That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas (9 page)

Prima spent less time on the road, apparently, to please his new wife and not to curtail expenses, as in addition to the boat he rented an apartment in the city and bought property just outside New Orleans that became known as Pretty Acres. He continued to own and bet on the ponies, and he purchased a majority interest in a New Orleans nightclub. His musicians began to leave him to pursue other opportunities. More people were staying home and hooking up televisions, but Louis wanted nothing to do with that medium. In 1949, Tracelene gave birth to Louis’s second daughter, also named Tracelene.

He had a big hit in 1947 with “Civilization,” and the story behind it shows Prima’s good ear for a tune. Carl Sigman and Bob Hilliard were writing songs for the orchestra at the Copacabana in New York, but “Civilization” was rejected as being kind of silly for the swells who made up the Copa crowd. (“Bongo bongo bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo” is a typical lyric.) The composers then put it in a Broadway revue,
Angel in the Wings,
where it was sung by Elaine Stritch, a dynamic singer making her Broadway debut.

Prima heard about the song and secured the rights to record it right away, and it lingered in the Top 10 for eight weeks. When Sigman showed up at Prima’s office in the Brill Building with more song candidates, he fell in love with the secretary whose job responsibilities included signing photos of Louis for fans, taking dictation, and placing his bets on horses. They later married, costing Prima a valuable assistant.

As a composer, Prima continued to craft a good tune, as shown when he cowrote “A Sunday Kind of Love,” which was a hit for Jo Stafford and Fran Warren. It was reported that in 1948 he earned half a million dollars from residuals, performances, his piece of the New Orleans nightclub, and other interests.

But that was his peak as a big-band leader and composer. Those bands were falling out of fashion, and the high overhead of the salaries and the traveling made them especially vulnerable. More of the audience were now fans of the singers who had emerged to front the musicians, like Sinatra and Doris Day and Perry Como.

“The crunch came in 1947,” wrote Cab Calloway in his memoir. “Movies were in, small combos were in, bebop was in, and big bands were out. I just couldn’t get the bookings for the big band, so I called the band members together.” He told them, “I’ve got to let most of you go. The big bands may come back, but right now it’s not happening.”

In the summer of 1948, Dot Smith was twenty, though she could easily pass for younger. She still lived with her family, still doing some singing, and she worked a day job as a bookkeeper. She had been pestering the owner of the Surf Club in Virginia Beach to book Louis Prima and his band. Finally, he did, for that August.

In the weeks leading up to the show, Dot worked on packing the place as though she were the promoter. According to a Prima recollection, when he and his sidemen drove into the area, he saw a young woman in a dark swimsuit emerging from the water. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, and he vaguely remembered the girl in the audience at the Steel Pier who had caught his eye the year before. This might seem far-fetched given the number of women who made up Prima’s audiences night after night, week after week, but by all accounts he did have an uncanny eye for women, one that matched his appetite for them.

During the first show at the Surf Club that Friday night, Prima announced that he was looking for a new singer. Lily Ann Carol had left for a solo career, and replacements Florida Keyes and Tangerine hadn’t cut the mustard. Several local girls tried out, but Dot, too nervous and shy, did not. There were more auditions on Saturday, again without Dot participating, and Prima still didn’t find what he was looking for.

The band performed at an afternoon tea dance on Sunday. Having attended the past two nights and with it being a hot summer day, during the show Dot was at the beach outside the club. Suddenly, she heard an announcement from inside the club: “Dot Smith, come to the bandstand.”

She was alarmed, thinking that something had happened to a family member. She rushed into the Surf Club, after borrowing a skirt and a blouse to get in. Jimmy Vincent recalled, “We’re playing in Virginia and there’s a beautiful nightclub, and oh, she was right in front of us.”

“Louis was standing there, and I said did you call my name?” Smith related in
Louis Prima: The Wildest!.
“And he said, ‘Yes, I understand that you’re a singer.’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘I want you to come up and sing a couple of songs.’ Well, I started shaking like you can’t believe. My knees wouldn’t stop knocking and I was barefoot, but I sang. And he hired me right then and there and I went to work with him that night on the spot and left with him the following Thursday.”

Dot, already knowing the arrangements, sang “Embraceable You” and “Sleepy Time Gal.” During that night’s show she performed in her only dress, the one she had worn to her high school prom.

On their way out of town—on the band’s travels until Dot turned twenty-one in March 1949, Dot’s mother and her brother Piggy would alternate as chaperones—Louis urged that she change her name. His suggestion was Dottie Mae. Dot insisted, “I’m no Dottie Mae.” Instead, combining her two real last names, she became Keely Smith.

Thus one of the most innovative and successful male and female partnerships in show business history began.

When the band returned to Virginia Beach the following summer, Prima wanted to give the audience something to remember him by in exchange for having taken a local girl away. To end the show, Prima led the playing and singing band off the stage of the Surf Club and right into the Atlantic Ocean.

Keely Smith turned out to be exactly what Louis Prima needed to put him back on top in show business. He was smart enough to recognize her potential. First, there was her large, natural voice. Keely could sing high and low, fast and slow, and her smooth phrasing was enticing, especially in contrast to his braying bellow. (Alluring too was her Virginia “Ah” substituting for “I” in songs.) During her peak years, some critics would say that if you looked up
sultry
in the dictionary, there would be a photo of Keely Smith. It wouldn’t matter that she couldn’t read music; she was a natural with a strong memory. Her appealing Irish-Cherokee looks kept audiences’ eyes on her.

In the ensuing years, Prima’s instincts told him to emphasize Keely’s physical features, especially her face, by presenting her with a pageboy haircut and encouraging a deadpan look that conveyed an attitude that she didn’t care what was going on around her. At least, Louis took all the credit for these stagings.

But Smith’s bored appearance was not a Prima invention. She was truly bored onstage. “It wasn’t a role,” she explained. “It was something that I did, I was never a hand-clapper or a finger-snapper.”

Because most of the stages they played on were small, Keely had to stand in the background until it was time for her to sing, and her wait could be a while as Louis sang and blew his trumpet and danced around. “I used to just cross my arms across my chest and for a half-hour I just stood there and did nothing,” Keely said. She watched the audience and people getting up and sitting down, “and I was so busy doing what I call being nosy that when Louis would come and shake my skirt and do motions to me, I would look at him like, ‘You’re interrupting my train of thought.’ It gave the impression that I was deadpan and that I was angry with him.”

Another time she explained, “I stood there like a dummy. That was no act. That’s bashful. Louis wouldn’t let anyone change me.”

Louis, always the best at reading an audience, saw how people reacted to Keely’s stage persona and made sure it remained part of the act for years afterward. It was up to Prima to grab her attention, and he would try just about anything to win at least a smile from her. The more she managed to resist his jokes and ad-libs, the harder he tried. When he did get a reaction—sometimes Keely couldn’t help bursting out with laughter—he and by extension the audience were especially pleased.

One of Keely’s most distinctive features was her pageboy haircut, and most accounts have attributed this to Louis’s insistence. But, according to Keely, “When I joined Louis on the road, we were playing venues similar to the Surf Club, but also the black theaters on the East Coast and big ballrooms all over the country. But none of them had air-conditioning. One night onstage, I was unbearably hot and I noticed a girl in the audience with a cute bobbed hairstyle. During the half-time, I went backstage, and she cut off my long hair.”

She added, “When Louis saw it, he wanted to kill me. But it worked out good.”

What really made the developing Louis and Keely collaboration work was that, for the first time in Louis’s life, equally important to him as his music was his attraction to his stage partner. His relationship with his first wife, Louise, remained strictly offstage. She shared little of his professional career, and their marriage ended relatively quickly. Alma was in the entertainment business but not necessarily in music, and she wasn’t nearly as ambitious as Louis was. Tracelene had been his secretary and not involved in creative pursuits.

For Louis, Keely combined work and play. Within her was a large reservoir of untapped talent. On top of that, he became infatuated with her, emotionally and physically. Barbara Belle, Louis’s manager and occasional songwriting partner through 1961, told Garry Boulard in a 1986 interview that Louis had joked that, when he first saw Dot Smith in a bikini, he “knew she had to be a good singer.”

Though Louis was eighteen years older, for Keely the feeling was mutual. “I thought he was the most gorgeous thing that ever walked,” Keely said. “He could look at me with his eyes and he could just melt me completely—no matter what he had done.”

What became an intense love story did not happen overnight, however. In the ensuing years, Smith recalled several times that Prima was “too hairy,” and she was put off by his apelike features, which was how Louis was often portrayed in caricatures and reviews of the act. Another time, to the
San Francisco Chronicle,
she said, “I didn’t like him at first, but he sure grew on me.”

Leaving Virginia Beach behind, Keely gave no indication that she thought that she was hitching her wagon to a guy who would lead her to a glamorous show-business lifestyle complete with all the fame and baubles that went with it. She would always maintain that she was sort of swept away by Louis and that going on the road with him and his band was an exciting opportunity.

In reality, far from landing on Easy Street, Keely was in for a bumpy ride. While Prima’s career could never be said to be in freefall, it was slipping. He still made money thanks to the songs he composed, some longtime fans still showed up at concerts, and there were those who were curious about his new girl singer. But as time went on, the shows were more spaced apart, with diminishing crowds, and in smaller venues. Supporting a band and a stable of horses on the ninety-seven-acre Pretty Acres estate in Louisiana was becoming more of a drain on his wallet.

“They cost Louis a lot of money,” Keely told Garry Boulard about the racehorses. “We were doing one-nighters everywhere just to support Louis’s horses. We’d go 700 to 800 miles to do a one-nighter, pick up something like seven hundred dollars, and then hit the road again—all for the horses.”

Prima wanted to keep “playing pretty for the people,” as he liked to say, but there were now fewer people, and they were farther apart.

Stubbornly, he kept looking for them. “We traveled on the bus, and Louis rode in a Cadillac,” recalls Michael Dastoli, who played saxophone in Prima’s band in the late 1940s. “We traveled all over the Midwest during the summertime playing the fairs, then in the wintertime we were booked three nights at a theater in Boston, then a week at a place in Rhode Island, and we even tried Canada. Wherever we could get a booking, we went.

“We used to come across Harry James and his band traveling by bus, and Tommy Dorsey too,” Dastoli continues. “Louis was a nut for softball, so when we were in Atlantic City for a week and Count Basie or one of the other bands was there, we’d play as many games as we could. Of course, Louis had to be the pitcher.”

However large or small the crowd, Prima still gave them a show. Dastoli remembers that Prima “wasn’t the kind of guy you could get close to,” and that he kept to himself offstage, but “what he used to do onstage was fantastic. He was a great showman. He wouldn’t warm up; he was always ready. Louis would come onstage and blow one note, and off we went.”

Dastoli wanted to remain with Prima’s band indefinitely, as he enjoyed the good times on the road and the music. But he had begun dating a woman who had come to see the band in Atlantic City. One day, Dastoli said, “She gave me an ultimatum as we were driving: go on to the church and make our plans to get married, or she’s not going to see me anymore.” Dastoli and his wife, Josephine, have been married for over sixty years.

As with wives, Prima could not maintain a steady relationship with a record label. He and Keely recorded together as early as 1949, but they didn’t stick with any one label, waxing songs for RCA, Mercury, Robin Hood, Columbia, and Decca in rapid succession.