That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (19 page)

Another kind of work that Louis did was not onstage or in a recording studio. He knew the value of good public relations. He sent items to the reporters and columnists who covered Las Vegas entertainment for the press. One that was especially self-serving appeared in
Fabulous Las Vegas
right after Keely’s much-praised appearance on television: “Keely Smith and Louis Prima ‘stole the show,’ when they appeared on the Dean Martin TViewer.”

Louis took out print ads, even when “The Wildest” wasn’t performing, such as one that ran in December 1957: “Season’s Greetings. To All Our Wonderful Friends—We’ll Be Seeing You Real Soon—Louis Prima * Keely Smith. Us too: Toni Elizabeth & Luanne Francis.” Their second daughter’s middle name was a tribute to Sinatra, which fueled some speculation about Keely’s relationship with the crooner.

Nineteen fifty-eight would be the most successful year ever for Louis and Keely professionally. Personally, their love story was going well too, but there were indications that perhaps Keely was giving so much to the relationship as well as the act that she wasn’t leaving enough for herself.

The party line since they had first met was that Louis called the shots. Keely continued to see herself as a small-town girl from Virginia who had gotten lucky with Louis, and being a headliner in Las Vegas hadn’t changed that. As she told the publication
TV Reporter,
“Louis is the boss. Everybody calls him the ‘Chief’ [and] he’s strictly boss at home and in business. It doesn’t really matter to me—when a woman really loves someone then she’s happy, his way.”

Looking back years later at her life at that time with Louis, Keely said, “I was in love. He was my husband. That’s what we did. At daytime, I stayed home with the kids and Louis went out and played golf.”

To the
Los Angeles Times
in the March 1958 interview, she said, “Happiness is the key to everything. And I’m a very happy woman.” Later in the article: “ ‘I am a happy woman,’ she will say over and over. ‘I am happy because I enjoy my work and I love my husband.’ ”

And toward the end of the interview, when asked about the possibility of a solo career, she said, “One thing I know for certain, Keely Smith is nothing without Louis Prima.”

One could argue that this was all she would allow herself to say for publication, but from everything Keely has said since, she probably did indeed mean every word she said. So while there was still a love story, it seemed to have become more one-sided as Louis focused on the act, related business opportunities, and apparently golf. Later, as the marriage foundered, it would be seen how the nature of the relationship almost killed Keely.

From most accounts, Louis was still a homebody, when time allowed. He had not yet bought into the swinger lifestyle made famous thanks to Frank Sinatra and his crowd.

What became known as the Rat Pack, the handful of entertainers and their entourage who would forever be identified with Las Vegas, originated in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s. The group was called the Holmby Hills Rat Pack because that is where two of the founders, Judy Garland and Sid Luft, lived, and they liked to entertain their friends, who became members and auxiliary members—Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the leaders of the pack, and Frank Sinatra, writer Nathaniel Benchley, agent Swifty Lazar, actor David Niven, restaurateur Mike Romanoff, composer Jimmy Van Heusen, director George Cukor, and actors Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The group was dedicated to drinking, laughing, and staying up late without caring what people said about them, and that didn’t change over the years.

In the December 15, 1955, edition of the
New York Herald Tribune,
Joe Hyams wrote, “The Holmby Hills Rat Pack held its first annual meeting last night at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and elected officers for the coming year. Named to executive positions were: Frank Sinatra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice-president; Lauren Bacall, den mother; Humphrey Bogart, rat-in-charge-of public relations; Irving Lazar, recording secretary and treasurer.”

Bogart was diagnosed with throat cancer in February 1956, and he died the following January, at age fifty-seven. Before long, Frank replaced Bogie as the head of what was called the Clan and came very close to doing the same as Bacall’s husband. The home base of the group began to shift to Las Vegas.

The Strip’s lore has it that the Rat Pack as a stage act began in October 1958, when, during her opening night show at the Sands, Judy Garland invited Sinatra and Dean Martin to join her onstage. They did twenty minutes of singing and joking, and the audience loved it.

Items about the Rat Pack—Sinatra changed the name from the Clan so as not to subject Sammy Davis Jr. to the obvious racial connotations—and their impromptu performances that included plenty of drinking and off-color jokes meant more space devoted to Las Vegas in the gossip columns and celebrity magazines. If you were a star seen there, it was reported everywhere. The city was the place stars were married or announced engagements, or in some cases revealed that there was a relationship.

After producer Mike Todd died, his widow, Elizabeth Taylor, was consoled by Eddie Fisher, who had been a close friend of Todd’s. The fact that the friendship between Taylor and Fisher had blossomed into romance could fly under the radar in Los Angeles, for a while, anyway. But it was a different story in Nevada. Six months after Todd’s death, Fisher was scheduled to begin an eight-week engagement in Las Vegas, at the Tropicana Hotel. Taylor decided to accompany him for her first public appearance since becoming a widow.

“Opening-night audiences are usually packed with friends and relatives and dedicated fans,” recalled Fisher in his autobiography. “When I announced that Elizabeth was in the room that night—as if anybody hadn’t noticed her entrance—the audience greeted her with affection. She was the beautiful survivor of a tragedy, the young widow left with an infant, the queen of show business. Everybody loved Elizabeth Taylor. It was a highly emotional moment for everyone in that room.”

And a very public one for the couple. Fisher obtained a divorce from Debbie Reynolds and became Taylor’s third husband. Only a couple of years later, he was the one being cast aside as Taylor took up with Richard Burton during the filming of
Cleopatra.
Fisher licked his wounds with a well-paid return to Las Vegas.

Bolstered ever further by being the head of the Rat Pack, Sinatra was viewed as the undisputed king of Las Vegas. Yet there was one person above all others he obeyed: Sam Giancana. After Al Capone was hauled off to federal prison, Giancana killed his way (it is estimated that there were two hundred notches in his leather belt) to the top of the Chicago mob. By the dawn of 1958, he rivaled Carlo Gambino of New York, the so-called boss of bosses, as the most powerful man in the American Mafia. He controlled all the numbers, prostitution, loan sharking, and other illegal pursuits in the Chicago area.

He enjoyed branching out, overseeing various crooked activities in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Miami Beach, Phoenix, and Central and South America. And, of course, Las Vegas. His points in the Riviera, Stardust, and Desert Inn meant millions of dollars of cash flowing in like a flash flood in a Nevada arroyo that didn’t stop flashing. He was simply “Sam” to Sinatra, Mr. Giancana to everyone else. Because of FBI surveillance, Sinatra had to hide Giancana in the Sands when the mobster visited Vegas.

Frank and Sam were good friends who enjoyed partying together and sleeping with some of the same women, and they benefited each other. It was no secret that Sinatra was under Giancana’s protection, so he was untouchable everywhere he went. Giancana liked the cachet of having the country’s biggest star at his side or a phone call away. The only person Frank really had to fear was Sam himself. If he refused a request to perform (sometimes gratis) at one of Giancana’s clubs, or tried to sleep with one of the boss’s women without permission, or was even thought to be talking to law enforcement at any level, Sinatra knew he was a dead man.

Unlike during the days of the Famous Door in New York, there apparently are no stories floating around of connections between Louis and Keely and the mob in Las Vegas. As a mostly stay-at-home mom offstage, Keely stayed somewhat isolated. Surely Louis rubbed up against mobsters who had financial interests in the Sahara or were simply patrons in the lounge. But it seems that he was unaffected by their presence.

“The Wildest” probably performed at private parties for top Mafia men, perhaps because of their friendship with Sinatra and the mobsters behind Milton Prell, and it was a smart thing not to say no or cause trouble. (Everyone on the Strip knew the story of how Joe E. Lewis had had his throat cut in 1927 by Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, an Al Capone lieutenant, for refusing to sign a contract with a Capone nightclub.) Otherwise, though, Louis and his band went about their business, not needing the mob to get them gigs or make them more famous. The Sicilian heritage that he and Sam Butera shared aided them among the gangsters, but for the most part the act had a life of its own by then, and among American audiences it was about to become much bigger.

Debbie Reynolds bounced back from her breakup with Eddie Fisher to become an even more favored star as an actress during the next few years—
How the West Was Won
and
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
were hits at the box office—and as a stage act. With the latter, she learned a lot from watching the performers in Las Vegas. With and without Fisher, she ran with the Rat Pack along the Strip. One of her favorite shows was Louis Prima and Keely Smith.

“Everybody after work went to hang out where Louis and Keely were,” Reynolds remembers. “No matter what hotel you were booked into, the Sands was the first place to go because of Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and of course Frank, and then it was time to hit the Casbar Lounge to see Louis and Keely. They were just incredible performers, and Sam and the band seemed to have more energy than anyone else, and this was at four and five in the morning.”

Reynolds became good friends with the couple offstage, and the many shows of theirs she saw and her talent for mimicry would result in a big favor for Louis a few years later.

The pace of performing six shows a week until dawn and caring for two daughters, recording in the studio, and taking side trips for lucrative gigs elsewhere—without the expediency of quick journeys because of Louis’s fear of flying—as well as what was becoming an emotionally one-sided relationship with her husband all took their toll on Keely. (In the 1970 interview, Louis claimed he did not fear flying but that “the plane doesn’t move once it’s in the air. That’s why I prefer to travel by train, because I can feel it going someplace.”)

In late March 1958, while onstage in the Casbar Lounge, she almost fainted and couldn’t finish the show. The next day she traveled to Los Angeles to be admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. “Presumably, to undergo minor surgery,” the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
speculated in the absence of any other information.

But when Keely was released, the pace continued. The
New York Times
reported on May 22, “Louis Prima and Keely Smith and their musical group known as the Witnesses will appear regularly on Milton Berle’s new television show in the fall.” (This was premature, as Prima and Berle got into an acrimonious spat over the financial terms of the contract that kept the gossip columnists busy for a while.) Two days earlier, “The Wildest” had returned to the Sahara for a new run, replacing the Mary Kaye Trio, which wound its way north to Harrah’s in Reno.

Louis and Keely were now recording almost constantly, putting more strain on her. When he had first made the deal with Capitol Records in 1956, Louis was already thinking ahead to helping Keely embark on a solo recording career.

“When Capitol Records came along, and we were at the Sahara and we had gotten so hot, they wanted to sign the group, and Louis said, ‘OK, but you have to give Keely her own individual contract,’ “ she recalled years later in an interview. “Their response was no. So Louis said, ‘Well, then you can’t have the group.’ About two months later they came back and said, ‘OK, we’ll take her.’ ”

Given that Louis had a large ego, was a self-promoter, and had to be the Chief, one might wonder why Keely as a solo act was important to him. Allowing him some credit, Louis loved his wife and was impressed by her talent. Just as likely, if not more likely, was that this was another challenge for the restless bandleader, and any success that Keely encountered would reflect well on him.

When the time came to make her first album, in November 1957, Keely and Louis and Voyle Gilmore, the executive who had signed them, began choosing songs. Gilmore called one of them a “pretty song” but doubted it would be a hit: “I Wish You Love.” It had been written as “Que Reste-til de Nos Amours” by the French composer Charles Trenet in 1955.

After listening to it, Keely told Louis, “Babe, I’ll do any eleven songs y’all want, but let me sing the French song.”

Gilmore said, “Well, that’s not going to amount to anything. That’s just a pretty song.”

“Man, if she wants to sing the French song,” Louis declared, “she’s going to sing the French song.”

She did. It became the title track of her debut album, which was arranged by Nelson Riddle, who had been lent to Louis and Keely by Sinatra. In the Grammy Awards for 1958, Keely was nominated in the Best Female Vocal category for that song, which had been a national hit. She lost out to the singer who had been one of her two favorites to listen to on the radio back in Norfolk, Ella Fitzgerald.

Also featured on the disc were “Fools Rush In,” “When Your Lover Has Gone,” and “When Day Is Done.” She said, “Every one of those arrangements is a Nelson Riddle arrangement. That is not a normal procedure for Louis Prima. He always had say-so over everything. But I think because Nelson was Sinatra’s arranger, Louis decided not to try to tell this man what to do, just go ahead and write. Those ideas came from his head, not Louis’s.”