That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (21 page)

“I had two beautiful daughters,” Keely reminisced to
Port Folio Weekly
in September 2003. “In the daytime I would stay home with them, and Louis would go play golf, and in the night time we would go to work. So it didn’t dawn on me that we were stars or not stars.”

That Louis went out almost every day to play golf with the boys didn’t mean that he was becoming a more gregarious man. He was passionate about golf, and there had to be a foursome to go out on the course, and that was as far as it went.

“His whole thing was ‘familiarity breeds contempt,’ that’s how he lived his life,” Sam Butera said about Prima. “We played golf and he said, ‘I’ll see you later, Sam, see you at the job tonight.’ But on stage, he made me laugh, listening to him and the way he did things and the way he moved. Nobody could mess with him. Frank Sinatra came on stage, Dean Martin came on stage, Jerry Lewis—no matter who, they could not mess with Louis Prima. He had a certain way. He laughed at them, and the people were looking at him instead of looking at them.”

As in the rest of America, there were changes brewing in Las Vegas in the twilight of the 1950s. The Dwight Eisenhower administration was in its last couple of years. The launch of satellites by the Soviet Union and the United States had initiated a space race. Rock ‘n’ roll songs and especially Elvis Presley tunes were being played on more radio stations. In the South, lunch counter boycotts and other civil rights protests endeavored to change longheld practices and prejudices.

A particularly significant change in Las Vegas was that the offstage barriers to black performers were weakening and soon to come down. A march of protest along the Strip took place in 1958, and among the marchers were Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, and Marlene Dietrich. They and other black performers refused to sign contracts with hotels that would not make all facilities available to them. Sinatra was fed up that Sammy Davis Jr. couldn’t stay at the Sands, and he boycotted the hotel—even though he owned a percentage of it and was its biggest draw—until that door swung open.

“The growing clout of the entertainers had much to do with ending segregation abruptly,” wrote Mike Weatherford in
Cult Vegas
about what would happen when the new decade began. “Three years prior, Harry Belafonte had negotiated a written contract with the Riviera that guaranteed the head-liner’s suite. Billy Eckstine had more direct methods, according to Claude Trenier. When a dice-table stick man informed him, ‘We don’t let niggers play here,’ Eckstine cold-cocked him.”

The Grammy Awards ceremony held in 1959 was a triumph for Louis and Keely. Best Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group formed a Grammy category for the first time, and they won that award for “That Old Black Magic.” (For the fiftieth anniversary of the song, Keely went onstage at the 2008 Grammy Awards to sing some of the song, with Kid Rock replacing Prima as her sidekick.)

The Grammys ceremony should have been a triumph for their friend Frank Sinatra too. With Nelson Riddle the previous year, he had recorded two of the finest albums of his career,
Only the Lonely
and
Come Fly with Me,
the two bestselling discs of 1958.
Only the Lonely
went to number one, and it remained on the bestseller charts for over two years. It continues to be one of his truly great albums, and how fitting (and anticipated) it would have been for Sinatra to receive the Best Male Vocal award. But the winner was Domenico Modugno for the song “Volare,” and the Best Album award went to Henry Mancini’s
The Music from Peter Gunn,
based on the TV show. Frank was furious over one of the very few times at this point in his life when he didn’t get his way.

There were indications that, by taking full advantage of their popularity, Louis and Keely were becoming overextended.
Variety
reported in March 1959 that in Hollywood a producer, Irving Levin, filed a breach of contract lawsuit against them, for just over two thousand dollars, for backing out of a deal to film a pilot for a TV series they had intended to do. The paltry amount implies the suit was more out of pique than anything else, or it could have been a small-time shakedown, but it was not unlikely that there were offers on the table for a “Wildest”-related television show.

Making sure that when Keely made another movie he would be the leading man, Louis explored combining film and recording efforts. “It’s understood that Prima has been dickering with other labels, among them MGM and Dot, for a new tie when his pact with Capitol runs out,”
Variety
reported in April. It went on to say that Louis was “looking for a disk affiliation with a built-in motion picture company tie because he’s scouting a simultaneous indie producer setup. Dot is tied to Paramount and MGM is aligned with the Metro studio.”

Another sign of cracks in the act was that, for the first time, Louis’s health failed him. That spring he experienced dizziness and headaches. Initially, he blamed his feelings on sagebrush and mesquite pollen in the surrounding area and the clouds of cigarette smoke in the Casbar Lounge. He even cast some blame on his trumpet, thinking it might contain dust or bacteria. The band took a hiatus, and Louis went to the hospital for two operations, which seems odd as a response to allergic reactions. Being ever-private offstage, no information was given out about the operations.

However, most odd is that, in a statement he did issue to the press, Louis offered that while he was in the hospital “rumors were started that Keely and I were breaking up. This is a preposterous lie, started by some imbecile. We have a wonderful family life, and we have two beautiful children, and Keely and I love each other very much.” He insisted that rumors that they would not be returning to the Casbar Lounge were untrue and that “it will be wonderful seeing you all again.”

They were welcomed back with open arms by tourists and celebrities alike. “They were
the
act to see in the late hours,” recalls Connie Stevens, who was just emerging as a singer and actress in the late ‘50s. “There were a lot of laughs and it was exhausting, but for me it was more fun than I’d ever had.”

Las Vegas was becoming even more of a playground for the famous, and the rest of the country paid increasing attention. The gossip columnists had almost more material than they had space to report celebrity happenings.

“The Tropicana engagement was my first major live appearance since the scandal became public, and I really did not know how the audience was going to respond to me,” recalled Eddie Fisher about the headlines that followed his split with Debbie Reynolds and his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. “Because Elizabeth was going to be there, the media descended on Vegas…. I was quite nervous when I walked out onstage opening night, until I looked down and saw Elizabeth smiling at me. ‘I opened here two years ago,’ I began. ‘Since then, nothing much has happened.’ The audience laughed, maybe even a little louder and longer than the joke was worth, but it was their way of letting me know they were with me.”

But most of the headlines were devoted to Sinatra and his pals, who were soon to become more visible on the big screen. What could be the first Rat Pack movie was, strangely, not shot in Las Vegas but in Indiana. Sinatra had signed on to star in
Some Came Running,
James Jones’s follow-up bestseller to
From Here to Eternity.
He played a heavy-drinking, gambling, would-be writer who returns to his Midwestern hometown after a long absence that included being in the Army. The second male lead was also a heavy drinker and gambler. Who else but Dean Martin for the part? And for the nice girl who falls for the star: Shirley MacLaine.

But they imported their Las Vegas lifestyle to the Midwest. “We were on our movie location in Madison, Indiana, when The Boys from Chicago visited Frank,” MacLaine recalled in
My Lucky Stars,
referring to men sent by Giancana to observe the film’s shooting. “I didn’t know who they were. I only knew that the nightlife of poker, jokes, pasta, and booze went on until five
A.M.
Our calls were at six
A.M.”

Soon one of “The Boys” was Giancana himself. MacLaine would learn more about what he was really like some years later in Mexico City. She was shooting
Two Mules for Sister Sara
with Clint Eastwood and on a day off went to see Sammy Davis Jr. perform at a nightclub. When she went backstage looking for Sammy, Giancana was there.

The mob boss kept insisting that she have some pasta, and each time she refused he twisted her arm behind her back harder. Davis came out of his dressing room and saw that Shirley was in pain. He intervened, and Giancana slugged him in the stomach. “OK, no pasta for you either,” he said.

Without help from mobsters, Louis and Keely went back before the movie cameras. For better or worse, the definitive Prima-Smith movie is
Hey Boy! Hey Girl!,
which was released in March 1959. Also opening on the big screen that week were
All Mine to Give
with Cameron Mitchell and Glynis Johns,
The Violators
with Arthur O’Connell,
The Big Fisherman
featuring Howard Keel,
It Happened to Jane
with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon,
The Scapegoat
starring Alec Guinness,
Scampolo
with European temptress Romy Schneider, and an Alfred Hitchcock classic,
North by Northwest,
starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason.

Hey Boy! Hey Girl!
is certainly no classic musical of the 1950s, but it has some enjoyable scenes and is the best feature-length representation on the big screen of the Prima-Smith-Butera dynamic, though the plot is far from being the “wildest.” It’s a low-budget showcase from Columbia Pictures that also features a recognizable supporting actor, James Gregory. It took only eleven days to shoot the movie late in 1958, nine of them in Las Vegas.

Keely plays Dorothy Spencer, who is trying to raise funds for her church’s youth camp. She approaches Louis at the club where he is performing, and he is first seen singing “Oh Marie,” backed by Sam and the Witnesses, who are also playing themselves. Louis agrees to help the youth camp, and that effort is interspersed with modestly romantic scenes as the two fall in love, accompanied by some finger-snapping musical numbers.

While not anywhere near the Top 10, the film did well at the box office, just one more indication that there was a substantial audience for anything the couple did. Keely exhibited an assured screen presence, and Columbia Pictures gave it a strong promotional push. One advertisement blared, “Smash Capitol Records promotion of soundtrack album! Socko standee displays in 8,000 record stores! Saturation deejay coverage!”

Despite such cooperation from the company, Prima decided that he and his wife would leave Capitol Records. As a couple and, for Keely, as a solo act, they had enjoyed a lot of success with the label, and an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude might have been wiser. But Dot Records, which had Pat Boone and Debbie Reynolds in its stable, stepped in with a substantial advance and offered that Prima would keep control of the masters they recorded, which could mean millions as years passed. If the couple continued at the rate of success they were enjoying, this one contract would set them up financially for the rest of their lives.

Louis and Keely would certainly be industrious in the recording studio, creating and releasing eight albums in just over two years, including twenty-five singles. In 1960, they released one of their most enduring albums sales-wise,
Louis and Keely!
It featured the couple’s versions of “Night and Day,” “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You),” “Make Love to Me,” and “Cheek to Cheek” among the twelve tracks.

However, they were not a good fit at Dot (despite its being her childhood name), and, as Keely later commented, “It was never the same after that, not like it had been at Capitol.”

They ended what was to date their most successful year with a smash show. They opened at the Moulin Rouge in Hollywood on New Year’s Eve, 1958. Twelve hundred people were turned away that night. It was estimated that during Louis and Keely’s seven-day engagement, fifteen thousand would-be audience members couldn’t obtain seats. Even at the height of his fame as a bandleader, Prima alone could not have done such business.

Louis kept his Italian roots close and performed some of the novelty songs from early in his career even in the arid, neon landscape of Nevada. “Oh Marie” was a regular in the act, and he sang it almost entirely in Italian dialect. As George Guida describes it in his
Journal of Popular Culture
article, “Dancing and clapping, he pours every ounce of energy into performing an Italian troubador’s song for the unflappable Smith, who stands by impassively and watches, like a Mardi Gras debutante. Such an
Americana
is not easily won, so Prima enlists the help of his own krewe, his own tribe, the band. The persona of the song swears to his love, ‘Sona chitarra mia!’ (‘My guitar plays for you!’), so Prima pleads with Butera to play HIS instrument, the saxophone. Butera steps forward for ‘una nota,’ which he cannot deliver for laughing. Prima notices and quips, ‘What’s the matter, Sam? You can’t play in Italian?’ ”

With the exception of their appearances on Ed Sullivan’s show, the most popular television exposure “The Wildest” ever received was on April 5, 1959, a Sunday, on
The Dinah Shore Chevy Show,
one of the small screen’s most-watched programs. The timing was perfect:
Hey Boy! Hey Girl!,
the movie headlined by the couple, was in theaters, and it was the five hundredth broadcast of Shore’s show and thus heavily hyped in print ads.

Louis, Keely, Sam, and the band were onscreen for the first fifteen minutes of the show. Their first number was, predictably, “When You’re Smiling.” According to David Kamp in a detailed
Vanity Fair
article published forty years later, after a new viewing of the Shore show: