That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (16 page)

Four of the main members of the Rat Pack on stage at the Sands Hotel: Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop.

UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Dean Martin entertains a packed house full of celebrities, including Jack Benny (standing) and Debbie Reynolds and Shirley MacLaine (seated right). UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

This pleasing portrait of Louis and Keely was taken in 1961. Ironically, it was the image sent to many news outlets to accompany articles about their divorce later that year.
BETTMANN/CORBIS

Louis and the singer who would become his fifth wife, Gia Maione, and the band performed on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday evening show in 1962.
BETTMANN/CORBIS

Twist All Night,
released in 1961, had Louis gyrating with much younger women in an effort to capture a new audience after his split from Keely.

Keely’s comeback record was her tribute to Frank Sinatra, whom she has called one of the loves of her life. The album earned her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Female Vocal at age seventy-one.

Keely is congratulated by singers Karen Akers (left) and Phoebe Snow after the opening night of a four-week engagement at the Carlyle Hotel in New York in April 2007.
PHOTO BY MARK RUPP

Up and down the Strip the neon glowed, illuminating the signs that shouted the names of the casinos featuring headliners who found awestruck audiences in the desert. Some performers, like Louis and Keely, were reaching for or were at their peak—Liberace at the Riviera Hotel, Carmen Miranda at the New Frontier (one of her skirts contained eighty-five thousand sequins), Frankie Laine at the Desert Inn, Martin and Lewis at the Sands—while others, such as the Ritz Brothers at the Flamingo Hotel, Jerry Lester at the Dunes, and Louis Jordan at the Sands, had found a second career in Las Vegas (with Prima falling into that category too).

But of all the acts drawing crowds in the mid-1950s, there was no one more important in Las Vegas than Frank Sinatra. It could be argued that Meyer Lansky or Sam Giancana or any one of the other top mobsters were more important because they controlled most of the money. But people didn’t travel hundreds or thousands of miles to see mob kingpins lounging by the pool, puffing on fat cigars. They came to see Sinatra, either onstage or at the tables in the casino. And he was to have a powerful impact on the careers of Louis Prima and Keely Smith.

“Sinatra was a pop music legend, not a civic leader or entrepreneur, [but he] was a one-man chamber of commerce who gave Las Vegas something equally important: an image,” wrote Mike Weatherford in the
Las Vegas
Review-Journal.
“And he did so in the mid-1950s, before demographics and visitor volume were buzzwords. It was a simpler day in a smaller town, and Sinatra’s magic was more easily described: gambling, womanizing, drinking till dawn—and all of it with style.”

Sinatra became close to Keely, and she idolized him. Years later there would be more than friendship—the two talked of marriage—but during the 1950s there were only rumors, which Keely contended were untrue. Sinatra was tight with Louis too. He could relate to his fellow Italian American entertainer who had tasted the heights of fame, fallen far, and had come back.

When Las Vegas was first starting to take off in the early 1950s, Sinatra was at the lowest point in his life. Such recent films as
Meet Danny Wilson
and
Miracle of the Bells
had bombed. His records had stopped selling, and he was reduced to recording novelty songs for Mitch Miller at the Columbia label—including one in which he did a duet with a barking dog—that were as popular as a week-old cannoli. (Before heading to Vegas, Prima had also recorded for Miller, then stormed out of the studio, vowing never to work with him again.) Sinatra was already a has-been at concert halls; the Chez Paree in Chicago fit 1,200 people, but when Sinatra sang there only 150 showed up. He was working on a broken heart because Ava Gardner kept threatening to leave him. (She eventually did, after seeing a newspaper photograph of him with two showgirls at a party in Las Vegas.)

But Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures was persuaded to OK casting Sinatra instead of Eli Wallach in
From Here to Eternity.
Gardner had used her influence, and Frank had begged Jack Entratter, the front man for mobsters Frank Costello and Joey Adonis at the Sands (the latter was Cohn’s fishing buddy), to pitch him for the picture. When the movie was a huge hit and Frank’s portrayal of Maggio won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, his star rose once again. Fast.

He signed a deal with Capitol Records in 1953 that would last until 1961, and many consider this period his finest as a recording star, working with Nelson Riddle as his arranger. His first album for the label,
Songs for Young Lovers,
released in ‘54, was a hit along with the first single released from it, “Young at Heart,” which was also the title of a popular movie he made with Doris Day. That year, in the year-end poll conducted by
Downbeat
magazine, he was voted the most popular male vocalist of the year, earning the title for the first time since 1947.

With his financial fortunes happily reversed, Sinatra paid fifty-four thousand dollars for a 2 percent stake in the Sands. Over time, his investment would expand to 9 percent, and that alone made him a multimillionaire. Among the other owners with Costello and Adonis were Lansky, Gerardo Catena, acting boss of the Genovese family in New York, and Joe Fusco, a former protégé of Al Capone.

Las Vegas was a playground for Sinatra as well as a source of revenue. He was royalty in the city, and he was both revered and feared along the Strip. In addition to the house he owned in Palm Springs, he liked to entertain his friends at his new home away from home.

“Frank used to call me up and ask me if I wanted to go to Vegas with him that weekend,” recalled Tony Curtis in his memoir
American Prince.
“He’d come by my house in his Karmann Ghia, and off we’d go. It was Frank who put the Sands Hotel on the map. When Frank started showing up at the Sands to perform, the Sands became
the
place to be seen. He sang there without a contract. When he was finished with his gig there, Frank would return home carrying a duffel bag full of cash. I don’t know how they did it—there were no mobile phones in those days—but whenever Frank and I drove up to the Sands, a greeting party was always standing outside waiting.”

“I used to stop always at the Sands, just to hang out,” recalls Debbie Reynolds. “And as a lark, sometimes get up and sing and do impressions with Frank and Sammy and whoever else was around.”

Though he still had to endure the vestiges of racism and segregation laws, another major Las Vegas headliner was Sammy Davis Jr. He had first performed there in 1945 as part of the Will Mastin Trio with his father and uncle. Out of loyalty, it remained the Will Mastin Trio for another ten years, though it was evident to everyone that Davis, with his singing and dancing and imitations, was by far the star of the group.

If you made it in New York or Los Angeles or both in the mid-1950s, the next stop was Las Vegas. “In early 1957 I was the headliner at the opening of the new Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas,” recounted Eddie Fisher in his autobiography,
Been There, Done That.
“In less than a decade Las Vegas had grown from a small oasis in the desert into a mecca of neon lights, gambling, and beautiful girls. It had become
the
destination for high rollers from everywhere in the world, an American Monte Carlo. Organized crime built it, with the help of entertainers like Sinatra, and owned it…. Mike Todd had once warned me against playing Vegas, but that was one of the few times I didn’t listen to him.”

Appearing regularly at the height of their fame as movie stars and as a nightclub act were Martin and Lewis. Audiences on the Strip couldn’t get enough of the combination of Dean Martin, the smooth straight man and crooner, and Jerry Lewis, who was a loud and totally unpredictable physical comic. For as long as they stayed together, they commanded top dollar.