That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (24 page)

Rickles soon ended up with a better job. In addition to his pre
–Tonight Show
TV work, Johnny Carson, who continued to enjoy heckling Rickles in the Casbar Lounge, had become a popular stand-up comedian. One week while he was booked into the Congo Room at the Sahara, he was felled by a sudden illness. The hotel needed a replacement fast, and it reached into the lounge. The Rickles debut in the main showroom was so well received that his days as a lounge act came to an end.

“That day the headliner crapped out and they put Don in the main room,” recalls Jack Carter. “The rest is history. He was ready for his big break when it came.”

In 1960, the impression among people in America who followed such things was that everyone who was anyone in entertainment played Las Vegas. Televisions had become typical fixtures in American homes, and the variety shows plucked performers from the casinos and put them in front of the cameras every week. Between the two venues, if you were a name in the business it was difficult
not
to make a living.

However, though the money flowed ever faster into entertainers’ pockets, not everyone enjoyed performing in Las Vegas. According to Lena Horne, “Las Vegas came to be a symbol of a great deal I hated in this business. It was and is where the big money is for an entertainer. I played the Sands for a decade. It was a beautifully run room, very classy. If you have to play Vegas that is the room to play. But to me there was no gratification to performing there. You never know when you’re working in Vegas quite what’s happening to you. The audience is a captive one, but the thing that has captured them is the gambling. They really only come to see you in order to take a rest from the crap tables, they aren’t thinking about you particularly. There’s no challenge in them, so you have no sense of discovery about your performance to gain through their reactions.”

Her typical outlook when she was nearing an engagement was, “Oh, it’s a waste of time, but I’m going to Vegas.” Horne didn’t particularly care for Frank Sinatra and his cronies, but she acknowledged that it was largely because of his clout along the Strip that many of the racist restrictions in Las Vegas had fallen by the wayside.

The most eccentric agent of change—though it had nothing to do with racism—in Las Vegas was Howard Robard Hughes. (Coincidentally, he was portrayed by Jason Robards in the 1980 film
Melvin and Howard.)
Hughes’s father had created a company in Texas that had as its biggest asset the drill bit, which was purchased in mass quantities by the petroleum industry. At eighteen, his parents dead, he bought out relatives to become the controlling owner of Hughes Tool. He went on to be hugely successful in careers that included engines and weapons manufacturing and movie producing.

One of his screen efforts was
Las Vegas Story,
released in 1952. It is a bland imitation of
Casablanca,
with the Flamingo substituting for Rick’s Place. The reason for the film was Jane Russell, Hughes’s lady love, who played the Ingrid Bergman role. She had to choose between the Bogie-like Victor Mature and Vincent Price. The only reason to see the movie today is Hoagy Carmichael, who sings and wisecracks his way through the picture.

Hughes had earned a well-deserved reputation as a womanizer; since the 1940s he had been the kid with the big sweet tooth, and Vegas was the candy shop. But by the late ‘50s, after a 1957 marriage to Jean Peters performed in a Nevada ghost town that, not surprisingly, didn’t last, Hughes became more interested in acquiring property than women.

Well, almost. Tony Martin, a longtime favorite of Hughes, tells a story about the making of
Two Tickets to Broadway
in 1957. Even though the singer had taken Cyd Charisse away from Hughes and married her, the two men remained friends. One night while Martin was singing at the Flamingo, Hughes sent for him.

According to Martin, “It was a command appearance. I went. Hughes always used Mormons as his men, because they neither smoked nor drank and he considered them exceptionally trustworthy. He spoke in a soft, high-pitched voice. He had ear trouble and so did I, so we both started aiming our conversation at the other guy’s good ear.”

Hughes offered the singer seventy-five thousand dollars for the eight-week film shoot. Martin accepted. What he later learned was that Hughes was infatuated with Janet Leigh, who had signed on as the female lead. He planned to shoot the picture indefinitely so that it would come between her and Tony Curtis, they would break up, and Hughes would pounce. It didn’t turn out that way, and, against the odds (and Hughes), the picture finally wrapped. “His unrequited crush on Janet Leigh must have cost him millions, but that was the way he was,” Martin reported.

But Hughes’s heart was really about money and property. “Many times, when I worked in Las Vegas, I’d get a summons from Howard to meet him after my last show,” Martin recalled in
The Two of Us,
his memoir with Charisse. “It would be about three in the morning. He’d have his old Chevy there, and I’d sit next to him. We’d drive around for an hour or so. The thing he liked to do best was to show me how much land he owned. ‘I own everything from here to the mountains,’ he’d say, gesturing with his arm to the mountains which loomed miles away in the moonlight. He wasn’t saying it as a braggart would; it was just a statement of simple fact.”

Even the mob changed as the new decade began. Shirley MacLaine waxed nostalgic in her
My Lucky Stars
memoir: “When The Boys ran Vegas, they knew how to do it. Their hotels didn’t care about a show room paying for itself. Gambling and a good time were the high priorities. The showroom and its entertainers were there to get you in the mood to drop your cash on the green velvet tables. If you were stupid enough to fall for it, that was their gain. Vegas was one of the only towns in the world that told the truth about itself…. Everything was designed to make you have such a good time you’d even enjoy your losses, and furthermore you were warned.”

A new generation of entertainers, still wet behind the ears, arrived in town looking to make an impression, sometimes finding that Las Vegas didn’t impress them. “I was disappointed in Las Vegas,” recalled Wayne Newton in
Once Before I Go,
who with his brother, Jerry, opened their act at the Fremont two weeks after he quit high school in his junior year in 1959. “I thought the Dunes Hotel should have been big sandhills with a door. I thought the Flamingo should have been a big bird with the elevator going up the leg. At least the Showboat should have been a real showboat in the water.”

Demonstrating how things had expanded since the Mary Kaye Trio and “The Wildest,” the Newton Brothers were just one of four lounge acts at the Fremont, the others being Glenn Smith and the Fables, the Jets, and the Makebelievers. It could be a tough place for a sixteen-year-old kid.

“The stage was set on a high platform, with the bartender standing below us mixing drinks, and the audience sat looking up at us,” according to Newton. “Some women would sit there at the bar and open up the tops of their dresses. We were the only ones who could see it. I was propositioned a lot, but I was too naïve to know it. It never occurred to me that any of the flirting was being directed at me.

“When I wasn’t looking down the front of ladies’ dresses, I was trying to finish high school by correspondence during the first year or two, an effort that didn’t prove too successful.” The good news was the act earned $280 a week in what ultimately was a forty-six-week booking, pretty good for a couple of teenagers from Phoenix in 1959 and ‘60.

While Las Vegas had been no secret to much of America during the 1950s, it would be truly discovered by everyone in the ‘60s and beyond thanks to television and an expanding entertainment media, leading to the overdeveloped, water-parched mini-metropolis it is today. In 1960, when Louis Prima and Keely Smith and the Witnesses were at the height of their fame, the population of the Las Vegas metropolitan area was 127,016, up from 5,165 thirty years earlier; by 1995, the population had hit the million mark.

Was “The Wildest” among the changes affecting Las Vegas? No. One would think that after six years they would make significant changes in their repertoire to keep audiences coming back. True, they made tweaks because of the move to the Desert Inn. And there was still improvisation within each show, though the players performed the script as written by Prima. There was no need to change, because what “The Wildest” delivered was what visitors from around the country wanted. Even after six years, the act had yet to get old. Prima’s North Star had always been to perform with an uncanny freshness what people wanted to hear and see.

“The whole thing kept working,” says Jack Carter. “You knew what you were going to get and still you couldn’t wait to see it. You knew that Keely was going to stand there and stare at him, and Louis was going to do dumb things and ad-lib. And he always tried to be dirty—’Ba-bum, up your ass’ and ‘Kiss my ass.’ He’d try to break her up and the band was great. That is what the audience came for night after night after night.”

The act stayed the same and kept working also because Keely could play her part flawlessly night after night, and both men and women in the audience loved the character she portrayed. “Keely played the role assigned to her extremely well,” says Bruce Raeburn. “She was attractive, sexy, and exercised extreme self-control as a poker face while continually under comedic assault by Prima. Imagine withstanding that mugging without cracking up. Meanwhile, she also came across as almost virginal in contrast to his very libidinous antics. She was an accomplished actress as well as a good vocalist, playing cool and aloof to Prima’s hot and agitated flawlessly.”

However, there were about to be many changes offstage.

Louis had attempted sailing again in the summer of 1959. In what could have been seen as a bad omen about his and Keely’s marriage, the results were similar to his failed voyage with Tracelene thirteen years earlier. This time, with Keely, Louis took a $160,000 yacht down the Atlantic coastline and once more grounded the boat. They sat on it, embarrassed, until the coast guard came to their rescue.

There exists a strange photo of the couple taken in May 1960 that hinted all was not well. Louis is standing on the right in a white suit holding his trumpet in his left hand; his mouth is wide open, and he is leering at Keely, standing to his right. She is quite tan and wearing a low-cut white dress. Her expression is disturbing—she is staring straight ahead with what was probably supposed to be passivity or dismissal, but instead she looks genuinely frightened.

Keely maintained to Prima biographer Garry Boulard and others that her husband abruptly began to go out after the Desert Inn shows and spend a lot more time away from their home. Such activities—and she could only guess at half of them—put an increasing strain on the marriage.

“Then all of a sudden—I don’t know, it wasn’t like an overnight thing, I’m sure it wasn’t, but that’s how it appeared to me—he started drinking,” Keely said. “He started smoking. He started gambling. And he started running all over town with different women. Maybe it was a phase he was going through. I didn’t know. But it lasted too long, there was just so much going on, that I wound up sick over it. I tried to talk to him about it and I really don’t think that he wanted to do it. I think it was something, he couldn’t help himself.”

“Whatever happened,” said Joe Segreto in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!,
“it began to affect their life together. He and Keely began to unravel.”

There are several accounts of Prima stepping out on Keely. He had never been much of a drinker, but that did change. There were innuendos in the local press about Louis sampling the nightlife at several casinos. Louis himself refused to speak to reporters. This had been a longstanding policy of his, not to grant interviews and, with the exception of the
Life
magazine profile in 1956 when the exposure was most beneficial, not to invite profiles of his wife and children.

“When you think about it,” muses Mike Weatherford of the
Review-Journal
about Louis’s policy, “if he has the ‘wildest’ show in Las Vegas, it wouldn’t help to keep emphasizing that he was a stay-at-home family man.”

Control freak that Louis was, part of his policy was that if he did do an interview, he had to approve the piece before publication. Even in Las Vegas, very few editors would agree. Louis kept on feeding PR tidbits to the press, but that was different because it was solely his message and the columnists were always hungry for material. As a result, there does not exist a tell-all or mea culpa article about the problems in the Primas’ marriage as would be commonplace today in the media world of Angelina Jolie and Tiger Woods.

Some incidents couldn’t be covered up, however. According to one newspaper account on October 7, 1959, “Singers Louis Prima and Keely Smith were sued in district court today by a collection agent for $1131.39 for clothing sold to the couple earlier this year. The claim states that Miss Smith purchased goods between Apr. 9 and July 6 at Sydney’s Proginals, Inc., costing $1106.71, and that Prima purchased an item for $24.68 on Jan. 26. Also asked for is $350 in fee for Atty. John Sullivan, who prepared the action.” In February 1960, the court found for the plaintiff. Presumably the couple paid the bill.

Whatever her own misbehavior—she has always been close-mouthed about her contributions to the friction between them—Keely blamed Louis for all their problems. She contended many years later, “He was being … not nice. He expected things. He didn’t like to pay bills. It was the case of the star starting to believe that the world revolves around him.”

“I was hearing from the guys that it was bad,” said drummer Paul Ferrara, who heard the gossip back in Al Hirt’s band in New Orleans. “I’m hearing that Louis started screwing around more. I think Louis at that time was still so hungry to make it—like, nothing was ever going to be enough—and so self-obsessed with it, that he started to let his self-discipline go, little by little. For Keely, what did she know about handling this?”