Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [16]
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