I leaned then against the back of the chair to watch what appeared to be my lover’s slow crawl across the floor to me, an inversion of the usual trope of the burlesque artist crawling the stage in garters and heels. Any performing I now did, I did solely with my face, with the expressions I allowed to shade it, the faces I had worn with Nate as he had supervised my sexual initiation, and this, more than my body, was the private core of my most private self and therefore Nate’s, and yet I had to draw on it. No one comes to the theater to see a performer restrain herself. I looked at the floor. As my lover reached me, I mimed accepting his lips and hands at my face and torso and then his head between my thighs, remembering the strange wet strength of Nate’s tongue bearing down on me for the first time. My head went back. The black-and-yellow lights above me seemed to swell, rhythmic as a heartbeat. What I became on this stage was what I had imagined myself to be when I danced for Nate Stein those three years ago in that empty Flamingo showroom, making my body undulate to those Andrews Sisters dated show tunes, making him want me. Would the audience?
The drums throbbed steadily and my fingers fluttered against the fabric of the chair. The music built in pace and volume. With my upstage hand, the one invisible to my audience, I found the edge of my chiffon fabric and gripped it tightly, at the ready. And then I let this mock cunnilingus go on, searching for the pulse of the audience, for the sounds of them, my band watching me, awaiting my signal. Then, simultaneously, I thrust my hips forward, opened my mouth for the trumpet’s libidinous squawk, and tossed the chiffon to the catwalk above me, a triple play that left my body naked for just an instant before the stage went black.
I waited, terrified, in that darkness. A few seconds later, the chiffon garment I’d flung to the skies plummeted back down onto my sweaty, garnished face. I swiped the thing away. I couldn’t breathe.
Was I ruined? Had we gone too far?
No.
As Nate had assured me, This is Vegas, darling.
There was no too far to go.
37
And Nate never left my side when the pounding on my dressing room door began, with every entertainer and VIP wanting to personally congratulate me, a crush, a crowd at the open door, a pack in the narrow backstage hallway. I knew Nate had coaxed and cajoled most of these celebrities to the Desert Inn, as Benny Siegel had once done at the Flamingo, with offers of free rooms and airplane travel and thousands of dollars of free chips because Nate knew a celebrity presence would legitimize my act, burlesque as socially acceptable entertainment, and that presence would legitimize me.
And Nate knew better than anyone my relative lack of sophistication, and in my dressing room he kept an arm around me, a cigarette in that hand, holding out my hand as if I were a mannequin when he saw someone wanted to shake it, speaking for me or prodding a few words from me when he saw that what he said was not enough, did not quite satisfy the well-wisher. I admired, as always, his social ease, his genial smile, his effortless chat, his warm handshake, his nod to me with a gentle incline of the head that signaled I must step into the circle of conversation with whatever vocabulary I could muster. I was somebody, now. The baskets of fruit, the bottles of champagne, the bouquets of flowers and stems wrapped in paper, all spoke to that—or to the fact that Nate was somebody and because I was somebody to him, these courtiers were prepared to flatter him through me.
Whatever the reason, it was after this night that everyone, even Donn Arden, began calling me Miss Wells, treating me with a deference I had never before been shown. Nor had my parents.
My mother watched all this from her photograph tucked into my dressing-room mirror, eyes hooded beneath her platinum wig, body hidden behind her wide-hooped satin skirt, posed up there in the altitudes on her winding staircase of the Shadow Waltz, and I wasn’t sure if she was proud of me or envious. I knew how my father felt. Neither proud nor envious. Distressed.
Pride, envy, distress, no matter. Because right out of the gate, I became one of the Strip’s high-grossing acts—there was no one else on the Strip like me, Nate saw to that—and Nate raked in the ancillary income in the drinking, gambling, and prostitution that followed my performance. Get me a girl. It wasn’t long before I asked him for a percentage of the showroom tables. And he laughed and gave it to me. Baby E.
38
For my next number the following year, I stole my material not from St. Cyr—who had, I learned later, stolen hers from an old 1897 burlesque film entitled After the Ball—but from the great Buzz Berkeley, who better?, creating for myself a water show somewhat like the one I read in Photoplay he was doing at MGM, confecting for Esther Williams the Fountain and Smoke number in Million Dollar Mermaid, shot at the Lot One saucer tank, surrounded by scaffolding and wires and stairways so cameramen could be stationed above the water, at the water’s edge, at the portholes below the waterline, so every gizmo and gimmick and girl could be filmed—it was all the business he’d done with his dancers on the soundstages and now would do in a pool. So.
My new act would feature not a pool but a giant martini glass, in a nod, after all, to where we were, its rim and slopes devices for my choreographic inventions, as were the olive on a stick and the stick itself, the stick which made a pole for me along and around which I slithered and slid, a phallus I straddled and rode. At the finale, I sank into the glass’s stem, bathing beauty at last, my pale hair loosed in defiance and floating upward, my flesh pressed into the tight column of glass, arms raised above me so the audience could fully take its pleasure in me, though I made them wait, because after all, the long joke is the essence of burlesque.
39
I should also mention this.
That night of my debut, Virginia Hill herself made a congratulatory appearance at my dressing room door, along with her escort, the mobster Joe Adonis. She too had just been called in front of the Kefauver committee and had testified there before all witnesses about her skills at fellatio, which had made her so essential to the syndicate men Epstein, Nitti, Accardo, Costello, Siegel, Adonis, and company, in that order, with some overlap, testifying about the capabilities of her lips and tongue and teeth, doing so all while wearing a mink cape and silk gloves. And a hat. None of which could buff away her rough manners in the same way that none of Benny’s fancy suits could buff away his. Afterwards, she had slapped a woman reporter and told her she hoped an atom bomb would fall on her. Virginia. Yet another piece of trash flapping on Kefauver’s wire.
She stood flapping in my doorway now, and there was something about the way she greeted Nate, the way they looked at one another, the way his hand stayed a second too long on the sleeve of her dress that recalled for me the rumors I’d heard back at the Flamingo, that Nate Stein had had Virginia when she was very young, when she’d made her initial appearance at the World’s Fair in 1933, a red-haired, pale-skinned sixteen-year-old girl, wobbling through Chicago in her big sister’s heels, trying to act as if she wanted to be passed around from one man to another. Epstein, Nitti, Accardo, Costello, Siegel, Adonis, and Stein? It was possible. And I’d also heard Nate and Lansky didn’t like the way Ben treated her. So there was more they didn’t like about Ben than just his Swiss bank account. And that June day after Ben battered Virginia for the last time and then chased her all the way home to Los Angeles, and that day after she called Joe Adonis and flew to Paris to get away from Ben, Al Smiley made his call to Vegas. And someone with a soft spot for little girls like me took that call and made another.
I narrowed my eyes at Nate, and he pivoted to introduce me to Virginia, as if we’d never met before. Did Nate not know how much I saw at the Flamingo, how much I knew about Benny and Virginia?
She didn’t remember me, of course, as the little cigarette girl she had scratched all those Decembers ago—a habit of hers, apparently—but I remembered her only too well. She looked as if she had aged fifteen years in the last six. While Mr. Adonis shook my hand, all pinkie rings and cigar, Virginia told me if she had done my act, she’d have gotten do
wn on her knees on that stage and pretended to suck the hell out of a cock. Which she then demonstrated.
Nate’s face tightened with offense, his affection for Virginia gone. He now wore almost, but not quite, the bad face.
It was directed at her, not at me, but both it and she served their purpose, which was to remind me exactly who and what I was. I was not and never would be again my child self, Esme Silver. I was some concoction now of the fellater Virginia Hill and the stripper Lili St. Cyr, a stage-show vulgarity in a satin dress and glass jewels, just one step away, okay, maybe two, from a cot on Block 16. Or a hotel room at the World’s Fair.
40
Los Angeles
1939
My mother now—to keep me out of her hair while she prepared for her debut at the Clover—allowed my father to take me with him on his errands for Mickey Cohen and Benny Siegel, despite their questionable nature. When he made the rounds of MGM or Warners or Columbia, picking up the checks written by the reluctant moguls in order to keep the unions of carpenters or electricians or extras from calling a strike, checks my father delivered to Mr. Siegel, I showed my father the way. I knew the layout of MGM and Warners by heart. Lot One. Lot Two. Lot Three. Etc.
Soon enough, my father found himself promoted from Cohen’s errand boy to his bookmaker, because, after all, that was his métier. No longer a bettor, he now took his place at the other side of the window, taking those bets, working out of Cohen’s Stratford Coffee Shop downtown or his Le Grand Prix Barber Shop in Hollywood or the La Brea Club on Beverly, with its $20,000 stakes and a crowd of mobsters or later still at his Dincara Stock Farm up in Burbank, a horse farm with a casino in the stable, one block from Warners, where actors still dressed in costume would come to play roulette and blackjack at the end of a long day’s shoot. Occasionally, my father worked nights helping out with the craps games Cohen hosted for his friends at the Ambassador Hotel. Better for my father to take the bets than to make them himself on races fixed by Meyer Lansky at tracks as far south as Agua Caliente in Tijuana and as far north as Santa Anita, which is where I had my memorable first sighting of Benny Siegel.
Eventually, by the end of the summer, my father ended up, more or less permanently, working at Cohen’s ratty little Kon-Kre-Kota paint store in the middle of nowhere on Beverly Boulevard, a store with rows of telephones and a walk-up window, where I was treated like a little queen in a hive of hatless men, green chalkboards, and ringing telephones. I’d fool around with all the phones, which were there so bets could be laid, making pretend calls to movie stars. There was also a back window where I could stand and spy on the men who walked up to put a dollar down on the dogs or the ponies or a ball game. I liked the paint store. It reminded me of my grandfather’s paint store. Mr. Cohen’s office was at the back, where he always managed to find a Three Musketeers bar or a Clark Bar or a pack of Rolo chocolates in his desk and where after proffering one of them up, he’d pat my head and pay me some kind of compliment. “Baby E, you’re one cute cookie!” and then run off to wash his hands.
Cohen was always making for the nearest bathroom so he could wash his hands, which he did, religiously, an obsession that started at nineteen when he contracted gonorrhea and continued ever after through the years. As a little girl, I found his whole washing routine hilarious, Mr. Cohen’s taking another shower?, Mr. Cohen’s in the bathroom again scrubbing his hands?, though now that I’m older, I understand it better. Three times a day he showered and powdered his entire body and put on fresh clothing. On the hour, he soaped up his hands. Almost every other mobster in town would eventually crawl out to Vegas where vice had made itself a comfortable home, but Mickey Cohen would stay in balmy Los Angeles with its clean ocean air and its sanitizing sunshine, and where, ultimately, he’d fill the vacancy left by Bugsy Siegel’s death in 1947. Fill it and expand it.
Anyway, the bathroom was where Mickey was standing, hands under a stream of hot water, when Maxie Shaman burst into the Kon-Kre-Kota one afternoon, his big body seeming to break through the doorframe and his anger over who knows what pushing him like a storm past the rows of paint cans and rollers and brushes and dust cloths and the racks of cardboard paint samples, where I stood, picking out the colors for my new bedroom in the Hollywood Hills house my father told me we’d be moving to soon, now that he was making so much more money and we needed to be closer to my mother’s club on Sunset. My plan was to paint each wall of my bedroom a different color, so I had all various shades of pink, purple, yellow, and blue in my hands and laid out like playing cards on the counter before me, weighing my serious decision.
And I seemed to be the only one to look up at the entrance of Maxie Shaman, who made directly for Mr. Cohen’s back office as if he knew exactly where it was—and in fact he did. His agenda? Fury over Mickey’s bodyguard Hooky Rothman, who broke a chair over Maxie’s brother’s head at the La Brea Club the previous night. For this disrespect, Maxie was going to hold not a chair but a gun to Mr. Cohen’s head.
It was the second time in my life I heard a gun go off. The sound was unimpressive, nothing like the impressively loud and crisp pop pop pop on my favorite radio show, Gangbusters, not even much like the ringing echo and zing of the bullets from the pistol Mr. Cohen used to shoot at Adolf Hitler’s portrait in that Deutsches Haus auditorium. But Maxie’s emergence from the back office was not unimpressive.
If he had rushed in like nature’s whirlwind, he lurched out like a crime against nature, moving quickly at first and then not so quickly, and then the big man fell, gracelessly and all at once, hitting the floor with a thud, his face a few yards from my sandaled feet, and it seemed to me that Shaman looked directly at me before his eyes turned blank, the floridly colored cards in my hands fluttering onto the floor beside him, the blood that still pulsed forcefully through him also pulsing out of him onto the tiled floor, inching toward me and soaking my little cardboard paint samples red. I took a step back. All the while, his eyes looked into my eyes. He said something to me. “Little girl.”
I turned slowly to search out my father by the betting window where he stood, frozen, some green bill making a feather in his hand. The men at the telephones had gone suddenly mute. I looked back down at Maxie Shaman. My sandals were wet now with his blood. He wasn’t trying to say anything to me anymore. Around me, telephones rang and rang. Why aren’t you answering, answering, answering? I looked back at my father. He hadn’t moved.
And then Mickey came crashing out of his office, a squat hulk in a suit, and it was he who took my head in his hands and turned my face away, saying, “Don’t look. Don’t look, Esme.”
But in Vegas, there would be no one to turn my head away. Far from it.
41
Las Vegas
1952
I knew of Tony Cornero from Los Angeles, from the gambling boats he ran, where my father had played before the city shut them all down—the Monte Carlo, the Rose Isle, the Johanna Smith, the Rex. And I knew of him also because he’d tried to set up shop in Mickey Cohen’s territory, and Cohen had bombed Cornero’s house to discourage him, which it had. So Cornero, like so many other crooked men, had come here to Las Vegas to build himself a casino, which he called first the Starlight and then the Stardust and for which he had borrowed over four million dollars from Nate and still the place wasn’t finished and hadn’t yet opened. And I remembered, when I walked toward the casino on my usual morning hunt for him, that Nate had told me Tony was coming over today to ask for more money and he wasn’t planning to give Tony one more dollar, was going to watch him fail, and then buy the place out from under him as he crumpled, gravity a slingshot, sending him out past his star-dusted galaxy.
The casino doors were closed and locked, I discovered, and I had to knock to be let in. Inside, the casino was deserted, obviously purposely so, except for Nate, who stood at the bar, stone-faced, a bartender behind him, and an impassive-faced croupier at one of the craps tables where a flushed, frantic-looking Tony Cornero was playing solo. All the
other croupiers and dealers, even the box men and pit bosses, were absent. Sent away. It was clear to me when I saw Tony and his red face that Nate’s unwelcome news had already been delivered and that Cornero was trying to have his vengeance at the craps table. But vengeance was not his. Not yet.
Even at 10:00 a.m., the casino was dimly lit, as if gamblers needed to play in an eternal night because if they knew what time it really was, they would surely gather up their chips and head to bed. The casino wasn’t a large one, just five craps tables, three roulette tables, four blackjack tables, and seventy-five slot machines, but it made Nate a fortune every month, raking in $750,000 a week from the first moment the casino opened, unlike the take at the opening of poor Benny’s Flamingo Club. Or the poor Las Vegas Jockey Club. So the house was winning and Tony was losing. But something else was going on or Nate wouldn’t be here. Or the casino so empty.
“He’s down thirty thousand,” Nate told me when I reached him at the bar.
“You should stop him,” I said. “Send him home.”
“Oh, I’m gonna stop him.”
So it was going to be a curt morning, a Baby E, go away morning. There were fewer of those now, but they still happened on occasion. Except that Nate didn’t wave me away.
Because then Tony—overheated, black hair glistening with hair oil and sweat, dressed in a suit and tie because after all he had come to beg for money, spiffy on arrival, I assumed, but now a disheveled mess, his collar turned up out of his suit jacket, shirt as crinkled as if he had taken it off and folded it a thousand times before donning it again—raised his arm and flicked a finger at the bartender behind me, signaling for another whiskey.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 21