Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [15]
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