That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (22 page)

As Kamp’s piece indicates, what the American audience saw that night was a big reason why “The Wildest” was such a hoot: sex. They were, after all, from Las Vegas and thus did not have to abide by the same standards as the rest of the country.

They perform two songs by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, “It’s Magic” and “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” then comes “Louis and Keely’s consummation of their unlikely love on ‘That Old Black Magic,’ performed by the Witnesses as a breakneck rumba,” Kamp continued.

As the song goes on and the couple trade lines, “The ice melts. Keely, getting into it now, mugs cross-eyed and sends up Louis’s ape-man gesticulations, galumphing across the stage with her jaw slackened and her arms swinging; he mimics her compulsive nose-scratching, pawing his proboscis every time she itches hers. She beams at him adoringly. He jumps up and down a few more times.”

Kamp concludes, “It’s unlikely, in 1959, that anyone has ever seen a more entertaining, or frankly libidinous, quarter-hour of television.”

But still not as risqué as their live performances in Las Vegas. During one of the “Wildest” shows at the Desert Inn, Keely said to the audience, “Doesn’t he look like the Indian on the nickel? I wish he was the buffalo.” Louis offered, “Once she gets home, she’s dead, believe me.” Keely responded, “That’s the only way we can start even. Believe me.”

The audience thought the racy repartee was hilarious. No one knew that the trouble brewing between them did have to do in large part with sex, but it wasn’t that Louis couldn’t perform. This bubbled below the surface for the time being, with just the occasional hint that Prima was re-establishing a pattern of cheating on his wife.

Surely, most people thought, it had to be different with Keely. The fourth wife was the special one. They were living a love story most American couples could only dream about. Never chatty with the press, unless it served a direct PR purpose, Louis became even more reluctant to do interviews. He claimed that he had nothing to say about himself, and he was interesting only because of what he did during shows.

As his brother, Leon, said about Louis: “His life was onstage. That’s what he wanted, to always be onstage.”

When Dinah Shore introduced “The Wildest” on her show, she called them “the greatest nightclub act in the country. They’re knocking ‘em dead in Las Vegas.” But there was one act in town that continued to prevent Louis and Keely from claiming that their act was indeed the greatest—Frank Sinatra, now surrounded by the Rat Pack, whose throne was at the Sands.

As individual performers, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop were favorites among Las Vegas audiences, and of course Sinatra was arguably the most popular entertainer in the country. But more often they began to take to the stage together, with lightweight song-and-dance man Peter Lawford in tow (Sinatra favored him because he was related by marriage to John F. Kennedy), and as a group they were idolized by the tourists, who believed they were experiencing a very special kind of entertainment.

In early 1960, casino boss Jack Entratter nicknamed these occasions the Summit after the meeting set for that spring between the leaders of France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. In the four weeks that Sinatra and his pals played the hotel that first time officially, during a movie shoot in Las Vegas, scalpers collected up to a hundred dollars each for three-dollar tickets.

According to Nancy Sinatra, “When they worked together, it was a summit meeting indeed, a gathering—within the entertainment world—of the top. Frank and Dean and Sammy. Joey Bishop. Peter Lawford. And whoever else from the upper ranks of show business—Bing Crosby, Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Judy Garland, Shirley MacLaine—happened to be around at that time and in that place.”

The unquestioned leader of the pack was Old Blue Eyes. Despite a schedule that put even Louis and Keely to shame, Sinatra kept producing in the recording studio and in front of cameras at a very high level. In the three years that concluded the 1950s, he recorded 124 songs in thirty-seven recording sessions, with many of those songs being the best in the Sinatra catalogue. He made six feature films:
The Pride and the Passion, The Joker Is Wild, Pal Joey, Kings Go Forth, Some Came Running,
and
A Hole in the Head.
He also had a steady diet of concerts and appeared on over three dozen TV shows. And it was always a major event when he took to a stage in Las Vegas. Several estimates contended that he earned more money than anyone in the history of show business, and this was without factoring in what he received under the table and the gambling credit the mobster owners granted him.

“When we got together and made pictures at the same time that the Clan was appearing in Vegas, there was an energy there that has never been duplicated since,” according to Shirley MacLaine. “Two shows a night, seven days a week, for three months … while shooting a picture. Granted, these pictures were not award winners, … but the spontaneous humor on the stage and the set was unparalleled then and has never been matched since.”

Powered by Sinatra’s still-increasing fame, the Sands Hotel had become the place to be, and would remain so for years to come. In
Play It as It Lays
by Joan Didion, there is this passage:

The Sands was glad to take full advantage of the growing Rat Pack legend. A marquee in January 1960 listed Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr.—actually, in an advertisement it was “The Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis Jr.”—Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. They wouldn’t necessarily all be onstage that night, but it was promoted that, because all were in Las Vegas filming
Ocean’s Eleven,
two or perhaps more would be part of any night’s show.

The group even had nicknamed white bathrobes. Sinatra’s read “Pope,” Martin’s said “Dago,” Davis had “Smokey” embroidered on his (and he had the only brown robe), and on and on. They were on a path to creating their own offhand language to communicate among themselves: women were “broads,” God was the “big G,” death was the “big casino,” a penis was a “bird,” sex was a “little hey-hey” (which is what Sinatra proposes to Angie Dickinson in
Ocean’s Eleven),
and “dullsville” pretty much applied to anyplace that wasn’t as fun and freewheeling as Las Vegas.

That
Ocean’s Eleven
is a pretty enjoyable movie is something of a miracle considering the chaos that surrounded shooting it. Actually, the project was born in chaos—in 1958, an entire raft of writers cobbled together a script about eleven men who served together in the 82nd Airborne reuniting to rob five casinos in Las Vegas. Quite a while later, once a final script was approved, the Warner Bros. project was given to Lewis Milestone to produce and direct.

Milestone had made the classic film adaptation of
All Quiet on the Western Front,
but that had been in 1930, and at sixty-four he wasn’t up to the task of corralling the Rat Pack. Sinatra’s Dorchester Productions was also on board as a producer, so he was the director’s boss as well as the star. Of course, filming took place at the Sands. During the weeks of shooting, the members of the Rat Pack played all night then staggered to the various locations in the morning.

The film began lensing on January 26, and the crew wrapped up their work in Las Vegas on February 16. It was a Rat Pack marathon of insults and seltzer-squirting interrupted by the occasional song at the Sands every night after shooting ended—or, more accurately, after Sinatra decided that there had been enough filming for one day.

The movie opened in August 1960 to mediocre reviews, but the Rat Pack was hot, and it did well at the box office. A celebrity-filled crowd showed up when
Ocean’s Eleven
was first shown at the Fremont Theatre after a show Sinatra and friends performed at the Sands.

Few remembered that
Ocean’s Eleven
was actually the second movie shot at the Sands.
Meet Me in Las Vegas,
a pleasing MGM musical, had been released in 1956. Ballet dancer Cyd Charisse visits Vegas and brings good luck to local rancher Dan Dailey. Also on hand to provide music are Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frankie Laine.

Louis Prima and Keely Smith make an appearance in
Ocean’s Eleven
too—but only as names listed along with Donald O’Connor in a shot that shows the Sahara marquee.

Given the relatively small population of Nevada and the fact that Las Vegas was a place to play, where only the money was serious, the town would not necessarily be considered significant in national politics. But that was about to change too, because of the vast amount of money on the Strip and that money’s intersection with a future president who already knew quite a bit about playing with celebrities. Among John F. Kennedy’s favorite songs was the Louis and Keely version of “That Old Black Magic,” and if they were onstage and JFK was in town, the senator from Massachusetts could be found in the audience.

Sinatra was already a Kennedy connection in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, but the connection became a bond when the singer took the senator’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford under his wing. Sinatra had attended the 1956 Democratic convention. When Adlai Stevenson received the nomination to run again against Dwight Eisenhower—JFK’s wife, Jackie, wrote the endorsement speech for him—Bobby Kennedy declared that the family should begin to plan for the 1960 race immediately. Sinatra volunteered to be part of that effort.

It included raising lots of cash, sometimes in unconventional ways, and giving it to the Kennedy campaign. Over the years, JFK increasingly enjoyed Las Vegas—being a guest member of the Clan/Summit/Rat Pack, the women, and the cash that would underwrite his campaign for the White House.

“Whenever J.F.K. or another person of prominence sat in the audience, Dad gave a colleague the honor of introducing him or her to the crowd,” recalled Nancy Sinatra. “One time Dean Martin would do it, another time Sammy, and so on. I remember the night Dean said to a room that was full of extra excitement and some kind of tangible glow: ‘There’s a senator here tonight and this senator is running for President or something and we play golf together, we go fishing together, and he’s one of my best buddies’ and he turned to FS and said, ‘What the hell
is
his name?’ and John Kennedy started laughing.”

Louis and Keely were not interested in politics. To them, JFK was just another handsome, tomcatting rake from Washington, D.C., having fun in Vegas. Louis, especially, was much more interested in the next gig and what the act would be paid for it than who would be the next president. The Chief probably also thought that he had to be a bigger star than Kennedy—how often had this Massachusetts guy been on Ed Sullivan’s show compared to him and Keely?

Because of Sullivan, Prima could keep making triumphant returns to New York. The stone-faced but canny impresario recognized a very simple formula: when Louis and Keely and Sam with the band appeared on his Sunday evening show, ratings went up. As a result, Sullivan tried to book “The Wildest” as often as possible. Sullivan even linked the couple with Elvis Presley, writing in his
New York Daily News
column that those two acts were guaranteed ratings winners for his show.

As good as the national exposure was, Louis was reluctant to accept every invitation from Sullivan because of his fear of flying. In addition, with such a round-trip to New York by train taking up to two weeks, the TV gig by itself didn’t come close to paying what the band would earn during the same amount of time in Reno or Chicago or Los Angeles—and, of course, New Orleans—especially with Sullivan being at least as tight-fisted as Louis was.

This
Fabulous Las Vegas
item shows their solution: “Another Casbar Theatre headlining act had a big night last Sunday as Louis Prima and Keely Smith plus Sam Butera and the Witnesses guested on ‘smiley’ Ed Sullivan’s show. Louis and Keely finished first at the Copacabana in New York and made another appearance with Sullivan before returning to FLV and the Sahara.” They managed to appear on Sullivan’s show eight times, but they could easily have doubled that.

Louis shaved a year off his age by claiming to have been born in 1911, sometimes 1912—and by claiming that he still had a full head of hair, though he had begun wearing a toupee in 1951. The fiction that Keely was born in 1932 still held. In their act, they wrung every ounce out of the aging lothario trying to seduce the sexy, somewhat younger woman scenario. It was a bit too lowbrow for some critics. In “The Wages of Vulgarity” in the September 7, 1959, issue,
Time
magazine sniffed, “The brassy, bulb-nosed, toupeed trumpeter, seeming like a frayed hangover from the night before, began to sing and prance. Somehow, his grinding, gravel-voiced antics made the simple lyrics of ‘When You’re Smiling’ as suggestive as the spiel of a strip-show pitchman. Across the stage, his partner stirred, scratched herself, smothered a belch.”