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By Root 852 0

He was taller than the other kids at school, who were mostly the children of craps dealers and waiters. As I had been, he was picked on. To make up for my long hours and his unhappiness, I spoiled him with toys, which were then stolen and sold. Increasingly, through my encounters with people such as Ice Pick Willie and Penny’s and Ida’s boyfriends, I began to realize how much crime and sleaze surrounded us. Vegas in those days was run by the Mob for the Mob; there was no getting away from it. They’d invested heavily in the town, and they had to spend the money they made there or be stung for taxes. That’s why people like Willie Alderman could be so generous with chips. But there was a downside to all those gangsters being around, vying against one another, and when Gus Greenbaum and his wife had their throats slit, I was truly shocked. Penny was understandably upset too, but to my surprise she almost immediately started dating someone else, a man who worked for Frank Sinatra. “You win some, you lose some,” she told me with a shrug. She definitely won; her new boyfriend took care of her until the day he died.

On a modeling assignment at the Flamingo Hotel (owned by Bugsy Siegel until he was murdered), I had to change in a small back room where dirty laundry was sorted. Pulling on an outfit, I glanced down at one of the wicker carts and shrieked. Lying in a heap was a sheet covered with blood—not just a drop but an entire body’s worth—shiny and fresh. “Oh, my God!” I cried, pointing. “What is that?” I thought the other girls would be as shocked as I was, but nobody flinched and everyone looked away.

A laundry maid fixed me with a frown and muttered, “Don’t you know better than to ask questions round here?”

Shivering, I thought, Uh-oh. My days in this town are numbered.

At a time when I needed reassurance at home, Joe was far from reassuring. One night he demanded my key to our joint safety deposit box. I’d been cleaned out by Bob, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again. Refusing to hand over the key, I hurried off to work. Three hours later, just as I was about to go on for the finale, Joe burst through the fire exit door backstage. He’d been drinking. I was in a black satin gown and rhinestone tiara and carrying a white ostrich-feather fan with a six-foot wingspan. “I need that key,” he said, grabbing my arm. I managed to wriggle free and stepped onto the stage with the other girls as our cue—the opening bars of “Humoresque”—struck up.

In a scene reminiscent of a Marx Brothers sketch, each time I went anywhere near the wings, Joe would reach out to grab me and then rush to the other side. I, meanwhile, was teetering around with my enormous fan trying to stay in the middle and look graceful but forgetting my routine and bumping into the rest of the company. Hissing at Joe from behind my fan, I told him I’d meet him outside the fire door during the next break. As promised, I slipped there between numbers, but we had a terrible fight. Before I knew it, he’d knocked my headdress off and was pulling at my costume. The heel of my stiletto caught in the grate and bent backward. The door had slammed shut behind us, so I banged on it with my fists until one of the stagehands heard me. I fell into the building, my lipstick smeared, my tiara tilted forward, and several feathers missing from my fan. The other girls had already done the first half of the number when I came crashing onto the stage all askew with a wobbly heel and a missing earring. As I found my rightful place in the lineup, Penny hissed, “Jesus, Barbara! What the hell happened to you?”

A few days later, Joe did find my key and sweet-talked a girl at the bank into letting him open our deposit box. He took the lot—money, deeds, and legal documents. Fortunately for me, within days he decided he wanted me back, so he returned everything and I put the box in my name only.

To complicate matters further, Bob Oliver began flying into Vegas again. He’d drop in to the Riviera to see me or turn up unannounced at the apartment to visit Bobby. He never brought money.