That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (14 page)

Being with Capitol after the success of
From Here to Eternity
gave Sinatra “his greatest role: his own musical and stylistic reinvention,” wrote Benjamin Schwartz in “His Second Act,” an essay published in 2007 in the
Atlantic.
“The 16 concept albums that followed, his most remarkable achievement and among America’s enduring cultural treasures, defied public taste and redirected it toward what would be known as the Great American Songbook. With his key collaborator, Nelson Riddle, Sinatra jettisoned the yearning, sweet-voiced crooning of his Columbia years in favor of a richer voice, greater rhythmic invention, and more knowing and conversational phrasing.”

Keely was being a trouper, apparently willing and able to be onstage right up until she went into labor. It helped that she was the youngest person on the stage, and she sure didn’t slow the rest of the band down.
Fabulous Las Vegas
in its February 19 edition referred to Louis and Keely “who, with their ‘witnesses,’ manage to set the whole room into a turmoil each and every night.”

“Meet me in the Casbar” was the line of copy above “Louis Prima with Keely Smith and Kay Martin Trio” in a print ad. What was unusual and a sign of the act’s rapid ascent was that the advertisement was for an appearance by Mae West in the Sahara’s Congo Room. The lounge was no longer an afterthought but another attraction drawing people to the hotel.

Because of the advanced pregnancy, Louis and Keely had to shut the show down toward the end of February. It had to be a bittersweet moment for Louis especially. He had taken big steps on the comeback trail, he was playing pretty for the people once again, his third child was soon to be born, he had a beautiful and talented wife, he had a foot-stomping band behind him … and he had to go sit on the sidelines.

Louis left the small stage with a generous gesture. “What a closing performance!” exclaimed Jack Cortez in
Fabulous Las Vegas.
“We’re speaking of Louis Prima’s final night of his Casbar engagement at the Hotel Sahara. The last show went on until six ayem. Prima bought drinks for everyone in attendance and the figure was close to two hundred and fifty (250). Everyone stood up and drank a farewell toast to Louis, his wife Keely and the child which will soon join the Prima clan.”

Two weeks later Keely, showing the same impeccable timing she had onstage, gave birth to Antoinette Elizabeth Prima on March 9, her own twenty-seventh birthday.

“The Wildest” wasn’t supposed to return until May 17, 1955, but the act was in such demand that Keely rushed back to the stage before the end of April. “This past week, Keely Smith and Louis Prima returned to the Casbar, for an unlimited engagement,”
Fabulous Las Vegas
reported. “Charles Boyer may have convinced a few women of the merits of the Casbar, but Louis and his wife have convinced an untold number that the Hotel Sahara lounge is the place to visit. A great ovation greeted them when they opened. It was fantastic to watch their many fans and friends attempt to crowd into spaces that were already taken.”

They quickly settled back into a groove, thanks in large part to their rigorous schedule. In addition to whatever rehearsal Louis demanded and the instructions he gave them, the band learned by doing.

Keely reiterated in
Cult Vegas,
“Everything we did, we found onstage—including all the lines that Sam used to throw. The deadpan look was because we did five 45-minute shows, and I was up there about a half-hour each show before I even opened my mouth. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I used to just fold my arms, cross my legs, and lean up against the piano. And I watched everything that went on in the room, and the casino too. And then when Louis would come and pull on my skirt, he would be disrupting what I was watching, and I’d look down at him like, ‘Don’t bother me.’ ”

Sam would usually get his turn in the show before Keely, after Louis brayed and danced his way through several songs that had long been in his repertoire.

“In general the next thing would be Sam Butera,” recalled Joe Segreto. “Sam had a segment in the show where Louis would introduce Sam, and Sam would do one or two of his numbers that could be a vocal or an instrumental.”

Writer Nick Tosches—whose biography of Jerry Lee Lewis,
Balls of Fire,
is a classic—observed in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!
that “Sam’s version of ‘Night Train’ is like the killer version.” He added, “Musically, in the relationship between Louie and Keely, Keely was the sweetener. Keely would sweetly come in and sing a little bit in English softly and nicely, a total contrast to Louis.”

“The lovely Keely would provide her husband with both a stoic, stone-faced counterpoint to his comic antics and a duet partner capable of matching him stride for stride,” wrote Joseph F. Laredo. “There came a moment in each show, however, when she would take center stage to perform a popular standard with such skill and soulful conviction that the audience grew quiet and hushed, and everyone sitting in the dark and smoky room was made fully aware that the sensitive stylist in the spotlight was a ballad singer of the very highest order.”

But Keely could be raucous too. According to a press item, “A real ‘ball’ was had by all who attended the Casbar at the Hotel Sahara, last Saturday ayem. Deadpan songstress-comedienne Keely Smith (Mrs. Louis Prima) let loose with all her hilarious nature and broke up everyone in the place, including the musicians.”

Still, Louis was the Chief at all times. Improvisation was fine within the parameters he set.

“He was a master at lining the show up,” Keely said about him. “He would feature himself in the first three songs, then he’d feature the trombone player, then the bass player or sometimes the drummer. Then Sam, then me, then he and I would close the show together.”

Those who marveled at Prima’s stamina were not privy to how he “prepared” for each show. “He would fall asleep, just like that,” said Butera. “Showtime, he would wake up and go on stage. I can’t do that. There’s certain people who can, you know, just fall asleep for a few minutes, and that’s what he did.”

“When that curtain would go up, if that audience wasn’t paying very close attention, he’d make the curtain come back down,” said Segreto.

According to Lou Sino, who spent ten years as Prima’s trombone player beginning in 1957, “I’ve seen him nights, when that curtain went up and he didn’t get that response he wanted, he said, ‘Bring the curtain back down again,’ and if the curtain went up again and the audience was still dead, ‘Bring that curtain down again.’ ”

“The audience would finally get hip to what he was doing,” Segreto said, “and then he would swing it and knock the back of the house up.”

“I even saw him stop in the middle of a song and switch to another song because he knew instinctively it wasn’t going to work and he’d take another path,” says Hunt-Bono.

Las Vegas was already known as a late-night town, but “The Wildest” brought that to a new level. “The horn blows at midnight in the Casbar Lounge” headlined an advertisement for the show in 1956. With short breaks in between they would perform until 6:00
A.M.,
which for some of the year was dawn or after.

“Prima did more than anyone except Sinatra to fuel Vegas’ image as a wild all-night party,” wrote Mike Weatherford in
Cult Vegas.
“Prima didn’t invent the lounge any more than Sinatra invented the showroom; he was just in the right place at the right time. But it was Prima who became the quintessential lounge act and put the Sahara’s Casbar on the cocktail napkin of history as ‘The Wildest Show in Vegas.’ ”

Some of the items that appeared in the Las Vegas press with increasing frequency about the act were planted by Prima himself. He found new outlets for the promotional energy he had displayed as a big-band leader. As one rival commented, “Louis was the only guy I know of who ever played Vegas that was able to get a quote from Howard Hughes for running in an ad on a billboard, and the quote was, ‘Every time I see them, they get better.’ ”

Prima was also increasingly asserting himself, even within the Sahara itself, as he became more of a Las Vegas insider and “The Wildest” brought in more revenue.

“The pit bosses were coming to Louis and telling him, ‘You have to be quiet, you have to turn the sound down,’ “ Butera recalled in
Cult Vegas.
“Louis would get very perturbed because what we were trying to get across was energy—make these people happy and make them want to stay there and enjoy themselves. It got to such a point that Louis said one night, ‘Pack up your things, we’re going home.’ That’s the way Louis Prima was—he wouldn’t take seconds from nobody, not if he thought he was right. He had to prove a point. Sure enough, we didn’t work the next night. Then they came to Louis and said, ‘There’s no people in the lounge.’ They came and begged him to come back to work.”

They must have enjoyed the night off. Somehow, Louis and Keely and Sam and the band kept to the brutal schedule of midnight to six, six days a week. Typically, lounge engagements were not that long, but, with “The Wildest,” the Sahara couldn’t afford to give them a break. According to one print account toward the end of July, “It seems as though every night it’s New Year’s Eve at the Sahara’s Casbar Lounge. Louis Prima and Keely Smith are playing to standing-room only (ten deep).”

People from out of town put seeing the act high on their lists. The word of mouth that tourists took back home to Minnesota and Pennsylvania and Texas was excellent. Because of the small space and the personalities onstage, the audience could feel part of the act.

“We have a lot of lounge acts that are very cold and very indifferent to the audience,” Keely told National Public Radio in a September 2007 interview to coincide with the release of the CD
Keely Smith: The Essential Capitol Collection.
“We talked to our audience. The audience was allowed to ask us questions. They were allowed to interact with us onstage. Nobody ever called me Ms. Smith, it was always Keely. Nobody ever called Louis Mr. Prima. That’s what our lounge act was, it was one big living room.”

Certainly Prima’s success in Las Vegas encouraged casino operators to put out the welcome mat to New Orleans musicians. At least once, his brother played the Casbar Lounge when “The Wildest” took a break, but, unlike Louis, Leon didn’t embrace the Las Vegas lifestyle. He preferred to stay put in the Big Easy. In November 1955, Jack Teagarden had made his Strip debut in the Stagebar at the Flamingo Hotel. Soon a new generation led by Al Hirt and Pete Fountain would be making appearances. Perhaps as much as New Orleans itself, Las Vegas exposed more people to the blend of Dixieland and other forms of jazz from the South.

The
Las Vegas Review-Journal
published a photo in its December 23, 1955, issue of Louis being presented with a huge birthday cake by Milton Prell. Only a little more than a year before, Prell might have wondered about Bill Miller’s sanity when he offered a seemingly washed-up Prima a two-week gig in the lounge. Now Louis, with his arm around Keely, was being honored by the top man at the Hotel Sahara. (Prell would do the honors for Keely and Antoinette, called Toni, too the following March.)

The caption underneath reads: “These all-time attendance record holders for Las Vegas lounges are back by popular demand in the Sahara’s Casbar Lounge. Louis’ versatility, complemented by the fresh song styling of Keely, make this combo one of the newest innovations in show business today.”

What a difference a year made. A few weeks later, as 1956 began, Prell would order that the Casbar Lounge be completely remodeled, adding a revolving stage and increasing seating capacity. Fittingly, “The Wildest” was going to get even wilder and bigger that year.

Louis Prima (center) was only sixteen years old when he formed this band in New Orleans in 1927 that featured (left to right) Irving Fazola, John Miller, Bob Jeffers, George Hartman, Cliff LeBlanc, Leonart Albersted, Jacob Sciambra, Burt Andrus, and John Viviano.

LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM JAZZ COLLECTION