That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (5 page)

Lombardo provided a temptation that proved to be too strong. He and his band, which included two of his brothers, Lebe and Carm, arrived in New Orleans for several concerts as part of the 1934 Mardi Gras celebrations. Their father had also emigrated from Sicily, but to London, Canada. Guy’s band had become one of the more popular ones in the United States, too, and this was its debut in the Big Easy.

“Everywhere, especially on Bourbon Street, there were small clubs and in them were fine musicians,” Guy Lombardo recalled in
Auld Acquaintance,
his autobiography. “It was springtime and warm enough so that the doors of the clubs were open. Up and down the street, sounds poured out, sweet, penetrating, Dixieland and improvised jazz. One night, walking alone, I heard the sound of a trumpet, different and more piercing than any I had experienced. I walked into the tiny club, which was almost empty. On the bandstand was an olive-skinned trumpet player, hardly more than a boy. He was leading a four-man group and a girl vocalist sat beside him. They were putting as much into the show as if the place overflowed with patrons. And the trumpet player so impressed me I ran back to the hotel and got Carm and Lebe out of bed.”

He dragged his brothers back to the club, and they were also entranced by Louis Prima. Playing a trump card to visitors from out of town, he invited the Lombardo brothers to his house for dinner the next night. They chatted amiably with Papa Anthony while sampling dish after dish of Angelina’s cooking.

“We came to hear Louis every night we could and I finally asked him if he would like to come to New York,” wrote Lombardo. “I was sure I could find a job for him; I hadn’t heard this type of music in the big town. I had one place in mind for him, a well-known nightspot on Fifty-second Street, Leon and Eddie’s.”

It didn’t seem to matter to Louis what Louise thought about a move to New York. Indeed, she might have even assumed that she and her daughter would go with her husband. But as far as Louis was concerned, he was going alone. The only question was whether his mother would let him go at all. His wife and child were nothing compared to the formidable Angelina.

It took months to win her over. She thought Louis should be content with a life in New Orleans that appeared enjoyable and increasingly successful and that he should stay put with a wife who could give her more grandchildren. And, of course, Angelina couldn’t stand the thought of being without the apple of her eye. But as the summer turned into fall, she knew she had to let him go. His talent, energy, and showmanship needed a bigger stage.

As Louis Armstrong had done twelve years earlier, with a case carrying a new trumpet under one arm, in September 1934 Louis Prima hopped a train north and left his family, his wife and child, and his friends behind. He was only twenty-three, yet he had the confidence to believe that it would not take him years of struggle to achieve fame.

At first, it wasn’t an easy transition to New York City. When Guy Lombardo had returned there, for his orchestra’s debut at the Waldorf-Astoria, he went to see Eddie Davis, co-owner of Leon and Eddie’s. Davis thought he could use a five-piece band, and he was willing to believe that maybe there weren’t already enough trumpet players from New Orleans around.

When Prima finally arrived, Lombardo took him to see Davis. After a few minutes of talking, Davis took Lombardo aside and told him that the union would not allow him to fire the five-piece band he already had, so there was no room at the club for Prima’s group. Lombardo was very embarrassed. To make up for it, he booked Prima and his band members into rooms at the Waldorf and asked a friend to try to find work for them at other clubs. After the gig at the New York hotel, the Guy Lombardo Orchestra left for an engagement at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles.

It wasn’t until weeks later that Davis told Lombardo the truth: the club owner hadn’t hired Prima because, he said, “I thought he was colored, and I just couldn’t take a chance on losing customers.”

Lombardo later explained, “The management of hotels and the night-club owners simply refused to break the color line, fearing financial consequences. Many of the best bands in the country were black—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson—but job opportunities were difficult to find outside of Harlem. Eddie Davis, on first seeing olive-skinned and swarthy Louis Prima and knowing that he came from New Orleans, had simply assumed he was a black man.”

Prima probably didn’t think so at the time, but he was a rather fortunate man. For four years, more than half the musicians in the country had been out of work, which would not have been a good environment for a young man with a horn just arrived in New York from New Orleans. But in 1934 the effects of the Depression were mitigated to some extent by the repeal of Prohibition the year before. Nightclubs didn’t have to hide in back alleys hoping that customers would come in to drink bootleg whiskey. Now they could serve alcohol as legitimate operations that also provided music.

“The repeal of Prohibition at the end of 1933 radically altered the character of Manhattan’s night life for the privileged few who could still afford one,” wrote Ross Firestone in
Swing, Swing, Swing,
his biography of Benny Goodman. “The speakeasies closed their doors and immediately reopened as nightclubs, some of which—El Morocco, The Stork Club, ‘21’—affected an air of genteel exclusivity that belied their less reputable origins.”

Because of Lombardo, who felt responsible for Prima uprooting himself (though he was more than ready to go), Louis was able to get gigs here and there so he could at least eat and afford a hotel room. In addition, a low-budget company, Brunswick, invited Prima to bring his five-piece group to its studio to record several songs.

The songs that came out of the Brunswick sessions made Prima only a few bucks, but he received some exposure as a bandleader and arranger as well as a composer and trumpet player. More important, the sessions caused Prima to hire Pee Wee Russell to play clarinet in his band, which was called Louis Prima and His New Orleans Gang. Sidney Arodin, a New Orleans clarinetist who had been part of the Gang, had just joined forces with another New Orleans trumpet player, Wingy Manone, and Louis was delighted to find Russell, who had spent some time in Leon Prima’s band, available. Until Prima recruited Sam Butera twenty years later, Russell was the best sideman he had.

“I was fortunate in having Pee Wee Russell with me,” Prima told an interviewer. “[He was] the most fabulous musical mind I have known. He never looked at a note. But the second time I played a lick, he’d play along with me in harmony. The guy seemed to read my mind.”

Charles Ellsworth Russell Jr. had been born twenty-eight years earlier in St. Louis. Like Prima, he played the violin as a child. But when he was twelve, and the Russell family was living in Oklahoma, his father took him to a show featuring the Louisiana Five, a New Orleans band with Alcide “Yellow” Nunez on clarinet. The next day he begged his parents for the instrument. By the time he met Prima in 1934, Russell was considered second only to Benny Goodman in clarinet players among most critics, if he was considered second at all.

“No jazz musician has ever played with the same daring and nakedness and intuition,” wrote Whitney Balliett in a
New Yorker
profile of Russell. “He took wild improvisational chances, and when he found himself above the abyss, he simply turned in another direction, invariably hitting firm ground.”

For the next several months, Prima made his first classic records. Recorded in one take was “The Lady in Red” featuring a trumpet-versus-clarinet duel, which would become a trademark of Prima and Russell’s work together for the next two years.

Perhaps most fortunate for Prima was the emergence of Fifty-second Street as a jazz mecca. Leon and Eddie’s at 33 West Fifty-second Street was joined between Fifth and Sixth Avenues by Jack and Charlie’s 21 Club and the Onyx Club as the area evolved into “Swing Street.”

“In its flourishing decade (1935–45), The Street served as the launching pad for more singers, more hit songs and more instrumentalists than any of the country’s entertainment centers—Rush Street in Chicago, Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Beale Street in Memphis, and Central Avenue or The Strip in Los Angeles,” wrote Arnold Shaw in
The Street That Never Slept.

It was a new nightspot, the Famous Door, that put Prima on the musical map as a jazz artist and quickly established him as one of the hottest acts in New York. Jack Colt, a businessman from Connecticut, found a few investors—among them bandleaders Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, trombonist and future pop-eyed comedian Jerry Colonna, and composer Gordon Jenkins. Colt also reached into his own pocket to come up with $2,800 to open a club one door west of Leon and Eddie’s, at 35 West Fifty-second Street. The concept was to provide a place for other musicians to come and listen to the latest jazz when their own gigs were done. The signatures of the owners on the door next to the bar, not the front door, were what gave the club its name.

In March 1935, Colt hired Louis Prima and His New Orleans Gang, which by this point was a well-rehearsed band, with Prima and Russell pushing each other during their dueling solos. Opening night—which, fortuitously, was the night after the Onyx Club up the street burned down—was at first a disaster. Only a handful of customers showed up. Prima was not used to big crowds in clubs in New York anyway, so he and his band went ahead and performed as though they were at Carnegie Hall. At eleven o’clock, Colt was too depressed to stay and watch, and he went for a walk.

While he was gone, several things happened: (1) The music of Prima’s band wafting out onto Fifty-second Street attracted people out strolling after dinner or the theater; (2) as originally intended, musicians who had finished their own shows were now on the prowl for something different; and (3), as people gathered at the front of the club, other people saw them and, not wanting to miss out on whatever was going on, joined them. The crowd swelled.

Colt returned to find patrons literally fighting to get in and his bartenders borrowing booze from neighboring clubs to meet the suddenly daunting demand.

“The Famous Door caught on that first night, with the customers it was opened for, and caught on soon thereafter with the customers who were never expected,” wrote Robert Sylvester in
No Cover Charge.
“Society came. Broadway came. Everybody came. The Door brought to first fame such arch musicians and singers as The Ink Spots, Bunny Berigan, Red Norvo, Max Kaminsky, Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Bobby Hackett, Wingy Manone, Joe Marsala and dozens more…. Swing Street was in business.”

But first among the first was Louis Prima. He and Russell—paid sixty and forty dollars a week, respectively—and their sidemen became a sensation. “When Prima plays there on Fifty-second Street, it starts this big breakthrough, this avalanche of interest in Fifty-second Street, and it really establishes that venue as the street of jazz as it became, and it also established Prima as kind of a trendy in thing at that point,” reported jazz historian Will Friedwald in the documentary
Louis Prima: The Wildest!
“That’s Prima’s first burst of fame.”

Like a burst of fireworks, Prima and his act in New York City were colorful and thrilling—and just about as brief.

Prima already rehearsed relentlessly when he was hit with sudden success. Throughout his career he drove himself and his band hard, dictating every arrangement and dance move, though later on, with the Las Vegas act, he allowed for improvisation onstage. He made sure that the people playing behind him received credit, but they had to keep earning it. One time Pee Wee Russell was late for a rehearsal, and for the next week onstage at the Famous Door, Prima introduced everyone in his band except him.

Night after night, Louis Prima and His New Orleans Gang packed the club, helped by items in newspaper columns by Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, and others. For the Famous Door gig he had created a slogan, “Let’s have a jubilee!” He adapted a song for his band with that title, written by W. Alexander Hill and Irving Mills. It further enhanced his reputation as a flamboyant showman that, to close the club at 3:30
A.M.,
Prima had the band swing into “Let’s Have a Jubilee,” which had also opened the show, and in New Orleans style he led them off the stage, through the audience, and out the door to parade down Fifty-second Street.

Eddie Davis across the street had plenty of time to regret his decision to reject Prima, but he was consoled by the cliché “A rising tide raises all boats.” With more people flocking to Fifty-second Street to check out the new nightlife sensation, there were plenty of patrons to go around. If you couldn’t get into the fifty-seat Famous Door, you could just step into Leon and Eddie’s.

However, many women wouldn’t settle for another club. They adored Louis Prima. He adored them back for his entire life. “Apparently, according to all eyewitness testimony, Prima was a ladies’ man for his whole career,” said Friedwald. “He had five wives and Lord knows how many affiliations, as it were.”

“Louis was the kind of guy who could engender a little romance with the ladies, you know?” Joe Segreto said in the Prima documentary. “He was a big, good-looking guy, and he was a star. Louis caused a lot of excitement with the audience, and I guess some of that spilled into the interest after the show.”

According to Sam Weiss, a well-known club owner at the time, “When [Prima] shouted, ‘Let’s have a jubilee,’ a lot of those sex-starved dames would practically have an orgasm. I think they thought he was shouting, ‘Let’s have an orgy,’ in that hoarse, horny voice of his.”

“I actually saw women pass out,” reported the guitar player Frank Federico, his New Orleans friend who rejoined Prima in New York. “Just blow their top in the Famous Door there in New York.”

“What Louis was bringing was a kind of special verve that he had, not only as an instrumentalist but as a vocalist particularly,” says Bruce Raeburn. “He had his own style.”