SUNDAY! ONE NIGHT ONLY! THE MAN WHO KILLED JERRY LEWIS

LEGSVILLE.COM

May 18, 2022

 

©2022 By Burt Kearns

 

 

“Bobcat Goldthwait comes out and introduces the clips that Jerry brought, and the clips are running. There’s the famous dance down the stairs from Cinderfella. There’s him doing the incredibly famous boardroom bit from The Errand Boy. And I’m watching Jerry look at himself.  He was seventy-six, overweight and nobody knows who he is anymore, and he’s looking at the twenty-six-year-old version of himself when he was super-famous. And I see Jerry look out at the half-full crowd, and then Jerry fell to the ground. And I think he’s dead.”

That scene was from the Palladium in London, September 8, 2002. It was supposed to be the highlight of Steven Alan Green’s career, the pinnacle of twenty-year, transcontinental climb that placed him alongside the ultimate comedy hero of any kid who grew up in the 1960s, especially a Jewish kid born in Long Island and brought up in Beverly Hills. Instead, it was a curse. A traumatic episode that follows Steven Alan Green to this day—and into the next week, onstage in the one-man show he’s presenting at the Yard Theater in Hollywood on Sunday.

“My comedy heroes when I was very young were Groucho Marx, Soupy Sales, and Wallace & Ladmo,” Green says this week. “The latter were a duo in the local Phoenix television market. I went from Beverly Hills to Phoenix back and forth—my father’s second marriage in the Sixties. I saw Groucho when I was a kid, in the street. He raised his eyebrows at me, and it was magical. My first professional show biz gig, I was five years old. A TV commercial for a department store. I played a kid. And then it’s the classic class clown. We moved around a lot, so every classroom that I was brought into in the middle of the day, in the middle of the semester, that was my audience.”

Steven Alan Green with Marc Maron

 

Professionally, after high school, after performing in musicals and drumming in rock bands, the career kicked off in Los Angeles, around 1981. “I taught myself to play a guitar, strumming a guitar. I had a two-and-a-half octave singing range, and I started doing these coffeehouse gigs. I played the Bla-Bla Cafe where Ricky Lee Jones and Al Jarreau started, and I ran an open mic music venue in Hollywood at a vegetarian restaurant called — get ready for this — The Natural Fudge, which sounds like an Amber Heard daily dish – anyway, having said that, I wish I hadn’t –

“So a couple of comics come into this open mic, and I would play these songs, really heartfelt, almost pukingly sincere songs, and I didn’t think anyone was paying attention. They were talking or they were waiting to go on, or I wasn’t that compelling, and then in between I said, ‘Okay, here’s another song that I wrote just this morning.’ And I played the beginning of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ And they would laugh. And it was that moment when I went ‘Hmm. This is about getting attention.’ And one of the comedians who was on the show said, ‘Why don’t you go to Comedy Store? You’re very funny. And I’d never heard of The Comedy Store.”

The Comedy Store

Steven Alan Green with Pauly Shore

 

The Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip was the hot comedy club in the haunted building that once housed Ciro’s nightclub. It was a competitive, cutthroat, coked-up joint where comedians were discovered, Tonight Show spots decided, sitcoms cast, and stars were born. Only a couple of years earlier, Store regulars including David Letterman, Jay Leno and Tom Dreesen led a strike, demanding that the comedians be paid for their work. The owner, Mitzi Shore, who’d won the Store in a divorce settlement from comedian Sammy Shore, fought back, gave in, and still called the shots. “So I cobbled together all the little quick music bits that I did between the songs at the coffeehouse and put them together in a four-and-a-half-minute routine. I signed up for three minutes. I did four-and-a-half minutes and got twenty-seven laughs. And they asked me to come back the next week. And then Mitzi hired me.

“And the next thing I knew, I was unprepared. I was being thrown on shows, including being an emcee, which was easier ’cause you could kibbitz. I had three minutes of material with a fifteen-minute spot, so I would go out and I’d start with gangbusters. I would kill and I was different than everyone else. I had all these different talents, and I had a ventriloquist dummy, and I had a guitar. I did impressions and I told jokes and I messed with the crowd and I would go, ‘I got nothing more.’ See if the light is on (meaning times up), but it ain’t. But I was on shows with everybody to think of: Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Roseanne, Bobcat, Steven Wright…”

Green was semi-standup royalty as a “paid regular” at the Comedy Store for five years – until October 1986, when “Mitzi decided to cull the herd – all the acts that weren’t turning into gold, like a couple of dozen of us. She re-showcased us up in the little Belly Room and most of us got fired. I was demoted from paid regular to non-paid regular.

Steven Alan Green with Robin Williams and Mort Sahl

 

“It’s one thing to lose your job. It’s worse when they say, ‘You can keep your job, we’re just not gonna pay you.’ So I went up onstage. It was a packed crowd, two hundred and twenty-five people at least, with another twenty-five standing illegally. And I just went up onstage and I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is my last show. I’m leaving the business. I’m done.’ And you wouldn’t believe how it coalesced the audience. They froze and you couldn’t hear any noise. It was intense. Because every comic was swimming downstream and I was swimming upstream. Like, ‘I’m done.’ I wanted nothing more. The Comedy Store was just filled with backstabbing pricks and snobby agents who made you feel even worse, and Mitzi was becoming less and less reachable. I was fed up. My relationship was with the audience and always has been and everybody else was in the way. So I said, ‘I’m done.’ And as soon as I said that, an enormous black cloud evaporated over my head. And I was funny and I was loose and I didn’t care. And I made everybody laugh.”

It worked so well that Green agreed to come back the following night for another “last performance.” And again. It was good shtick. He got out of town, away from the Store, away from L.A., and worked the road. “I did basically five thousand ‘farewell performances,’ every show my last, sixteen years.”  He moved to New York City, into the Chelsea Hotel. He showcased for Letterman and SNL, but the scene wasn’t happening for him. Then his father, with whom Green always had a complicated relationship that was bad for the psyche but good for comedy, suggested: “Go to England.”

“I had played there in ‘82, at the old Comedy Store when I visited my brother, and so I went there on a three-week trip. I went back to the Chelsea, told my girlfriend Kathrine, ‘I’ll be back in three weeks.’

A gun to his head

The London scene was happening. – and welcoming. “I got bookings and I hit the ground running. There were two-hundred comedy nights there and about half a dozen clubs. And they paid money and they got me. No one ever got offended or complained about me, ever, there.”

He got a top agent. “There were basically two Americans who lived there. There was me and Rich Hall. I think we actually got there the same year. Ninety-five. He was and is definitely a better comedian than I am. There’s no question. He’s really funny and you’ve gotta see him.  But what I had was something different.  I was more of an entertainer. I was more of a provocateur. Most British comics that I was on the circuit with were rather polite and ironic and talking slow, and their jokes were slow burn. And I’m coming on and I’m, ‘Hey! How’s everybody doing? How the fuck are ya!? What’s going on?!’  And I was saying things and doing things on stage that they wished they could.  There was the cursing, but they certainly do curse if they have enough alcohol, but it’s standing up on stage and being an America and saying ‘fuck you’ to the system. ‘I quit.’ It’s putting a fake gun to my head. They don’t have guns in England.”

 

Green scored big in the UK. He did television, he did one-man shows. The audience understood his threat to make every show his last. He’d explain that he’d become addicted to their laughter and the only way to kick the habit was to get out of showbiz. To the Brits, it made sense. They got it. They got him. Well, almost everyone did. The editor of the Sport tabloid took it a bit seriously, with a front-page headline: SEE ME DIE ONSTAGE!  “The sicko New York comedian… plans to go out with a bang… His final punchline will be to whip out a gun and blow his brains out before a live audience.”

Steven Alan Green was a hit each year when he and his colleagues made the pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe, the arts festival dominated by comedy. “In England, you do Edinburgh shows. That’s what you do in August. If you’re a star comic, you just go and have fun. People come see you. If you’re a mid-range comic, you’re working out new material for London. And if you’re a beginner, it’s a way to get seen and experience. I went up to Edinburgh with one-man shows. I had great success and it was fun.”

‘High on Laughter’

 It was in Edinburgh that Green’s fortunes took a turn. He couldn’t tell at the time. He seemed to be on his way to becoming a comedy Bono or at least a Bob Geldof… or a Jerry Lewis maybe? He did well with his show, Viagra Falls, in 1999. For the August 2000 Fringe, Green produced High on Laughter, a benefit show for Turning Point Scotland, an offshoot of the Turning Point drug and alcohol charity, aka “Princess Diana’s favorite charity.” The lineup at the nine hundred-seat Queens Hall included a mix of British comedians and performers from the States, including Zach Galifianakis, Rick Right, and headliner George Wendt. The show was a success. Green followed up in 2001 by going bigger. The show at the three thousand-seat Edinburgh Playhouse featured British comics including Johnny Vegas and Ian Cognito (who in 2019 actually did die on stage) and Americans Galifianakis, Emo Phillips, and Rick Overton. Green was on a roll. How could he top that?

“The Palladium,” a friend told him.  “You’ve got to book the London Palladium.”

“I said, ‘What’s the London Palladium?” What’s the London Palladium? What’s the Palladium?  Playing the grand theater in the West End is the equivalent of a vaudevillian making it to the Palace on Broadway. Hope, Bing, Louis, Sinatra, Sammy, Judy, Liza, the Rolling Stones — the Beatles — all made history there. Cass Elliott performed her last show at the Palladium. Green put down a deposit, booking the place for Sunday, September 8, and began rounding up talent, including Galifianakis, Overton, Bobcat Goldthwait, Jim Gaffigan, and Paul Provenza.  Max Alexander, the rotund comic who did lots of fat jokes, won a spot in the lineup when he made an offer that Green found difficult to refuse.

“I’m friends with Jerry Lewis,” Alexander said. “Would you like Jerry Lewis on your show?”

Jerry the Hutt

Green needed a big name to fill the Palladium. But Jerry Lewis? Forget all childhood influences like Groucho and Soupy. Growing up in the Sixties, Jerry Lewis was the towering influence over them all. Jerry Lewis! They loved him in France, and France was right across the channel. “Next thing I know, Max is helping me craft an invite to Jerry,” Green recalls. “He says, ‘You’ve got to give him an award. ‘An award?’ ‘Yeah, an award. And tell him all you’re going to offer him.’ And so we faxed it to Jerry, and Jerry calls me. He’s very friendly. He says, ‘Come down to San Diego. We can have lunch on my yacht. Bring a big appetite.’ So I had a coffee and a bran muffin and drove two hours. I get to Jerry’s yacht. As soon as I enter the yacht, a flash bulb went off. It was Jerry Lewis taking my picture. Big, fat, Jabba the Hutt Jerry Lewis.”

The Jerry Lewis who Steve Alan Green confronted on the yacht looked nothing like the Jerry Lewis he’d grown up with or followed on the Telethon each year. Since the spring of 2001, Lewis had been on a regimen of prednisone for treatment of pulmonary fibrosis. The steroid had caused an incredible weight gain — and caused Lewis’s head to balloon like a basketball, giving him the appearance of a bobblehead or one of those giant-head characters staggering around a street festival in Spain.

“There’s no lunch, brunch, breakfast. He’s just having his assistant bring me popsicles.” Green continues. “And he’s at his computer. He’s writing this book. There’s papers all about the floor and he’s handing me pages and he’s telling me the story about him and Peter Lawford and Marilyn Monroe in the White House bathtub, and he’s telling me all kinds of stories, and namedropping. But the first story he tells me was that, I think it was ’82, he was in Cannes at the premiere of ET: The Extraterrestrial. The film gets a standing O, Spielberg comes out and takes a bow and Spielberg sees Jerry in the royal box and passes off the ovation to Jerry. Jerry stands up and bows like the king that he is.” Green pauses. “Why would a comedy legend tell, a schmuck like – a schmuck like me?” he repeats in perfect Jackie Mason. “Why is he trying to impress me?”

After about twenty minutes of light conversation and more popsicles, Lewis switched gears and laid out his demands: a thirty-six-piece orchestra, travel and accommodations for an entourage of seven and his musical director. “And he’s gonna stay at the Dorchester Hotel and he’s going to bring videos, and there was still no lunch and I’m getting popsicles and I’ve got to use the on-boat bathroom to pish. I opened the medicine cabinet just because I was curious, and it was all hand sanitizers. This was 2002. Very weird.

“And when people would walk through the boat, he was rude to everybody – except his wife, Sam. But even she was walking on eggshells. Jerry was barking orders at everybody: ‘Bring me this! Bring me that—’ There’s no formality, There’s no ‘please.’ Two-and-a-half hours into it, I’m hungry.  So I literally excused myself. I said, ‘Okay, Jerry, it was great meeting with you. I’ve got your fax number. I’ll be in touch. Thank you so much.’ And I left. And as I was leaving the yacht, he actually came out, stood on boat and said to me, ‘And by the way, I charge 150,000 dollars worldwide rights if you’re gonna film this, as you said you were.’”

Green drove off, stopped to get a burger, and back in L.A. got on the phone to the UK. He whittled the thirty-six-piece orchestra to eighteen, arranged for a local musical director, Gareth Valentine, who’d conducted Lewis in Damn Yankees, offered him travel and accommodations for four people, and a stay at the Dorchester Hotel. It was all he could afford when raising money for a charity. Then he faxed Lewis the offer.

‘I’m not doing your show!’

“Jerry calls me up. ‘Steven Alan Green? This is Jerry Lewis. And I’m not doing your show.’ Without missing a beat, I said, ‘Good, who the hell needs you?’ And he laughed. And it was at that point that the alchemy of whatever kind of relationship that we had for that summer, was forged.  Then it became negotiation. Then it was phone calls from him every day and I was praying it wasn’t him. There were phone calls when he was in a mood, when he was in tears. ‘I’m fat, what’s the press going to say about me? I can’t do this.’ And I’d be, ‘Come on, Jerry, they love you in England. And then the next phone call would be, ‘Look, you’re going to do it this way or it’s not going to happen at all.”

 

And so it went for weeks.  There was the issue of the award. “I told him, ‘We’ll give you the High on Laughter Award for all your incredible accomplishments in philanthropy and comedy.’ And Jerry said, ‘Why don’t we call it the Charlie Chaplin Award?’ And I said, ‘Why’s that, Jerry?’ And he said, ‘Because I was compared to Charlie, and we later became friends, and it would just be great.’ I went to the Chaplin estate. I didn’t want a lawsuit, so I tried to clear it with them, and they said, ‘Absolutely not.’ So it was the Jerry Lewis Award, first recipient, Jerry Lewis.”

Lewis had agreed to do two weeks of press to promote the Palladium show, but the local publicist later said that far less time would be needed. “So I called Jerry. ‘Hi, Jerry, it’s Steven Alan Green.’ ‘Yeah. What do you want?’ ‘So anyway, we don’t need you for the two weeks, just an hour-and-a-half on the phone. That’s all we need. And he said, ‘I’m not doing any press.’ And I paused. I didn’t want to tell him that ticket sales weren’t happening yet. I said, ‘You know, the thing is –’ And he interrupted me and said for the second time, ‘And I’m not doing your show!’ And I was humina-humining like Jackie Gleason. And while I was recovering from that, Jerry fired the final shot. He said, ‘I eat people like you for breakfast!’ 

“I felt I just seen The King of Comedy and I felt like he was that guy and I had to be De Niro. So I said, ‘You know what, Jerry–’ He didn’t know I was doing a De Niro impression. It was one of those I was doing in my head. I said, ‘You know what, Jerry? I don’t want you on my show.’ Jerry said, ‘What did I say?’ And I hung up on him.”

Showtime

Jerry Lewis backstage at the Palladium with Max Alexander

 

There were more reversals. Green threatened a lawsuit. On the day Lewis and his entourage were to fly from Los Angeles, they were all in Las Vegas, so new travel arrangements had to be made. Lewis arrived in London with the video compilation of his greatest screen moments and a tall director’s chair with his famed caricature embroidered on the canvas seatback. He’d neglected to bring the sheet music for the orchestra.

At showtime on September 2, the Palladium was half-full — or half-empty, depending on how you want to look at it. By this time, Lewis wasn’t talking to Steven Alan Green. But the show went on.

“The show’s going swimmingly,” Green remembers. “Everyone’s doing great. Zach Galifianakis, Jim Gaffigan.” And then a last-minute addition, Daniel Kitson, took the stage. Kitson was a British comic who’d just won the Perrier Comedy Award at Edinburgh. “And Daniel Kitson’s opening line is, ‘It’s always been a dream of mine to play a third-full Palladium for people who have come to see a dying man.’ Jerry’s in the dressing room. There’s a speaker in the dressing room.”

Then it’s time for the main event. Bobcat Goldthwait has the honor of introducing the video clip montage that will precede the entrance of the great Jerry Lewis. Just as the video package begins to play, the showrunner rushes over to producer Steven Alan Green, who’s watching from the wings. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says, “but Jerry is not going to come out of the dressing room to accept the award unless you leave the theater.” Green is apoplectic, but he’s also responsible for the show. He takes a breath. He makes himself scarce.

“I’m hiding in the wings. The clips are running, and the clips are both incredible and cheesy. There’s the famous dance down the stairs from Cinderfella. There’s him doing the incredibly famous boardroom bit from The Errand Boy. I’m on side of the stage, and on the other end, a silhouetted, round penguin figure flanked by his mini-entourage. And I thought to myself, ‘I accomplished this, Steven. I did it. I slayed all the dragons. I kept my powder dry when necessary. I made this happen.’ I was so proud.” He takes a moment to compose himself.

“And I’m watching Jerry look at himself.  He was seventy-six, overweight and nobody knows who he is anymore, and he’s looking at the twenty-six-year-old version of himself when he was super-famous. And fifty years ago, almost to the day, he and Dean Martin played the Palladium. I see Jerry look out at the half-full crowd – even though Kitson said one-third– and then Jerry fell to the ground. And the most surreal part of it was the clips were still running. The real Jerry Lewis is now laying on the ground. I think he’s dead.

“And the clips of Jerry going ‘La-dee! Woo!,’ jumping around, are still going and would continue to go for another five or six minutes. The oxygen tank was rushed to his side. His entourage knew just what to do. They stood around him blocking the audience’s vision. I didn’t know what to do. The orchestra’s on stage, the clips end and there’s this long, silent ‘what do we do?’ moment, maybe about thirty seconds, but it was a very long thirty seconds. And then I then rushed out onstage and said, ‘Fooled ya! Okay, just a little technical problem. Just hang on, everything’s going to be cool.’”

Green introduced another comedian. An ambulance arrived. Jerry was carted off, placed in the ambulance, and rushed to… the Dorchester Hotel.

‘I Eat People Like You for Breakfast’

 

“High on Laughter climaxed with nothing less than high drama,” the review in the London Daily Standard concluded. BBC News reported that Lewis was “resting comfortably” after the collapse “that left him unable to take part in the benefit.”  “The story got out there on that new thing called the Internet,” Green says. “It spread around the world, and every comic, every club owner, every agent, manager in London, New York, and LA would continually ask the same unanswerable question: ‘Did Jerry Lewis really collapse?’ Meaning, ‘Did Jerry Lewis fake his collapse? Did the king of pratfalls fake his collapse?’”

Jerry Lewis never called Green to explain. There were no updates. Eventually, Green decided it was a good possibility that Jerry Lewis had faked it. Green talked to attorneys, considered a lawsuit. He dealt with the embarrassment, the trauma of it all. And then someone suggested: Turn it into a show. So he did. He got together with British poet and comedy writer John Dowie and came up with a one-man show called I Eat People Like You for Breakfast! He made comedy out of his personal tragedy.

I Eat People Like You for Breakfast! premiered to much acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2003. Green went on to perform the show in London and Los Angeles. With Julian Krainin, who won an Oscar as co-producer of Quiz Show, he wrote a screenplay, “a drama,” Green says, “almost Shakespearean, really.”

“Shakespearean” in the way Jerry Lewis plagued Steven Alan Green and began to define his life. But he found he wasn’t alone. “It turns out that there’s a little private club around the world of people who Jerry has fucked over.” Steven Alan Green did his best to move on. He started a charity of his own, The Laughter Foundation (“to help professional stand-up comedians acquire health care and establish a world-class comedy museum”), produced shows, directed films, acted (and starred in the 2013 short, Archie Black, with a cast that included Pete Davidson, Jessica Kirson and Artie Lange), and did voiceover work. For the past ten years or so, he’s spilled out details of his life, fears and setbacks, and offered, gratis, a barrage of one-liners, jokes and concepts, on Facebook. He calls himself a “legend,” ironically, but is among The Comedy Store legends, with his name written on the side of the building, along with the likes of Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Richard Lewis, and George Hirschmann.

A legend returns

 Steven Alan Green recently returned to standup, showing up at open mic nights in Hollywood, and performing at clubs like the new Comedy Chateau in North Hollywood. “It was a French restaurant. My opening line my first time there was, ‘Yeah, the Comedy Chateau, great comedy club. Used to be a French restaurant until it was invaded by a German restaurant and rescued by an American restaurant.’ They loved me there, and there’s a couple of others, and I’ve been killing!”

Which leads to Sunday night, May 22, and Steven Alan Green’s return with a one-man show, The Rising Fool. “It’s a light-hearted romp,” he says. “I’m telling all the stories, my best stories.  Stories about my parents and my upbringing, and we get through that and we’re now at the Comedy Store. And then we quickly end up in London, and I then I tell the whole story I told you. And then I tell the aftermath of what happened, and I show my seventeen-minute short, multi-award-winning film (Little Things), and I play music, sing a little bit. I will make the crowd laugh continually. I will make fun of myself.”

And finally, twenty years later, he might finally have killed Jerry Lewis. At least the Jerry Lewis in his head. “Yes, I invested a lot of money and time and I put it out publicly that he was the star and I wanted it to work. But also, there was some connectivity where I really felt that I was of value to him. Everyone else was being sycophantic and afraid of him, and I was the only one who stood up and said, ‘No, fuck you. This is what we’re going to do.  At the end of the day, I learned two valuable lessons. One, everything that happens, I’m responsible for, because I’m the producer. Even the things that Jerry Lewis did, I’m responsible for, because I hired Jerry Lewis. Two, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to apply this in my life, the most valuable lesson I learned: ‘Never work with Jerry Lewis.’

“The whole Jerry Lewis adventure has been both a curse and a, a — an adventure that was very interesting. Jerry was one of the only people I felt who got me. He was the one person I really felt got me. And the one thing that still haunts me is ‘Did he really get me? Or was he working me?’ And I think it was a little bit of both.”

Steven Alan Green stars in The Rising Fool, Sunday May 22 at 7 PM at the Yard Theater, 4319 Melrose Avenue, in East Hollywood. Tickets are $20 at EventBrite.com.

999

Burt Kearns produces nonfiction television and documentary films and writes books, including Tabloid Baby, The Show Won’t Go On (written with Jeff Abraham), Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy (available for pre-sale on Amazon.com), and the recently-announced Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel.

MAKING THE WILDEST SHOW IN LAS VEGAS PART 2: LOUIS & KEELY

Legsville.com
May 13, 2022

©2022 By Burt Kearns

 

(Louis Prima, Keely Smith and Sam Butera revolutionized Las Vegas, the lounge scene and 20^th century popular music when they launched their spectacular act in December 1954 at the Sahara hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The story of their success has never been told in full, and never accurately – until now. Based on long-hidden interviews with the principals and extensive research, Burt Kearns reveals how all the parts fell into place, long before that historic debut. In Part One, we met Sam Butera, the saxophone genius without whom this success story would never have happened. In Part Two, we join entertainment star Louis Prima and his new wife Keely Smith as they make the decision to scale down their act — and expectations.)

 

999

 

For Sam Butera, it had begun with a phone call. Months earlier, a phone call also led Louis Prima to Las Vegas.

 

“Bill! It’s Louis Prima.”

 

“Louis! How are you, man?!”

 

“My wife is pregnant and we really need a job!”

 

The big band era was in the rearview mirror. Louis had left third wife Tracelene in their palatial apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan and shacked-up quietly with young Keely in a third-floor walk-up across the Queensborough Bridge in| Howard Beach. The divorce came through in June 1953 and Louis married Keely in July. He was forty-two. She was twenty-five. He’d hired her when she was twenty (not a teenager, as has been repeated over the years). Now she was a few months pregnant.

 

“Louis and I went out on our own because we couldn’t get work for the big band and it cost too much money to take it out,” Keely recalled. “He and I went out, just the two of us, and worked with the house band wherever we worked. We went wherever there was work. We worked places like Erie, Syracuse, the Dude Ranch in Atlantic City, the El Rancho in Las Vegas. Towns in Canada. A lot of colleges and on military bases, and all of the black theatres up and down the East Coast.”

 

 

Louis wouldn’t fly, so they never landed in Europe, but his reputation preceded him, and the couple could always find dates, and enough work for Louis to organize a small combo: piano, drums, bass, and second trumpet to back his clowning antics, novelty songs, trademark trumpeting, and Keely’s ballads. They weren’t totally in the wilderness in early 1954. Louis wasn’t sold on television, not yet, but he and the band did a number on The George Jessel Show on ABC on Valentine’s Day. In August, he sang “If I Loved You” and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” on NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Meanwhile, he’d sharpened his routine with Keely. She’d grown out of the young innocent role, singing her number and retreating to her position by the piano, where she’d sit, impassive, while Louis did his thing. Now, after six years, she was a woman, a partner. Louis was not merely the prancing clown, but playing something of a “dirty old man,” mugging for her attention. Keely’s natural deadpan indicated she wasn’t interested. Now, with Keely into her first pregnancy, two years after he’d headlined in the showroom at the El Rancho in Las Vegas, Louis made that phone call to his former talent agent, Bill Miller.

 

“Pregnant? Congratulations!”

 

“Yeah, but we really need a job!”

 

Mr. Entertainment

 

In Vegas, they were calling Bill Miller “Mr. Entertainment.” To Louis, he was Bill Miller of Bill Miller’s Riviera, the hot nightclub on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. Miller was a former vaudeville dancer, producer, and talent agent who got into the nightclub business and had real success with niteries like the Embassy Club in Manhattan. In 1945, he bought the Riviera, a successful club that had folded at the start of World War II. He slapped his name on the place, booked stars like Tony Martin, Frank Sinatra, Martin & Lewis, and the Will Mastin Trio featuring Sammy Davis Jr., and restored the Riviera as one of the top venues in the country, sucking business and acts from Manhattan clubs like the Copacabana.

 

When the Riviera was condemned in 1953 to make way for the Palisades Interstate Freeway, Miller took the cash, and by the time Eddie Fisher and Henny Youngman closed the club on October 4, he’d already accepted an offer to buy a ten percent stake in the new Sahara Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas and sign on its Entertainment Director.

 

Vegas was the future, the fastest-growing small city in America, a former cowtown teeming with cowboys and wiseguys, millionaires and con artists, gamblers and hookers, entertainers, and tourists. Tourists were the key, and the Sahara was a dream operation, a 240-room hotel across Route 91 from the El Rancho, and the first casino you’d hit on the drive south from the downtown casinos on Fremont Street. Developer Milton Prell opened the Sahara in October 1952 on the site of his old Club Bingo casino. “The Jewel of the Desert,” Prell called it. He gave the place an African theme. Two plaster camels near the driveway. The Congo Room showroom. The Casbar Lounge.

 

The lounge. Bill Miller had plans for the lounge, but first he needed to get the showroom pumping. The showroom attracted customers to the casino. Get a big name to draw the crowds to the casino, give ’em a quick show and dump them back out into the gambling rooms. All the big nightclub acts had passed through Las Vegas since the end of the War, and Miller had connections to all of them. There was one slight problem: Jack Entratter. The former manager of the Copacabana and Miller’s competitor in the booking wars had been transferred by the mobsters who owned the Copa to manage the posh Sands Hotel and Casino. The Sands opened three months after the Sahara. Entratter arrived with the ribbon-cutting and had already locked up many of the headliner acts Miller had hoped to reel in. He was the other “Mr. Entertainment” in Vegas.

Bill Miller, Mae West and a muscleman at the Sahara, 1954

 

Bill Miller had to be creative. He booked Ray Bolger, the singing and dancing Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, and built a nightclub act around him. He did the same for Donald O’Connor and Marlene Dietrich. By the time Louis Prima called, Mae West and her musclemen were a hit in the Congo Room.

 

“I can give you two weeks in the lounge at the Sahara.”

 

“I’ll take it.”

 

“Now, hold on a minute. I said ‘lounge.’ You’re used to headlining a big room. I’ve got the lounge.”

 

Now for the lounge. Every casino had a lounge, a smoke-choked bar off the side of the casino where gamblers parked their wives or girlfriends with a cocktail and maraschino cherry while they had a run at the tables, the room where winners barged in to buy a round and maybe some companionship from a hooker whiling away the after hours, and where losers retreated for a shot of something strong to ward off the panic after losing the nest egg in disastrous runs at craps, blackjack or roulette. Live music was offered in the lounge, in most cases, unobtrusive — a tinkling piano or trio paced by a snare drum played with a brush, so as not to interfere with conversations or drink orders — and often drowned out by loud drunks in the room, and the whoops, cheers and moans from the tables and constant rattling of coins puked from the one-armed bandits in the casino. The acts in the lounge came alive after the showrooms went dark, shortly before midnight, and played until the sun came up. Bill Miller, as history would record, had a plan for the Vegas lounge.

 

“Bill said the only thing he had was two weeks in the lounge and Louis said we would take it,” Keely told the Las Vegas Sun. “Me, Louis and his band hopped in five cars and drove across the country to Las Vegas. We were happy to have a job.”

 

The birth of the lounge

 

It’s often assumed that Louis Prima was the first performer to turn a Las Vegas casino lounge into a jumping ground zero of show business cool. He wasn’t. A year before he and Keely returned to the Vegas Strip, the Mary Kaye Trio was already drawing crowds to the lounge at The Hotel Last Frontier. She was a pretty Hawaiian princess (born in Detroit) with an electric guitar and two singing, clowning male cohorts – her older brother Norman and comedian Frank Ross.

 

“The Trio became a favorite of the stars,” said George Schlatter, a talent agent who went on to a career as a network television director and producer. “On any given night, celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr., Betty Hutton, Milton Berle, and Liberace rubbed shoulders with regulars at the group’s show. The Mary Kaye Trio changed the history of Las Vegas. They were all over the room and they were hysterical. Anybody who ever saw the act realized this was the most sound you ever got out of three pieces. And goddamn, they were funny!”

 

Prima didn’t invent the “lounge act,” and he wasn’t the first major star of the Big Band era to slalom from headlining gigs in theatres and showrooms to the midnight-to-dawn shift in a lowly Las Vegas casino lounge. The days of big bands enjoying extended engagements in a single location had given way to endless one-night stands for less money. Economics alone had forced the bands to become smaller, if only cut the cost of transportation and salaries.

 

“These developments have paved the way for the acceptance of the lounge jobs that have been opening up in Las Vegas hotels,” Variety reported in October 1954 – before Louis gassed up his Lincoln Continental for the trip west. “Las Vegas is a Nirvana for the bandleaders buffeted by economics and hardships of the road.

 

It’s one location in which they can remain in one spot for a spell and make big money and at the same time avoid the ruinous cost of transporting a band. Another considerable item that makes the location an ideal eagerly sought for by maestri and sidemen and sidemen is the bad food and lodging frequently encountered on the road.

 

One of those maestri was playing the Casbar Lounge months before Louis and Keely arrived. Cab Calloway was one of the most successful bandleaders of the 1930s and ’40s, a Black scat-singing dancer and entertainer to whom Louis owed a debt when it came to crowd-pleasing performance style. Calloway had spent the last couple of years performing as Sportin’ Life in Porgy & Bess, on Broadway and on tour, and had settled in with a quartet at the Casbar on September 7.

 

The Casbar Lounge was no Apollo Theatre. It was no Cotton Club. It was a cocktail lounge that could hold maybe seventy-five, squeezed into booths and on red leatherette chairs around the bar tables. One side was open to the casino, a double bar ran along the back – nine bar stools at traditional bar height alongside a lower bartop, with a dozen chairs, a few feet from a stage — if you could call it a stage. It was a narrow platform maybe thirty feet across, with just about enough space for the players, a piano, and drumkit. Cab reached the stage by climbing a few steps behind one of the cash registers, which rang and slammed as waitresses called out orders. There was no spotlight – no lighting at all — and a low ceiling.

 

Few performers were as energetic and enthusiastic as Mr. Zoot Suit, the Hi-De-Ho King, and Calloway had assembled a crack combo to back him: Howard Roberts on trumpet, pianist Marl Young, Adolphus Ashbrook on standup bass, and drummer Eddie Davis. They could swing, and Cab stood out front in his dress coat with tails, leaning over the heads of the barflies, no spinning or deep dives this morning, carefully tippytoeing the plank of a stage while singing into a handheld microphone. He belted and scatted through “Minnie the Moocher,” just as he did when the song was fresh in 1931.

 

She had a dream about the King of Sweden
He gave her things that she was needin’
He gave her a home built of gold and steel
A diamond car with platinum wheels

Hidee hidee hidee hi!

 

And Cab, only forty-six but feeling every year, held that big clunky hand mike up over the bar toward the audience, so they’d get in on the hidee hidee hidee ho call and response–

 

“Hidee hidee hidee hi…”

 

At least he seemed to be singing. Cab was moving his lips and making faces – but could anyone really make out what was coming out of that expressive mouth? There was one obvious problem: the sound from microphone had been turned down low, so as not to intrude on the conversations of customers or the shooters at the craps tables! Hidee hidee hidee NO! The great Cab Calloway could hardly be heard over the noise from the customers and casino.

 

The reviewer from Variety was in the room. He thought the scene was sad, and not a little disrespectful.

 

…Tuneful rhythms are expounded, but the Calloway showmanship is missing, as there is no presentation. And for an entertainer of his magnitude, it doesn’t seem right to sit in a noisy room with people yakking while Calloway belts his “Minnie the Moocher,” “Got the World on a String,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and other faves that earmarked the rise of Calloway as he fronted big bands in big rooms. Without pomp, spotlight or production, watching Callaway in a cocktail lounge gives music lovers a sense of frustration…

 

Despite all those issues, Calloway was deemed a success. Bill Miller extended his run into November. That was when Louis Prima got his first look at the Casbar Lounge, and that was when he saw Cab Calloway’s show. That when Louis stormed out of the Sahara, ready to call off the Casbar gig before the first downbeat.

 

The Mississippi of the West

 

 

It wasn’t the sad state of the great Cab Calloway on the stage above the bar that led Louis to try to cancel the two weeks in Las Vegas. Seated with Keely, Louis watched the show. He listened. He strategized. Cab’s combo was tight, and there was enough space up on that stage to arrange the six members of the Prima group. Keely stands by the piano. Drums stage right. The bass player and second trumpet stage left. Louis would stand centerstage, don’t jump too high and careful not to knock off his toupee on that ceiling. Not perfect, but hey, this was a major Las Vegas hotel and casino. He’d find a way to be heard. He could work that room.

 

After the set, though, all bets were off.

 

It was when Cab Calloway strode through the smoky lounge, shaking hands and accepting praise as he made his way out, that Louis and Keely called him over. Louis stood and gave Calloway a hug. They were old friends from New York.

 

“Cab, baby! So great to see you. Looking good, sounding good!  Sit, sit down and have a drink with us!”

 

“Actually, I, well –” Calloway demurred. “We, the musicians, we’re not allowed to stay around the lounge after the show. Perhaps we can meet up –”

 

“That’s crazy, man! I insist!” Louis called over a waiter as he pulled a chair for his friend. “Waiter, a drink for Mr. Calloway.”

 

The waiter stood for a moment, awkwardly. “I’m sorry sir, we can’t serve Mr. Calloway  in the lounge.”

 

“What?” Louis was seriously confounded. The man had just performed there. “Why can’t this man have a drink with me?”

 

“It’s the law, sir.” Louis must not have noticed. Las Vegas was a segregated city, so outrageously that it was known as “The Mississippi of the West.” Casinos and hotels on the Strip, dependent on tourists from segregated parts of the country and not about to offend the suckers, were white-only. Black performers, even headliners, entered through the back doors or through the kitchens, and were not allowed to stay in the hotels where they performed. They were forced into sketchy motels on the edge of the desert, boarding houses in the city’s Black west side or, in Cab Calloway’s case, a trailer, parked behind the Sahara.

 

“You must be kidding me!” Louis was about to blow his top.

 

The waiter excused himself and stepped away to find the manager.

 

“They don’t serve colored people here,” Cab Calloway said quietly, as the manager moved in.

 

“Mr. Prima, I can make an exception and get you a table, but under no circumstances can you be in view of the casino.”

 

“No,” Louis said. “I expect this in the South. But here?!”

 

Calloway wanted to defuse the situation as quickly as possible. “Louis, I have a very nice trailer out back. Why don’t we meet there later, share a drink and swap some old stories?”

 

Louis could see the humiliation on his old friend’s face. “Yeah, you know what? Cab, that will be really nice. Let’s do that!”

 

Louis sneered at the manager. He and Keely said their goodbyes and headed toward the lobby. “Forget it!” Louis raged as soon as they hit the lobby. “I don’t wanna work for this place. I’m not playing here!”

 

When they got to their hotel room, Louis picked up the phone and dialed. “This is Louis Prima. I want to speak to Bill Miller.” He listened a moment. “What do you mean he’s on his way to Mexico?”

 

“Louis tried to get out of the gig,” Keely recalled later. “He would have blown the whole job, but when he tried to call Bill Miller, Miller was out of town.”

 

Louis eventually calmed down and reconsidered the situation. The show went on.

 

“We were the first to have blacks in our audience,” Keely said.

 

Louis Prima opens at the Casbar

 

 

When Louis Prima opened at the Casbar in mid-November, it was not with the swinging, rocking, hilarious show that would make Las Vegas lounge and pop music history. Louis had two weeks to make an impression with a version of the act he’d perfected since cutting down his big band: some jazz, Dixieland, and small-combo swing that relied on his trumpet playing, double-entendre Italian numbers and Keely’s vocal turns. While Cab Calloway fought to be heard above the casino din, Lewis made sure people could hear him.

 

“They realized after we were there a week that we were a show act, not just background music,” Keely said, and that was an understatement. When Bill Miller returned from Mexico, he saw right away that the gambling tables were less crowded and the lounge was drawing a crowd after midnight. And it wasn’t only a crowd of tourists, but workers from other casinos – like the Italian-American dealers who’d come out from Steubenville, and headliners as well. His idea just might pan out, after all. The lounge would draw people into the casino after hours and pull in traffic from the other hotels. Miller extended Prima’s run from two weeks through the holidays. He took out ads in the local papers. There was no mistake, Louis and Keely were suddenly the action in Vegas and the Casbar Lounge was where it was happening. Word spread beyond the desert on December 14, when Dick Williams, entertainment editor of the Los Angeles Mirror, checked out the scene.

 

Hottest late spot in town is the Sahara lounge, where Louis Prima and band and the Kay Martin Trio (she’s a platinum-blond version of Abbe Lane) are alternating from midnight until 6 a.m. Prima’s thumping New Orleans style jazz of “When the Saints Come Marching In” variety, is exhilarating. Bill Miller started a new Vegas policy in lounge entertainment a year ago here and it has paid off. Tremendous crowds.

 

Dick Williams reported that Prima and his “pert young wife” would be at the Casbar through January, “then head home to New Orleans for the birth of her baby in March. Due for an L.A. stand on the Sunset Strip in May.”

 

Everything was going according to Louis’ plan. The crowds got bigger with each night. Red Skelton showed up, stood up and gave a wave. Danny Thomas was singled out. More people showed up to see what headliner might join the frolics on the small stage behind the bar. Louis was killin’ it – but he knew what was missing. He wanted to get in on this new music that was causing riots – and selling records. This rhythm & blues, what Alan Freed called rock ’n’ roll. This Elvis Presley, whose first record came out in July. Louis could never get away with playing rock ‘n’ roll for that mainstream Vegas audiences – but sneak in that beat amid the swing and the laughs and they’d all be dancing and they wouldn’t know why. Throw in some Dixieland, keep it light with a little Baciagaloop Makes Love on the Stoop, and work in this new shuffle beat he’d come up with: zooma zooma zooma zooma…

 

He had the formula. He had Keely at the center, deadpan babe, while all the boys go crazy around her. He knew what was missing.

 

And that led Louis to make that phone call on Christmas Eve 1954.

 

Sam Butera joins the act

 

“I said, ‘I’ll be up on the twenty-sixth.’ He said, ‘Well, bring a drummer and a piano player with you,’” Sam recalled. “The drummer and piano player, they worked with me. They were in my band. Tommy Maxwell and Dick Johnson. I was still hurt (from the auto accident), you know, so everybody was more of less on hold. And I told the guys, ‘Listen, we goin’ to Vegas, be with Louis.’ Right away, they asked me, ‘Well, how much money?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about the money!’”

 

A smile creased Sam’s wide, expressive face as chuckled and shook his head. “‘Don’t worry about the money.’ Well, that’s where we catch up with the story, where I came in that evening.”

 

As he’d promised, Sam landed at McCarran Field in Las Vegas on the evening of Sunday, September 26. The first of four shows would begin when the horn blew after midnight. He had brought along drummer Dick Johnson and pianist Tommy Maxwell, but something was missing.

 

Sam’s luggage hadn’t arrived. It was left behind in Houston, Texas, where he’d changed planes on the way from New Orleans. His clothes, what he’d planned to wear onstage, were in Texas. And worse, so was his horn.

 

It was hours before showtime. The young man with a horn was standing in the middle of the Mojave Desert without his horn. And without his stage attire. “My horn wasn’t there. It was left in Houston. And I had no clothing except the clothes I wore on my back,” Sam Butera said.  “I called Louis.”

 

“Louis, I can’t go on tonight!”

 

“What do you mean you can’t go on? I told you, I been tellin’ all these people that you’re gonna be here tonight!”

 

“I have no horn or clothes!”

 

Louis Prima, Sam had to admit, had a pretty simple solution.

 

“We’ll get you a horn. And we’ll get you clothes.”

 

And so he did. He hung up the phone at the Las Vegas airport, McCarran Field. Even before checking in at the motel Louis had arranged for the musicians, Sam headed for the Sahara.

“We went into the Sahara Hotel and there was a lounge they called the Casbar, which was a nice lounge, man. Right on top of the people. And there was a ramp they put from the stage that went over the bar and some steps in front of the bar so we could walk down there and do the march thing (marching the horn section around the room, playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’). People love that. That was always the thing in New Orleans. Every band in New Orleans did the marching thing. It was nothing new that we were creating. They all did it, but these people out here, I guess they hadn’t been exposed to that kind of carrying on, you might say.”

 

There were hugs. There were quick introductions. There was a huddle. And then, Sam Butera stepped up onto the stage with the others. Through the smoke, he could see the faces. He could hear the cheers and shouts and the sounds from the casino. How else could you describe it?

 

 

“It was so wild! It was unheard of to come on a group without a rehearsal, just walk onstage and say, ‘Here, play the music,’ you know? That was a muthafucka, man. And they were hysterical, he and Keely. Keely, oh I loved it when she sang. I thought she was absolutely a wonderful singer. Her intonation was just fantastic, her phrasing was great and her performance — well, you know their whole thing was Keely not showing emotion and making fun of Louis whenever she had the opportunity to. People would laugh at that.  And she’d just stand up there with a blank face and listen. Look at her! And here we are groovin’, knocking our asses off, and she’s just there like she don’t give a fuck.

 

“After the first set was over, Louis always acknowledged: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have, Keely Smith! Sam Butera!’ And he couldn’t think of the names of the guys — the two guys. Louis had never met them before we walked on stage! And I said, ‘The witnesses!’ And he said, ‘The Witnesses!’ and then people laughed, and so we kept the name. The Witnesses.

 

“We got offstage and Louis looked at me and he says, ‘I told you!’ And that was it. After the sets, Jesus Christ, everybody was grabbing me, hugging me, the people, the fans in the audience. ‘About time you showed up!’  Kidding me, because I was supposed to come Christmas night, and Louis told them, ‘He can’t make it.’ And the fans immediately enjoyed what I did. They really did, right from the get-go. It was different, a fire, man, under the group.  When I got there, fire happened.”

 

(With Sam Butera on board, blasting that saxophone, fine-tuning the band lineup, and handling song arrangements, the act known as “Louis Prima featuring Keely Smith with Sam Butera and the Witnesses” became the biggest attraction in Las Vegas. Ultimately, its joyous, goombah gumbo of Dixieland, jazz, jump blues, pop, R&B, and rock ’n’ roll was a national sensation. More than sixty years later, hits like “Just A Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Jump, Jive and Wail,” That Old Black Magic” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” sound as fresh as ever. The act in this form lasted a little more than six and a half years.  The story is just beginning to be told…)

 

 

999

 

Burt Kearns produces nonfiction television and documentary films and writes books, including Tabloid Baby, The Show Won’t Go On (written with Jeff Abraham), Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy (available for pre-sale on Amazon.com), and the recently-announced Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel.