When I offered a pack of cigarettes to Sonny Tufts, he smiled at me, called me a Little Sweetie, and he was so handsome and so blond, it was hard to believe in a few years he’d be such a lush, drunkenly groping at girls’ thighs with his teeth like some shark. Benny’s friend George Raft, who played gangsters even as he befriended real ones who then copied his movie mannerisms and his style, so much so that who could tell anymore the original from the copy, bought a pack of Lucky Strikes from me, giving me a wink and a smile, saying, “Little girl, let me see what you have there on that tray,” and then stuffing his tip into the waistband of my skirt while I flushed. I was close enough to smell the oily scent of the pomade on his hair.
I’d seen movie actors like these men on the MGM lot, but they had never looked my way before and I had never been quite this close to them before. My proximity made me a little clumsy, made me tremble a bit with the coins and the Luckies. The whole experience was like being on one of my mother’s soundstages, but this time as a player, not as child, watching. And this frisson of the movie set was exactly what Ben Siegel was after, of course, hoping it would make gamblers lose their minds and their money with the excitement of it all. It was certainly making me a fool.
Mr. Raft had tipped me with a hundred-dollar bill, a discovery that astonished me after the fact, as I thought it rude to look too closely at the tips as I accepted them, peeking at them only as I walked away. The sight of Benjamin Franklin’s doughy green face made me stumble. I was rich! Had been made rich in under two hours! This was the moment I first understood that Vegas might hold some benefits for me personally, not just for Benny or my father. My father always said I had a mind like an abacus, just like my grandfather’s. I stood there in the middle of the casino, working my beads, adding things up. Then I looked around the room, suddenly all blue and silver and light and possibility, and Benny, across the room, saw me looking, saw my face, and came over to me to say, “So what do you think, Esme?” knowing of course what I would say and wanting to hear it.
And I had to say, “It’s wonderful.” And then I couldn’t help but wag my big bill at him. “Look at my tip!”
He smiled, all gratified contentment as if we shared in all this together, which in a way we did, and Benny peered at my mouth, knowing it was safe to tease me now, saying, “Is that by any chance Passion in Red?” Which was the lipstick he’d bought me on his last trip out and which I hadn’t until now had an occasion to wear. Or hadn’t wanted to make him happy by wearing.
I laughed.
He leaned over and impulsively kissed my cheek. “You’re a good kid. And I promise you, life is going to be a lot more interesting around here, now.”
True.
And then someone from behind me yanked at my hair, jerked my head back. It was like being attacked by a dybbuk, and when I turned to see who it was, I found Virginia’s contorted face two inches from mine, that block jaw of hers wide as a wall, her black painted eyebrows jammed together like an automobile accident. She was already screaming at me, and before I could even make my mouth into an astonished O, she reared back and her other hand came forward to scratch my face with her long fingernails, raking me from my eyebrows to my chin, and the pain was so astonishing it made me cry real tears, though the shock left me voiceless, a weeping mute.
Not so Benny. “Virginia,” he bellowed, “what the fuck are you doing? This is Ike’s girl, Esme.”
As if maybe he thought in my adult getup, I was unrecognizable to her.
He grabbed at her arms, but he couldn’t get both of them, and one of them still flailed and flapped at me, those painted nails, hard as concrete darts, still scrabbling at my face. I tried to duck, but she reached me anyway. Octopus! Benny grabbed her other arm, finally.
“Sure, save her young face, you gangster,” she shouted, kicking at him and spitting at me, and the two of them tussled, evening dress and swallowtails a twisted jerking mess that appalled me, as I backed up, my face stinging and my hair unfurling from its inexpert coiffure, feeling humiliated, as any person publicly spanked would feel. But I also felt something else I couldn’t quite identify, maybe some pride that I wasn’t such a little baby, anymore, after all, if Virginia could be made jealous enough to hit me. I was still baby enough to cry, though.
Grappling with Virginia, Benny managed to jerk his chin at me, which I understood as instruction to flee, and so I ran for the kitchen, my cigarette tray slapping against me, and made it through the kitchen’s swinging doors, where one of the chefs gave me a wet towel. From the round peephole windows, I watched as Benny’s men helped pin Virginia’s arms and, with Benny following, dragged her up the gorgeous spiral staircase and off to, I assumed, Benny’s penthouse suite, which just last night had had a front door installed. Good thing. Because behind that door tonight Virginia would be held prisoner.
But she wasn’t there yet, and she kept screaming at Benny and everybody else the whole way up that seemingly endless staircase, “Gangsters, murderers, you’re all murderers.”
We weren’t allowed to say that or anything like it in front of Mr. Siegel.
But there she was, saying it.
“Gangster. Murderer,” she yelled one last time into Benny’s face before she was made to vanish.
She wasn’t wrong, of course, though I didn’t know that then. The pit bosses, the counting-room bosses, even half the gamblers here or at the El Rancho or the Last Frontier or the casinos downtown I would come to learn were gangsters or hit men or one-time crooked cops who now dealt openly in vice. You had to pity the poor prospectors and ranchers who still thought of Las Vegas as their town. So when Virginia screamed, she screamed the truth.
The action on the floor stopped for a moment.
And then the few gamblers we had here resumed their play, chips laid down, wheels turned, slot machine arms pulled. They would stay, put up with what they had to, in the name of greed. Just like us. And my father, over by the craps tables, hadn’t even seen what had happened to me and could hardly believe it when I told him about it later, showed him my scratch marks, the evidence of another one of Virginia’s regular breakdowns in civility, a little more public maybe, this time, with a corresponding breakdown in civility on Ben’s part, as well. Virginia’s tantrum, a full-blown humiliation for me, was just a kerfuffle for Benny, something that hardly retained his attention. Because the real problem for him tonight was the house losses. He didn’t have time to beat up Virginia, as he sometimes did. He had business to attend to. And so he came back down the stairway, and I watched from my kitchen porthole as he resumed his perambulation about the casino floor, glad-handing and back-slapping, joking and smiling, offering up gaming chips, gratis. As if we weren’t being taken enough. Too many of the players were winning and the swankily tuxedoed Greek dealers were stealing Benny blind, stuffing their pockets with chips they claimed were tips from the gamblers and cashing in the chips at the cage during their breaks.
So maybe it was lucky for us, after all, that this first night the casino emptied out early. Around midnight, the lights in the casino blinked in the storm and then failed, and when it became clear the lights were not going to come back on no matter how hysterical or how imperious Benny became, our little crowd of celebrities and their fellow gamblers drove off down the highway into the distance toward the kitschy El Rancho, Ben’s nemesis!, and the neon cactus of the Last Frontier. Because there weren’t any rooms here for anyone to stay in. The hotel itself wasn’t finished, just the club and casino.
We really shouldn’t have opened tonight at all, but Benny was frantic to show his investors a return on their money, to prove his desert dream could be fruitful.
Well, not so fruitful. Not tonight.
So while my father was calculating the evening’s losses and figuring out how to best present that terrible information to Mr. Siegel, I went outside to let the wet night air soothe my sore cheek. I could be scarred for life! My mother had led me to believe that a woman’s face was her fortune and mine wa
s now subject to a terrible downgrade. I had been maimed. And even if I wasn’t an applicant for one of those coveted slots as a Louis B. Mayer screen goddess, I could already see that even here in Vegas, a woman’s face would be her fortune. As was her body. I thought about my tips and tried not to finger my raw skin as I meandered around the front of the building.
The minute the main structure was built, Mr. Siegel had the tall Flamingo sign at the front entrance erected so it rose like a totem pole, one letter on top of the other, and at the apex, the talismanic bird flapped its wings. The words Casino. Lounge. Restaurant. Casino. Lounge. Restaurant repeated themselves along the very edges of the roof above the cypress trees and scraggly desert plants below, just in case the world wanted to know what this building was doing here, the architecture of clean straight angles, as if we could sweep away our own troubles and the troubles of the past decade with a plumb line and a few boxes. I wished.
I sat down on the ledge of the fountain by the front entrance. The mechanisms were not yet turned on. Earlier this week, I’d discovered that the orange tabby cat roaming the construction site, coming here from God knows where, had given birth to a litter of kittens in the bottom of this very fountain, a concrete nest of safety from prairie dogs and raccoons, and I’d begged and begged Benny to let her stay there with the mewing babies, until finally, with an, “All right, Baby E,” he had relented, and Benny’s three-story-high water show was an empty well, bubbling jets inert, the only water in it the sharp blips of falling rain. None of this would have mattered, of course, if everything else had gone well this evening, but as it was, the dead fountain was just another notch in the tally of Benny’s disappointments. All was quiet down there now with the mama and her baby kittens.
I tipped my face up to the raindrops, let my hair flatten and my makeup run. What did it matter? The night was over.
I missed my mother.
And then I saw Ben standing a short way down the drive, smoking a cigarette, all alone, too, and looking rather wet and vulnerable. Maybe all his bluster and bullying were out of fearful desire rather than power. In that moment he reminded me of my parents, with all the big beautiful dreams they chased with such fervor gone psst, leaving them lost and bewildered. The only thing worse than being scared of Ben was not being scared of him. Our fortunes were tied to his. I wiped my face and watched Benny. The end of his Lucky made one small light in the middle of the wet desert.
11
After the Flamingo lost $300,000 in its first two weeks, Meyer Lansky forced Ben to close at the end of January, finish construction of the hotel, and retool the casino. And Mr. Lansky sent some of his men from the successful casino at the El Cortez in downtown Vegas—Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum—ahead of him to poke through everything before he himself flew out in March to review the account books, to check the cameras in the counting room, to rerig the tables and rewire the slot machines in the casino. Out front there were to be no more thieving Greek dealers. No more tuxedos. This wasn’t Paris or Havana. We needed to be friendly looking, not intimidating. The new dealers would wear regular suits, just like the patrons. There would be bingo and giveaways, though just the idea of either one of those made Benny wince. And, further, Lansky also wasn’t happy about Ben’s recent divorce from his wife, Esta, over his affair with the ridiculous Virginia. So there was nothing at all, really, that Lansky was happy about on this visit.
He and one of his men even made a point to watch the dress rehearsal of our new floor show before we reopened. No detail was too small for his review. So we were all nervous. What would Lansky think of us? I’d been promoted from cigarette girl to dancing girl during the closure. When I’d told my father I wasn’t going back to school after Christmas, he hadn’t objected. I was fifteen. Neither he nor my mother had finished high school, and the Flamingo was just too exciting.
And, anyway, who needed math and history lessons to be a dancer? Daddy Mack had been my schooling for that, just as he’d schooled my mother, and I’d had more of that schooling for sure than my fellow dancers, a bunch of local girls, pretty, but a little clunky, untrained for the most part, the kind of girls my mother and I would have bent our heads together and laughed at if we’d seen them on set. None of them could dance, not that we had much choreography to perform. A bit of strutting, some waving of feather fans, a kick here and there, some tap. Who couldn’t do that? Our little numbers were scheduled between the real acts, a sip of water to cleanse the palate, the announcer introducing us with, “And now, from the Fabulous Flamingo Hotel, here’s our lovely line of dancers!” The hotel had even been given a new name for our grand reopening. No longer the Flamingo Club, we were now called the Fabulous Flamingo, as if the adjective could make us so.
I don’t think we lovely line of dancers was that important to the overall show, but still I was nervous about making a good impression. We could be dumped just like the Greek dealers—and then what would I do? Sell cigarettes. Check hats. Or be sent back to school to keep me busy. So I was watching closely as Lansky, Benny, and a man I didn’t know sat on chairs in the empty nightclub, the three of them our only audience, their table the only one with a cloth over it, smoking and tipping their ashes into our flamingo-adorned ashtrays. The three kings.
It was the wrong time of day, of course, to see a floor show. You needed night. The sun was bearing in on us despite the draperies, rendering the room vacant and dead, like any theater during the day. And having the men sitting there at the center front table with a tablecloth laid deferentially just for them made the rehearsal feel like an audition. None of the girls were wearing curlers as they usually did for four o’clock rehearsal. No one was wearing practice clothes. We wore our pink feathered costumes, our rubberized mesh tights pulled up high and rolled at the waist, our red high-heeled shoes. I’d Pan-Caked over the faint scar on my face. And what if the men didn’t like what they saw? Would the costumes be taken from us? Would the opening be postponed still further? Did these men have sway over everything, even something that seemed as inconsequential to me as the floor show?
Eventually, I would come to understand that our show, or any show here, had just one purpose, a purpose of paramount importance to Lansky and company, which is why they bothered paying any attention to it or to us whatsoever, and that purpose was to send the exhilarated, titillated, intoxicated audience members out into the casino eager to part with their money. Because the casino was the heart of the heart of Las Vegas, the whole point of the whole city.
The baying patrons, flinging their money down, always amazed me. Didn’t they know the house always won and the house would always do whatever was necessary to make that so, even if what was necessary was to shut down an entire hotel?
Benny, sitting there between Lansky and friend, looked chastened, his normally ruddy, enthusiastic face a little empty, a little sandpapered, and he looked small, even though he was actually bigger and taller than Lansky, who lacked Benny’s, or for that matter, even my father’s, sartorial flair and dash. Mr. Lansky wore a shirt without a tie and a herringbone sports coat, his hair combed straight back. He was not handsome. He was ordinary looking, middle a little thick. He could have been a shopkeeper in Boyle Heights. Or a rabbi. The other man, whose name was Nate Stein, though I didn’t know this yet, wore a two-toned golf shirt and slacks. He was tall with a broad back and his hair was a black shock of a pompadour before there even was an Elvis Presley to sport one. Not that this man wanted such style. He just had a lot of thick hair. Lansky might look to me like the rabbi at my grandfather’s synagogue, but the way he held himself, the way both those men held themselves, the way they smoked, the way they looked about the club said they were not obedient servants of the Breed Street shul, but men who considered themselves as powerful as the God to whom its worshippers prayed.
My father wore a bouncy enthusiasm, always looking for the next opportunity to grab, sure it was coming around the corner. Lansky and Stein had already grabbed hold of opportunity and had twisted it in
to something miraculous. They were more powerful, I realized, than Benny Siegel, who held his own with Sedway, Greenbaum, and Rosen, but I hadn’t yet met anyone more powerful than Ben. I thought bigger than life meant powerful. But Lansky and this Stein lived smaller, they lived quietly, and there was nothing small or quiet about Ben, and for the first time, I realized that might be a liability. Quiet like my grandfather might be better, power hidden up the sleeve, not sprayed all over everybody in sight. I’d only ever seen grandstanding—in Ben, in Buzz, in my father, even in Louis B. Mayer with his big white semicircular desk up on a pedestal in his blindingly white office.
Under Lansky’s disapproving gaze, everything around me seemed wrong. First of all, our costumes looked cheap. In this glare, my short pink dress had a tacky sheen to it and my red shoes were silly and the pink feathers I held ridiculous. I’d had a better costume at last year’s Helldorado parade, a bluebird flapping my wings as I flitted about our float’s silver pâpier-maché birdcage. I wasn’t sure the men would even understand that we were supposed to be flamingos, picking our way across the stage after the Andrews Sisters exited and before the Xavier Cugat band played again. Yes, I was finally going to have a chance to put my expensive Daddy Mack lessons to some use, and I should have been thrilled, but our dour audience snuffed out any excitement. For me, anyway. The other girls, scooped up from dry-goods store counters and restaurant cash registers in a pinch to fill the stage, seemed oblivious to anything but the fun of this. We’re flamingos! At the Flamingo! Ha, ha, ha. And suddenly, I knew just exactly how my mother felt in her blackface with that spring boinging on her hat in the “Harry” number from Babes. Truly humiliated.
So I watched the Andrews Sisters sing “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time,” watched the way they tapped their way toward the proscenium and back, swinging their arms in unison, doing a few step ball changes, singing their little delightful dated songs, and I thought, This is boring. Even their costumes were boring, their hairstyles dated. Early forties. Wartime entertainment. Patrons could get the Andrews Sisters back in Los Angeles or watch them in the movie houses. And they weren’t even that pretty, one of them with a big nose. Any extra on the MGM lot was prettier than the prettiest of the Andrews Sisters. This wasn’t what people would drive to postwar Las Vegas to see. The stark desert and the luxury hotels would need more riveting entertainment, more beauty. Not this. And not a handful of chorines like me dressed in short pink dresses and red high heels doing some kicks and tap dancing between the real numbers.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 6
