That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (20 page)

When the album was released in 1958, John S. Wilson wrote in the
New York Times:
“Keely Smith, whose long career as the stone-faced stooge in Louis Prima’s raucous troupe has brought her close to the fringes of jazz, turns away from both stooging and jazz on
I Wish You Love
(Capitol) to sing a set of love songs with hitherto unsuspected warmth and sensitivity. Miss Smith is not yet an assured singer in this area but she gives evidence on this disk that she could be an unusually good ballad singer. She is helped greatly by the understanding, graceful arrangements of Nelson Riddle.”

For the first time since the late 1930s, Prima went in front of movie cameras. He and Keely made a film that year titled
Senior Prom,
directed by David Lowell Rich, that also featured Butera and the Witnesses and a cast of mostly young, unknown actors including Tom Laughlin, who in the 1970s would go on to star in and direct the popular Billy Jack series of films.

“Senior Prom
is another of those musical salads of the 1950s, heavy on the guest stars but very light on plot,” was a typical review. Sharing the screen with Louis and Keely to do musical numbers were Bob Crosby, Freddy Martin and His Orchestra, Les Elgart, and Mitch Miller. Even Ed Sullivan made an appearance. An interesting tidbit about the movie was that the associate producer was Moe Howard, reuniting with Louis after the Three Stooges had performed with Louis’s orchestra in New York in the 1940s.

Another film was announced in the trade press,
Bourbon Street Blues,
that would star Louis, but it was not produced. (There is now a nightclub with that name in New Orleans.)

“The Wildest” had done such a fine job of putting the Casbar Lounge on the national map that it became a good career move to play there and be associated in any way with the act.

“Louis might have been the most successful lounge performer in Vegas history,” recalled Don Rickles (in
Rickles’ Book),
who entertained the crowd in the Casbar with his emerging insult humor when Louis and Keely and the band took breaks. “With singer Keely Smith looking sultry and seductive, with his backup band Sam Butera and the Witnesses blowing their brains out, Louis rocked and rolled every night of the week. He sang, he joked, he carried on until the audience was exhausted. Every night I asked myself: How can I follow this guy?”

In his autobiography, written with David Ritz, the comic remembered, “The setup was strange. Right in front of the stage was a pit where the waiters and bartenders walked back and forth serving food and drinks…. At the 5
A.M.
show, if I saw that the lounge was empty, I ran offstage, ran into the casino, stood by one of the crap tables and yelled, ‘Hold down the noise! I’m trying to do a show in there!’ Then I ran back into the Casbar with a new following of fans eager to see what this nut case was screaming about.”

Rickles recalled one particular young comic sitting at one of the lounge’s tables after his own act was done. “Hey, Rickles, when’s Louis Prima coming out?” Johnny Carson asked repeatedly. Beginning in 1962, when Carson became the host of
The Tonight Show,
he would showcase many of the Las Vegas acts that he had admired as he was cutting his comedic teeth there in the 1950s.

It was during 1958 that Keely and Frank Sinatra first collaborated in a recording studio. “Nothing in Common” was a duet done for Capitol, and it would be Sinatra’s last commercially issued
78-RPM
record.

“Louis drove me to Capitol Records, handed me over to Frank, and took a train to New Orleans,” Keely remembered. “He left me—who didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground in those days—with Frank Sinatra. Everyone thought we were having a big romance. We didn’t, but I could kick myself now.”

The song was written by Rat Packers Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. Keely and Frank had a brief discussion, and then they did a take. “OK, that one’s good,” said Frank in his customary way—as with making movies, he didn’t like doing more than one take.

But it hadn’t sounded quite right to Keely, and she was used to Prima’s more rigorous recording sessions. “No, no, that’s not good,” she announced. “I think we can do better.”

There was shocked silence in the studio. Everyone braced for an explosion. One did not disagree with Sinatra, especially when it came to his music. Frank grinned and said, “You’re right. Let’s do it again.” The second take ended up on the album.

When Louis and Keely next stepped into the studio, it was not to record an album but a single, “That Old Black Magic.” Louis had first recorded it as a duet with Lily Ann Carol. She was only sixteen when she joined his orchestra in 1939, and she stayed with the Gleeby Rhythm Orchestra through World War II. After several others had recorded or at least performed the 1942 tune, she and Prima incorporated it into the act. That had ended when Carol left the orchestra in 1946.

Apparently, Prima had filed the song away and waited for an opportunity to try it out again. In Keely, he had the best singer to do a duet with. Sammy Davis Jr. had recorded and released a version in 1955 that did well, so Louis had to bide his time. In 1958, he was ready. “That Old Black Magic” was recorded not as part of an album but as a stand-alone single.

It immediately received airplay and jumped onto the Top 40 charts, where it remained for two months. Among the audiences who crowded into the smoky and sometimes stifling Casbar Lounge, it became the couple’s most requested song, and it was the same with Ed Sullivan and other TV hosts.

Louis and Keely had risen to the pinnacle of their popularity, and with the exception of Sinatra no act was more in demand in Las Vegas—well, certainly after 3:00
A.M.
The last four years had indeed been magical.

Keely’s debut album had been so successful and her popularity as a singer rose so rapidly that the executives at Capitol Records did a complete reversal and were now eager for her to record as a solo artist. Apparently Louis did not feel threatened by this development, at least not initially. With his big ego intact, it may never have occurred to him that his wife could actually eclipse him as a figure in the music business—though there is a somewhat defensive hint to the title of an album that he would record and issue in 1959:
Strictly Prima.
And there was a financial incentive: he viewed Keely’s achievements as allowing them both to keep riding the wave of escalating performing fees and recording royalties.

“Everything was working well, every song was a hit for Keely, everything that Louis did and everything that Louis and Keely did was a big success,” said Joe Segreto in the documentary
Louis Prima: The Wildest!
about 1958, when the couple reached the height of their fame. “They were doing a lot of television at the time, when television was really taking off.”

As far as the public and the people who knew them could tell, Louis was genuinely proud of his wife’s success. There was, of course, ego involved here too, because he and Keely were the Las Vegas version of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, and everything she had gained in her life she owed to him. What she achieved satisfied Louis’s burning desire to be more famous and more successful.

“Louis was so ambitious it was unreal,” Sam Butera stated in the 1983 TV documentary
Louis Prima—The Chief
(which offers glimpses of first wife Louise and daughter Joyce attending a 1981 tribute to Prima in New Orleans). “It was uncanny the way he would get what he wanted. He planned it all out. Even in the car, we’d be driving to a show; he’d turn off the radio and say, ‘Leave me alone,’ so no one would interfere with his thinking.”

Keely was back in the studio in June 1958 to create a follow-up to
I Wish You Love.
She worked with arranger Billy May, another Sinatra collaborator, on
Politely,
which included the tunes “The Song Is You,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and “I’ll Never Smile Again.” It too sold well, so before the end of the year Keely was recording “It’s Magic,” “Stardust,” “Stormy Weather,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and other classics (or about to be) for the album
Swinging Pretty,
with Nelson Riddle back as the arranger.

“The procedure for selecting the tracks on these albums was simple,” critic Joseph F. Laredo wrote. “Standards and the pop tunes of the day were tried out in live performance first, and those that elicited the most gratifying audience reaction made it into the lineup.”

Keely was doing double duty because she and Louis and Sam Butera and the Witnesses continued to record as “The Wildest” to fulfill the Capitol contract and the nearly insatiable demand of the public. And then Hollywood came calling.

As a teenager in Virginia, Dottie Smith might have dreamed of being in a Hollywood movie with a famous and handsome male lead, but she would not have expected it to really happen. And like many young women in the late 1940s, one of the actors she fancied was Robert Mitchum. Now, because of Mitchum, Keely was about to make a big step up from such film fare as
Senior Prom.

By 1958, Mitchum was one of the most popular actors in the world. He had gotten noticed in such 1940s film noir classics as
Out of the Past,
and in the ‘50s was loved by the (mostly female) audience in box office hits like
River of No Return
with Marilyn Monroe and by critics in
Night of the Hunter.
He was branching out to producing some of his own pictures, and his latest project was
Thunder Road.

Mitchum played Korean War veteran Lucas Doolin, who drives fast and hard through the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee as the fearless delivery man of the family’s moonshine business. He is targeted by both government agents and a gangster who wants his organization to take control of all the independent moonshine makers. Doolin doesn’t want his younger brother to follow in his footsteps. For romance, when Doolin is in town he dallies with Francie Wymore, a nightclub singer.

James Agee—known for the book
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
and who years before had cowritten the film
The African Queen
—knew a story about a fast-driving moonshiner who had died in a crash. He passed it along to Mitchum, who decided to produce it as a film. Mitchum also cowrote the script and the music and reportedly directed much of the film himself, though Arthur Ripley received the credit. Mitchum handed the script to Elvis Presley to play Robin, the younger brother. Presley was ready to sign on, but his manager, Col. Tom Parker, demanded too much money, so the role went to James Mitchum, Robert’s sixteen-year-old son. In March 1957, the elder Mitchum had released an album of songs titled
Calypso—Is Like So …
He was a music aficionado and a fan of “The Wildest.” For the role of Francie, he turned to a fellow Capitol recording artist, Keely Smith.

While Louis may have been uncomfortable (or worse) with the love scenes between his wife and Mitchum, Keely could only have done the picture with Louis’s permission. Everything she did professionally depended on her husband’s approval. She told
Newsweek
magazine in June 1958, three months after the
Los Angeles Times
interview, that anything new that happened to her was entirely due to “God, luck, and Louis Prima,” and added, “I don’t think I’ll ever do anything unless Louis OKs it or supervises it or directs it.”

Thunder Road
went straight to box-office gold after it was released on May 10, 1958. It was a big favorite of the drive-in crowd and has attained cult movie status. “Whippoorwill,” a song from the film, cowritten for Keely by Mitchum, was a hit, as was Mitchum’s own “The Ballad of Thunder Road.” (In 1975, there was another successful song, written by Bruce Springsteen, that was titled “Thunder Road” and was inspired by the movie.) For Keely, her first foray as a featured actress in a Hollywood movie was boffo, which in turn made “The Wildest” an even bigger attraction among Las Vegas tourists and television audiences.

Still, Keely maintained about the time, “I didn’t know how big we were. That didn’t matter to me. I was just very happy being with Louis, being with my kids, and singing or whatever.”

It wasn’t easy trying to be family people between the traveling and the demands of the lounge act. Prima’s lifelong fear of flying meant trips to New York for concerts and TV shows and anywhere in the United States to fulfill bookings took longer. And wherever they went, they were on a tether because they always had to return to the Casbar Lounge. They were yet to grow tired of it; instead they relished it.

“I just think the lounge made us work harder,” Keely told Mike Weatherford in
Cult Vegas.
“It kept our feet on the ground. When you’re all over the country with first-class treatment in the best hotels, it’s kind of hard to keep your feet on the ground. If you’re in Las Vegas working midnight til six in the morning, and your best friends are cab drivers and hookers and waitresses, you’re pretty normal.”