That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (13 page)

“The success generated by Louis and the excitement was part of what created all of that whole entertainment furor in Las Vegas where every club and every casino had a fabulous show,” said Joe Segreto in the documentary
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.
“He opened the door for all of that to happen.”

According to James Ritz, “Visitors to Las Vegas latched onto Prima’s show like a desperate gambler glomming a lucky streak. Soon Louis, Keely and Sam were the toast of the Strip, admittance to their shows in greater demand than that of some of the headliners in the main rooms.”

In a Sahara print ad in January 1955, only a little over a month after the band came to town, “Louis Prima and His All-Star Quintet” received the top billing among four acts. Already Louis expected no less. He now had with him the best band since the Famous Door days in New York, and in Keely, his most talented singer, who was madly in love with him to boot. Yet he made sure that the band worked at getting better.

“Everything sounded spontaneous but we were well rehearsed,” Butera said. “With Louis’s laughter and Keely’s presence and great singing, the group always looked like we were having fun. And we were, really.”

“With Keely, the more she deadpanned, the funnier she was,” says Jack Carter. “She stood there, and people roared and screamed. But when she sang, she had one of the best voices in the business. With that funny haircut and all, she stared at Louis like he was an idiot and people couldn’t stop laughing.”

It is interesting to note that, even with the acclaim Keely would receive over the years as a singer, she didn’t necessarily view herself that way. “I’m actually nothing more than a clown,” she told Wally George of the
Los Angeles Times
in an interview. “I’m a comic—that’s why I complement Louis.” Then she added: “You know how it is, like a man and his dog.”

“They might not even have known it themselves, but Louis and Keely were more than ready to be a smash when they came to Las Vegas,” says Lorraine Hunt-Bono, who before being elected lieutenant governor of Nevada in 1999 grew up in Las Vegas and was a casino and nightclub performer. “They had spent years doing the little clubs whether it was Lake George or Atlantic City or their home towns. They worked, they went to school with each other, and they had the chance to hone their craft. So when they came to Las Vegas, they were real pros. They had paid a lot of dues, but to us here they were new and fresh and very exciting.”

Hunt-Bono was a teenager at the time and would not normally have been allowed in the Casbar Lounge, but she had a cousin who was a maitre d’ there. He installed her in the back with a night’s worth of soda, and she was enthralled.

“Louis was a master, an absolute master of leading the band, and of reading the audience, and he appeared to always know what to do to entertain the crowd,” she says. “I watched and learned how he worked the audience. And how he revolved around Keely, whose character he had created. She was not going to jump around with dramatic gestures like all the other girl singers; she was supposed to stand there and every so often look at him like he was a bad, bad boy. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much on her part, but Keely was a brilliant performer.”

The success of the show re-energized Prima. He had turned forty-four in December 1954, which was not old for a performer even during the days when men’s life expectancy was in their sixties. However, there was a lot of mileage on Louis. He had been driving audiences to distraction since playing on street corners in New Orleans. He had already packed several careers into one lifetime. He had a fourth wife who was only twenty-six. He made that disparity part of the act: in a performance of “Can’t Help Loving That Man” recorded live at the Sahara, Keely tells the audience, “I’m too young for this man,” and Louis quickly chimes in, “That’s a stage joke.” She retorts, laughing, “I wish it was.”

He had gotten another shot at the limelight and was going to make the most of it. And there was a competitive aspect. Keely was not necessarily seeking audience adulation—indeed, her stage persona projected that she couldn’t care less—but she received it in increasing doses. Sam was simply knocking fellow musicians out with his saxophone and impressing still others—the Witnesses were the best backup band on the Strip. But the Chief, as Louis insisted on being called—not only to acknowledge who was the leader of the act but to further define his domineering relationship with his wife of Native American descent—was not about to be left behind.

A telling photo taken by John Bryson sometime during a night at the Casbar Lounge was distributed to the press. Keely stands center stage, surrounded by the drummer, bass player, and pianist, in a dark-shaded blouse and a wide white skirt adorned with a large flower. With her hands joined behind her back, she gazes impassively at a spot in the middle of the lounge. In that spot is Louis, lying on the floor blowing his trumpet with his legs bicycling. Bent over and blowing their saxophone and trombone at him are Sam and “Little Red” Blount. They are surrounded by patrons at small white tables who are laughing and smoking and looking a little like they are observing the inmates taking over the asylum and believing that is a wonderful thing.

It also helped that, according to Keely, once the act was established, “Louis changed everything. They had the service station for the bar right in front of the little stage. And a girl would walk up and say ‘Three beers’ and ‘Two of this and two of that’ while I’m in the middle of singing ‘The Man I Love’ or something. Louis got that moved to the far end of the bar. And we got a maitre d’ who would seat people. It really turned out to be a nice lounge.”

A sure sign that the act had made it in Las Vegas was that when performers were done with their shows, they came to the Casbar Lounge (also advertised as the Casbar Theater). Yes, it was more than convenient that Louis and Keely and the Witnesses still had hours to go when other acts were finishing at one or two in the morning, but they did come to see what “The Wildest” was really about, and with good reason. It became even more difficult for Keely to maintain her deadpan look as she gazed out at the tables and saw some of the most famous entertainers in the world sitting at some of them.

“Everybody was there,” said Butera. “Every star, when they got through work, there wasn’t a seat in the lounge. This is no baloney. It’s true.”

Segreto said, “Sinatra would go with Sammy Davis and those guys and say, ‘Look what this guy is doing. Look what he’s creating here. That’s what we have to create. Look what excitement he’s causing.’ ”

“You look anywhere around the lounge and there was a star,” Butera added. “There’s a star, and another star, and there was another star. You couldn’t acknowledge everybody.”

“Louis always found a way to break things up, and also to get people to come up onstage,” Jack Carter remembers. “We’d always get up with him and do a number, because we all knew every song, everybody did. The other performers certainly did. That was a big thing in the act, that these terrific performers would be up onstage. It didn’t matter if it was the one o’clock show or the three o’clock, that lounge was packed.”

The SRO crowds meant that Louis was putting money back in his pockets, and he and his wife began to think that this Las Vegas gig could last a while and maybe they should think about staying put even after Keely had the baby. They were living in an apartment on Malroney Street and wanted to be in a better part of town, especially after a thief broke in and tossed the place, taking $235 in cash and Keely’s watch.

They weren’t yet making the big money they would when they signed their next Sahara contract, but even so, when the time came to buy their own place, they could afford it. Though the Las Vegas Strip was booming, land in and around the city was still pretty cheap. In 1955, a 50-by-135-foot lot cost $695. Another deal offered a 100-by-300-foot lot for fifteen dollars down and fifteen dollars a month. On the high end was a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a landscaped yard for $18,250—negotiable.

What made “The Wildest” work onstage was that every member of the band contributed, knowing his or her role. But all followed Louis’s lead. He became the performer he was apparently born to be, and he reveled in being the center of the musical storm.

According to Segreto, Prima “had an extraordinary ability to feel the pulse of the audience, and not only to feel the pulse of the audience but to almost create a pulse for the audience.”

“The most important thing was that the music never stopped even in between songs,” said Will Friedwald in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.
“Even during announcements and things like that, the tempo always kept going. Everything was always to the beat. And it just kept everything at this really high energy level.”

“The Chief always opened his show with ‘When You’re Smiling’ and he always closed the show with ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ but always what happened in between there, each and every show, was completely different,” said Segreto.

Sam Butera said, “When we walked on stage, we didn’t know what we were going to do. He called out the songs and we hit ‘em.”

“I may have seen his show thousands of times,” said Segreto, “and no one show was the same.”

“He always managed to keep it on a very high dynamic,” Friedwald said. “He always kept the excitement level going no matter what. So you were always sitting at the edge of your seat at a Prima show.”

Fifty years later, George Guida, in a lengthy essay in the
Journal of Popular Culture,
tried from an academic perspective to describe what the Louis-Keely dynamic was and why it worked:

Bottom line: They kicked butt onstage, and the audiences laughed with them and loved them.

In more layman’s terms, the comedian Shecky Greene remembers, “Louis had animal magnetism. He was not a beautiful man, but the women would go crazy for him. He was just a great showman, and everything he did appeared perfect for grabbing an audience. And Keely—she would just stand there and what was so smart is that was the only way you would put your eyes on Keely, and once you did, it was hard to take your eyes off her and bring them back to Louis or maybe Sam blowing the sax. Years later, when I saw Sonny and Cher, it was like seeing Louis and Keely all over again.”

An important extra ingredient is that everyone believed that Louis and Keely were very much in love, and they did nothing to dispel that. They were together almost all the time, on- and offstage (an exception being when Louis played golf). They didn’t discuss their romance with the press because, when not performing, Louis was all business and Keely simply was not likely to talk about her personal life.

“Offstage, I was very shy, I didn’t talk to anybody,” Keely reflected years later about her early days in Las Vegas. “During intermission, I would go to the ladies room to read a book. Even when Sinatra was in the audience, I’d say hello and then disappear into the restroom.”

The record companies were convinced that “The Wildest” was not a flash in the pan. It was a new and original act that was doing turn-away business and represented the new brand of Las Vegas entertainment that moved beyond the late-career acts of Sophie Tucker, Rudy Vallee, Ray Bolger, and Jimmy Durante (also from New Orleans), though these performers remained popular on the Strip and had regular return engagements.

“The Wildest” was so popular that the Sahara didn’t have to worry that it drew people away from the gaming tables into the Casbar Lounge; the act was attracting a lot of people who might otherwise have gone to another hotel. With five shows a night patrons might have to wait until the third or even fifth show to get in, so they might as well play blackjack or roulette or the slots while they waited. Or they could catch the earlier entertainment in the hotel. For $6.75, a patron could both enjoy a New York steak dinner and see Abbott & Costello’s show in the Congo Room, the hotel’s main showroom. For a casino, a possible concern was that the lounge act was becoming more popular than the main acts in the Congo Room, but as long as the main room kept filling up, that was simply an embarrassment of riches for owner Milton Prell and his backers.

Prima signed on with Capitol Records, which had Frank Sinatra, who was in the process of changing American music, as its biggest star. Sinatra may have helped to bring his fellow
paisan
and Las Vegas showman into the fold simply because he thought Prima’s surging popularity would sell records. But he also saw in him a guy who had been down on his luck and practically had to beg to keep his career going. Prima had called Bill Miller and was willing to take anything. Sinatra had signed a recording contract that paid only a thousand dollars, and he had to pay his own expenses. Then he won the Academy Award for playing the doomed Angelo Maggio in the number-one film of 1953.