That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (27 page)

What did mirror the Louis-Keely dynamic is that Prima fell in love with his singer, and vice versa. “I don’t know where idolatry ended and love began,” Gia recalled. “We were in Lake Tahoe and it was in between the second and third show and he said, ‘Meet me at the side entrance of Harrah’s right after this show. Change your clothes and meet me.’ So I did.”

In February 1963, in a limo being driven to Reno, he proposed. She accepted. They found a justice of the peace in Reno and got married. They returned to Harrah’s, and, instead of introducing her as Gia Maione, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Mrs. Prima.”

Before long, Gia made fewer stage appearances, because in the next two years she gave birth to two children, Lena Ann and Louis Jr., Louis’s first and only son. Prima was fifty-four when the boy, his sixth and last child, was born in June 1965.

Prima, like many performers whose careers had begun twenty or more years earlier, was nearly crushed by the cultural tsunami that was the Beatles. American radios first began to blare “She Loves You” in the fall of 1963, but the impact was minimal until the following February, when the Fab Four stepped off a jet at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
the same program that had kept Prima and his generation of performers in the American entertainment spotlight for a decade. The moment the Pan Am plane from London touched down, everything changed. Prima’s act appeared dated, and his attempts to avoid becoming obsolete by changes in toupees and clothing only emphasized that he was thirty years older than John, Paul, George, and Ringo and the British invaders who followed up on the beachhead they established.

“I don’t think there was a period when Prima’s fortunes really lagged because of the absence of Keely,” contended the writer Will Friedwald in the Prima documentary. “Obviously, it was star power, because Keely had been a headliner at that point. The problem with Prima’s later career was the onset of this whole other kind of music. There was really not much he could do against the British invasion. There wasn’t very much he could do to stay in the limelight at that point and it was the same thing that happened to Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, to all the great stars of that period, finding a way to deal with that.” The way Prima dealt with that was by concentrating on his core audience in Las Vegas and New Orleans.

Even though the Beatles played a show there, Las Vegas remained a refuge or last outpost of what was becoming a conquered race of entertainers. Acts like Louis Armstrong (before being reclaimed by jazz purists), Nat King Cole, and the Mary Kaye Trio were, in the mid-’60s, the Joe E. Lewis and Sophie Tucker, Ray Bolger, and Jimmy Durante of a decade before in Las Vegas. Would Prima have been more of a survivor if he and Keely had remained together? One has to believe so. She was still in her thirties for most of the 1960s. She most likely would have further established her solo career while also packing the rooms with Louis and Sam.

In the fall of 1965, Prima signed a contract to perform at the Sands Hotel. Sinatra was on hand to mark the occasion, but in a photo taken for publicity purposes his expression is remarkably different than when he appeared in photos with Keely. It’s obvious that this was not the way Frank wanted things to turn out.

In connection with the Sands deal, Prima’s official biography for the press was revised. It is a breezy and of course effusive overview of his career—among its offerings are, “Along with space travel, the most talked-about subject today is Louis Prima” and he “is easily the youngest living legend in show business”—and concludes with his ongoing collaboration with Gia Maione and Sam Butera. Not anywhere in the three full pages of copy is there a mention of Keely Smith. It read as if he had headlined alone during the 1950s.

Before 1965 was over, Louis’s mother, Angelina, died. Louis was devastated and could not bring himself to look at his mother during the wake. He may have felt guilty, too, because Angelina was unhappy when her son and Keely divorced.

Even the welcome mat in Las Vegas began to shrink. But Prima could always go home to New Orleans and find an enthusiastic audience, and he was accompanied by the ever-loyal Sam Butera, though the cast of the Witnesses kept changing.

“We made some arrangements for him to come back to New Orleans, and he would perform most of the year there,” said Joe Segreto. “It was a big departure for Louis to want to do that.”

But there was one more life to this cat. In 1966, Prima received an invitation from the Walt Disney studio for him and his band to perform for the studio’s team of animators. They did, and the result was the creation of the King Louie character that would play an important role in Disney’s next animated film,
The Jungle Book.

Before the movie came out, Prima attempted to create a second life for his animated alter ego. He commissioned a screenplay titled
King Louie the Most,
written by Stephen Lord, in anticipation of capitalizing on the Disney film. It would star Louis and Gia with Sam and the Witnesses. The opening scene has a narrator identified as Louis Armstrong who introduces the audience to the king of Groovesville (Prima) and his royal court: Sampson the Sender, Sir Winston Smirchpill, Sir Walter Rolly, Morgan the Merrier, and Sir Dancelot. In the painful dialogue, Prima tries to come off as a cool ‘60s swinger.

The Jungle Book
was released in November 1967, and Prima had his best big-screen role ever, as a cartoon ape. His rocking rendition of “I Want to Be Like You” is a highlight of the picture. He and costar Phil Harris (the film also featured Sebastian Cabot, George Sanders, and Sterling Holloway) made two successful albums together, and they earned a gold record.

According to a review in the December 11, 1967, issue of
Newsweek
magazine, “At worst, ‘The Jungle Book’ is an unpretentious and agreeably old-fashioned cartoon. What it lacks in inspiration it mostly makes up for in expertise.” And “Louis Prima talks a great game as king of the apes.” The
New York Times
was more enthusiastic, calling it a “perfectly dandy cartoon feature” and “grand fun for all ages,” as were audiences, who made
The Jungle Book
a holiday box-office hit.

The success of the Disney movie did not result—fortunately, it would seem—in backing to make
King Louie the Most.
It did allow for Louis and Gia to record a Disney album,
Let’s Fly with Mary Poppins,
on which the couple warbled “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” and other tunes from the Oscar-winning movie.

His popularity restored for a time with a new generation, one that was accustomed to seeing stars on television, Prima made regular appearances on shows hosted by Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop, Johnny Carson, and others. Ironically, among the biggest stars on TV was a duo who had patterned their stage act on Louis and Keely. Sonny and Cher scored pop hits with “I Got You, Babe,” “The Beat Goes On,” and “You Better Sit Down, Kids” and presented themselves as hip, counterculture performers. Salvatore Bono, or Sonny, eleven years older, took credit for discovering Cherilyn Sarkisian, and he wrote and arranged much of their music.

By 1969, however, after a couple of failures at the box office and a label contract ending because of dwindling record sales, Sonny and Cher had to reinvent their act and hit the nightclub circuit. That July, they had a month-long engagement at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, opening for, of all people, Pat Boone, and with Sonny in a tuxedo to boot. During the gig, they found that, with Sonny playing a buffoon and Cher supplying the well-timed jibes and fine voice, the older audience embraced them.

In a
Playboy
interview, Cher recalled, “We went on the road and played nightclubs. At first, we died. Then we started getting off on the band, just getting into a little rapping, and then we noticed that people were beginning to laugh so we just started working on it. We never wrote anything down. If something worked, we’d add it, and if it didn’t, we’d chuck it out.”

Their act was a success on the tube too. After an appearance on
The Merv Griffin Show
in 1971, CBS created
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.
It was a huge hit that ran for several years. To those watching them on television who had seen Louis and Keely a decade or more earlier, it was déjà vu all over again. Sonny and Cher also divorced, but in their case Cher went on to become a megastar.

Prima did a steady number of nightclub and theater shows, though the runs got shorter and the venues got smaller. And his energy flagged. A June 14, 1972, review in the
New York Times
of his opening at the Rainbow Grill began with a slap: “Louis Prima, lest we forget, was once a part of the jazz world.” Later, the reviewer reported that after “When You’re Smiling,” the first number, “Mr. Prima’s performance is downhill all the way. He is now a dour, rotund man who spends most of the evening standing around while Mr. Butera and his musicians hold the spotlight…. Mr. Prima’s main stint is a medley of his old recording ‘hits,’ an impressively forgettable list aside from such universally performed songs as ‘Just a Gigolo’ and “I’m Confessin'.”

While performing at the Mill Run Theatre in Chicago in the summer of 1973, the sixty-two-year-old Prima had to be helped off the stage in the middle of bellowing one of his signature songs, “When You’re Smiling.” Prima was found to have suffered a mild heart attack. He began a strenuous exercise program and appeared to fully recover.

Eventually, the
Jungle
Book–fueled acclaim began to ebb. He returned to Las Vegas occasionally and even designed and constructed a golf course there, called Fairway to the Stars, just south of the city. When he went out on the road, he and Sam and the band found themselves in places like the Colonie Coliseum Summer Theater, a small venue outside Albany, New York. In July 1974, he told a reporter for the
Schenectady Gazette
that he never tired of performing “as long as I can see the people.”

His home base now was New Orleans, where he could always find work and spend time with Gia and their two children. In October 1974, Mayor Maurice “Moon” Landrieu announced a Louis Prima Week in the city. It was a city that had changed much since he had lived there as a boy, including the razing of his home on St. Peter Street as part of the construction of a public housing complex.

Prima began to experience headaches when he tried to sing high notes and, before long, when he played the trumpet too. The pain increased, and he gave up blowing the trumpet and had to keep his singing to lower ranges. Doctors who examined him found a healthy man. But he wasn’t.

“We were working at the Melody Fair in Tonawanda, New York, which is right near Buffalo,” Sam Butera recalled in a 1999 interview with the
Las Vegas Sun.
“We were working opposite Jerry Vale. Prima was taking like eight or nine Tylenol before each show—terrible headaches. He told me a couple months prior, ‘Sam, we’re going to have to lower the keys in these songs because I can’t make those high notes anymore.’ I said, ‘Look, whatever you want to do, we’ll do.’ ”

Louis began to suffer the headaches even when not performing. By the summer of 1975 they had become intolerable, yet he continued to do shows and record, including
Louis Prima Meets Robin Hood
for Disney and
The Wildest ‘75
for his Prima One label. The last song he recorded in a studio was, prophetically, “I’m Leaving You.”

CAT scans were just beginning to be used, and Prima had one done of his skull. The reason for the headaches was found. “Sure enough, they saw a tumor,” said Gia Prima. “It was not malignant, it was benign. But it was in the brain stem, which is the most difficult place. Every nerve in your body goes through there, so there was only one neurosurgeon who would risk it even though there would be less than 1 percent chance of survival.”

In October, Prima drove to Los Angeles for an operation at Mount Sinai Hospital that would attempt to separate the tumor from the brain stem. But immediately after surgeons cut in, part of the brain hemorrhaged, and Prima went into a semicomatose state. In an especially cruel twist, he could understand and see everything around him, but he could not respond, nor could he match a thought with an action.

Four months later, Prima was flown—his fear of flying no longer mattered—to New Orleans, where he entered the Ochsner Clinic. Thus began an agonizingly slow decline to death. “He didn’t ever come out of it,” his sister-in-law, Madeline Prima, said about the coma in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!
“We just watched him die.”

He remained in the coma, at Ochsner and then at the Touro Infirmary, for almost three years. “I went to see him once at Ochsner, and it was sad to know that he was incapacitated for so long, because in everyone’s vision, Louis was indestructible, you know, and this was a monumental man,” said Joe Segreto. “You just never imagined that Louis would be ill and not playing for the people.”

In a 1970 interview for the New Orleans Jazz Museum, Prima was asked how he would like to be remembered. “I would like to be pictured as having a lot of fun and making people happy,” he stated.

After six weeks of battling pneumonia and being given last rites, Prima died on August 24, 1978, at age sixty-seven. He was buried two days later at Greenwood Cemetery. Gia, of course, was there with her children, as was Keely with hers and first wife Louise with her daughter, Joyce. Sam Butera attended along with local musicians, some of whom dated back to the very beginning of Prima’s career.

His casket was moved to a crypt in the Metairie Cemetery in 1981, on a site that, appropriately, was once a horse-racing track. On his marble tombstone is carved:
WHEN THE END COMES, I KNOW, THEY’LL SAY ‘JUST A GIGOLO,’ AS LIFE GOES ON WITHOUT ME.

Joyce Prima lives near the site of the former Pretty Acres, the estate that her father created outside New Orleans. She had lived in New York for years and attempted a singing career of her own before returning to New Orleans for what she thought was for good. But her home and her possessions were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and she left the city. Pretty Acres is now the site of a Wal-Mart. Tracelene Prima returned to her native Washington State with her daughter, and Louis’s second child continues to live there.