B00C4I7LJE EBOK (10 page)

Karen was right; everything about Las Vegas was easy. The flight took forty-five minutes. When we landed, the airline PSR took Phyllis and Warde out a side gate directly from the plane to the waiting limousine. Las Vegas was used to celebrities.

When we got to the hotel, Karen and I separated the bags.

“I’ll take Phyllis’s up to the suite,” she said. “You get us organized.”

I stopped at the front desk to check us in and get our keys. The manager had already given Phyllis and Warde their keys, but Phyllis wanted Karen or me to have a key to their room as well. Checking us all in was basically a formality and took only a few minutes. While I was at the desk, I made the arrangements for the phone calls as Karen had instructed: all of Phyllis’s calls would come to me. If I was not in my room, then Phyllis would be paged, but I would answer the page. The hotel policy was to have its entertainers paged by name whenever possible for the publicity and to let people know they were there. If no one answered the page, then the messages would be put in my box. (Those were the days before voice mail on hotel phones.) In the evenings, the calls would be put through to the dressing room backstage. There were only a few people whose calls went directly to Phyllis: her children, her agent, her publicist, and her attorney. Once that was settled, I followed the bellman up to our rooms. I had just stepped inside the door when the phone rang. It was Phyllis.

“Are you all settled in?” she asked—her polite way of saying she was ready to work. I would have to unpack later.

Before I left my room, I opened the office bag and took out two dozen scratch pads and a dozen sharpened pencils. I also took four dozen pens—a dozen each of black, blue, red, and green. Phyllis wanted pens and scratch pads always within reach. She expected a note pad and a pen by every phone.

“Nothing is more irritating,” she told me, “than calling someone and have them say, ‘Wait a minute while I get something to write on,’ unless it’s having that person call you and then ask you to wait.”

As soon as I got into the suite I started setting out the pads, pencils, and one pen of each color on every flat surface. The pens were color-coded: black for phone messages, blue for notes relating to work, red to file in her “gag file,” and green for an idea she wanted to keep or expand. She had dozens of these notes in her room, both on the road and at home. How she managed to keep track of everything was a mystery to me. I was not entirely sure that she always did.

While I did that, Warde called their favorite restaurant for dinner reservations between shows.

“Not on opening night,” Phyllis said when she heard him making plans for that evening, and Warde hastily changed the reservation.

Phyllis didn’t actually want to work; she just wanted to be sure everything was in place. I checked the cards on the dozens of red roses that filled the room. They were from her agent, publicist, and a couple of friends. Later, I would write thank-you notes for her to sign. I didn’t sign them because Phyllis would want to read what I’d written and, besides that, she never minded signing personal correspondence. “That’s what makes it personal,” she told me.

Rehearsal was at 5:00, and Phyllis told me to come back to the suite at a quarter to. That just gave me time to do my own unpacking. Before I left to go back upstairs, I called Karen’s room but got no answer.

As I arrived at the suite, Phyllis called out, “Warde, are you coming?”

“Be there in a minute, Ada,” he answered.

Ada was Warde’s pet name for her. It was her middle name and as far as I knew, he was the only one who called her that.

Phyllis glanced at me as we waited for Warde. “I’m going to show you the back way to the dressing room.” It turned out to be through the kitchen, which rather than being filled with wonderful odors of exotic food, smelled like wet garbage and cauliflower. Yuck!

Karen had finished laying out the accessories by the time we walked in. Dog collars, false eyelashes, and cigarette holders spread across white towels to the left of the mirror. On the right were the jars of makeup, and in the middle a clock that looked like a very large pocket watch. Phyllis opened the top drawer and I could see her gloves, all arranged in pairs by color.

Over the speaker in the dressing room, we could hear John Davidson, Phyllis’s opening act, rehearsing. (After the fiasco at the Holiday House in Pittsburgh, she never let Warde be her opening act again.)

Phyllis didn’t have much to rehearse. In fact, she didn’t even have to be there, but being a professional, she was. Warde passed out the music to the orchestra and explained which was her play-on and play-off music. He did her introduction from backstage, then the band played some snappy music as she dashed out.

Phyllis talked briefly to the light man about the overhead banks of lights. “All warm colors,” she told him. The mix of yellow, red, and pink were flattering to the skin. (One time Warde insisted that blue was a warm color, but nobody paid attention.) The lights were set and the only thing about them that changed was the “travel spot,” which followed her. Once the curtain came down behind her, she would be in the spotlight all by herself for forty minutes. At the end, the band would play her exit music and keep it up long enough for her to take a bow, then she’d dash offstage, and that would be it. While she was actually performing, one of the stagehands would have to “page” the microphone cord, keeping it fairly taut so she wouldn’t trip on it as she pranced across the stage (in the days before wireless mikes).

As soon as rehearsal was finished, Warde and Phyllis went through the kitchen and back to the suite. Karen was itching to play the slots, so she dragged me into the casino. That was the first time in my adult life I had been to Las Vegas, and I was excited by the whole atmosphere. I had been to the Riviera many years before when we had taken a family trip to Chicago. We had stopped in Las Vegas long enough to see an actual casino. My parents still had a picture of me standing by the pool at this very hotel.

As Karen flagged down a change girl and got a roll of quarters, I strolled around, taking in the action; it was early enough that the casino wasn’t packed, and I could easily stand and watch over the shoulders of people at the blackjack tables, and watch the fast and furious betting at the craps tables. What really interested me, though, was roulette. It reminded me of an elegant weekend I’d spent in Swaziland when I was in the Foreign Service. I decided that if I did any gambling at all, it would be roulette.

Phyllis did two shows a night and after the second show, which ended at one-thirty in the morning, I went with Karen to gamble. I watched her feed quarters into a slot machine for a few minutes, then sidled up to the roulette table. A sheik was there—an honest-to-goodness Arabian sheik. He wore a flowing robe from which he pulled a series of hundred-dollar bills. I was so fascinated that I changed a ten-dollar bill into chips just so I could stand next to him and watch. I bet a dollar a spin and he bet $100 a spin. I couldn’t tell if he had a system, but whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working. I’d never seen anyone lose money so consistently. I’d started with $10 and left with $12.
Whoopee
. I walked away a winner! At least until the following night.

The casino had lovely chandeliers, and Phyllis told me that the Riviera and the Desert Inn were the two casinos that catered to the “high rollers.”

As I walked around enjoying the action, I couldn’t help thinking,
I’m Phyllis Diller’s personal secretary. I’m part of what makes all this happen.
It was like having a delicious secret.

The shows went perfectly and the absolute professionalism impressed me. Orchestra members wore tuxedos or black cocktail dresses (depending on their sex, of course), and the stagehands, who were also dressed in black, worked quickly and quietly.

“Why are they all wearing black?” I asked Karen. “Is it like a uniform?”

“Because if they ever get in the audience sight line they won’t be obvious.” Once she’d said it, of course, it made sense.

I didn’t have a thing to do, so the stage manager, Bob, let me sit in his office while Phyllis performed. He impressed me by always being one jump ahead of whatever was going on. No wonder Karen liked to work in Las Vegas—it was virtually a holiday. Besides that, Bob was a hunk and a nice guy, too.

On the second day, the phone rang in my room and a lady asked for Phyllis.

“She isn’t in at the moment. This is her secretary, may I help?” (My standard response.)

“Would you ask her to give me a call,” the lady replied. “My name is Totie Fields.” I jotted it down and repeated the number she gave me.

“Will she know who you are, or can I tell her what this is in reference to?” I asked. I’d learned my lesson from the milk commercial. I wasn’t taking any incomplete messages to Phyllis.

There was a slight pause. “I’m a friend of Phyllis’s” came the polite reply.

“I’ll give her the message as soon as she returns.”

When I went up to the suite later that afternoon and handed over the note, I apologized for the lack of details. “I couldn’t find out what she wanted,” I said, “but she said you know her.”

Phyllis looked at me and started to laugh. That laugh is great onstage but rather overpowering in a closed space. Finally she caught her breath and reached for the
What’s On
entertainment guide. She thumbed through it until she came to a full-page ad for the International Hotel. It read in half-inch letters, “The Las Vegas International Hotel is proud to present . . .” And in inch-high letters, “TOTIE FIELDS!”

“Oh,” I said feebly. By the time I had absorbed the fact that it must’ve been the same Totie Fields, Phyllis had her on the phone.

“Totie! It’s good to hear from you.” Pause. “I got your message.” Laugh. “New secretary. Her name is Robin.” Pause. “No, no. It’s just that I’ve trained her to think I’m the only comedienne in the world!”

Prolonged boisterous laughter from both ends of the phone.

Well, live and learn.

Totie asked Phyllis and Warde to dinner in her new house.

“What can I bring?” Phyllis asked. “Really? You don’t even have furniture?”

As soon as she hung up the phone, Phyllis began putting on her “uniform.”

“Call Karen,” she said, “and get the car. Come on, Warde, we’re going shopping. Totie just moved into a new house. She told me the only thing I need to bring is something to sit on. We need to find some secondhand shops.”

The hotel provided Phyllis with a car. Karen got to drive. I sat up front.

It wasn’t long before we were crawling along Main Street past Al’s Used Furniture, Bi-Rite Furniture, and the A-Z Mart, all of which had merchandise displayed on the sidewalk in front. Phyllis decided the last one looked promising and Karen maneuvered the Lincoln Continental into a space relatively near the curb. Phyllis and Warde hopped out and I followed behind like a lady-in-waiting, carrying the money. Karen opted to stay with the car. She had been on those shopping sprees before.

After they looked through the store, Phyllis pulled me aside.

“Find out how much that chair is,” she whispered rather loudly as she pointed. “If they know it’s for me, they’ll jack up the price.”

I figured that horse was already out of the barn, but I did as instructed.

“It’s only twenty-five dollars,” the man said, trying hard not to look at Phyllis and Warde as they tried equally hard to be inconspicuous.

Twenty-five dollars didn’t seem very “only” for an obviously used straight-back chair, no matter who was buying it.

While that was going on, Phyllis wandered through the rest of the shop and found a lamp that was “perfect” (for what I wasn’t sure) and a large picture of Jesus in a solid-looking frame. She pointed out the objects of her desire, and I paid for them as she returned to the car. Warde actually made himself useful by carrying the lamp and helping to get the chair stowed. We drove sedately back to the hotel with the rather large chair protruding from the trunk.

“Have the bellmen bring everything up to the suite,” Phyllis instructed as she and Warde alighted. If I felt somewhat odd following a parade of three bellmen, one carrying a chair, one a lamp, and the other a nearly life-size portrait of Jesus, I felt even odder that evening as I followed another bellman through the casino carrying the chair, now festooned with bright red ribbons that Phyllis had taken off the fruit baskets in her suite.

The bellman had been reluctant to take the chair from the room, insinuating that I must be stealing hotel property. There had been a change of shifts since our shopping expedition, so he’d not seen the earlier procession. I managed to convince him, however, that the Riviera Hotel certainly wouldn’t furnish its suites with obviously secondhand furniture. He checked it carefully before he agreed to take it down to the car.

Of all the bellmen in the hotel, that one in particular managed to convey his disapproval of Phyllis, me, entertainment, and gambling in general, all without saying a word. Unfortunately, he also showed up two weeks later when we called for help in packing. Neither the lamp nor the large picture would fit in a suitcase. When he arrived and I had explained we needed to have them packed for shipping, he scrutinized both objects, fixed me with a baleful stare, then looked once more at the picture.

“That is a beautiful picture of our Lord,” he intoned in an undertaker’s voice.

“Yes. Yes, it is.” I hoped he hadn’t noticed, but knew he had, that Phyllis had “autographed” the picture for her publicist. In a bold, black scrawl she had written: “To Frank Lieberman, who made me what I am today.”

That happened two weeks later, though. That night all I cared about was getting the damned chair delivered and trying not to look as foolish as I felt trailing the surly bellman past all the elegantly gowned ladies and besuited gentlemen. And Phyllis had made it worse by giving me specific instructions to see to it personally that the chair was delivered to Totie Fields’ dressing room.

“Don’t just leave it with a bellman,” she told me. “I want you to make sure it gets where it’s going. If you leave it with someone, Totie might not get it for days.”