That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (8 page)

This bond rally stint performance resulted in Dowell hiring Dot. Her mother was glad for the few dollars this gig brought in but was not pleased at how her teenaged daughter was openly ogled by the sailors while onstage and when she sang off the back of a truck driven around Norfolk. Offstage, and when not in school, Dot listened to the radio, and her favorite singers were June Christy and Ella Fitzgerald.

It was a step up when bandleader Earl Bennett hired Dot, paying her five dollars a night for performances. This enabled Dot to buy clothes and books for school. Because Dot was underage, her mother accompanied her to the nightclubs where the band played.

During the summer of 1947, Dot and her family went on a vacation to New York, but because of the heat they took a detour to Atlantic City in New Jersey. Two of her brothers liked to jitterbug and wanted to go to the Steel Pier, where many big bands performed. They saw a large banner advertising “Louis Prima and His Orchestra,” and a big crowd surrounded the bandstand. She picked up her youngest brother (born to Fanny and Jesse) to help get through the crowd. Prima was in the middle of his show, and Dot was enthralled.

According to Smith, she was not familiar with Prima at that time. “The band was so good and so funny. I edged my way up to the stage and placed my little brother on it, and I stood there absolutely mesmerized watching this man. I just stood there dumbfounded. I had never seen anything like it before. Besides being one of the best bands to dance to, they were funny. The comedy was unbelievable.”

One brother pointed at Prima and told her that the bandleader kept staring at her. “I must have had a look he liked,” Smith said. “He never said a word to me, though, the whole day.”

She went home and listened to Louis’s music nonstop, learning his arrangements. If the Prima band ever came to the Norfolk area, she would be ready to imagine that she was part of it.

Despite the success of his New Orleans Five in New York and the embarrassment of his Chicago orchestra outing—and perhaps goaded by Goodman’s success with the song he had composed—Prima wanted to try the big band format again. This made sense in that the big bands dominated the dance halls and record charts in the years immediately before World War II. There was ego involved, too—he wanted to be as famous as Goodman, Ellington, and the Dorsey Brothers. He was certainly more of a showman than they were, so it was a matter of blending his personal jump, jive, and wail style with a crisp orchestra that would supply the balance and the basic dance grooves. But to do so he would have to set aside the kind of music that had brought him to where he now stood.

“The big band era of the 1930s and ‘40s pretty much wiped out the whole New Orleans approach to jazz,” says Bruce Raeburn of the Hogan Jazz Archive. “The small combo, doing collective improvisation, all of this was taken over though some of it got featured in big bands. The music was pretty much organized by arrangers and band leaders. By 1940, Louis Prima had a big band which he called the Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra, which was a great name, and you can see what he’s doing over the course of the early 1940s. He was appealing to the public. He was trying to find the sound that they wanted.”

The orchestra Prima put together—which he sometimes also dubbed the “Be Happy” Orchestra—would eventually contain as many as eighteen musicians. They spent most of their time in cars on the road. The Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra could play in Kansas City one night, St. Louis the next night, and Cincinnati the night after that. It was indeed one of the most popular acts in the country. When Prima wasn’t on the road he could be found in a recording studio, producing the orchestra’s latest records.

He and Guy Lombardo were among the “name bands” that headlined the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. For the Prima show that August, three thousand seats were set up “with room for many more thousands to stand near by,” the
New York Times
reported.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Prima’s thirty-first birthday, the United States entered World War II. The war had no effect on his popularity, but Prima from time to time had to replace musicians who enlisted or were drafted, and gas rationing forced the William Morris Agency to arrange for more geographically prudent bookings for the band. Prima spent more time in the Northeast, with the occasional foray to New Orleans or Miami Beach.

Depleted ranks didn’t cause him much concern because ultimately the entire act was on his shoulders. “Louis Prima, in an eight-week run at the Syracuse Hotel, has brought the spot the biggest business of the season,”
Billboard
reported in 1942. “Prima, fronting with his torrid trumpet, now has a commercial band that does both hot and sweet numbers and Prima is still the showman of old.”

“Louis Prima and his orchestra enjoy top-billing in this week’s vaudeville entertainment at Loew’s State Theatre,” reported the
New York Times
on March 19, 1943. “Other performers on the program include Jackie Green, comic; the Debonettes, dancers, and Carlton Emmy and the Mad Wags, dog act.”

Unlike the less ethnic big bands, a good portion of the Prima repertoire consisted of familiar Italian tunes, such as “Josephina,” “Please No Squeeza Da Banana,” and “Bacciagaloop, Makes Love on the Stoop,” and music he wrote himself. One song was dedicated to his mother, “Angelina.” (The presumption has always been that this song was written by Prima as a tribute to his mother, but in fact it was composed by Doris Fisher, who was also known for another novelty hit, “Tutti-Frutti.”) While this fare was a big reason why jazz critics wrote negatively, sometimes scathingly, about the Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra, such songs were real crowd-pleasers.

A more cautious and less confident bandleader would have ditched these tunes during World War II because Italy was a member of the Axis. But Prima knew his audience, and his popularity actually increased.

“When Mussolini joined Hitler, all of the Italians were sort of, how would I say, dumbfounded, because they didn’t think it would happen, so maybe you stay away from that music,” said Leon Prima. “But Louis stayed with the Italian trend, he still played the Italian music and used the Italian words.”

“Obviously, one of the things that made Louis Prima very special and different from other trumpet players and singers was the Italian element,” said Will Friedwald in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.
“It’s not just the fact that it’s Italian, but that it’s any type of ethnicity group, because there really wasn’t one; there was no big star at that point who stressed his ethnic group.” It is not a stretch to say that because the popular Prima exhibited such pride in his heritage, audiences remained more open to a new generation of Italian singers who emerged during and after the war, among them Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and Vic Damone.

During the war, Prima’s orchestra was one of only three white groups to perform at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and they did so seven times in four years, compared to twice each for the other bands. They also appeared at the Royal Theatre in Baltimore, the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Regal in Chicago, the Paradise in Detroit, and other venues where the performers and most of the audiences traditionally were black. Prima shrewdly included in the band’s lineup songs with a local connection or references to please the hometown audience, such as “Boogie in Chicago” and “Brooklyn Boogie” (which he cowrote), and when he played black venues he always sang, with a sly grin, “It Takes a Long, Tall, Brown-Skin Gal.”

With Ellington, Calloway, Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Count Basie so popular, it was not unusual for black artists to cross over and play for and have their records purchased by a white audience, but Prima more than any other white bandleader ensured it was not exclusively a one-way street. Sammy Davis Jr. once remarked that “half the people thought that Louis was black anyway, mixed. So he was a big favorite.”

When not working, Prima had two favorite pursuits: women and horses. And he shared a problem with Ernest Hemingway: as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The problem isn’t that Ernest keeps falling in love, it’s that he marries all of them.”

Even Keely Smith later admitted, “Louis could have any woman he wanted.” The most enthusiastic members of his audience were female. The Louis Prima Fan Club consisted of forty thousand acolytes—thirty-five thousand of them women, who dubbed themselves the Prima Donnas.

His devotion to horse racing would eventually cost him a lot of money, but he made some along the way too. It wasn’t enough that he went to the track, he had to also own racehorses. In front of 28,430 spectators at a New York racetrack in 1944, a five-year-old gelding he owned, Play Pretty, was a surprise winner and paid $9.10.

But most of Prima’s seemingly limitless energy was devoted to music. Like Goodman, he had the knack for recognizing talent. (And like Goodman, he put on integrated performances, also working with Wilson and Hampton.) He preferred to have a regular lineup of good musicians, and he worked them hard in rehearsals so that what they did onstage would sound flawless while appearing spontaneous.

Jimmy Vincent once recalled that he played with the Prima orchestra for a month, and then one night Prima asked the audience to vote on whether the drummer should become officially part of the band. “I was with him for twenty-four years,” said Vincent in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.

He also recalled: “Every time we worked in a theater, during the rehearsal all the light men from the front and the side would come down and say, ‘Let us give you the rundown of the show.’ Louis said, ‘We don’t need no rundown.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ Louis told them, ‘I’ll direct you with my hands. Just follow me.’ Louis liked to work with his hands. So as the show goes on, he’s going here, there, pinpointing here, you over there, lights off, a little meeker, doing this the whole time, and he’s got them where they’re grooving now, everybody in the place. He did that every theater we worked in, directing with his hands always.”

When the orchestra played New Orleans—such as a very successful run at the St. Charles Theatre in 1944—Louis took as many members as could fit to the house on St. Peter Street to feast on Angelina’s cooking.

“When Louis would come home, the kitchen and dining room and living room were all opened up to the musicians,” Madeline Prima remembered. “We didn’t get to eat up there until Louis was gone.”

“It was a day for red gravy,” said Joe Segreto. “The meal would open with meatballs with the gravy, and we would have the pasta, and copious wonderful meals, and the family all around you and the friends of the family made it an exciting day.”

Vincent remembered a conversation with Mrs. Prima: “She’s doing the dishes, and I’m talking some Italian, and we’re grooving, and Louis is in the living room reading, and he’s listening to us. ‘Where do you think Louis got that talent?’ Angelina says. ‘From me. From me, Jimmy.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I used to be the singer in church.’ ‘You did? What did you do?’ ‘I was the singer.’ ‘How do you sing?’ And she starts in. I’m slapping out a beat and Louis is hysterical.”

In the audience at one of Prima’s shows in Washington, D.C., in early 1944 was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She apparently could not resist the bandleader’s charms either, and she invited him to the White House.

A number of celebrities, including actresses Joan Fontaine and Mary Pickford, had been invited for a gathering to celebrate President Franklin Roosevelt’s sixty-second birthday. Prima joined them. The grandson of Sicilian immigrants from Little Palermo in New Orleans stood in the East Room of the White House with various government officials and then was introduced to the president. The hyped-up Prima blurted, “Hello, Daddy!” Fortunately, Roosevelt thought this was hilarious. When a group portrait was taken, Prima stood next to Mrs. Roosevelt, and thus his fame was further boosted when the photo was published in newspapers across the country.

By the end of World War II, at age thirty-four Louis Prima was in the top tier of successful American entertainers. At a show in New York City in 1945, he shared the stage with Frank Sinatra. The predominantly female audience swooned and cheered more for Prima whenever he sang or blew the trumpet.

The problem, as he found out, was that from here there was nowhere to go but down.

After the war, the musical tastes of audiences in the United States began to change. As a result, big bands faded in popularity. For bandleaders like Prima, as concert revenues dwindled, it became more difficult to bankroll the larger groups of musicians. Some bands went out of business altogether, while others struggled on or downsized, becoming quintets or even quartets.

Prima pushed ahead with the latest incarnation of the Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra. He continued to record—he signed a new contract with RCA Victor Records—and he remained popular. A six-week engagement in 1945 at the Strand Theatre in New York grossed $440,000, and in 1946
Metronome
magazine recognized him as Showman of the Year. But his spending continued at a high level, not just to underwrite his band but also to buy and maintain racehorses. Having two ex-wives didn’t help either.

Louis was not a faithful husband while on the road, and his traveling so much put a strain on his marriage to Alma. Finally, in 1947, she sued him for divorce. It was granted, along with alimony of 7.5 percent of his annual income. (Eleven years later, the terms were changed to a forty-five-thousand-dollar payment and $250 a week.) He began dating Tracelene Barrett, who had once been his secretary and was all of twenty-one.

In June 1948, the two were married in New York City. Angelina and Anthony Prima attended, with the former singing during the reception. The couple launched their honeymoon by getting on a boat that Louis had bought for his bride and named the
Tracelene II.
In what could be seen as symbolic, the boat hit a sandbar in the middle of the Hudson River, and the newlyweds had to be rescued.