Lady Blue Eyes Page 4

  After the show, we were all enjoying a nightcap in the lounge when Bob stormed through the door. Before I could say anything, he marched to our table and slapped me across the face. “Now wait a minute!” cried Joe, jumping up. Two bouncers rushed over, our table was upturned, and Bob was manhandled to the floor.

  “Okay, Bob, that’s enough,” I told him, my cheek burning. “Let’s go home!”

  Wriggling free, he bolted for the door.

  I drove back to our apartment, but Bob was gone and so was his pilot’s gear. It was four days before I found out what happened to him. Blind with jealousy, he’d flown to Las Vegas in his single-engine plane on a stormy night. Flying through the notorious Cajon Pass in the San Bernardino Mountains, he had to hug the cliffs. The experience must have given him the fright of his life because three days later he rented a car to drive home. After a week of stewing, he sent me a two-line telegram: HAPPY EASTER. MY ATTORNEY WILL CALL YOU.

  Deciding to celebrate, I went to the bank to withdraw some money and treat myself to a mink stole, but the modeling school account was empty; Bob had cleared out every cent. Determined not to be thwarted, I persuaded the bank to lend me the cash to buy the stole, which I insisted was necessary for a woman in my position. Amazingly, they agreed. A few days later, I instigated divorce proceedings on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. I was the first Blakeley ever to seek a divorce and probably the first to have an affair with a married man. My parents were horrified. I asked the court for seventy-five dollars a month child support, although I doubted I’d ever get a dime.

  The second Miss Universe pageant was a bigger success than the first and was won by a pretty French girl, who went on to have an international acting career. I became friends with the German contestant, Christel Schaack, and moved into her apartment once I’d moved out of Bob’s. When Joe’s TV show relocated to San Diego’s KFMB-TV, he asked me to go with him. I didn’t say yes immediately; this was the fifties, after all. When I told my mother, she couldn’t believe that I’d even consider living in sin, as she put it. I wished she understood that after my dreadful experiences with Bob I needed to get away and follow my heart. Having been uprooted from Bosworth and forced to acclimatize to a life far from all I’d known, I’d married to escape the religious strictures she’d imposed, only to become Bob’s fool. For the first time, I was doing something utterly for myself. Leaving Bobby shared between his doting grandmothers, and the modeling school in the hands of my sister, I packed my suitcase and headed south.

  San Diego was a great place to be in the 1950s, especially for a carefree young couple in love. It was buzzing, lively, and fun. When I wasn’t parading models on Joe’s show, I was doing live commercials for everything from dog food to mattresses. We found an oceanfront high-rise in the exclusive La Jolla resort on the edge of the city, with its rugged coastline and small-town atmosphere. Despite being happy with Joe, though, I missed my son dreadfully. Talking to him on the telephone every day wasn’t enough, so I commuted to Long Beach to visit him every weekend in my white Cadillac Fleetwood convertible. I tried to oversee my business, but eventually, the school became too much of a burden and I made a gift of it to my sister and two favorite graduates.

  In the fickle world of television, Joe’s show didn’t survive, and he found himself out of work. The world of big bands was dying, and he didn’t know which way to turn. When he was offered a job as a disc jockey for a new radio show in Las Vegas, he had little choice but to accept. My mother and I were barely talking by then, and the more fundamentalist she became in her religious beliefs, the tougher her influence over Bobby. She wouldn’t allow him to watch movies like King Kong or play any games she regarded as wicked. When I told her I was moving to Vegas with Joe, she hit the roof. As Bobby played on roller skates out in the backyard, she began to yell. Having announced that Bobby and I would burn in hell, she slapped me.

  “All right, Mother,” I told her, as calmly as I could. “That’s enough.”

  I opened the screen door and told Bobby to get into my car. He was still wearing his roller skates and looked confused, so I said, “Leave them on!” I drove him over to Marge’s house and asked if she’d take care of him until I was settled. After that, I announced, I would look after Bobby myself. “It’s time I took more responsibility for my child,” I told her firmly. I could tell she was upset. My decision all but broke my mother’s heart too, but she’d pushed me too far.

  It was the summer of 1956 when Joe and I moved into a small furnished apartment at the back of the Sahara Hotel. Our neighbors were casino employees and wait staff, most of whom slept during the day and worked all night. The sprawling metropolis of Las Vegas was unrecognizable from the days I’d first gone there with Bob Oliver. Then it was a small western town that still held rodeos and boasted just four casinos on its Strip—Hotel Last Frontier, the Thunderbird, the Flamingo, and El Rancho Vegas. Bob had managed to lose money in them all.

  I soon picked up some modeling jobs at the Sahara and Flamingo hotels. Wearing clothes sold locally, I wandered through bars and restaurants quietly informing shoppers about each of my outfits. “This is from Fanny’s in the lobby arcade,” I’d say. “The dress, at a hundred dollars, is pure silk from Thailand.”

  “But how much is the girl in it?” some wise guy would usually joke.

  “You couldn’t afford it,” I’d reply.

  A few weeks later, I spotted an advertisement in the Las Vegas Sun for showgirls at the Riviera. “Minimum five feet nine inches tall,” the ad insisted, but I figured half an inch wouldn’t matter by the time I slipped on some heels. While I was waiting for my audition, two showgirls came to look me up and down. “You’re wasting your time, honey,” the brunette announced, chewing gum. She must have been over six feet tall. “They’re never going to hire you. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s a lark,” I replied with a smile, feeling short for the first time in my life. “I thought I’d see what happened.” The women I’d later come to know as Ida and Penny strode off as I began to have my doubts. I had little idea what the job involved and was relieved that there wasn’t a dance audition, which I knew I’d fail. Instead I gave the choreographer Dorothy Dorbin and the producer Sammy Lewis my best wedding-march walk and was hired along with a blonde named Marsha.

  I moved Bobby to Vegas, enrolled him in a local school, and paid a housekeeper to babysit him after hours. I bought him a scruffy little mutt of a dog named Boots to keep him company. Joe, who had a young son of his own back in L.A., wasn’t thrilled to have my “kid” in tow, but he put on a brave face and even threw a ball around the yard for Bobby every now and then.

  Being a Vegas showgirl was all that I’d hoped it might be and more. The shortest and blondest in our quartet, I reached six feet in my four-inch stilettos and had to master gliding across a stage wearing a towering headdress featuring anything from the Statue of Liberty to the Eiffel Tower. I was paid $150 a week for two shows a night, six nights a week. I earned almost twice as much as the twenty-six chorus girls who danced their feet off, learned complicated routines, and did quick changes in the wings. When I was through working at the Riviera in the early hours, I’d usually try to get across town to sit in on Joe’s late-night radio show or watch him sing at one of the smaller hotels. Then the next day it would be the same routine of modeling at lunchtime before my evening shows. The days were long and the nights even longer, but I had the stamina of youth and never seemed to tire.

  To begin with, my fellow showgirls gave me the worst seat in the dressing room and excluded me from their conversations. They were afraid I might horn in on their relationships with the casino bosses. It was like my first day at school in Wichita. Once I assured them I was happy with Joe, they relaxed, and the more I found out about them the more I liked them. Penny, from Texas, had run away with the circus at thirteen and learned to read tarot cards in Cuba. Ida not only was six feet and an inch but had the most vibrant blue eyes and the whitest skin I’d ever
seen. Marsha, the free-spirited sweetheart from Oklahoma, became my closest friend.

  Best of all, these veterans of umpteen Vegas shows taught me how to be one of the flagships of the Riviera fleet. Not only did I have to balance fifteen pounds of headdress with just a tight clamp at the temples and a chin strap to hold it on but I had to keep smiling, float down polished stairs like a goddess, and avoid the chorus girls whirling all around me.

  The other girls plastered on so much makeup that, close up, they looked like Egyptian mummies. As a fresh-faced country girl, I couldn’t bear to slap on that much foundation, rouge, and eye shadow, and I wasn’t about to start layering hot wax onto each eyelash as Penny did each night. So I used my own makeup line and the subtle techniques I’d picked up as a model. In the end, all but Penny copied me, toning down their looks to match mine. I guess she just couldn’t break the wax habit.

  We formed the decorative backdrop to acts such as the comedian George Gobel and Spike Jones and the Band That Plays for Fun. In one of my first shows featuring Liberace, we wore ruffled, bare-midriff costumes and our heads were topped with three-foot-high plastic champagne bottles tipped forward at a precarious angle. Liberace was charming and gave each of us a china piano. Most of his fans, including my mother (who came to see his show several times), were not aware that he was gay. Liberace came running into rehearsals one day crying, “Help me! Help me!” as three screaming middle-aged women gave chase, seemingly determined to rip his clothes off.

  As part of our contractual obligations, Ida, Penny, Marsha, and I were required to slip into cocktail dresses after our final performance and “dress up the room” in the hotel’s piano lounge for an hour or more to draw in passersby. The bosses often wandered through to check that we were in situ, and there was always the “eye in the sky” security camera monitoring our every move. Bouncers kept watch too and shooed away anyone making unwanted advances, especially to the girlfriends of the bosses. Celebrities were the only exceptions to the rule. People like Cary Grant and James Stewart always turned a few heads. Howard Hughes would wander in wearing a tuxedo with the scruffiest tennis shoes you could imagine. Once he homed in on a girl he liked, he’d bombard her with gifts and flowers in the hope that she’d leave with him, just as he had with my model Shirley Lewis. I met Howard a couple of times and would smile as I was obliged to, but I saw the way he harassed the other girls so I always tried to avoid eye contact after that. Apart from anything else, those who’d been with him warned me that he was dirty and that, close-up, he smelled. Elvis Presley was working in Vegas, so he was a regular too, but he was after every girl in the place, and I avoided men who drank too much or got high. Anyway, I had Joe.

  Once we’d fulfilled our duties in the lounge, we were free to do as we pleased—gamble in the casino, see a show, or go home to bed. The top acts in town that year included the Minsky Girls (the first topless showgirls in Vegas), Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra, who opened at the Sands soon after his divorce from Ava Gardner. Frank was doing well again after a personal and career slump, and was working with the composer and arranger Gordon Jenkins, with whom Joe had worked. Nat King Cole was also working with Gordon and was a huge success by then, with his own TV show and the hit single “When I Fall in Love.” He’d broken through racial prejudices to play in Vegas alongside stars such as Lena Horne and Sammy Davis, Jr.

  Whatever the rest of the showgirls decided to do after work, the others almost always went gambling, so—curious—I began to tag along. “I presume you know how to stash the cash?” Marsha asked me one night. When I looked blank, she shook her head and sighed. “You really are fresh from the farm, aren’t you? Okay, watch me tonight. I have a date with a high roller, so come to the craps tables and see how I do it. When I raise my right eyebrow, I’ll meet you in the restroom.”

  Intrigued, I watched as she hooked up with a silver-haired man in a Stetson who laid hundred-dollar chip after chip onto the green baize. Soon, he began to slide some of his chips her way so that she could gamble too. Hanging on his arm, giggling with delight, she placed her bets but almost always seemed to lose. I watched her closely but saw nothing unusual other than her reaching into her purse occasionally for a handkerchief or powder for her nose. Then she arched her perfectly penciled eyebrow at me, so I drifted away from the table and met her in the restroom.

  “Quick, open your purse!” she whispered once she was certain we were alone. Reaching into hers, she pulled out a fistful of chips. There were more stuffed inside her brassiere. I could hardly believe my eyes. “Now go home and hide them somewhere. I’ll pick them up tomorrow.” She left in a cloud of perfume and cigarette smoke.

  I went back to my apartment feeling sick to my stomach. I was a nervous wreck, convinced that the police, the bosses, or both were going to burst in any minute. I didn’t dare count the chips, but I could tell there were several thousand dollars’ worth. Even though I knew they were legitimately hers, they felt tainted, so I threw them in a box and hid them under the bed. Kissing a sleeping Bobby on the forehead, I slid between the sheets to wait for Joe, terrified that I’d done something criminal. I barely slept a wink. When Marsha called the next day to collect her chips, she was surprised by my reaction.

  “Don’t ever ask me to do that again!” I told her. “I don’t know how you did it and I don’t want to know.” Dear Marsha, she was determined to stash enough of a nest egg to pay for her return to her small town in Oklahoma to buy “the biggest house on the hill.” Stashing was tolerated so long as half was gambled back or she wasn’t too obvious about it. On no account could a girl and her beau move to another casino. Sadly, Marsha was caught in the end. A drunk she was with went broke at 5:00 A.M., then demanded some of his money back. She slid a couple of chips across the table, but he shook his head and said, “Come off it! You have a lot more than that.” There was a fight, and plainclothes security men arrived and unceremoniously tipped Marsha’s purse upside down on the table. I guess she’d had no one to pass to that night.

  After that, Marsha went to work at El Rancho Vegas, the last stop for a showgirl on the Strip. That hundred-room hotel had been the first casino in town, co-owned by the Marx Brothers, but by then it was the end of the line. I hated to see that happen to her, and unfortunately we lost touch. Three years later, El Rancho Vegas burned down. I never knew if Marsha saved enough to buy her house on the hill. I sure hope so.

  Marsha had also showed me another way of supplementing her income. It was common for a woman standing at a casino table to have a stranger walk up and put some chips down in front of her as a gift. No strings. Maybe he was a big spender being nice to the “little lady.” Maybe he was having a good night and feeling generous. His reward? In my case, just a smile. Needless to say, the other girls got hit on a lot more than I did. One night a funny little guy with a Kewpie doll face put stacks of hundred-dollar chips in front of me at the blackjack table, where I rarely placed a bet above five dollars. “Here, Barbara, have some fun,” he said.

  I was shocked; I’d never been given so much before. Turning to him, I said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that.” He looked surprised.

  The girls who were with me whispered, “Are you nuts, Barbara? That’s Willie Alderman! Go on, take it.” The name meant nothing to me, and I shook my head. He left, taking his chips with him.

  Penny couldn’t understand why I’d refused, so I told her straight. “Because some night in the future I’ll get a knock on my door from that weird little guy, and I don’t ever want to have to deal with that.”

  Ida assured me that I’d never hear from him. “Oh, Willie isn’t like that!” she insisted. “He’s a sweetheart. He just likes to help the girls.”

  I wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t until years later, when I read a book called The Green Felt Jungle, that I discovered how Mr. Alderman made his money. More commonly known as Ice Pick Willie, he allegedly specialized in killing people by sitting next to them at a cocktail bar and shoving the pointe
d tip of an ice pick sharply into their eardrums. Once they slumped over dead, he arranged them to look drunk and calmly walked away. My encounter with him was my first of several lucky escapes.

  THREE

  I’m a proud mother with my new son, Bobby, and

  my mother-in-law, Marge Oliver.

  COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  Luck Be a Lady

  “Hey, blondie—come on in here!” The greeting was casual, slurred even. The man yelling at me through the smoky half-light had his back to the bar, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Standing around him was a group of equally well-dressed companions in tuxedos, their bow ties hanging limply at their collars. I recognized a couple of the faces.

  “Keep walking,” I said to Ida and Penny. It was four in the morning, and we were on our way home. We’d already performed two shows at the Riviera and had hurried across to the Sahara to catch the husband-and-wife singers Louis Prima and Keely Smith in their after-hours performance. I was tired. My feet hurt. My son was home in bed with his dog; the housekeeper was waiting. I wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep too.