That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (17 page)

Their start in Vegas had not been an auspicious one, at least not for Lewis. In September 1949, they were booked into the Flamingo Hotel for a week at fifteen thousand dollars. The recently married Martin brought his wife, but Lewis’s remained in Los Angeles. Left on his own when not performing, the twenty-three-year-old Lewis greeted the gambling opportunities with gusto. By the end of the week he was over a hundred thousand dollars in debt.

When confronted by the crew that had taken over the hotel from Bugsy Siegel, Lewis wisely vowed to repay it. He claims that he did, in less than three years, every penny. And he never gambled there again.

As one hotel and casino after another opened on and near the Strip, the demand for entertainers grew rapidly. If you had some talent and name recognition, you could get a job. It might not be in the main showroom, but you were getting paid to entertain people who in larger numbers were coming from all over the country.

Las Vegas was a place where one could find the composer and conductor Andre Previn moonlighting as a jazzman. Michael Freedland reported in his biography of Previn, “One Christmas, Andre and his trio were playing in the lounge of a Las Vegas hotel. It wasn’t most people’s idea of festive surroundings for the festive season. No number of girls in short costumes dressed as Santa Claus in the middle of a heat wave can really compensate for the traditional Yuletide. Yet here he was surrounded by walls without windows, decorations without clocks and everywhere the slot machines.”

Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow in 1939’s
The Wizard of Oz,
found new life in Las Vegas as a song-and-dance man. One of more recent vintage, Donald O’Connor, headlined in the Sahara’s Congo Room. Judy Garland herself made her Las Vegas debut in July 1956 at the New Frontier Hotel. Orson Welles made his first nightclub appearance at the Riviera Hotel in February 1957. Shortly before, Betty Grable and Harry James had formed an act for an engagement at the Hotel El Rancho Vegas, and had warmed up by seeing Louis and Keely perform at the Sahara and joining them on the crowded stage. One of Louis’s old flames was in town when, according to one account, “Martha Raye arrived to visit her ‘dream man,’ Al Riddle, dealer at the Hotel Sahara.”

As Sammy Davis Jr. found, Las Vegas was a good place to build a career and emerge as a star as long as he could stand insults like not being allowed to stay at the same hotel where he performed. By the 1950s, Davis had seen and experienced plenty of bigotry. The son of a black dancer and a Puerto Rican chorus girl, in 1943 he served in the U.S. Army’s first integrated unit. His nose was broken repeatedly in fistfights with bigger white soldiers. He was able to transfer to an entertainment unit, and after the war he formed a trio with his father and a man he considered his uncle, and the Will Mastin trio wound up in Las Vegas.

“When the trio arrived in Las Vegas, they were treated like anyone else on stage,” wrote Matt Birkbeck in
Deconstructing Sammy.
“But when the music ended and the crowd disappeared, they were black again and forced to sleep in hotels on the segregated west side of town. Sammy sat in his room late at night, looking out at the lights on the Strip, knowing he was barred from entering any of the hotels or casinos there.”

“By the late 1930s, despite their growing importance to the community’s infant resort industry, blacks faced more segregationist barriers,” wrote Eugene P. Moehring. “Although southern dam workers were gone, tourists (many of them southerners transplanted to California) increasingly expected southern Nevada to mirror the Jim Crow atmosphere of not only Dixie but the rest of the nation. In response, Fremont Street clubs increasingly barred ‘negroes’ from the bars and gaming tables.” An integration of public accommodations bill died in committee in the Nevada state assembly. “In the meantime, blacks now found themselves being denied service not only in hotels, but also in a growing number of restaurants and stores.”

Lena Horne recalled in her autobiography written with Richard Schickel being the subject of prejudice not so much from casino owners and audiences as fellow musicians.

When she was booked at the Flamingo soon after it opened, “I made what amounted to a pioneering trek to Las Vegas—pioneering in the sense that I was the first Negro to star in a big club there and pioneering, also, in the sense that I went there right at the beginning of the expansion and glamorization of the big clubs on the strip.”

Horne shared the bill with a well-known Latin band, the leader of which was deliberately rude to her. When she threatened to walk out on the engagement, her fiancé, Lennie Hayton, placed a call to the Flamingo’s manager, who was less than enthusiastic about stirring up trouble. Then Hayton heard another voice on the line: “I didn’t know she was having any trouble,” Bugsy Siegel said. “She will not have any further trouble.”

During subsequent shows, the bandleader couldn’t have been more polite. However, another account has it that while Siegel allowed Horne to stay in a cabana near the Flamingo, he had the maids burn her bed linens every morning.

Not only could black and white patrons still not share tables in the lounges, black customers could not place bets in the casinos. Sammy Davis Jr. had to stand behind a white friend placing bets for him. When in 1955 Dorothy Dandridge played the Hotel Last Frontier, Pearl Bailey was at the Flamingo, Billy Eckstine sang at the Sands, and Lionel Hampton and his troupe performed at the Moulin Rouge, none could stay in any of the rooms upstairs. So it was a coup for Horne that after making her debut at the Sands soon after it opened, she was able to live in one of the rooms for the duration of her engagement. Another time while at the Sands, Marlene Dietrich grabbed Horne’s arm and pulled her into the casino bar for a drink, and no one challenged the two stars.

Las Vegas was often referred to in the early to mid-’50s as the “Mississippi of the West” by black performers, and there seemed no end to the indignities—Davis had to stay with a black family across town, and Nat King Cole could not have dinner in the hotel where he headlined (while his supporting act at the Sands, the comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, could). But they wanted to be hired there because of the money. Before Horne had had enough of Vegas, she was earning twenty-five thousand dollars a week. Certainly there was more money and more opportunity for talented black entertainers in Las Vegas than there was on Broadway.

Taking a big financial step forward in July 1956 was Nat King Cole. Jack Entratter at the Sands signed him to a contract that called for a series of engagements into 1959 for five hundred thousand dollars. In the year-end issue of
Fabulous Las Vegas,
the publication made this Christmas wish: “To Nat King Cole and Louis Prima, an extra large over-size money belt (my, those contracts!).”

A pioneer in Las Vegas desegregation was Allard Roen, who in the 1950s was the managing director of the Desert Inn. When the black U.S. diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ralph Bunche wanted to visit Vegas, Roen reserved a room for him at the Desert Inn and escorted him to it. He extended golf privileges to Sammy Davis Jr. for use of the resort’s course. He also met Pearl Bailey’s request that she be able to use an all-black chorus line. In 1960, he negotiated an agreement with the NAACP to open the Desert Inn and Stardust officially to minority guests.

As Prima found out, Vegas was a place where careers could be remade. In 1956, in the wake of his acrimonious split with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis went to Vegas to recuperate with his wife and another couple. They stayed at the Sands for four days. He and his former partner as well as their handlers worried if either of the men had a career left with the act finished.

As Lewis was packing to leave he received a call from Sid Luft telling him that Luft’s wife, Judy Garland, was too ill to go onstage at the Frontier Hotel. Any chance Lewis could fill in, like, now?

Perhaps the suddenness allowed Lewis not to think about being a solo act and, of course, not having a solo act to do. He said he would be right over. He threw on a blue suit and borrowed a pair of black socks. When he got backstage and after being greeted by a sobbing Garland, the orchestra struck up “Over the Rainbow,” and there was even a “Miss Judy Garland” introduction. But out walked Jerry Lewis, blinking into the lights. “I don’t look much like Judy, do I?” he asked.

The audience agreed and found that very funny. Lewis improvised for an hour, which included singing songs that had once been Martin’s exclusive territory. He closed by doing an imitation of Jolson singing “Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody.” When he walked off to cheers, Lewis had begun a career as one of the most successful performers on the Strip for years to come. That December he did three weeks at the Sands. This was an unhappy occurrence to part-owner Sinatra, who supported his friend Dino, but Lewis earned every cent of the twenty-five thousand a week he received. (The following year Garland, in the midst of one of her many comebacks, had her eleven-year-old daughter join her for a duet onstage at the Flamingo, and thus Liza Minnelli made her Las Vegas debut.)

Also not necessarily predictable but better planned was Martin’s new career phase as a solo performer at the Sands. He had just made a movie,
Ten Thousand Bedrooms,
with Gina Lollobrigida, that failed financially and critically. Some observers in showbiz contended that Dean had been little more than a Bud Abbott–like straight man for the more talented Jerry. Martin had a nice-enough voice, and maybe he would have a modest career at best on his own. In darker moments, Martin believed that too. But he also realized that if he did no more than sing he would be perceived as only half an act, and he had to do something about that.

He hired Ed Simmons, a comedy writer who had just also dissolved a partnership, with Norman Lear (who would go on to TV fame with
All in the Family, The Jeffersons,
and other hit shows). He and Martin created a soused saloon singer character, and wrote jokes accordingly. Then it was time to hit the stage.

“Dean’s opening night at the Sands was something,” recalled Shirley MacLaine in
My Lucky Stars.
“It was well attended by celebrities because we wanted to be there for him. We were nervous because there but for the grace of God could go any of us. What would he do as a single? Many already thought he was a has-been.”

Instead, Martin was a comeback kid. He walked out onstage with a glass of scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other and told the audience, “Drink up—the drunker you get, the better I sound.” His act alternated between offhand jokes and songs, many with lyrics altered for comic effect. “The audience adored him,” reported MacLaine, “particularly those of us in show business. We understood what a breakthrough he had made. He had found who he was comfortable being.”

But number one on anybody’s list of acts to see was Sinatra, and to do that you had to go to the Sands. “Soon, the Sands was
the
place,” recalled Nancy Sinatra in her memoir
Frank Sinatra: My Father.

Sinatra was entering his peak years as an entertainer, and he found his greatest success in Hollywood and Las Vegas. On the big screen in the mid-1950s he was seen in
Young at Heart
with Doris Day,
Guys and Dolls
with Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons,
The Man with the Golden Arm
(which earned him his second Oscar nomination, this time in the Best Actor category),
High Society
with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, and
The Joker Is Wild,
about longtime Vegas comedian Joe E. Lewis, who performed often at the Sands, sometimes reciting Shakespeare with Sinatra.

And there was Elvis too. He would become a regular in Las Vegas late in his career, but his debut there was not promising at all. He was twenty-one in April 1956 and had just completed his first sessions for RCA Records. “Heartbreak Hotel” was getting radio play, and he had made his first television appearance, on the
Dorsey Brothers TV Show.
Presley was booked to appear at the New Frontier Hotel on a bill with Shecky Greene and Freddy Martin and his orchestra. To help hype the relatively unknown man from Memphis, he was proclaimed in print ads to be “The Atomic Powered Singer.” (Greene became friends with both Louis and Keely, and for a time employed Louis’s daughter Joyce. “He was not happy about that,” Greene says. “I don’t think he wanted her in show business.”)

People didn’t come to Las Vegas to see rock ‘n’ roll then, as evidenced by the tepid reception Presley received. He did two twelve-minute shows a night for two weeks. Even dressing him up in a bow tie and jacket didn’t help him blend in. Elsewhere in 1956 his career took off, especially when he appeared on Milton Berle’s TV show and Ed Sullivan’s show, which was seen by fifty-four million viewers. When he returned to Las Vegas later that year, it was to see Liberace’s show at the Riviera and Freddie Bell and his Bellboys at the Sands. Presley was particularly captivated by Bell because of a song he sang that began, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog!” It had been recorded in 1953 by Big Mama Thornton and was written by two white teenagers, Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber.

Apparently, there was another popular act in Las Vegas that Elvis enjoyed. After Presley’s “All Shook Up” climbed to the top of the charts, he was asked where he got the wiggle that went with performing it. “From Louis Prima, of course,” he replied.