That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (26 page)

Louis did not make a similar effort to keep the marriage going. No longer a homebody when offstage, he was seen drinking at other casinos and at parties accompanied by women. Years later, in interviews Keely contended that her husband at fifty exhibited signs of “male menopause.” This might seem trite, and it was unheard-of in the 1960s, but it did seem to be the case that Prima, after knowing Keely for thirteen years and being married to her for eight, was feeling anxiety about getting older. The aging lothario he had played onstage for all those years he now played offstage, seeking approval not from his wife but from young women who were starstruck when he bought them drinks after the show.

They were due back again at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Keely was too heartsick to go. Yet an intact “Wildest” did perform there.

“I’ve never told this one before,” says Debbie Reynolds. “They were booked for a week at the Fontainebleau in Miami, and Keely got sick. I knew the act so well that Louis called me in California and begged me to fly east and do Keely’s part. I only found out later that she and Louis were so on the ropes by then that she wasn’t sick, she just couldn’t go on with him. So I did a week being Keely Smith—I wore a black wig and her full poodle skirt and my impression of her, and for the five days the audience didn’t know that it was Debbie Reynolds and not Keely Smith. It went so well that Louis asked me to stay, but I had film commitments and young children at home, and I just couldn’t do it. But I had a great time. And because no one knew I wasn’t Keely, Louis got paid.”

To this day, Reynolds says, “I doubt that Keely ever knew that I did it. I’m sorry that they ever broke up. I loved them both. And they had the greatest act.”

In August 1961, news broke that the Primas’ golf course house, which was not yet completed, was up for sale, fueling more reports like one in the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
that “entertainers Louis Prima and Keely Smith will break up professionally.” Grimly, the couple prepared for their next stint at the Desert Inn that month.

When that gig ended in September, so did the marriage. Louis rented an apartment off the Strip and moved into it on October 1. Just two days later, either as a kneejerk reaction or a long-planned move, Keely filed for divorce.

The story of the divorce ran in the
New York Times
and other major newspapers around the country and appeared on the front pages of the Las Vegas newspapers. At the very least, what took place inside a courtroom on October 3 demonstrated how liberal the Nevada divorce laws really were: Keely filed the suit in the morning, and Judge Taylor Wines granted the decree that same afternoon. She had charged “extreme cruelty, entirely mental in character … causing great unhappiness and injury to plaintiff’s health.” She claimed that Louis stayed out all night and neglected her and Toni and Luanne.

Keely wore a puffed-out light-colored dress with a checkered pattern and white shoes, and clutched a white purse as she left the courthouse. Especially noticeable were the large, dark sunglasses that hid her red eyes. Walking past reporters, she managed to choke out, “I never actually thought it would happen … but I guess it’s best for all of us.”

She told reporters that she would continue to live in the still-unfinished house on the Desert Inn golf course with their two daughters. “Everything was very friendly and fair,” she said about the fifteen-minute divorce proceeding, which Louis did not attend. “I think I’m going to do a TV show,” Keely said about her immediate plans as a performer. When asked if she would ever share a stage with Louis again, she replied, “Gee, I don’t know.”

It was an abrupt end to the real “Wildest,” though the name would live on. “Prima and Miss Smith were riding the crest of popularity for their act at the Desert Inn, which included Sam Butera and the Witnesses,” reported the
Review-Journal. “They
closed an eight-week engagement at the hotel Monday night, and Prima is slated to appear later this month at a Los Angeles nitery with Butera and his musical group.” So even though the headline in the
Las Vegas Sun
read “Keely Smith Sheds Prima,” Louis and the band both were leaving her behind too.

Two days later Keely arrived in Los Angeles, appearing to be in the midst of a breakdown. She got off the plane clearly exhausted and weeping and was embraced by Barbara Belle. She was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with the excuse again being “minor surgery.” She was ill for weeks.

“I felt that Louis was more broken up about what happened, but then again I saw him more than I did Keely after the divorce,” says Reynolds. “But I never asked because I didn’t feel it was my business.”

The year got tougher for Louis when his father, Anthony Prima, passed away at age seventy-four.

In the year-end issue of
Fabulous Las Vegas,
among the ads offering season’s greetings was a very simple full-page one. A strip at the top read “Happy Holidays.” The rest of the page was a black-and-white illustration of a pageboy haircut, forehead, and dark eyebrows and eyes. The rest of the page was white except for only “Keely” in script.

The portrait was clever and eye-catching, but the partial image could also lead one to wonder if she was fading away.

And, much too suddenly, the love story of Louis and Keely was over.

If Louis felt broken up about the divorce, he didn’t show it. He forged ahead with plans to continue the act and treated Keely’s loss like an annoying distraction that he wished reporters would stop asking him about.

“As their career unwound and they divorced as a married couple, there came some difficult times—much more difficult for Keely at that time than it was for Louis,” according to Joe Segreto, who was recruited from New Orleans to become Louis’s manager (because by offering Keely a sympathetic shoulder in Los Angeles, Belle, in Prima’s eyes, had sided with his ex-wife). “Louis, that cat’s got nine lives.”

Indeed, printed on new stationary that Prima ordered was “This Cat’s Got Nine Lives.”

“Louis went through a couple of girls trying to find the one to fill that spot, and he worked for a time with another girl singer,” said Segreto in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!
“He still had Sam Butera and the Witnesses. He still had marvelous music to draw on. He still had his own talents. There were some things different, of course. The fans were used to Louis and Keely.”

“It was disappointing to us fans when they broke up,” says Lorraine Hunt-Bono. “It was very much like when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis split. It sure felt different on the Strip to not have Louis and Keely performing together.”

That difference first became apparent to a national audience when in 1961 the film
Twist All Night
was released, with Prima as the lead. Butera and the Witnesses were again on hand, but this cheesy attempt to ride the coattails of the dance craze created by Chubby Checker’s hit single completely lacked the charm and sweetness found in
Hey Boy! Hey Girl!
Any discomfort felt about Louis being the “boy” of the 1959 film’s title was exacerbated in the new film as the fifty-year-old awkwardly gyrated with young women, some less than half his age. For those who saw
Twist All Night,
clearly a big piece was missing. It did Prima a favor that not too many people saw it.

Louis’s attitude that he was the star and everyone around him mere supporting players was shaken when the Desert Inn cancelled his contract. Wilbur Clark did not want “The Wildest” without Keely, certainly not in the main showroom and for fifty thousand a week. In a rather cruel gesture, the casino’s next paycheck to Louis had the figure “$000,000.00” on it. Also cancelled was work on a TV series that had been proposed to Louis and Keely. Club owners around the country who had appreciated what Keely brought to the act removed bookings of “The Wildest” from their schedule. The Dot Records deal was up in the air. Their personal split was professionally going to cost the couple millions of dollars.

Prima’s career was far from over, however. He found that he was still somewhat popular as a solo act. Being surrounded onstage by the loyal Butera and the Witnesses helped. Or did it? It was probably impossible for Prima emotionally and financially, but at the time he might have been better off striking out on his own with a new band and reinventing his career once more. Like the movie audience, the stage audience saw the same tried-and-true act, but Keely was missing. He even had to endure hecklers, who asked where Keely was and said “The Wildest” was not as wild without her.

“After the divorce, Louis, when he was away from his Las Vegas power base, seemed like one of the walking dead,” wrote Garry Boulard, adding, “Even Prima’s continued presence in Las Vegas was suspect. Where once Vegas was portrayed as the home of the hip, to many 1960s kids the gambling mecca was viewed instead as a graveyard of misplaced values, unrealized dreams, and middle-aged juveniles.”

With no singers working out, and with Louis offering reporters ridiculous statements about Keely like “We are better off without her,” he had to find a true replacement, and pronto. In 1962, he told reporters he was looking for a new singer. As the items appeared in the press, women sent him photos and tapes. As he and Sam worked smaller clubs around the country, he held auditions. The woman he chose, like Keely, was already a big fan of his, much younger, and very impressionable.

Gia Maione was a waitress whose father was a longtime fan of Prima’s. When she was fourteen, on a family vacation in Florida, her father arranged an introduction, and Prima signed a photo of himself for her. From that moment on, Gia recalled in a 2008 interview, “I collected every single recording he ever made. In school, for the variety shows, I would always perform Louis’s music.”

Gia saw herself as a singer, having studied voice as well as piano. She was twenty when she showed up at the door of the Latin Casino in Camden, where Prima and the band were playing that night. He listened to her sing and invited her to a lunch show that Mother’s Day Sunday at the local B’nai B’rith. (The venue was surely a sign of how his popularity was waning.)

“I was working as a waitress at Howard Johnson’s restaurant at the time,” Maione recalled. “He called me up during the show, and I think because I was so young, and naïve, and innocent-looking with the full crinoline skirts, and the poodle haircut, he thought he was just going to get a kick calling me up onstage. During the show he asked me if I knew ‘I’m in the Mood for Love,’ and I said yes. So he started the intro for it, and of course, I knew every arrangement, I knew everything, so I just did it. And he would look at me and then he would look at Sam. Then he said, well, do you know this song, and I said yes, and so we did the next song. Then he kept me up there and he went into ‘Just a Gigolo’ and ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody,’ and I did all of the backgrounds with the boys. I just knew exactly what to do.”

Prima ended up picking her over two other candidates, Michelle Lee and Charlotte Duber. “He never really told me I got the job,” said Gia. “But he said to my mom and me, ‘We’re opening at Basin Street East tomorrow. Can you be here in the parking lot tomorrow morning to take the bus there?’ And of course, I did. It was a Cinderella story come true. And the engagement, later that week, was
The Ed Sullivan Show.
So that was my first TV show. My first professional engagement and it was wonderful. Everyone else was a nervous wreck. I was not.”

Gia did have a winning voice and personality, and some critics overlooked Keely’s absence. “Louis Prima’s excellent new vocalist, pretty Gia Maione of Toms River, N.J., won a standing ovation at her Basin St. East premiere,” the
New York Post
reported in its May 15, 1962, edition. “It’s a Cinderella tale. The auburn-haired 21-year-old [Prima may have had to add a year to her age] was a hostess in a Howard Johnson restaurant and sang professionally only a few times. She joined Prima four days ago, didn’t buy a gown or shoes for last night’s opening till 3
P.M.
yesterday.”

Though young and inexperienced, it appears that Gia was not intimidated following in Keely’s footsteps and performing with a band that Keely had fronted for seven years. “I was an entirely different person with an entirely different style of singing,” she told Bruce Sylvester in 2003. “The intention was never to duplicate their act. She had a deep, smoky sound. She was a torch singer, but Louis immediately saw that my niche was novelties like ‘I Want You to Be My Baby’ and ‘Goody Goody.’ When I was hired, neither Louis nor any of the Witnesses made me feel like I would have to fill her shoes. They immediately respected my style and the way I was, and they helped me mature and grow up as a performer with Louis.”

During the next few months, Gia underwent a transformation orchestrated by Prima. There was an odd similarity to what the James Stewart character did to the Kim Novak character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film
Vertigo
in an attempt to resurrect his former lover. Gia’s hair got shorter, as did the dresses. The way she was billed on concert posters and TV shows gave her status it took Keely years to earn. Louis was making a statement that Keely had been just one in a line of female singers who had succeeded only because they were in an act with him.

That had been true with the others but not with Keely. Louis had conveniently forgotten where his career was going in 1948, which was musical Palookaville. Keely Smith opened the door that allowed Prima to have that Scott Fitzgerald second act. Gia, as engaging as she was and with a pleasing voice, was not about to give Louis’s career a similar boost. This was not her fault—she was genuinely talented—but Prima’s career was about to be rocked by a changing cultural landscape.

Soon Prima was acting out another Hollywood film parallel—to
Citizen Kane.
The much older John Foster Kane (Louis was fifty-one to Gia’s twenty when they met) is obsessed with establishing his girlfriend as an opera singer, and the results of his hubris are disastrous. While not disastrous, Prima’s efforts to create a solo career for Gia were at the very least disappointing. He built a recording studio in the home they were now sharing in Las Vegas and began his own label, Prima One Magnagroove Records, because “the music we’re going to put out on this record label is in a large groove.” He took six months and employed forty-eight musicians to record Gia’s debut as a solo artist,
This Is … Gia.
It garnered some good reviews, but consumers didn’t take to it.