After that day, there were rides in his roadster, rides on his shoulders, rides on the ponies he rented for his daughters’ birthday parties to which I was invited, a sort of third daughter when his girls were in town for summer vacations. My father always looked down at me, bemused, when I asked him each morning if we were going to see Mr. Siegel that day. Tell me, Dad, tell me! But until we moved to Vegas, I saw a lot more of the squat, broken-nosed Mr. Cohen than the glamorous Mr. Siegel. But much as I loved him, I didn’t go to Benny’s funeral, and I wasn’t the only one to abandon him at the end. Benny’s sister, his brother, his wife, and his two real daughters would be the only ones there at Groman Mortuary in Los Angeles to mourn him. Virginia, that other outlier, was in Europe, overdosing on sleeping pills.
Yes, Benny was dead, but we were still here, alive, walking the earth’s crust. I stumbled along in my heels, ruining them from the dirt and the pebbles and the creosote and thinking how the dresser at the Flamingo wasn’t going to be happy about my needing another pair when we got back.
18
Though the Desert Inn was called Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn, Mr. Clark was merely the affable casino-floor gadfly with a percentage. Anybody who knew anything knew that Mr. Clark was the front man for the men who were really in charge, Moe Dalitz and Nate Stein, who had moved here to Vegas a few months ago. That’s why I walked over to the Desert Inn just after New Year’s in 1950 to audition for Donn Arden. The Desert Inn was set to open in April, with the new Donn Arden Dancers. For the grand opening, the Ray Noble Orchestra would perform along with Edgar Bergen, and Abbott and Costello, and the dancers would open and close the show and have a number in the middle, as well, just for a change of pace from the other acts. Book covers and a bookmark, as Arden said, though I wasn’t sure he’d ever actually read a book or personally employed a bookmark. He’d spent his whole life in jazz shoes and nightclubs, his biggest vocabulary words being, “a one and a two, step ball change.”
Nate, who’d used Arden to choreograph shows for his nightclubs in Detroit, had tasked him with creating something glittery and slick and big-city to distinguish it from the other shows in Vegas. So Nate had thought we Flamingo girls were parochial, backwater! To be one of those glitzy Donn Arden dancers, with my big, childish handwriting I filled out an application that looked something like this:
Name
Age
Height
Weight
Hair Color
Eye Color
Complexion
Bust Measurement
Waist
Hips
Dress Size
Bathing Suit Size
Hat
Shoe
Present Occupation
Ambition
Why did you apply for this position?
Answer to the last: to try to save my father and myself from further degradation.
If my father and I were going to get anywhere in this town, we needed to get away from the Flamingo. Because as my father predicted, he had been punished for being one of Benny’s boys, not important enough to be murdered, just demoted to the credit cage. All the hard count workers at the Flamingo had been fired or shoveled into other jobs, under suspicion by association.
It was hard for me to see my father now in the brass cage, no matter how fancy the design of it, pushing stacks of chips across the counter, where he reminded me of his own favorite betting clerk, Carl, from Hollywood Park, rather than the desperately carefree gamblers Carl served and of which my father had once numbered. My father wore a uniform now, not a suit. He looked like a bellman or a valet, and I worried that’s where he would find himself next, pushed out of the casino entirely and onto the front drive, a cap on his head, pushing a luggage cart with one hand and holding out the other for his five-cent tip. And, of course, all this was my fault for encouraging him to stay.
And with my father’s downturn in fortune, so went my own. I could see how the children of the casino managers were granted all the privileges—they were the ones dancing on the Helldorado floats, they were the New Year’s babies in diapers when the hotels held their big champagne-drenched parties, they were the ones sitting at the tables at the Passover seder that gave the floor show the boot for a night at the Last Frontier, matzo balls replacing the bread rolls. When my father’s fortunes were rising, so were mine. But with his demotion and Benny’s death, I was only one step from ignominy myself. It was too easy now to get lost in the blur of young women and men filling all the spots in this bigger Vegas, in all the bars and lounges and stages. No one paid me any attention anymore.
So I knew we needed whatever grace and favor I could fashion for us to cancel out our having laid our money down on Ben Siegel.
The stage in the Painted Desert room where the auditions were being held was so small it could fit only twelve girls at one time across the breadth of it, not much different from the Flamingo’s tiny nightclub-sized stage. A little disappointing. I’m not sure what I imagined, but there would be no more space to dance here than down the Strip. But any extra feet for a stage took up space for a table. The tables brought in money. We girls cost money. This disadvantage Donn, like Buzz before him, would overcome with tiered sets—not that Buzz ever had a problem with stage size—every one of the MGM soundstages was, measured by any dimension, a massive space.
A row of men in rumpled shirts sat before this stage at a long table that had been carted in from somewhere, clipboards and papers and pens before them as if we girls were a list of sums to be added up, their suit jackets laid over the various and sundry round nightclub tables and chairs behind them. Not one of those men was good-looking, but they didn’t let that interfere with their ability to judge the beauty and presentability of us girls. Not at all.
After we handed in our applications, we sat down at the little cocktail tables and waited to be called. I gazed at the blue murals on the walls, vaguely suggestive of the mountains around us, the orange ceiling as hot-colored as a desert sunset, the orange and blue braided drapery dressing the stage. The room felt nice, plush, moneyed without the filigree of ostentation that marked Benny’s club. I approved.
Then I studied the other girls, my competition.
Some of them wore leotards and tights and some of them were wearing street clothes, summer shirts and cropped pants. I wanted to stand out, so I wore tights with my very high-heeled dance shoes, a half leotard, and a long-sleeved black turtleneck, my hair in a high ponytail, which was not at all the fashion of 1950, where the tightly rolled hair of the forties had turned to loose bouncing curls to the shoulders. I still wore my hair like a child. Maybe it was not the best thing to be, to be different, here among the ponies and stablemates, the regular girls. You needed to match up, not stand out.
Worse, Donn Arden liked tall, classically trained girls, and I was small. And I was trained by Daddy Mack.
I would have been a better match at the Sands, where the showman Jack Entratter preferred small girls with pretty faces. I was Entratter material. And Jack didn’t even care if his girls could dance. So it was a plus if you could. All he wanted was pretty. But I couldn’t wait another year or two for the Sands to open. By then my father would be the size of a midget, sweeping the kitchen floors with an oversized broom. So that’s why it had to be the Desert Inn for me, the DI and Nate Stein. Because if anyone in Las Vegas could help my father regain his footing, it was Nate. Already, even in 1950, nothing happened in Vegas without Nate’s say-so. I only hoped he remembered me.
So I fudged my height on the Donn Arden application and I wore heels, but I was hard pressed to look five feet six inches.
While group after group of girls were called up to the stage, I looked surreptitiously toward the back of the club, quietly turning my head each time the next group of ten girls climbed up the steps at the sides of the stage. I guess I was hoping Nate might be at the audition. But it was just the men at the table and Arden, who wore a suit jacket, a striped shirt, dance shoes, and a pinkie ring o
n his right hand that held his cigarette. Finally, my group was called, and even though I was watched every night on the stage at the Flamingo, I felt suddenly self-conscious walking up onto this stage, all those eyes assessing me, assessing all of us, calculating the balance of plusses and minuses. I did the Daddy Mack walk tall and when I found my place in the row of girls, I lifted my chin high.
Arden jumped up onto the stage to demonstrate once again the Arden walk, the way he wanted his showgirls to move across the stage, something he had already demonstrated ten times this afternoon. He had patience, I’ll grant him that. “Imagine you’re wearing a two-foot-high headdress,” he said, and he put his hands behind his back, elbows crooked, and stepped forward first with the ball of his foot and posed there before moving farther. I loved it. Pose, walk. Pose, walk. Just the way Buzz liked his girls to walk across the endless polished soundstage floors. And Arden even looked a little like Buzz, with dark hair and a mountainside nose, but with a more reasonable face, no beetle brows, no snarling, a gentler version of Buzz, or so I thought at the time, before I heard him bark at some poor girl, “Get off my stage, you fat cow.” These men.
“Okay, girls,” Arden clapped his hands, “let’s see what you’ve got.”
He jumped down off the stage and began to count. “One, two, three, go. Step. Pause. Step. Pause.”
There was no music. Just the sound of Arden’s voice, the rustling of paper from the long table, the soft slide and scrape of our high-heeled dance shoes. Think Buzz, I told myself. Think Dina Wells. This was my screen test, or the equivalent of. Would I capture the interest of this man who held such inordinate power, against which, like all aspirants, I was powerless, with nothing other than the weapons I marshaled of hope and desire. Pitiful weapons, enormous odds. I stepped and paused forward and back. I pivoted. Arden watched us all intently, studied me, I thought, in particular, conferred with the men at the table, turned back to us. “You,” and he pointed to a brunette with the neck and legs of a giraffe, “stay. The rest of you, thank you very much.”
It’s never easy, that rejection. It’s so personal. You. Your face, your body, I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. Get off my stage. Cow.
But there was a sop. As I descended the steps of the stage to the carpeted floor where the civilians dwelled, Arden said to me, “You’re lovely, dear, but I want them very tall.”
19
When Arden dismissed me that day, I went out into the hotel lobby, prepared to wait for hours, if necessary, until Nate came by, which he did, every day, the manager assured me, at least four times a day, as he went from the restaurant to the kitchen to the grounds to his office at the back of the casino to the telephone where he was paged at least three times while I sat there, “Paging Mr. Nate Stein, paging Nate Stein,” to the counting room to his own rooms because all the important men at every hotel had rooms somewhere in the hotel assigned to them alone, where guests were never booked. These men lived where they worked, obsessed with every detail of the hotel plant and with the hotel’s place in the larger universe ruled by their god. Mammon.
So I waited. I sat in one of the cushioned armchairs that faced the front desk with its wall of cubbyholes that would in a few months hold mail and keys and messages, my back to the big window and the row of leafy plants, all leaves, no flowers, growing in the long stone planter there, and I held a tissue in my hand, ready to hold that pose for hours if necessary, to cry when it was time. I wasn’t my mother’s daughter for nothing. I’d learned from her how to ambush a man to get what I wanted. And when, finally, I saw Nate—his glossy black hair shooting up high—stroll by the front desk, I stood. This was suddenly terrifying. I had radically underestimated the amount of daring it took to perform an ambush. It was a swan dive, without the certainty of water below. Suddenly, I was filled with admiration for my mother.
Nate turned his head. And having seen me, too late for me to run now, he squinted—I found out later he needed glasses but was too vain to wear them—and then he came over to where I stood, and as he neared, I saw he was smiling, his face soft. “Is this little Esme Wells crying in my hotel?” he asked, teasing me with the stage name I’d given him three years ago, which he had remembered, as he had remembered me. So this wasn’t going to be so hard, after all.
I laughed. I hadn’t actually managed yet to make myself cry, my big plan, even as I posed, tissue to my face. I tried to do so now. Cry, I told myself. Cry! But no tears came. I didn’t feel distressed. On the contrary, I felt exhilarated. Nate remembered me! But when I finally found the words to tell him I’d just auditioned for Donn Arden and that I hadn’t been chosen as one of his dancers, my voice sounded convincingly choked up, even to me, each word a reluctant child I had to poke between the shoulder blades to push out.
Nate smiled again and said, “That must have been a mistake.”
I folded up my tissue. No longer needed. The prop itself had done the work. Thank God.
“So tell me, Miss Wells,” he said, “why do you want to dance in my hotel? Aren’t you happy at the Flamingo?”
I couldn’t say what I couldn’t put on that application. So instead, I answered Nate with an honesty I hadn’t intended: “I’m eighteen now. I’m all grown up.”
He turned his head from me so I wouldn’t see him laugh, maybe at my youth or at my lack of strategic prevarication. And then he turned back.
“Yes,” he said. “So you are.”
We stood there in the hotel lobby looking at each other. Once again, he was dressed, this time in a dark suit with a tie, the formal costume of a businessman, an empire builder, and I was in the costume of a plaything. A partially dressed plaything. Each time we met, it seemed, too much of me was revealed, reducing me to a state of indignity that should have given him the upper hand. And yet, it didn’t feel that way, exactly. It felt as if I had the upper hand. Though I wasn’t exactly sure how that could be. Some instinct had me run my fingers through my long ponytail, pull it across my breasts. My mother’s special gesture, the touching of the hair. His lip ticked upwards slightly, tugged by some impulse. He bent his head toward me, pulled it back. I stroked at my ponytail, flipped it behind my shoulders. On a conscious level I did not yet recognize the extraordinary power a woman’s beauty lent her, but some part of me somewhere must have. I might be eighteen, but I was a young eighteen, despite everything. Because of Ben, because of my father, men had left me alone. But now Ben was gone, my father demoted, leaving me—well, leaving me easy prey.
The quiet hotel lobby, full of winter sunshine and green plants and the coordinated fabrics of furniture and drapery and carpet, waited with us to see what would happen next. The clock over the front desk tick-tick-ticked.
What happened next was that Nate took me by the hand, not the one with the pinkie ring, but the one with the wedding band, and this hand was as large and warm as I remembered it. And when he touched me, I let out an involuntary sigh. Which made him smile again. With this hand, he led me back into the club, interrupting the tail end of the endlessly ongoing audition to bring me to Arden’s side.
Arden turned, a little surprised, and mid-word stopped his spiel, the one with the Pose, walk. Pose, walk. It was as if L. B. Mayer had walked onto a set. The girls up on the stage stopped moving when Arden stopped speaking, abandoning their showgirl postures now to stare, unabashedly, at me, this important new girl, new to this hour, new to them, anyway, brought in on Nate’s arm. I wasn’t even sure if Donn remembered me from my audition an hour earlier. I might be new to him, too. All the men at the long table stood up to shake Nate’s hand, but still he held on to me, even as he turned to Donn.
“Donn, I think this girl is exactly what we’re looking for.”
Arden looked at me. Blinked.
“Of course,” Arden said, “I’ll make her the lead girl, Mr. Stein.”
Ha.
20
Los Angeles
1939
My mother and I were headed over to the Star Suites, t
he long white building abutting Washington Boulevard. On the other side of Washington, this building would have been an apartment house. On this side, though, the humble two-story structure was the Star Suites. My mother said to me guilelessly, “Let’s just go in for a minute. What do you say?” And without waiting for me to say anything, she entered the vestibule, hushed, to study the directories posted on the wall, black boards with white stick-on letters. You could see who was big by who was given an apartment in this modest building, the directory of the Women’s Apartments and Men’s Apartments constantly shifting, fashion or death prying names from the signs. Hence, the stick-on letters.
Women’s Apts.
First Floor
A Lana Turner
B Jeanette MacDonald
C
D Norma Shearer
Second Floor
E Greta Garbo
F Myrna Loy
G Louise Rainer
H Joan Crawford
Men’s Apts.
First Floor
A Clark Gable
B Nelson Eddy
C William Powell
D Donald Loomis
Second Floor
E Robert Montgomery
F Robert Taylor
G Spencer Tracy
H Mickey Rooney
While my mother whispered their names, I studied the letters lined up in each spot. By First Floor, Apartment A, behind the white letters my mother told me spelled out Lana Turner’s name, I could see where the letters had once spelled out something else, those letters just black shadows now, the sun having quietly faded the background all around the previous vowels and consonants, leaving just this echo.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 11
