That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (28 page)

Antoinette and Luanne Prima both live in Southern California, near their mother. Toni’s husband, Dennis Michaels, is an arranger and Keely’s musical director. Both daughters had brushes with musical careers, which included cowriting a production in 2001 titled
The Wildest!!!: Hip, Cool and Swinging.

Lena and Louis Prima Jr. are both singers, and they continue to perform their father’s music as separate acts in nightclubs and concert halls, including Las Vegas. In interviews over the years, Lena and Louis Jr. have spoken of a happy home life. Unfortunately, both were teenagers when their father went into a coma. Their mother, Gia, no longer performs. She oversees the Louis Prima Archives, based in New Orleans, and louisprima.com. She lives in Florida. Both Gia and Keely have said repeatedly in interviews that they are writing books about their husband.

Life went on for Sam Butera after the Louis-Keely split. He continued with the band, which kept the name the Witnesses, and remained Louis’s loyal sidekick. He did some freelancing:
Thinking Man’s Sax
was one of the albums he made as a solo artist, and in 1964 he recorded
Sam Meets Sam,
a collaboration with Sammy Davis Jr., for Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label. He recorded “Stargazer” with Sinatra in 1976 and that same year opened for Old Blue Eyes on a tour that included a gig at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He acted in and did the music for
The Rat Race,
a Columbia feature starring two familiar Las Vegas faces, Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds.

Butera groused—with justification—to anyone who would listen after the David Lee Roth version of “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” was released in 1985. “He copied my arrangement note for note, and I didn’t get a dime for it,” Sam said. He contended, however, that “there wasn’t an act in Atlantic City or Las Vegas that would do that song, out of respect for me.”

Alas, Butera was only a footnote in the 1996 film
Big Night,
which featured Stanley Tucci, who also cowrote the script and codirected the picture. The movie’s plot is about the staff of a struggling Brooklyn restaurant that waits all night for Louis Prima to show up and eat there … and he doesn’t. Sam’s sax can be heard on the soundtrack, however.

It was only after Louis’s failed operation and eventual death that Sam performed with Keely during her infrequent nightclub appearances. But they had what was described by acquaintances as a “falling-out” and ceased sharing stages.

Through the 1980s and ‘90s Sam continued on as a solo act. He remained popular in Las Vegas, where he and his wife, Vera, and four children had lived since 1961. According to an article titled “Lounge Wizard” in the July 13, 1997, edition of the
New York Times,
when Sam was soon to turn seventy, “Mr. Butera, who played in Mr. Prima’s band and arranged many of his songs, carries on that tradition so well that he remains the highest-paid lounge performer in Las Vegas. His contract requires the kind of treatment more customary for showroom headliners: a hotel room, free meals and a provision that no other band or entertainer can perform his songs in the same building during his engagement.”

But within a few years the Las Vegas lounge scene that he had helped put on the American entertainment map was fading. Sam went on the road around the country, up to forty-eight weeks a year. Then he did what some jazz artists had done much earlier in their careers—he went to Europe. There he shared stages with the likes of Van Morrison and was embraced enthusiastically by young fans who idolized his combination of swing and early rock ‘n’ roll. He returned to the States to play Las Vegas once more, at Sante Fe Station.

Sam’s last public appearance was in 2003, when he was present to be inducted into the Italian-American Hall of Fame in New Orleans. (He had been inducted into the Las Vegas Hall of Fame four years earlier.) Then it was time to end the show for Sam: in 2004, he hung up his saxophone and declared himself retired.

Sam fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease, and because of complications he was hospitalized in January 2009. He died on June 3, two months shy of his eighty-second birthday. He left behind Vera—whom he had met in high school and who was his wife for sixty-two years—his children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

In what was both a generous homage and evidence that there was lingering animosity toward Keely, Gia said, “Louis’s true ace in the hole for twenty-one years was Sam Butera. I don’t care what vocalists were with Louis, his true ace in the hole was Sam Butera. Side by side, Louis and Sam kicked Las Vegas’s butt for twenty-one years.”

At the memorial service at St. Viator Catholic Church in Las Vegas, a longtime friend closed his eulogy by saying Butera would tell St. Peter, “I think what you should do is get rid of this guy Gabriel because I’m going to be blowing the horn from now on.”

As of this writing, Keely Smith is still recording and performing. Hers is truly a story of survival that no one—least of all herself—could have predicted after her divorce in 1961. She may have never stopped loving Louis, but she did learn that she wasn’t nothing without him.

Keely Smith didn’t disappear from the entertainment scene, as that
Fabulous Las Vegas
holiday ad in 1961 implied, but it sure seemed that way. There was some solace in that she no longer had to conform to a rigorous recording and performing and traveling schedule, and she could focus on raising Toni and Luanne. As with his two previous daughters, Prima gave much more attention to his career and new family than he did to his children with Keely. She once ruefully remarked about Louis, “When he divorced the wives, he divorced the children too.”

It took Keely quite a while to recover, professionally as well as emotionally, and it wasn’t easy. “Louis blackballed her,” contends Pete Barbutti. “He went to all the casinos and promised them that he would work for them if they didn’t hire Keely. She was close to living on the street. She was going to the hotel buffets and begging.”

He adds: “I believe that Shecky Greene saved her life. Shecky ran into Keely and she was in tears and looked terrible. He knew what it was like to feel very alone, and he vowed to help Keely.”

“I got her back in the business,” says Shecky Greene. “She wasn’t getting any work, and it looked like she might not be up for it anyway, but she needed the money. The first time, I took her to open for me at a benefit for St. Joseph’s Hospital in Albuquerque. Then I took her to Chicago. I said to her, ‘I’ll stand onstage. You don’t have to get nervous. I’ll even hold your hand.’ And that’s what I did. Keely opened her mouth, this great voice came out, and once she got going she was fine.”

She made records with Dot but with mixed results and declining sales.
Swing, You Lovers, Dearly Beloved, Be My Love,
and
A Keely Christmas
were issued in 1961 and seemed to be efforts to profit from the lingering Louis and Keely popularity. Released in 1962 were
Because You’re Mine,
the painfully titled
Cherokeely Swings
(with her on the cover as a squaw),
What Kind of Fool Am I?,
and
Twist with Keely Smith,
as awkward an effort as Louis’s movie.

Also in ‘62, as Louis was hooking up with Gia, Keely made her debut as a solo performer in Las Vegas to mixed results. That same year Johnny Carson invited her to appear on
The Tonight Show,
and she sang “Little Girl Blue.” Richard Rodgers saw the performance and offered her the lead in the musical
No Strings
in London, his first production since the death of his composing partner, Oscar Hammerstein II. With her children being only seven and five and the thought of living on another continent too daunting, Keely turned him down.

Europe might have been a good change of scenery, because Keely struggled with developing a career on her own. “I was scared to death at the prospect of working by myself,” Keely recalled to the
New York Times
in December 1977. “In those days, I didn’t express my opinion about anything. Louis told me how to look, how to dress. I never sang a song he didn’t like or wear a gown he didn’t like. When we broke up he told me he was going to hire another girl and call her Kelly Smith. He told me I was nothing without him. That’s why I was scared. But Dinah Shore talked me into going on her television show.”

Sinatra also came to the rescue. After leaving Capitol Records, Frank had established his own label, Reprise Records. He believed Keely obviously needed help to keep any kind of solo career going. He reunited her with Nelson Riddle, and together they recorded
Little Girl Blue/Little Girl New
and several songs, including “Twin Soliloquies,” on a compilation album of songs from the Broadway shows
Kiss Me Kate
and
South Pacific.
Both albums were released in 1963.

Stories had circulated around Las Vegas for years about the relationship between Frank and Keely being more than friendship, even going back to 1957, when Luanne was given the middle name Francis in honor of Sinatra. As far as anyone knows, they were just stories. But Keely has acknowledged having an affair with Frank after her marriage to Louis ended.

“I almost married Frank,” Keely has stated repeatedly. “He was a wonderful man, but we lived different lifestyles. Frank was on the fast lane and I was still a Virginia girl.”

The arrival of the Beatles in 1964 actually boosted Keely’s struggling solo career. She recorded an album,
Keely Smith Sings the John Lennon/Paul McCartney Songbook,
that was successful in Great Britain, and a single released the following year, “You’re Breaking My Heart,” earned a spot in the Top 20 in England. Two more albums for Reprise followed:
The Intimate Keely Smith
and
That Old Black Magic,
in 1965 and ‘66.

With Sinatra out of the picture, Keely remarried in 1965 in Las Vegas. “Keely Smith, popular singer, was married today to Albert [Jimmy] Bowen, a Los Angeles recording company executive,” the Associated Press reported on July 19. “About 30 persons attended the ceremony. The singer used the name Dorothy Keely Prima on the marriage license.”

She essentially retired, though she termed it a hiatus, so that she could spend more time with Toni and Luanne and her new husband. But the marriage lasted less than four years. As the AP reported in May 1969, “Keely Smith, the singer, who is suing James A. Bowen, composer and conductor, for divorce, won $2,250 a month temporary support today pending trial.” This came in handy, because during the last few years a struggling Louis had repeatedly fallen behind in his child support payments.

Keely married again, in 1974, to Palm Springs resident Bobby Milano, whose real name was Charles Caci. He was a supper club singer and sometime record producer who had been nicknamed the Crooning Crybaby after being convicted of complicity in jewel theft and transportation of stolen goods in 1968. He died of cancer in January 2006; the marriage had ended, but he and Keely remained friends.

In the 1970s, with her daughters on their own, Keely looked for bookings in the supper clubs of several major cities. “All of a sudden, one day, my daughters came to me and said, ‘Mom, you should go back to work now,’ “ Keely recounted for National Public Radio in September 2007. “And I did. I finally decided one day, OK, I’ll take a stab at it. They had a room at the Century Plaza hotel in Los Angeles. Joey Bishop’s brother was the maitre d’, and whenever an act would get sick, his brother would call and say to me, ‘Keely, can you come over and fill in for us?’ And I would always go do that. I thought, well, heck, this is OK, I can still do this. So I finally decided to go back to work.”

She didn’t have the connections in New York City as Louis did, but she was received with special warmth there when she played a three-week engagement at the Rainbow Room in 1977, her first performance in the city in fourteen years. She was well into her forties, and for one generation there was a lot of nostalgia hearing her sing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “I Wish You Love” again, while a younger generation discovered a faded star, possibly turning her into a new one.

But Keely was not the road warrior Louis had been, and her appearances in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere were too infrequent for a renewed career to gain real traction. She had reunited with Sam Butera for the Rainbow Room show, but Sam had his other projects too, and friction grew between them.

There were legal issues with Gia that must have been draining financially as well as emotionally. (Keely contended too that when she and Louis divorced, she was presented with a $130,000 bill from the IRS on revenue she never saw from her husband.) In August 1977, Keely sued a Los Angeles pawnshop. She claimed that she had sold $150,000 worth of jewelry to the shop for $24,350, but when she tried to redeem the property for over $28,000 she found that the items had been sold.

After two years of Prima being in a coma, Gia had trouble making ends meet because of the medical bills. She sought bookings in nightclubs as Gia Prima and the Witnesses, but by then, in early 1978, Keely and Sam were touring with the “real” Witnesses. Ignoring Sam’s wishes, Gia argued that the name belonged to Louis’s business holdings and she was the de facto head of them, so there was more legal wrangling.

Keely was still part owner of Pretty Acres, as was Gia, third wife Tracelene, Louis’s brother, Leon, and his sister, Elizabeth. The property was appraised at five million dollars, and sorting out who got what took over a decade. It certainly didn’t help that after his death it turned out that Louis’s last will disinherited three of his six children, resulting in four of his daughters suing to have the will tossed out. There was also an argument over the disposition of the house that Louis had been building for him and Keely on the golf course in Las Vegas when they divorced. In 1995, it was purchased by Vince Neil of the rock band Mötley Crüe.

In 1985, Keely recorded an album,
I’m in Love Again,
that featured the Cole Porter title song and such other classics as “How High the Moon,” “Sunday in New York,” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” But the Fantasy label release did not find an audience. David Lee Roth’s version of “Just a Gigolo” put the spotlight for a time directly on Louis, and Keely remained in the shadow. The same thing happened with most of the songs that got used on movie soundtracks and advertising campaigns, such as the Gap’s use of “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail,” because the songs were more associated with Louis than other ones he and Keely had originated or recorded in the ‘50s.