventy more shares than the next-largest owner.

The goal was to open the Flamingo, on thirty acres with one thousand feet of frontage on the Strip, by or on Christmas Day 1946. Del Webb, who was also owner with Dan Topping of the New York Yankees, was to build it. Building materials were hard to come by so soon after the war, but Senator Pat McCarran took care of redirecting material coming into his home state to the Flamingo project, which sometimes meant that houses for returning war veterans had to be delayed. (The Las Vegas airport is named after McCarran.)

The project fell way behind, and costs kept escalating. One estimate was put at $6.5 million, which included money that Siegel’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill—one of ten children from a backwoods Alabama family, she had turned tricks at the Chicago World’s Fair as a teenager—was skimming off the top and depositing into a secret bank account. Still, Siegel insisted that it open on December 26, and it did. Jimmy Durante played to only about eighty guests, some of whom had to be put up at the El Rancho and Last Frontier hotels because the Flamingo wasn’t finished. The weather was uncharacteristically wet, most of the Hollywood celebs stayed away, and the incomplete hotel impressed no one. During the next two months, as work on the rooms continued, hundreds of thousands of dollars more were lost.

Siegel’s partners, despite a push for continued patience by Lansky, finally lost that patience with the delays, mismanagement, money losses, and the suspected skimming by Siegel and Hill. While sitting in the living room of Hill’s home in Los Angeles on June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot twice in the head and twice in the chest by a .30-caliber Army carbine through a window. (His left eye was shot out, and the intact eyelid was found ten feet away.) Only five people showed up at his funeral. No one was arrested for the shooting, but the killers were known to be connected to Jack Ruby, the mobster who sixteen years later would murder John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Under new management, the Flamingo became successful and showcased the next generation of hotel-casinos establishing themselves on the Strip.

Las Vegas has the distinction of being the largest city in the United States incorporated in the twentieth century. This is pretty remarkable when one considers that much of its growth came after the century was almost half over. In 1950, the city’s population was 24,624, three times what it was when the 1940s began.

Still, it was in the 1950s that Las Vegas truly took off as a vacation destination. Resort hotels couldn’t be built fast enough along the Strip, with each one more spectacular—and, it seemed, with more neon signage—than the last one. By the end of the decade, the city’s population had jumped to 64,405.

“The spectacular development of the Las Vegas Strip was the paramount story of the 1950s,” wrote Eugene P. Moehring in
Resort City in the Sunbelt.
“As early as 1948, it was obvious that the highway south of Las Vegas would need more than four resorts to handle the growing waves of Californians driving to and from the city. Only the undeveloped tracts south of town possessed the space for parking lots, tennis courts, swimming pools, riding stables, and the other amenities which resort guests had increasingly come to expect. The crowded downtown lots bordering Fremont Street simply lacked the room to compete with their suburban counterparts south of town. The 1950s witnessed a hotel-building fever which eventually made Las Vegas famous.”

Ironically, a big boost to Las Vegas had been the hearings held around the country by the Senate Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, chaired by Estes Kefauver. In 1950 and ‘51, it traveled fifty-two thousand miles to fourteen cities taking testimony from over six hundred people. One outcome was the closing of casinos across the country that housed illegal gambling. Las Vegas, with its legal gaming, became even more of an oasis in the law-enforcement desert.

As if gambling weren’t enough of a lure, the casino managers (who fronted for their mobster owners) booked entertainers into their main rooms. Such performers as Sophie Tucker (El Rancho Vegas), Rudy Vallee, Mickey Rooney (New Frontier), Jimmy Durante (Desert Inn), Eddie Cantor, and Maurice Chevalier (Dunes), whose Hollywood heydays were long over, found new life for their careers thanks to their name recognition and acts that featured beautiful showgirls. A steady stream of cars wheezed their way through the Mojave Desert from Los Angeles to Vegas, carrying current Hollywood stars as well as blue-collar couples spending their weekends and some of the extra cash they earned in the economic boom of the 1950s.

According to Tony Bennett, who made his Las Vegas debut at the El Rancho in April 1952, “Those were sensational days. Entertainers like myself, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Harpo Marx, and Louis Prima really made that town happen.”

And, if the entertainment and gambling weren’t appealing enough, there were the nuclear special effects. The U.S. government created the Nevada Test Site seventy miles northwest of Las Vegas in 1951, and city officials were happy to promote the clearly visible mushroom clouds as tourist attractions. Stylists at some of the hotels created hairdos that resembled mushroom clouds, restaurant menus featured “atomic burgers,” and bartenders mixed champagne, vodka, and brandy to make “atomic cocktails.” In less than four years, three dozen nuclear bombs were exploded at the site, and over a hundred by the end of the decade. There were reports that horses stopped eating and pets refused to be touched in the days following atomic tests, but there seemed to be little attention paid to the effect on the humans in the city or even the ones who had been allowed to drive out to the test sites to observe.

Las Vegas officials thought there was further promotional value in the B-grade movies that were made using the atomic explosions as a backdrop or plot device.
The Atomic Kid
was a comedy starring Mickey Rooney about a young man who gains unusual powers (such as glowing in the dark) after being exposed to one of the desert blasts. The script was written by Blake Edwards, who would go on to make such much-improved pictures as the Pink Panther series and
Days of Wine and Roses.
In 1957, three years after
The Atomic Kid
made only a small dent in the box office,
The Amazing Colossal Man,
which tells the tall tale of “a savage giant running amok in Las Vegas,” was released. He does indeed wreak havoc along the Strip before Army firepower sends him plunging to the bottom of the Boulder Dam.

At the beginning of the decade, Moe Dalitz funneled mob money into the construction of the Desert Inn. “Vegas Vic,” a huge neon cowboy, was fastened to the Pioneer Club in 1951 to welcome visitors. The two-story, 276-room Sahara Hotel, featuring Ray Bolger as the opening act, made its debut in December 1952. “The hotel was an immediate success; in fact, business was brisk enough that first year to justify construction of 200 more rooms in 1953,” wrote Moehring. “Throughout the 1950s the resort was a hangout for stars and gamblers alike. John Wayne and Fred MacMurray frequently came and, even until his death, Elvis Presley (while he never headlined the Congo Room) often played the slots late into the night.”

Also in December 1952, the Sands opened. The owner of the Desert Inn, Wilbur Clark, hosted the first nationally televised Tournament of Champions, allowing people around the nation to see Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and other celebrities jousting on the golf course, further enhancing Las Vegas’s reputation as a playground.

There were still some Old West touches that clashed with the city’s growth and path to urbanization. “Humane Society dog catchers were ordered today to make a wholesale roundup of scores of ‘wild dogs’ reportedly roaming Las Vegas subdivisions and raising havoc with new laws, milkmen and postal employees,” began the lead story in the December 16, 1954, edition of the
Las Vegas Review-Journal.

And the reading public enjoyed the occasional tawdry scandal. Sharing the same page in the
Review-Journal
was this lede: “Pat Bryant, 41, a pretty strip hotel waitress, whose looks belie her age, came into justice court for a preliminary hearing on charges of involuntary manslaughter growing out of the fatal shooting here last August of George Updaw, local casino dealer. The woman is charged with firing a bullet through a door and into the chest of Updaw. She said she had been locked out of Updaw’s former wife’s home, 2200 Santa Rita Dr., without her clothes.”

The combination of anticipation of huge profits from gambling and an expanding drug empire—much of it under Lansky’s supervision—led to an explosion of casino construction in Las Vegas on and near the Strip. Kefauver had definitely been onto something, but he just couldn’t do anything about it, and even some of his colleagues in Congress were enjoying sojourns in the desert. With more mob money, the Showboat was built in 1954, featuring a five-hundred-seat Bingo room and a twenty-four-lane bowling alley. At year’s end, tabulations showed that the city had attracted eight million visitors.

In April 1955, it was the Royal Nevada’s turn to open its doors. That same month, the Riviera made its debut. With 320 rooms in nine stories, it was the first high-rise on the Strip—and thus featured the first elevators in a Strip hotel—and it also boasted a television set in every guestroom. The opening act was Liberace, and jaws dropped among the other hotel owners when it was revealed that he was being paid fifty thousand dollars a week. Also that year, the New Frontier was christened.

In May, the Dunes Hotel added to the glut of casinos that opened in 1955. It struggled financially until a new owner offered “Minsky’s Follies,” the first topless revue in Las Vegas. (In December 1957, the Dunes offered “Holiday for ‘G’ Strings,” produced by Minsky.) When the Moulin Rouge opened that same May (a co-owner and host was the former heavyweight champion Joe Louis), Las Vegas had its first interracial hotel and casino, though it was on Bonanza Road, not the Strip. That edition of the Moulin Rouge lasted six months, crippled by financial troubles.

The competition for tourist dollars became as hot as the desert air in the second half of the decade. The Hacienda Hotel arrived on the Strip in June 1956. Ten months later came the opening of the Tropicana, and in October 1957 the Sans Souci opened across the street from the Sands. When the Stardust made its debut in July 1958, an attraction was a 27-feet-high, 217-feet-across sign that was the largest neon sign in the world and could be seen from three miles away. Also in 1958, construction began on the Las Vegas Convention Center, with its ninety-thousand-square-foot exhibit hall and main auditorium shaped like a flying saucer.

As Louis Prima and Keely Smith and Sam Butera and the Witnesses settled in at the Sahara in 1955 for what became a long run, a city of lights and stars grew around them. Louis’s luck and timing allowed them to be right at the center of an entertainment scene that would change and to some extent dominate American culture for almost a decade.