Now, though, times were changing. And I was going to find my way to the other side of the camera and enjoy an early start in the business, like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland had, pushed by their mothers onto vaudeville stages at the age of three. Yes, now that would happen for me, new child star at Wells Pictures, as soon as there was a Wells Pictures, where my father would have a desk bigger than Louis B. Mayer’s white one up on a pedestal. Maybe it would be gold! No, silver!
Who were those studio moguls anyway, but men like us with nothing in their pockets but rags and scrap metal and an initial investment in a nickelodeon or a vaudeville house. Adolph Zukor was a Hungarian immigrant who sewed piecework, bought an arcade filled with nickelodeon motion picture machines, and ended up founding Paramount Pictures. L.B. came from Russia, dealt in scrap metal, bought a burlesque house he turned into a movie theater, and ended up with MGM. The Polish Goldwyn sold gloves. Everybody started from nowhere in this business and ended up somewhere big. Why not us? It was our turn.
That night it seemed to us that we could do anything, run our own nightclub for my mother to headline, start our own studio and make our own pictures, drag a ladder over to the Tower and climb it to stick the letters of her name up on the marquee. And mine. e s m e.
By the time we headed back to our car, we already had the whole thing figured out. All we needed was some startup money. And some talent. And because we had my mother and because that night my father’s back pocket was bulging with money, plenty more where that came from, wherever it came from, we had it all, and anything was possible.
And when my father retrieved our big green Cadillac from the Auto Park, we all piled into the front seat, listening on the car radio to Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet and his orchestra, playing “If I Had You,” direct from the Blue Room at the Hotel Lincoln in New York City.
I could be a king, uncrowned,
Humble or poor, rich or renowned,
There’s nothing I couldn’t do,
If I had you.
My parents sang over the clarinet and the rest of the orchestra as we headed back over the Sixth Street Bridge to Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles River a dry dark slither beneath us, and when they finished the song, they kissed, and my father said, “You’ve got legs and pipes, baby. You’ve got it all and I’m going to make a fortune on you.” And my mother kissed him and then me, too—St. Petersburgundy!—she was that happy.
And that night, my father did not sleep in the garage on the couch but rejoined my mother in their Art Moderne marital bed, from which, despite my mother’s earlier kiss to me, I was unceremoniously booted out.
So I had to spy.
I waited a bit before I went and put my eye to their bedroom door keyhole, expecting to see some kind of glittering spectacle, the bedroom strung with chiffon ribbons and hung with garden swings, silver poles wrapped in great big bows of shining satin, the ceiling and floor turned to mirrors, maybe. Perhaps my father would have changed into a black tuxedo and my mother would have donned a sparkling evening gown and some sparkling dancing shoes. Perhaps a crown. I could hear their voices singing, roaring, and I couldn’t wait to see them waltzing perfectly in unison to some beautiful and clever lyrics.
I could leave the old days behind
Leave all my pals, I’d never mind
I could start my life all anew
If I had you.
But, of course, once I knelt and put my eye to the door’s old-fashioned keyhole, I didn’t see anything like that at all.
34
Las Vegas
1951
The El Rancho Hotel, once Benny’s nemesis, looked like an old-school Mexican ranchero, and it stuck stubbornly to its Western roots, no matter what the rest of the Strip had made its mind up to do around it. The hotel had a stucco exterior, with a tower that sported a Texas-style windmill and Western fences that bordered its lawns. In the Nugget Nell cocktail lounge, the name a nod to Nevada mining, rough stone walls stared at a giant roulette wheel hanging upside down in the dome of the ceiling. Ha. Behind the dining-room buffet line, a painted mural featured a chuck wagon out on the Western plains and two cowboys on their horses about to dismount for the chuck. Diners sat in wood-and-leather chairs studded with brass nailheads. The Old West, American, Mexican, or some mixed-up version of the two, for sure.
Nate and I were headed for the showroom, for years called the Round-Up Room, all lassoes and cattle, and only recently and reluctantly renamed, incongruously, the Opera House. The place used to look like a barn with wooden rafters and bundled hay, but now all that was gone. The wood-planked ceiling had been painted over and embellished with sparkling stenciled ribbons scrolling and unscrolling. Everywhere, chandeliers hung and gargantuan vases of floral arrangements stood, both accents looking as if they came from some European court five thousand miles away. Court or opera house. A gilded and carved frame divided the proscenium from the body of the stage proper, as if the events performed upstage were living pictures. To the right lay an alcove for the band, the Carlton Hayes Orchestra, the men and their instruments situated next to and beneath a swell of pleated drapes that matched the inner stage curtains. A second set of exterior curtains sparkled.
We’d always regarded the El Rancho as second-rate, an early forties hotel, pre-Flamingo and pre-everything else new on the Strip. The pool was pitched only a few yards from Highway 91 and its four lanes, where cars whizzed by at sixty miles an hour. But despite its humble design, the El Rancho brought in top talent from Los Angeles. Tonight’s lineup was advertised by the highway sign,
The Hotel El Rancho Presents
Joe E. Lewis and Lili St. Cyr
Dining and Dancing
the sign’s lit-up arrow rounding those words in a constant lasso sweep of neon white.
Nate might make regular rounds of all the hotel offices and casinos and construction sites on the Strip, but I liked to make the rounds of its showrooms, see what the Fabulous Flamingo Girls, the El Rancho Dice Girls, the Thunderbird Dansations were up to. He’d laugh at me, “What are you looking for, E, a second gig?,” like the second gigs picked up by so many of the Vegas musicians, who played a couple of shows at one hotel lounge and then another two at a different hotel and then, too hopped up to go home to bed, hung out until sunrise in the parking lot of Chuck’s House of Spirits, right by the Desert Inn. We’d see them there tonight, when we drove home, forty men in black suits, sitting on their car hoods, on the parking lot curbs, on the one inadequate bench in front of the liquor store, instrument cases turned to makeshift footstools.
Nate might laugh at me, but he liked it, my ambition, my competitiveness, and he encouraged it, went with me to the floor shows when he could. We both of us liked to keep an eye on the horses coming up from behind. And having grown up watching, always watching, this surveillance felt only natural to me. Tonight I wanted to look at Lili St. Cyr, who’d abandoned Minsky’s Follies in New York and coasted west, headlining at Ciro’s, one of Mickey’s clubs on Sunset, back in the Los Angeles from which Nate had just returned.
Nate grinned at me now, wolf, wolf with a cock, as the maître d’ seated us, best table, center front, and ordered a bottle of champagne. The bottle would be on the house, as I’d begun to notice since the Kefauver hearings so many things were for Nate—meals, tickets, chips, drinks, golf games, hotel rooms, travel. Every time he shook a hand, I wondered what deal lay behind that handshake, where the money came from and to whom it was transferred and how Nate would stuff that money down some gopher hole the government would never be able to find. And every man Nate talked to or laughed with or drank beside, I squinted at, wondering exactly who he was behind his front as real estate developer or construction contractor or entertainment director or hotel treasurer. Everybody here had a front door and a back. Watching Nate at the hearings, I had a good view of his expansive backyard.
But if I’d expected the hearings to change Nate as they had changed me, they had not. He seemed entirely the same, his usual e
ven-tempered, unperturbable, sanguine self. Whatever bravado he’d shown at the hearing or whatever triumph he felt at having exited that hearing untouched, he concealed from me, saying only, “E, it’s good to be home. Let’s go to bed, goddammit.” Whatever he was out there away from Vegas, whatever he was in the past, here and now, he was someone else, the version of himself he had always wanted to be.
At some point during my third glass of champagne—when I was with Nate, I was always served, even though I was underage—Joe E. Lewis, black bow tie, black tux, and boutonniere, finished joking and striding left and right across the proscenium dragging his standing microphone with him. The house lights dimmed, and the Carlton Hayes orchestra began to play first a jazz number, then something brightly sinuous, and the curtains of the small stage parted.
Lili St. Cyr, her name as complete a fabrication as her set and her act.
She breezed onto the stage to the applause of the audience, radiant, all smiles, as if after a terrific evening out, garbed modestly in a long coat, long gloves, and a rhinestone tiara, which signaled she was playing a lady, the status purposeful as it made the fact that we were going to see her naked just that much more titillating. Her face, though, was the face of a guttersnipe, catlike, narrow and forward thrusted, all cheekbones and black eyeliner, bubble of bleached blond hair rolled into a twist.
She spent a third of her fifteen-minute number just strutting her person about the stage set, a bedroom—what else?—with its dressing screen, oversize bed, cushioned chaise, and candelabra, its sconces fitted with several long unlit yellow candles—it was as if all of MGM’s overornamented props for Rich Lady’s Bedroom had been removed from storage in the Mill Buildings and trucked east here to be arranged on this stage. Eventually, St. Cyr began to disrobe, because disrobing was what we came to see, the raison d’etre of her particular show and of all burlesque, ceremoniously removing her coat, then her long gloves, so that we could see her bare arms, and eventually, after much delay, her long skirt, so that we could see her stockinged legs. Finally approaching the point of it all, but I could tell the audience did not want her to hurry.
Her long peplum sleeveless top remained on, one more nod to delay, until she faced the audience and let out a wiggle that allowed this last piece of outerwear to drop into her hands. A trick. Beneath that blouse, not bare skin, but a full armament of undergarments that Playtexed her from breasts to thigh. The audience laughed. Her corset sported bra cups as pointed as the wax paper cups from an office water cooler dispenser, the bottom of the costume a lacy frill. She smiled at us, You didn’t think I would make it too easy for you, did you?
“I hear she makes a hundred thousand dollars a year from this,” Nate said into my ear, his breath as vaporous with alcohol as mine must be.
A hundred thousand dollars a year.
I earned fifty dollars a week as a Donn Arden dancer. Twenty-five hundred dollars a year.
St. Cyr showed us her back now, allowing us a glimpse of her half-bare bottom before covering it with the blouse she still held, a tease as she walked the Donn Arden pelvis-swinging walk I knew so well. At her chaise, she sat and proceeded theatrically, languorously, to remove one shoe, one stocking, the other shoe, the other stocking. All this movement was stylized, long slow gestures nothing like the hysterical shedding of costumes that went on backstage at the Painted Desert Room between numbers, our dressers shrieking at us, “Careful. Don’t touch the fabric with your hands!” bending for what we dropped as we stretched out our arms to be inserted into the next number’s garb.
There was more walking, so much walking, and then St. Cyr vanished behind her dressing screen, various of her limbs appearing and disappearing as she discarded her corset, a quick glimpse of the side of her nude body in profile, split vertically by the screen, so we saw one leg, half her back, an arm, a shoulder, the side swell of her bosom. She emerged, finally, in a fluffy robe with a fur collar, hair down, was moved to yawn, arms stretched up to the catwalk, and then she slid into her bed with a draped headboard and a tiara all its own. Once under her shining quilt, she tossed her robe to the chaise. Implication: I’m naked under here.
That was it. And that should be enough for you, just knowing this.
I would come to learn all her numbers were the same—the dressing and undressing, sometimes requiring the assistance of a uniformed, homely maid, the props of a chaise, a black telephone with its long black cord, a parrot, a trapeze, a $7,000 bathtub reported to have once belonged to Napoleon’s Josephine, or the impersonation of various historical figures such as Salome and Carmen for further variation—but all of them were versions of this, her signature number—A Woman Alone in Her Boudoir.
I wasn’t sure exactly what St. Cyr was. Not a showgirl. Or what her act was exactly. Not a striptease. Not really even burlesque, with its usual brief climactic reveal of pasties and breasts. Which St. Cyr had tried, at Minsky’s, with much less success.
Whatever this was, it seemed clear to me that it or something like it was tailor-made for our undersized showroom stages here in Las Vegas, our little jewel boxes much better suited to this than to the tight row of overdressed showgirls we currently stuffed there, the feathers of our headdresses bristling against each other as we struggled to smile. Vegas seemed intent on sowing and reaping these wholesome showgirls, those friendly faces, open smiles, as if to say, gambling is just as wholesome! Come out to Vegas!
But what if our new city proved more fertile ground for a little perversity in its showrooms? Vegas, after all, prided itself on being a narrow bit of vice-rich real estate, an island alone unto itself, unrepentant. An extension of the old Block 16. That’s really what people drove all the way out to the desert for. The vice. Legalized vice. As Nate had told Kefauver. And unlike other American cities, with a stable population in need of constant variety, Vegas hosted an incessant stream of visitors from all parts of the country, an ever-changing audience. A nightclub in Vegas could host the same show for months on end, even for years, and still fill every seat. And judging from the volume of applause in the El Rancho’s Opera House, that audience would lap up the whiskey of a Lili St. Cyr.
Or of me.
After all, why should St. Cyr have license to come here and do on our stages what I could easily do? I was already here. And I was younger than St. Cyr, prettier, blonder, with longer legs and a dancer’s training. St. Cyr looked a bit squat, hard-muscled, somewhat overpainted. I didn’t yet look as if the years had run their tracks all over my face. Life magazine had just featured a headshot of me, sparkled and feathered, on its cover, “Esme Wells: The Prettiest Showgirl in Las Vegas,” that banner emblazoning the bottom of the page. No need to explain why I was selected for the honor.
I didn’t want to watch someone else be what I wanted to be, as my mother had, mooning over the Old Mill Buildings on Lot One, where MGM had once made its silent films in the twenties and which now stored every kind of knob, lamp, table, or couch you could possibly want for any picture set in any time period, Mexican pueblo, Louis XIV palace, Andy Hardy house. At lunch breaks, when everybody else went to the Commissary to eat, my mother would shake her head at the other girls and say she was going to have a cigarette first, and she would head around the back of the soundstage with me in hand. “I’m not hungry,” my mother would say to me, “are you?” And I, who was, said I wasn’t, so as not to disappoint her. “Here. Take a little smoke,” my mother would say, “take the edge off,” and she’d hold out the cigarette for me, and then she’d lean back against the concrete wall of the soundstage to smoke and gaze at the many glass windows of the Mill Buildings.
She would stare at them so long, I would turn to stare, too. What was she seeing? I would lean against the wall beside her, a little dizzy from the nicotine. The structures were so large and so light-filled, she said, that they could make many movies within them at the same time, each one in a different corner. Inside these glass structures, Greta Garbo had filmed The Temptress and Joan Crawford The Taxi Dancer,
and in the scene where Crawford lay on the floor, weight on her elbows, tossing her hair, the light had glowed on her face, made it soft and white as a petal, and my mother said there was nothing more gorgeous than that, was there? And you didn’t have to be quiet making those films because no sound would ever be heard. The directors could shout at you even while the cameras were going, which, given Buzz, maybe wouldn’t always be such a good thing. She smiled wryly down at me. If only it were 1925, she said, she knew, with her face, she would be a great star. Crawford, like my mother, had begun her career as a dancer. You could start at one place and end up at another. My mother’s article of faith. But it wasn’t 1925. It was 1939, and that was the bitter difference.
So here was opportunity, ready to be snatched up by the eager and the game, my opportunity, my chance, and I didn’t want to miss it, the way my mother had missed hers, lamenting later and forever her bad timing. And, really, how else was a young woman in 1939 Hollywood or 1925 Hollywood or 1951 Las Vegas to make her fortune but from her face and body. Nothing was forever, as I saw from my own reading of those movie magazines my mother had loved, Photoplay and Movie Stars, which the hotel lobby shops here kept so well stocked. Like those vanished silent screen stars, Mr. Mayer, I read, had recently been tipped from his white throne at MGM and sent packing. Mickey Rooney made his last Andy Hardy picture in 1946 while my father and I were out here at the Flamingo and sent over to Fox and United Artists. Judy Garland had been trucked unceremoniously from the lot—too many pills and suicide attempts.
Object lesson.
This was what would eventually happen to me. I was twenty. In ten years I’d be thirty. Too old to be a showgirl. Then what? Cocktail waitress at the craps tables. And when I got too old for that, eventually, I’d end up working the graveyard shift hustling drinks at the casino slots, one of the worst gigs in town. No one playing slots tipped well, you had to be in the pit, by the craps or roulette tables for the big money. No, you had to be young and attractive and you had to stash away your money against the day you were told to go totter around the slot machines. Or worse, told to put on sensible rubber-soled shoes and go wait tables in the coffee shop.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 19