That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (6 page)

In addition to being in close proximity to women, success for Prima meant rubbing elbows with mobsters.

“The reality of the situation, particularly as it affected jazz musicians between 1880–1940, requires that these hitherto unpublicized admirers and well-wishers be discussed for what they were and what they did,” wrote Ronald Morris in
Wait Until Dark,
his study of the nightclub scene in New York. “I am referring to that legion of underworld characters known in the Broadway vernacular as mobsters and racketeers. I am also referring to their sponsorship of jazz, an activity without which the artists themselves would have shriveled up and died.”

Prima was an especially attractive draw for mobsters. He was of fully Sicilian descent, and looked it. He and his group were one of the hottest acts in town, and he was an entertainer on his way up. Yet there is nothing to indicate that Prima courted gangsters or wanted their approval or even attention. In fact, he had a few reported run-ins with mob tough guys, and this may have been a reason why he left New York abruptly for Los Angeles. One, according to Robert Sylvester, took place at the Famous Door when a hit man known as Pretty Boy Amberg slugged Prima because he didn’t play a requested tune. Most musicians, white as well as black, knew that Duke Ellington had been the victim of a kidnapping attempt in 1931 and that he carried a .38 revolver whenever he was not onstage.

From his days of playing in clubs in Chicago, Russell was even more familiar with the underworld. He claimed to have repaired tommy guns for mobsters and disposed of pistols for them in Lake Michigan. There must have been some truth to his assertions about close ties to the mob. According to several accounts, Prima and Russell were confronted one night by a couple of men with knives who demanded protection money. Russell contacted Lucky Luciano, who dispatched Amberg and a chauffeur to drive the two musicians from their hotels to the Famous Door and back after the show. Prima and Russell were not approached again.

Only a year after Prima was not hired to play at Leon and Eddie’s because of the belief that he was black, Prima’s skin color gave him an advantage over many other musicians in New York—he was welcome in both of the jazz hubs in the city. He had quickly become royalty on Fifty-second Street, but he and his band were embraced uptown, too. The area in and around Harlem boasted such jazz and dance music venues as the Plantation Club, Kit Kat Club, 101 Club, Hoofer’s Club, Bert Hall’s Rhythm Club, the Cave, Brandy Horse, and others. Ellington, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway were the bandleaders mixed audiences wanted to see.

The publication
Billboard
even referred to Prima and his “jam band” as a smaller version of “a hot Negro orchestra.” As he had wanted to do as a young teen, Prima was now dancing to the sound he loved, and he was the one creating it with the best sidemen he’d ever had. He sang and blew his horn as he jumped and strutted around the stage, hot jive movements that no audience would see Benny Goodman or Guy Lombardo or any white bandleader do, but Cab Calloway would. As Mick Jagger would do thirty years later when the Rolling Stones burst on the scene, Louis Prima sang and moved like a black entertainer filled with the combined spirits of jazz, blues, and pop.

One woman in particular set her cap for Prima; she apparently adored him. But what intrigued him was that she had a lot of talent and was already far from just a face in the crowd. Martha Raye (born Margy Reed, from Butte, Montana) would later become known for musical comedy, and in her TV years in the 1960s and ‘70s she adopted the persona of a big-mouthed, brassy broad. But in the mid-1930s she was an aspiring actress and talented jazz singer. She became infatuated with the act at the Famous Door and attended dozens of shows.

“To me, Martha Raye was a great singer with a natural feel for improvisation,” Arnold Shaw quoted Prima in
The Street That Never Slept.
“If she had stuck to singing, she would have been a great one.”

As it was, she was stuck on Prima, who, like Raye, would also be criticized as his career progressed for choosing musical comedy over straight jazz. (They would also share the dubious distinction of having twelve spouses between them.) They were believed to be an item offstage, but what made the newspapers were the reports of their impromptu pairings on the Famous Door stage. When Louis spotted her at a table he introduced her to the audience, who demanded that she join the band.

While the Depression still held a grip on the United States, in New York City it was nonetheless a great time to be a musician, or at least a popular one. In 1919, when Prohibition began and many musicians had yet to emigrate north, there were four jazz clubs in New York. By the time Prima headlined at the Famous Door, there were thirty-five such clubs.

Yet, for the restless Prima, it was already time to go.

Prima and his band continued to record for the Brunswick label during their Famous Door engagement. In May 1935, when they cut a new version of “The Lady in Red,” a highlight in addition to the dueling between Louis’s trumpet and Pee Wee’s clarinet was Prima’s Armstrong-inspired scat singing. Also recorded at the time were “Chinatown” and “Chasing Shadows.” All three became hits that summer across the country, which, along with an appearance he and Raye made on Rudy Vallee’s national radio show, brought Louis Prima and His New Orleans Gang to the attention of people on the West Coast.

It might have seemed like too much of a career risk for Prima to leave New York. Jack Colt had given him raises to keep him at the Famous Door. The Brunswick sessions allowed him to record his own compositions as well as standards, and the records were selling. Walter Winchell and other newspaper columnists continued to write about him regularly. He was only twenty-four, and there was plenty of time to become an even bigger success in New York. But apparently, other than of mobsters, Prima had no fear. When he was approached about having a piece of a Famous Door nightclub in Los Angeles, he and his band packed their bags.

First there was a trip that had to be especially sweet for Prima—to New Orleans. When the train arrived that September, it signaled a triumphant return. In less than a year he had gone from local stardom to national recognition and being one of the biggest names in the Big Apple. With the now-named New Orleans Five, he performed for cheering crowds for five nights at the Shim Sham Club, at 229 Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, owned by his brother, Leon, who had also achieved success in New Orleans but apparently did not share his brother’s grander ambitions. Prima’s return was a jolt of good news for the city, which was in mourning over the assassination of Governor Huey Long only a few days earlier.

Jack Colt never had the same success at the Famous Door with another act. Billie Holiday, in her first show outside of Harlem clubs, was one of the performers who replaced Prima on that stage, and even she, with Teddy Wilson on piano, could not generate similar excitement. No doubt even worse for Holiday was the fact that she was not permitted to sit at a table or the bar, and so between sets she had to sit upstairs just outside the toilets. After four nights, she was fired.

Colt contacted Prima and offered another raise if he would come back to New York, but the bandleader was too intrigued by what Los Angeles had to offer. After filling up on Angelina’s cooking and visiting with the family (spending very little time with Louise and Joyce), Louis got back on a train, this time heading west.

In Los Angeles, the Hollywood Famous Door opened on Vine Street. The nightclub swells had never seen an act like Louis Prima and the New Orleans Five, and they ate it up. Leon had tagged along to manage the band, and he was able to see the impact the boisterous show had on audiences. Also soon returning on guitar was Frank Federico, who became a Prima sideman for the next eleven years.

Word quickly got around that there was a new musical sheriff in town, and he was at the Hollywood Famous Door. “That club was filled every night with the biggest stars in the industry at that time,” reported Joe Segreto in the 1999 documentary on Prima. “They all became Louis’s very good friends. He played poker with Spencer Tracy and Walt Disney and all those guys. Certainly, he was excited to be out there.”

And the women on the West Coast were excited about him being there too. There were plenty of starlets available, but according to some accounts, he became involved with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

“The last person who Jean Harlow loved was Louis,” contended Gia Maione, Prima’s widow, in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.
“Her chauffeur would bring her to the Famous Door and she’d sit back in a smoky corner and watch Louis perform and wait for the show to be over to spend her time with Louis.”

In 1932, when Harlow was only twenty-one, she appeared in
Red Dust,
a hit with Clark Gable. She became bigger at the box office with
China Seas, Hold Your Man,
and
Wife vs. Secretary
and was the top female star at MGM, which claimed to have “more stars than there are in the heavens.”

In 1935, when she would have met Prima, she was ending her third marriage. It was also at this time she became involved with and was eventually engaged to William Powell, star of
The Thin Man
and other popular thrillers and comedies. If an affair with Prima took place, it would have been when Powell wasn’t looking. In any case, she died in 1937 from kidney disease.

“I think Louis was very serious about Jean Harlow and she about him,” Segreto said. “He was on a train when he saw a newspaper hit the ground, like the guys would throw a bundle on the ground, and there was a big headline about Harlow dying and I think he was quite saddened about that.”

Thanks to Hollywood, Prima was reunited with a former flame. After doing a series of short, documentary-like films—one, titled
Swing It,
marked the film debut of Lucille Ball—Prima was incongruously cast as a cowboy in
Rhythm on the Range,
headlined by Bing Crosby and newcomers Martha Raye and Frances Farmer. Prima gamely backed up the two singers in what would seem to be an inauspicious start in the movie business, but fueled by the public’s adulation of Crosby, the musical was a box-office hit. So was
Rose of Washington Square
with Tyrone Power, Al Jolson, and Alice Faye.

Prima appeared in several more movies—one of the more unusual casts had him mugging next to Gene Autry and new baseball star Joe DiMaggio—playing either himself or a fictional bandleader, so he never had reason to stretch much as an actor. None of the films was able to capture his roof-raising stage performances, even
Start Cheering
in 1938, which had him singing and hoofing alongside Jimmy Durante. Still, because of these appearances, he became better known to people around the country who were buying his records, not just those in New York and Los Angeles.

It was obvious that his marriage could survive neither the geographical distance nor the affairs. Early in 1936, Louise petitioned for a divorce in New Orleans, and it was granted. Soon afterward Alma Ross, an aspiring actress from Minnesota, attended a show at the Hollywood Famous Door and caught Louis’s eye.

Prima and Ross attended various Hollywood social events and nightclubs together and were mentioned as an item in the gossip columns. The relationship became very serious quickly. Oddly, Louis waited until he was on the road with his band to propose marriage. Alma met him in the Midwest, and when they encountered Guy Lombardo in Chicago, he invited the couple to accompany him to a gig in South Bend, Indiana, where they could be married, with Lombardo as the best man.

When the newlyweds returned to Los Angeles, it seemed that Louis and Alma could become one of the more prominent couples in Tinseltown. She signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures and played supporting roles in several movies. He returned to the Hollywood Famous Door to play to packed houses. He started to form a larger band so he could join the more famous and higher-paid likes of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Lombardo as orchestra leaders.

In October 1936, he thought he was ready. The New Orleans Five had evolved into a twelve-piece group that still included Russell and Federico, and now had singer Velma Rae. For a sort of out-of-town tryout, he took the band to Chicago, where it debuted at the high-profile Blackhawk Club. It was a disastrous experience in front of a full house and plenty of press. The band just wasn’t ready to play together as a cohesive unit, and it looked like the twenty-five-year-old leader had bitten off more than he could chew.

Prima couldn’t get the problems with the disjointed band straightened out, and he eventually abandoned both the Blackhawk Club—the owners were not sorry to see him go—and, for several years, the big band format. Along the way he lost Pee Wee Russell, who felt uncomfortable playing in an orchestra, where there was less improvisation.

“I don’t like big bands,” Russell explained in a biography by Robert Hilbert. “You are too regimented. Not that I mind being told what to do, but I can’t bear to play that same note every night.”

He decided to stay on in Chicago, and he and Prima never worked together again. Though plagued by alcoholism, Russell remained one of the great jazz clarinetists, and toward the end of his life (he died in 1969) he was still doing innovative work with a new generation of admiring musicians who included Gerry Mulligan and Thelonious Monk.

Back to leading a fast and furious five-piece band, Prima went in search of a fresh burst of popularity. He found it where he had found the first one: late in 1937, the band played at the original Famous Door in New York, and they were a smash all over again.

“Louis Prima, that trumpet-tooting madman, is currently delivering the high notes at his old alma mater,” wrote nightlife columnist Theodore Strauss in the
New York Times.
“And on a street where the rhythms are notoriously fast and the music loud, Mr. Prima steps up the pace a notch or two. His trumpet playing, which took his breath away, took ours away too. He is the hottest man on the three stops we know. His band is small, not the usual fourteen-piece outfit crowding the tiny Fifty-second Street basements, but under Mr. Prima’s leadership they go to town with a will, fast and in the groove. Racy stuff.”