That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (18 page)

In the time before Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, it was rare for a Las Vegas headlining act to consist of a husband and wife. You could find them on television, with notable examples being George Burns and Gracie Allen and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and such fictional pairings as Ralph Kramden and his wife, Alice, on
The Honeymooners.
But Las Vegas was about single performers, or those who wanted to convey a single reputation.

That was a big reason why Louis and Keely were different. They were married. They appeared to have fun together. With Antoinette they were a family. They were in love and had passion for each other that no one thought was feigned.

“He was extremely sexy,” Keely said about her husband. “He had something about him that was almost animalistic. He was so intense and had such command of the music and his audience. And the way he moved his legs—you know, he was the original Elvis Presley.”

Women in the audience might still be swooning, but Keely would not swoon onstage. That she appeared impervious to his charms upped the sexual tension in the act. How could she not give in? And when the time finally came when she did, the earth must have moved.

“Perhaps no other husband-and-wife team had been as successful in American popular music,” wrote Garry Boulard. “Productive, exhaustive, and nationally visible, the Prima-Smith marriage seemed like a Hollywood treatment of romance and happy endings. One of the imponderables of their success undoubtedly was the role their very public private lives played in their careers. Fans and friends wondered what it was like in the Prima-Smith household, were they really the good friends that they seemed onstage? Were there any tensions performing together, doing business together, and living together as husband and wife? Fan magazines speculated, but the adoring masses would have none of it.”

The couple wasn’t talking. Keely remained shy and content in her husband’s shadow. Louis, ever the businessman, knew that, like in a relationship, keeping the mystery alive meant success. And in this town, success was measured in money.

Money was what made Las Vegas tick. It flowed in and it flowed out, in some cases to hidden and overseas bank accounts. If you had it and spent it, you could get away with almost anything—even just being yourself, as a future billionaire found out.

“Once again, we spotted Howard Hughes on the local scene, garbed in his far from meticulous apparel,” went a report in
Fabulous Las Vegas.
“He had a lovely, well-groomed chorine in tow. The millionaire sportsman indulged in back-line gaming at the Hotel Sahara. The dice-shooter tossed a few passes, causing tycoon Hughes to lose some of his silver dollars. In a burst of temperament, he ordered the lovely lassie to leave him, claiming she was bringing him a heap of bad luck. (This is sportsmanship? ‘Tain’t the way we heard it!)”

By this point, with Las Vegas enjoying a golden age of wealth and entertainment, every hotel was promoting lounge acts. “The Wildest” was anything but highbrow, but the act had made casino lounges respectable.

“The big gamblers used to seat their wives in the lounge and leave them,” Keely told Mike Weatherford for his
Cult Vegas.
“And they were okay; they knew they wouldn’t be touched, that nobody would try to pick them up. It gave the gambler the freedom he needed to go gamble.”

Louis looked after the money that the act was raking in. He had total control of the act’s finances, and he was not known for being generous with salaries.

“I really liked Louis, but I couldn’t swallow some of the other things that went with him, such as being really tight with a nickel,” recalls Paul Ferrara, a drummer from New Orleans who spent two years with the act, in 1958 and ‘59. “One time Louis got a new set of drums and every night he showed them off to the audience, like ‘Look what a great bandleader I am.’ One night, Barbara Belle comes to me and says, ‘Paul, the Chief wants to know when you’re going to make your first payment on the set of drums.’ The blood rushed to my head. I said, ‘Barbara, you tell the Chief for me, when he wants me to make the first payment on these drums, for him to tell me. And that’ll be the day I leave this fucking job.’ ”

There were the occasional generous gestures, at least with his wife. One of the local columnists reported in 1956, “Over at the Sahara, Keely Smith was more enthusiastic than ever. Hubby (Louis Prima) had Santa drop a couple of mink stoles on her lily white shoulders.”

If “The Wildest” was so popular, why weren’t all the casinos booking the same kind of acts in their lounges? Most tried, with performers who attempted to measure up to Prima and his band. Mickey Katz and his troupe were advertised as “those madcap zanies in a riot of hilarity.” There was Tony Pastor and His Singin’, Swingin’ Pastors. The Goofers was another attempt. The lounge at the Flamingo offered Harold Stern and His Singing Violins, who managed to get a guest stint on an
I Love Lucy
episode.

But they just didn’t have the same ingredients and formula. To the audiences in Las Vegas, there was only one Keely Smith, one Sam Butera, and of course many had known and were now being convinced all over again that there was only one Louis Prima.

He was back, finally, in a studio, recording songs. In a burst of creativity, on the same day Butera wrote new arrangements for “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Jump, Jive, an’ Wail,” they were recorded in April 1956. The album containing both, titled
The Wildest,
would be out in October, and Prima would have his first big radio hit in almost a decade.

The album included “Oh Marie,” “Buona Sera,” and “The Lip,” among others. Louis’s head, mouth wide open, took up most of the cover, with his name right under the title, and in the lower left corner in smaller print was “featuring Keely Smith with Sam Butera and the Witnesses.” The Chief, not the Injun—as Keely was sometimes called, especially by Sinatra—got the top credit, no questions asked.

“Much of the material had been performed by Louis and Keely for years previous, but Butera re-arranged all the selections to make them really swing,” wrote Scott Shea in the liner notes to a reissued version years later. “The selections on this disc abound with Prima trademarks: sudden tempo shifts into and out of Prima’s patented ‘shuffle beat’; tarantellas interwoven with Dixieland jazz; medleys of re-worked standards; altered lyrics befitting Prima’s dialect, and numerous passages of Louis’ own inimitable scat talk.”

As Capitol executives had hoped,
The Wildest
was successful outside the bounds of Las Vegas. The album hopped onto the national charts and remained there for months. Many outside of Las Vegas appreciated that Louis Prima, who had first burst on the national entertainment scene two decades and two wars ago, was back and wondered, “Who’s that young girl with him? She’s pretty good too.”

“Just a Gigolo” became Prima’s signature song, and it is more associated with him than “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Originally titled “Schoner Gigolo,” it was composed by Leonello Casucci in Vienna in 1930. The first U.S. recordings were by Irene Bordoni and, more successfully, by Victor Lopez and his orchestra. It had last received attention in the 1946 feature film
Lover Come Back,
starring Lucille Ball (and not to be confused with the Doris Day–Rock Hudson comedy years later).

It was time for the rest of America to be exposed to “The Wildest.” In the past, that would have meant Prima and his band hitting the road, traveling thousands of miles to do shows in one city after another. While Prima did take the act to clubs and concert halls in major U.S. cities, the old barnstorming approach wasn’t necessary in trying to reach a larger audience in the mid-1950s, thanks to the explosion of television.

The TV executives looked eagerly to the expanding entertainment scene of Las Vegas as a reservoir of crowd-pleasing talent. If audiences full of tourists from all over the United States were happy with your act at the Sahara, Sands, or Tropicana, it stood to reason that the larger demographic of a TV audience would want to see your act too. It would be a plus if you made headlines, though not in a negative way.

Money was thrown at Frank Sinatra to do television. Dean Martin was given his own show. Milton Berle had been at the top of the TV heap for years. A successful engagement in Las Vegas meant getting a call to give TV a shot. It became Louis’s turn, though it was his wife who made a special impression on the small screen.

“The major and altogether delightful surprise on Dean Martin’s variety show Saturday evening on Channel 4 was the performance of Keely Smith, in private life the wife of Louis Prima, the bandleader,” wrote Jack Gould in the October 7, 1957, edition of the
New York Times.
“Miss Smith, a young woman with a striking gaminelike quality, displayed not only a fine sense of comedy but also a distinctive voice of attractive huskiness. She easily stole the show.”

Other popular programs on that week in the expanding television world were
The Big Record
hosted by Patti Page with Julie London and Paul Whiteman as guests,
The Rosemary Clooney Show
featuring an appearance by William Bendix, who had scored a TV hit with
The Life of Riley, Art Linkletter’s House Party,
and broadcasts of the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves games in the World Series (which would be won by the Braves).

The Sahara had already made sure that Louis and Keely didn’t stray too far. In August 1956, Louis had signed a contract with the hotel that covered three years of work and earned him and Keely one million dollars. Such a contract would have seemed a total fantasy just two years earlier.

The contract did allow them to stray up to a point, to do TV shows and to accept bids for one- and two-week runs at clubs. This was good publicity for the Sahara and Las Vegas in general, because if you saw “The Wildest” and wanted to see more of it, you could come to the Strip, where Louis and Keely ruled.

When they returned to the desert from a tour or the occasional vacation to visit the Prima family in New Orleans, they were welcomed with open arms. As columnist Jack Cortez reported, “The Hotel Sahara is readying the ‘red carpet treatment’ for the December 13th return of Louis Prima and Keely Smith, to the Casbar Lounge. In the time they’ve been away, the Primas vacationed at their eastern ‘Pretty Acres.’ However, we can’t understand why they call it a vacation when they spent all of their time working. Such is the fate of a property owner.”

Only a few years earlier, Prima’s property had consisted of a suitcase and a used car. Now he and Keely managed to blend a love story with an old-fashioned American success story.

Louis and Keely offered a believable—and by all accounts, genuine—portrait of domestic bliss. Perhaps, entering his late forties and with a beautiful young woman who was his professional as well as personal partner, Prima was able to consistently resist his own call of the wild. One photograph from the time shows the Primas in pajamas—though they had not yet gone to sleep after the all-night shows—having breakfast at the kitchen table with Toni and their second daughter, Luanne, born in May 1957.

They maintained quite a separation between work and private life. Onstage they perpetuated the “Wildest” image, and sometimes in the Las Vegas press Louis and Keely were referred to as “Preem and Steam.” But away from the Casbar Lounge, Keely was content to spend her time with her daughters. Louis was not outgoing and mostly focused on business, staying to himself even with members of the act.

“Louis was a hard man to get to know, and he could be hard to get along with,” says Paul Ferrara. “Keely was sweet, but Louis … I don’t know if it was insecurity. He had a very old-time attitude. I assume he got it from being Sicilian.”

Ferrara continues: “On one hand, it was a very exciting time. You never knew who was going to be in our audience. After they split up, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin would still come see us but just sit at opposite ends of the room. But the Chief could be tough to know. If he was sitting there with Sammy Davis or Sophia Loren or whoever, he didn’t want you to sit with him. You were like a peon.”

Life
magazine published a profile of the couple in the summer of 1956. The piece portrayed a full night that ended at 7:00
A.M.
with breakfast at home with Toni Elizabeth, who was then almost eighteen months old. Of special interest was its backstage look at Louis. In between shows from midnight to 6:00
A.M.,
he attended to business in the hotel’s coffee shop—conferring with Barbara Belle, his business manager, setting up schedules for recording sessions, and deciding on various broadcast offers. Only when it was time to go back onstage did Prima morph into the happy-go-lucky Louis, the impresario of “The Wildest.”

After breakfast, Louis and Keely went to bed. He was up by noon, and occupied the next five hours with more business matters and a round of golf, with Keely focusing on Toni. The family had dinner at five, then Louis and Keely napped until it was time to get ready to go back to work at the Sahara.

“I don’t know how Louis did it, and I guess I don’t know how any of us did it,” Jack Carter says. “We’d be up all night, go to bed at seven, get up at ten, then go play golf all day. We got what was called Vegas throat, which is what you sound like on no sleep. All those years when I did a show at the Sahara or Riviera or Flamingo, I’d come out and croak, ‘Good evening, how are you?’ and people thought that was my normal speaking voice. At least I didn’t have to sing, like Louis did.”

In June 1957, the couple escaped the desert summer heat, but not via a vacation. They signed on to spend the summer in the more comfortable Lake Tahoe in the mountains between Reno and California. That August, producer and director Will Cowan arrived at Harrah’s with a film crew to lens
The Wildest,
a short performance documentary that would end up coming the closest in Prima’s career to showing his frenetic stage style.

There seemed to be an insatiable hunger for the act’s albums.
The Wildest
was followed in 1957 by
Call of the Wildest,
in which Louis shared the album cover with a moose. That in turn was followed by
The Wildest Show at Tahoe.