by Shawn Levy
He’d always gambled on good manners and talent to get him past barriers, and he’d had his face bashed in for his efforts—sometimes literally. Still, at the end of the day, no matter how hard he’d fought or entertained, he was shunted to the side, to the back, to the colored part of town. “Colored, colored, colored,” he shouted to himself in anger. “Why do we have to live colored lives?”
Injustice anywhere was plainly awful, but in Sammy’s case especially, it was truly perverse. Few performers of any race ever so thirsted for showbiz glory and fewer still so deserved it. Sammy was a man infected by a bug—a bug that mostly preyed, it so happened, on whites, and he turned the disease into a staggering talent that curiously tilted toward white models. He perfected imitations of Cagney, Bogart, Cary Grant; he could sing and dance a la Fred Astaire; he admitted to “emulating the white stars”; Frank famously called him on it: “You’ve got to get your own sound, your own style. It’s okay to sound like me—if you’re me.”
And that was onstage. Offstage, he ran so readily in the fast life of showbiz—a white fast life—that he became a constant target for the worst kind of racist smears. For years, he was demonized in the gossip press as a consort of glamorous white stars, sometimes rightly, often wrongly, and once, with Kim Novak, wrongly at first but so intriguingly that the two consummated the affair just to savor the exotic taboo that they’d been accused of violating. In the black press, he was excoriated, conversely, for ignoring his blackness: “Is Sammy Ashamed He’s a Negro?” blared a headline; “Look in the mirror, Sammy. You’re still one of us,” sneered an editorial.
He couldn’t, it often seemed, please anyone except the audience immediately in front of him. Attacked on all sides, he once chose the most foolish, immature solution imaginable: Out at the Silver Slipper on the Strip one night in 1958 on a drunken gambling binge, he proposed marriage to Loray White, a dancer he’d once gone with; she accepted; he shouted it out to everybody and even stood for pictures. Then he went home to sleep it off.
When he awoke, he got a glimpse of the magnitude of what he’d done: Not only was he engaged to the first pretty black woman he’d found, but the same black journalists that were lambasting him as an Oreo a few days before were now ringing him up for details of the wonderful news. He would have to go ahead with it. Against the wishes of his dad and his uncle, he arranged to marry the dancer, then quickly divorce; she would be induced to go through with the charade by money and career favors.
It was such an awful hoax, such a crass, hypocritical gesture, that he got drunk again on his wedding night, clutched his fingers around his bride’s throat, and squeezed. Within a few weeks of the farcical wedding that was meant to make his life easier, he had fantasies of gunning his sports car off a Hollywood Hills road and killing himself in some moonlit canyon.
He had tried to serve everyone—white bosses and audiences and icons, black audiences and journalists—and it had nearly been the end of him. Now, however, with Jack Kennedy his friend and Frank his padrone, he felt he could do more and do it more honestly. Time was ripe.
In March 1960, in the midst of the Rat Pack Summit and days after Kennedy left town, Las Vegas NAACP officials presented an ultimatum to the casino owners of the Strip and Freemont Street: Let us have the same access to your establishments as whites or we will take to the streets; you have two weeks.
The city was riding a glorious crest; Sammy was everywhere, and Frank had his back; the eyes of the world were on them. The casino owners tried to negotiate, they tried to bribe, but they finally had to cede. At 6:00 p.m. on the day of the deadline, after intense brokering by crusading Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun, the NAACP, the Las Vegas chief of police, the Clark County sheriff, and Governor Grant Sawyer signed a deal to bring down segregation barriers at all hotels and casinos in the city and on the Strip. It was called the Moulin Rouge Agreement, in honor of the hotel in which it was signed.
The irony in naming a civil rights accord after the Moulin Rouge was bittersweet. If Vegas is a Roman candle, always exploding with dazzling new delights, then the Moulin Rouge hotel and casino might have been its brightest-ever rocket, a little pocket of Las Vegas as wild as Harlem, Beale Street, Central Avenue, or the French Quarter.
Built in 1955 way out in a no-man’s-land between the black shanties of Westside and a few hardscrabble white developments off Bonanza Road, the Moulin Rouge was the first fully integrated casino and hotel in Las Vegas. It was a place for the town’s five-thousand-odd blacks to gamble, drink, and carouse, for wealthy blacks from around the country to have a deluxe place in the sun of their own, and for entertainers not welcome at the segregated casinos to stay and party in splendid comfort.
It was high time, as Sammy could attest. When he’d rolled into the city a decade earlier to play the Last Frontier as part of the Will Mastin Trio, he split $350 with his dad and uncle and was otherwise unwelcome; except for their dressing room, the stage, and the back of the hotel, where they stood waiting each night for a taxicab, white Las Vegas was off limits to them. They could drink and gamble and dine out in skanky makeshift joints on the unpaved streets of Westside, they could sit—quietly—in the back row of a downtown movie theater, they could visit black-only whorehouses, churches, and stores, but the razzle-dazzle of dice and lights and ice cubes and perfume and plunging necklines—the Las Vegas that was even then a paradise on earth—that was out. And Sammy, so painfully aware of being accepted as a performer and rejected as a man, ate his heart out over it, gazing out the dirty window of his despicable little rooming house at the glow radiating from the Strip.
Back then, even the biggest black stars got shafted in Las Vegas. It was a Jim Crow town, plain and simple, and all the more awful for being not some Deep South backwater but a major entertainment center and a vacation spot for people whose opinions mattered so much in showbiz. Black show-people grew used to ill treatment as they traveled throughout the country, but they had never experienced Vegas’s strange combination of big-time facilities and salaries and Mississippi backwater segregation. Sure, they’d been treated the same as they got in Vegas—and far worse—in little burgs everywhere. But they needed to be a part of Las Vegas—just as they needed to be part of New York and L.A.: It was where the showbiz was.
But it was also segregated by both official and unofficial policy. The people who ran the city—Mormons, Italians, Jews—always claimed that they weren’t the racists; they blamed it on the Texan high rollers on which so much of their business relied. But they weren’t necessarily averse to setting limits on other groups, either. They didn’t need black entertainers in their showrooms nearly as much as black entertainers needed to show that they could play Vegas crowds, create buzz, and earn Vegas money.
It didn’t matter if you were Louis Armstrong or Will Mastin, Pearl Bailey or Sister Rosetta Thorpe, the Mills Brothers or Tip, Tap and Toe; sunset either found you working on a hotel stage or back in Westside where you belonged. Even the majestic Lena Home, the second-ever headliner in the history of the Flamingo, wasn’t allowed in the public areas of the hotel, and ultimately stopped coming to Las Vegas altogether, despite the fact that the town’s “cabarets,” as she called them, paid the best salaries of anywhere. “I never liked the atmosphere,” she remembered diplomatically.
It hadn’t always been that way. Before World War II, there were so few blacks in Vegas—and, truly, so little going on at all—that the town was integrated as a matter of course. In 1941, for instance, Pearl Bailey got off a train at Union Station, walked into a Freemont Street casino, and put down a bet; nobody thought to stop her. But by the end of the war, when a booming magnesium industry brought thousands of black workers from the South—and when the first big-money resorts in town began to blossom—a less liberal atmosphere descended. If Pearlie had tried to place that same bet the next time she was in town—at the Flamingo in 1947—she would’ve been asked to leave the joint by somebody comfortable calling her “nigger.”
And
that was for headliners—who were the only blacks permitted to play in the city at all. Black lounge acts, musicians, dancers, chorus girls, singers, and comics without big names weren’t even considered worthy of the right to be humiliated by the bosses of the best hotels. Almost every black act that played Vegas was a major one; new talent was almost completely denied the town as a proving ground. The Will Mastin Trio, for instance, barely qualified, and it was only when Sammy became a star that anyone considered hiring them regularly.
Not that Sammy’s making a hit in Vegas was some kind of integrationist success story; it may not even have been a showbiz rags-to-riches tale. It might have been even rarer—a true marriage of souls. Sammy was in perfect harmony with the excess of the place—the whole of showbiz in one pint-sized fireball. He was never more alive than when he was performing there, wringing an audience limp—he aimed at no less, in fact—then wandering out to drink and smoke and bet far too much money and grab every pretty girl that walked by; just the sort of excessive, spree-bent guy the town thrived on. Success in Vegas—wowing a star-choked crowd—mattered as much to Sammy as making a hit in New York or L.A.; the town became one of his shrines and he, in turn, one of its great prophets. And as his star rose gradually, with one or two others who shared his plight, he set about to make the place more accommodating for himself and—what the hell—for those alongside and behind him, too.
Like him, a handful of black entertainers broke through one at a time. They were superstars, they were brash young men, they were brotherly with the entertainment directors and casino managers and hotel presidents: They belonged. They had to be cagey and sly and daring and gutty—but they did it.
In 1955, Sammy and his pop and uncle broke the color line at the Last Frontier. Over the years, other black headliners had been permitted to live in gilded cocoons while performing at the hotel, but the Mastins were given rooms, allowed to have family members in the audience, and granted access to the casino. Management found out that letting a guy like Sammy wander the pits could be profitable, especially just after shows let out, when the sight of a hot star gambling big money tended to encourage onlookers, drunk on charisma, into rash, house-friendly bets of their own.
At roughly the same time, just across the road, Harry Belafonte integrated the Riviera through a string of subversions. Taking the initiative of jumping into the swimming pool and placing bets at a blackjack table without asking first if it was okay, he was accepted by adoring crowds and then by the bosses—who didn’t approve but couldn’t complain with the way things turned out.
For the most part, though, the absurd, hurtful charade continued unabated. An Ebony reporter in town to do a story on a black entertainer was allowed only to watch a show from the wings and talk to the star in a private dressing room before being whisked from the Strip to Westside. Light-skinned black balladeer Herb Jeffries showed up for an engagement at the Sands unaware of the segregationist policies—as was the new hotel employee who’d booked him and arranged for his room. At first, management was prepared to show him the door, then relented and gave him a room but no access to any other parts of the hotel; moreover, he was told, his accompanist would have to stay in Westside. “If he does, I do,” Jeffries declared, introducing pianist Dick Hazzard to Sands executives: Hazzard was white.
It was ridiculous, it was insulting, and it would have to stop—at least for the big stars. In 1957, Nat King Cole, a mainstay at the Sands, got the green light from Jack Entratter and Carl Cohen: While he was in town he could do anything in their place that he wanted to, anything any white person did. He couldn’t necessarily visit any other joints, but the Sands was his. By that time, Sammy had moved to the Sands as well, partly out of love of Frank, partly because the Sands was the acme of the Strip, partly out of his own well-deserved star status, partly because it was more sophisticated, and, by extension, more welcoming, than any other place in town.
Except, of course, the Moulin Rouge, that fabulous paradise owned, ironically, by a syndicate of Jews from New York and L.A.—with two points thrown to heavyweight champ Joe Louis in token of his services as front man and greeter, his first such sad gig in town.
From the day it opened in 1955, the Moulin Rouge was a sensation. It didn’t book acts as famous as those that played the Strip hotels—it couldn’t afford them—but it drew those same performers, after hours, for fabulous, star-studded jam sessions. If Louis Armstrong couldn’t drink and party and schmooze at the Sands—and he couldn’t—he’d head over to the Moulin Rouge for the 2:00 a.m. show, with its fabulous Watusi dancers, and beautiful can-can girls, and Lionel Hampton entertaining a mixed-race crowd that might include Frank, Sammy, Dean, Bob Hope, the Dorsey Brothers, Nat King Cole. Showbiz, so well integrated, flocked to the place. “People knew the rest of the town was so wrong,” reflected the hotel’s entertainment director, Bob Bailey, “and everything at the Moulin Rouge was so right.”
The place was as handsome as any hotel on the Strip. From the outside, it resembled the Sands, with a big cursive sign atop a sort of artfully perforated pylon. The inside was done up in a Parisian motif, with gilded chandeliers and ornaments, lavender ceilings, and murals of the Pigalle. It was built during a boom time—the Hacienda, the Dunes, the Riviera, and the Royal Nevada all opened that same year—but it so stood out among its peers that it made the cover of Life magazine.
It lasted six months.
You’d hear whispers over the years that the Strip hotels, fearful of loss of custom to a celebrated new rival, leaned on the banks that had written short-term loans to the Moulin Rouge’s owners, that the notes were called back, that a sinister cabal wiped out paradise. But the pettier truth is that the hotel was undercapitalized—there were legitimate mechanics liens against the place—and the town had overbuilt besides: The Royal Nevada, which broke no taboos, went belly-up almost as fast and strictly for financial reasons; the Dunes and the Riviera struggled out of the gate.
Still, those other hotels meant nothing to anybody, whereas the Moulin Rouge was an Eden, and fate and the gods, it seemed, had conspired to reveal it and then close it away. In 1957, it reopened, with another white owner, barely surviving, eventually losing its liquor license when it was revealed that black customers had to pay more for drinks at the bar than whites. The resultant cry of racism leveled at the city’s one fully integrated casino was strange, hurtful. To many of those trying to break Las Vegas’s color line, the Moulin Rouge became an embarrassment; it had been a transitional vehicle, and once their sights were set higher, they abandoned it as a distasteful compromise—a separate-but-equal joint.
The last meaningful glimpse of the hotel as a part of the Vegas scene was that day in March 1960 when the Strip’s major resorts finally agreed to open themselves to black customers, the day the Moulin Rouge Agreement, the first major step in ending Las Vegas’s awful racial history, was signed.
It was, of course, hardly an instant sea change: As late as 1966, Sammy, an acknowledged Prince of the Strip, could complain about being asked, “Stay in your suite as much as you can between shows, OK?” (“At least they’re ashamed of it now,” he sighed), forcing him to turn his rooms in the Aqueduct building of the Sands into a seraglio of evanescent delights—wild parties, private movie screenings, near-orgies.
In all, a decade of pressures, investigations, protests, and legislation would be required before the once-and-for-all integration of state gaming facilities and resorts was complete from patrons through employees. But the Moulin Rouge Agreement was the start. After that moment, little Sammy could feel able to confront big Jack Entratter about segregation.
He did it, too. When integrationists threatened to picket the Strip hotels at a time when Sammy would, coincidentally, be performing at the Sands (they wanted more black employees at the major casinos), Sammy stuck his neck out, walking into Entratter’s office with an ultimatum: “You’re going to get picketed and it’s going to be very embarrassing, because I’m going to be on the picket line.… I’m
not going to, quote, be in a hospital recuperating from mild pneumonia and exhaustion, end quote. I’ll be right out front, walking back and forth.”
He wasn’t asking for the world—“Nobody’s saying take out an ad in Ebony magazine saying, ‘You’re Welcome at the Sands’”—just some fairness. Entratter, to his credit, came through. Eventually, Sammy played to mixed-race audiences, and customers at the Sands would see black faces—however scattered—among the employees of the hotel.
For Sammy, even to make such requests of Entratter was a sign of a raised consciousness. And soon afterward, when civil rights leaders began to ask him to lend his presence to protests, petitions, and marches, he joined Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis—acknowledged leaders—and he did the right, selfless thing, flying to Selma and staring down Bull Connor and his thugs.
He didn’t spend the night—he didn’t dare—but he made himself visible: an icon of white showbiz, a very prominent black man, linking arms with Martin Luther King Jr. and declaring solidarity with other people who had skin like his.
Frank never marched; Peter, Joey—never; Dean joked about it: “I wouldn’t march if the Italians were marchin’.”
But Sammy, finally on top of the world and awakened to the opportunity to help others reach his status, stepped outside of himself for the first time in his life without thinking of what he, personally, would get out of it.
Frank had told him to be his own man: When he finally embraced his race, when he declared blackness to be his “religion,” he was just that.
Almost the end of frankie-boy
By the time the Miami Summit and the Elvis show were over, politics was more the order of the day than showbiz. Virtually from the moment that John Kennedy left the Sands with his satchelful of cash, Frank was among his most avid supporters, volunteering not only his time, money, and talent but that of everyone within his orbit.