April 22, 2009
The Palms Resort; Las Vegas, NV
The endless noise showering through the casinos in the early morning is something you have to get used to. The main casino floor at the Palms was already buzzing and it was still early. Five minutes ago the phone in the Kingpin Suite rang and I nearly fell out of the bed trying to answer it. My driver was downstairs, a stranger’s voice told me, sent over from Mandalay Bay as I requested the night before. I didn’t have any luggage, clothes, or personal items in the suite anyway, so it was just a matter of splashing cold water on my face and heading to the elevator.
The bowling alley-themed suite was pretty trashed, but that will happen when sixty people are given free food and booze. Not even six hours ago I was bowling naked in the same suite. It sounds a little crazy, but I was alone – my corporate guests long gone. I calculated the probability of ever again having the opportunity to bowl naked on a lane in my hotel room, which was so small that, mathematically speaking, it had to be done.
I pushed the main entrance door open and the first breath of fresh air I’d felt in hours washed over me. Opposite the valet stand I spied a black sedan with a female chauffeur leaning against the passenger door. She eyed me as I approached.
“Mr. Todd,” she announced while gesturing toward the open rear door. Someone at Mandalay Bay must have described her passenger as someone who looked like they were possibly up all night bowling naked.
“That’s me,” I answered quickly as I ducked into the back seat, closing the door behind me.
I watched her from the back seat as she made a few inaudible, but loud cackles toward the door guys in front of the Palms. They smiled and said a few things in return, which I also couldn’t make out. She moved pretty well for her age. She even gave the guys a quick shimmy as she spun around the front of the car. She flipped one of them off laughing as she reached the driver’s side door handle, yanked it, and fell into the front seat.
She was in her late sixties if I had to guess, which made it weird that I noticed her jacket was struggling to contain her breasts. She wore a black pantsuit typical to any chauffeur, and thick glasses that made me wonder about her qualifications as a safe driver.
“How do you feel this morning?” she asked, looking me up and down through the rear view mirror. “Long night?”
“As long as any other in Vegas,” I replied.
“I heard that,” she said while chuckling roughly. “Well, where are we headed?”
Her voice was deep and rough, which I assumed was brought on by years of smoking.
“I need to refresh myself a bit at Mandalay Bay, so that’s the first stop if that’s ok,” I said.
“Whatever you say,” she said as she started rolling forward. The tires hadn’t yet made a full turn before she had to stop to wait for an exiting car that was slowly cruising through the arrivals lobby, both passengers gazing in awe at the lights, sounds, and sights all around them. Tourists.
They were pretty startled when she laid on the horn to get them to speed up. It was so out of place, and woke me up as much as it did Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver in the rental car. They sped up and got out of her way.
“Vegas is so different these days,” she started venting as we pulled out onto Flamingo. “Too many damn tourists, too many fucking people.”
Whoa…all right then. She’s pushing seventy and dropping unsolicited “f-bombs”. I crouched a little lower in my seat and tried to pull my typical fake phone call trick to avoid having to speak to a stranger. I excel at that. Usually.
My being on the phone didn’t stop her from moving along with her conversational bombardment as she gunned the engine and we blazed down Flamingo. “I assume you’re staying at Mandalay Bay? They’re the ones that sent me over here anyway.” Before I could muster an answer, she went for the obvious question, “So you got lucky last night or what?” She was staring at me through the rearview mirror and I could feel her hoping I’d give her a story she could pass along to her next client.
I rewound a bit. “Yes, I’m staying at Mandalay Bay.” She started nodding with a big smile, her glasses magnifying her eyes in the mirror. “No, I didn’t get lucky last night. I hosted a party in one of the Fantasy Suites and just decided to sleep there instead of heading all the way back to my other room.”
She turned her attention back to the road and the bevy of cars we were passing.
“Well, that sucks for you, huh?” she spat with laughter that shook the inside of the sedan.
We pulled onto the ramp leading to I-15 and headed south. Off the highway to the right was Dean Martin Drive and to the left was Frank Sinatra Drive, the Interstate cutting through the two like the future through the past. My head drifted over against the window as I watched the cars below us easing along.
“Holy shit!” she yelled as she hit the breaks long enough to miss a car cutting her off. She laid on the horn as she sped back up. “Back in the day, that guy does that to the wrong person and you’d never see him again. The guys I hung around with anyway. I saw it plenty of times.” Internally I was rolling my eyes, but I didn’t know how to follow that statement up, so I just stayed silent.
“You know what it means to ‘86’ someone?” she asked, starting to calm down and settle back into her seat, her eyes darting between the rearview and the road.
“Get rid of them,” I answered.
“The Vegas Mob coined that phrase though. You know what it actually means?”
“I never really thought about it,” I answered, telling the truth.
“Eight miles out into the desert, six feet under the ground,” she said. “That was their code to get rid of someone. And that would have happened to that guy. No one would have thought a thing of it.”
My bones chilled with her casual mention of mob murder and body disposal as we whipped through the entrance of Mandalay Bay; the massive structure’s shadow consuming us. She exited with the brute of a man’s manner into the vehicle lobby and shouted a smoky hello to one of the valets as she made her way to my door. My brain was working in a low gear, but I couldn’t glass over how odd of a character she was, especially for someone with a limo driver job in Las Vegas, where she could easily be escorting someone of minor importance rather than a burnout who stayed up a little too late bowling naked.
She opened the door and I reaffirmed with her that I still needed to go to the Venetian for a day of recovery at Tao Beach. I would be maybe twenty minutes upstairs and then back down to continue that way. She popped me with an open hand across the shoulder assuring me she would be there when I came back down and I hurried along the driveway toward the entrance.
I overheard two of the valet staff in a muffled conversation about the driver that my clouded mind found so intriguing. They were looking in her direction and giggling boyishly about something I couldn’t quite hear. I was happy to confirm that I wasn’t the only person affected by her oddities.
“Are you all talking about my driver?” I asked, not thinking that they might feel invaded by my nosiness, not to mention embarrassed that a guest caught them in an unprofessional moment. I took a step toward them with a hand outreached to assure them that I was in no way coming down on them for bawdy behavior. I was just curious.
“Is Lisa your driver?” one of the valets asked, smirking a bit as the words dribbled reluctantly from his mouth.
“She is, just for the morning,” I explained, glancing over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t standing right behind me. “She’s a little crazy, no?”
“You know who she is, right?” the second valet leaned closer, excited with the prospect of telling me something I didn’t know. “Lisa was the first topless showgirl in Vegas. She’s a wild one.”
I glanced over my shoulder and confirmed that Lisa was on the phone now, leaning against the hood of the car. “You’re kidding me,” I said, gesturing for them to follow me inside. Even with this new information I had to keep moving toward my room – every minute here was a minute I wasn’t relaxing at Tao Beach.
As we cleared the entrance doors and the mechanical dance of the slot machines rang around us, the shorter of the two valets pointed over to a gift shop and asked me to follow him. Just inside the door was a carousel of Vegas-themed books. He spun it half a turn before reaching in to pluck out one titled, “When The Mob Ran Vegas”. He flipped it over to the reveal the back cover and handed it to me.
An involuntary smile spread across my face.
Holy shit. That’s her.
The picture was probably taken fifty years ago, but the girl on stage with a full floral headdress flanked by less opulently dressed dancers was unmistakably her. And she was the focus. The star.
“She’s mentioned in here a few times actually,” the shorter one went on, obviously the more local of the two valets now escorting me around a little Vegas history. “She was pretty connected to these guys evidently, the Mafia. As well as the Rat Pack I think. Can you believe it? Now she drives a limousine.”
It all made a lot more sense to me now. And then it hit me that all the things she had said on the way over, all the things I had dismissed as hyperbole, trying to get a rise out of me, were all probably true. How much had she actually witnessed? I was beyond intrigued.
Being chauffeured by the city’s first topless dancer didn’t alter my state of cleanliness. I needed a shower. I hustled to the elevator bank, punched the button for my floor, and was in and out of the 180 Suite in a matter of minutes – fresh and clean.
When she saw me exit the hotel lobby heading her direction she took a long drag from her cigarette, smoke wafting around her face, and crushed it into the pavement of the porte-cochere.
She opened the carriage door and we were off once again.
“So the Venetian?”
“Yeah, there’s a pool cabana there calling my name,” I said, trying not to let on that I was searching for a cool way to ask her a hundred questions.
“Those new club pools are something else,” she said. “Really expensive, right?”
“They are, but I don’t have that kind of money. I know the girl that works the door at TAO Beach and she let’s me pass out for a few hours in one of the cabanas that isn’t yet reserved for someone.”
“That’s a good deal. What kind of favors are you giving her?” she said with an impish smile, glancing at me through the rearview mirror.
“Nothing like that,” I said, “she’s a fan of my college Alma Mater and I usually bring her a hat or a shirt whenever I’m in town. It’s an easy price to pay for the comfort of one of those lush cabanas.”
“You’re not kidding! Those pools have been popping up all over Vegas, like a spreading disease. I’ve heard those cabanas are nice, I wouldn’t be able to listen to that rapping DJ shit they play all the time though.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“I like all kinds of music really, that shit just doesn’t fit the Vegas I know. It used to be so much more about the live entertainment. Small lounge acts that would sing and entertain. You could be sitting right next to some of the biggest people in Hollywood, like they were your friends. When you left those shows, you really felt like you saw something.”
“I can handle the DJs in some situations, but I agree with you,” I said. “There’s nothing like seeing a live show by someone with real talent. Especially in a small, intimate room.”
Should I just ask her if she slept with Sinatra? If she ever held Momo Giancana’s hat while he “86’d” someone?
“So how long have you been chauffeuring?” I asked, wimping out on the questions I really wanted the answers to.
“About five years I guess,” she answered. “Back in the day I was a dancer.”
“Really?” I played dumb, but I’m not sure why. She obviously had no trouble sharing. “What was that like?”
“It was like living a rock star life, man. The 50s and 60s were crazy in Vegas. That’s when this town was great. I was in Folies Bergere at the Tropicana for years. I was actually the first girl to show my tits in Vegas if you can believe that.”
“How’s that?” I laughed a little to loosen her up. “Was that in the Folies show?”
“No, Folies came along a few years later. Actually, Lido di Paris was first, then Folies. But this gig was in 57’ at the Riviera. It was a Harry Belafonte show and they wanted a girl to stand still under this waterfall with only certain parts covered, you know. It was illegal see, to dance naked, so I couldn’t dance. I had to be like part of the background or the set. But then I would shift and you could see my tits and the crowd went fucking wild. That was me. They liked me for that because I had’em, and people wanted to see’em. Simple as that. But that was the breakthrough. That’s how it went down.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, not having to fake interest. “I bet you have a treasure trove of unbelievable stories.” Was that too obvious?
“You name it, honey, I’ve done it,” she continued. “It was a whole different town back then. What are you wanting to know?”
Here we go.
“Are you going to tell me you had a thing with Sinatra?”
She cackled the second I got it out.
“Everybody always wants to know about Sinatra. If you were a showgirl in Vegas and didn’t have a thing with one of the Rat Pack guys, you were at the wrong party, honey.”
“That’s the general consensus,” I said, trying to figure out if she really answered my question.
“Cary Grant wanted to put a baby in me,” she said as we turned onto Koval and started making our way north behind the MGM Grand and away from the tourist traffic of Las Vegas Boulevard. “He was going to set me up for life if I agreed, but I had a feeling he was gay. I couldn’t deal with all that.”
“Wait. That was a lot of information,” I said.
The Venetian was closer with each second passing, and the impending end of my trip weighed on my mind.
“You were dating Cary Grant and he wanted to have a baby?”
“We were dating, yes, and he wanted a baby, but he wanted the baby more than he wanted me. He was gay, there’s no question in my mind.”
“What about the mob? Any crazy shit you can tell me about without getting us whacked before we get to the Venetian?”
She laughed again while dodging to the left of a slow moving car and accelerating through the intersection at Flamingo. Way too fast.
“Nobody’s gonna kill us today, honey,” she said. “I used to run cocaine and girls for the mob in the 70s once I was done dancing. They ran the town and you didn’t fuck with them, that’s for sure. In the 70s, those guys were out of control and it was a bad time for a lot of people. The old mob guys back in the 50s and 60s were much more discreet. They were classy even. They were around the clubs, and you knew who they were, but they were polite. Fun.”
I’d spent years infatuated with mafia stories, not just in Vegas but everywhere. As we pulled into the motor lobby entrance of the Venetian she left me with one final statement that would haunt me for years after, only because my time was up and I knew there was so much more to hear.
“My dad was poker buddies with Bugsy Siegel in L.A before they blew him away for fucking up the Flamingo Hotel. Bugsy started Vegas you know. The Vegas everyone knows today anyway.”
“Yeah, I know the story.”
