A Conversation with the Mann (44 page)

The line formed behind the high rollers who got their way for dropping heavy at the tables, and even they were to the rear
of the “special guests,” showbiz buddies and Mafia cronies who came in daily chartered plane-style. At a mere $5.95 The Summit
was the most priceless ticket in town. No one wanted to miss it.

I saw it all.

For the three weeks that The Summit was in session, I was the opening act, and for all my time in lousy little clubs, it was
my toughest gig in years. I wasn't so much a comic as I was a delaying tactic. I would go up onstage and try to tell jokes
while stragglers filed into the Copa Room, while the management hunted down one more chair to seat one more guest. I would
kill time any way I could until the boys, who spent the day working—if you call doing one take of every scene work—and the
evening napping, had roused themselves enough to grace the fans with their presence.

And eventually they would. Sort of. The shows were poor. Qualitywise, they wouldn't much hold up to a high school amateur
night. Mostly they consisted of Frank and his crew—tired, hung over—mixing drinks from a cocktail cart, swapping jokes that
only they seemed to get, talking about broads, dames, and dolls, and trampling to death any attempt by one of the others to
actually do a serious number in its entirety … And the audience loved it. The stars, the thugs, the chosen few, were happy
to pay their money to sit and swill and watch these icons get high on a mix of booze, fame, and the love of women. Who wouldn't
want to drink up some of that? In a changing world, as the blitzkrieg of civil rights and Vietnam and the youth movement began
raining their chaos across the American landscape, the sight of middle-aged men having frat-boy fun and saluting the martini
and lounge music values that middle-brow USAville held dear was somehow reassuring. The Summit was counter-counterculture.
It was the last party, the nightcap of a generation, and a good time to be had by all.

By almost all.

Sammy Davis, Jr. had come to Vegas to work. The man loved a good time as much as anyone—more than most—but while he was onstage
he was strictly Mr. Entertainment. The horsing around was all right, but he actually wanted to perform, to sing or dance or
do some impressions. He wanted to do something—anything—without having at least one of the others toss a pratfall into the
middle of it. But all that clowning around was just injury to insult. The real nastiness were the jokes. The “smile so we
can see you, Sammy” jokes. The “what's the matter, you got watermelon in your mouth?” jokes. And the big joke, the showstopper—Dino
picking up Sammy, announcing: “I'd like to thank the N-double-A-C-P for this award.” Oh, the howls that followed that one.
Night after night, the same bits that were supposed to be funny because the guys who were telling them were “progressive.”
And night after night, upon hearing the punch lines, Sammy would grin and laugh and stomp his feet like he was just about
to bust from the rib-splitting hilarity of a racial slur well told.

Onstage.

But while one of the other cats was trying, not hard but trying, to get through a solo, Sammy would go backstage and pour
himself into a lonely folding chair. Out of the spotlight, away from the people, he would hunch and droop, all the energy
and life that he carried for his audience wrung from his body. I would watch him as he sat, just sat, looking so very tired—beat
down with a weariness that took a guy a lifetime to stockpile. A lifetime of trying to please and appease, of living in the
shadow of a legend while day by day by year climbing a mountain and reaching the top, only to find out no matter how much
they
pay to see you, no matter how hard
they
clap for you,
they
are still going to want to know, in truth and in jest: “If I hug you, is that going to rub off on me?”

He was such a star. He had all that a person could want. What could it matter to him what
they
thought? But it did matter. To him it mattered more than any other thing in the world—the money or the fame or the lust of
women of every color.

Looking at Sammy, I promised myself when I got to where he was I would stop trying to make people love me. I'd stop caring
if they did.

And then there would come a cue and Sammy would bolt up, reinvigorated by an unquenchable desire to be before a crowd, and
burst back onstage. And through the curtain I could hear a thunder of applause for any of the one thousand ways that only
he knew how to entertain.

A
FTER THE SHOWS
the party went private, in one of the Sands suites that was strictly off-limits to anyone who wasn't FOF, or at least sixty
percent legs and forty percent chest. It was a room filled with smoke and vacant smiles. It's where stars mingled with mobsters
and politicians, and an election was bought and paid for in cash. One million, literally, in the bag. It's where the entertaining
wasn't done by the entertainers but by starlets, and dolls who wanted to be starlets, and chorus girls who just wanted to
get noticed and by plain old prostitutes lubed with liquor and ready for a little hey-hey.

I'd be lying if I said on occasions I wasn't part of all that. I was. But most times I wasn't. Not that I wasn't up for some
ring-a-ding-ding, but I already had a girl. And I had a girl on the side. I had Liliah.

When I first called and invited her out to The Summit, she was an incalculable as ever. Maybe she'd come. Maybe she wouldn't.
If she felt like it, she might. Or even if she didn't, perhaps she would.

I hated myself on the first day of the show when all I did was vex over her arrival or non-arrival, when I wouldn't leave
the room for fear of missing the call from the lobby from her that never came. I hated myself for thinking that me and her
could have anything more than a once-only fling. I despised myself for even letting Liliah get her hands in my head when I
was truthfully so very much in love with Tammi.

Then, from up onstage, in the middle of wrestling a herd of people into an audience, I caught sight of her sitting front row
and everything else I'd been feeling and thinking got shoved aside by desire.

Between pictures, Liliah had some free time and, despite her change-a-minute nature, decided on spending it with me. Nearly
all of it. In that first week of shows she was front and center every night and the first face I saw every morning. In between,
Liliah introduced me to the tables and got no trouble about it from the roughnecks who previously wanted to strong-arm me
toward the nearest door. During the run of The Summit the color lines in Vegas got scratched out, even if just temporarily.
There was too much dark-skinned talent in town for the show—Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte—for the management
to be picky about who was spreading money around the pit. And with Frank on the premises, no one wanted to chance getting
caught tossing around any Jim Crow jazz. I strolled the casino floor openly and freely, as I had always wanted, and better
than I had ever dreamed. I strolled the casino floor with Liliah Davi wrapped around my arm.

The first thing I learned, the first thing she taught me, was the last and only game I had ever played: roulette.

“The simplest of games,” Liliah said as I stared at the thirty-six numbers, the zero, and double zero, bordered with the outside
bets. “
Zhust
play the action numbers.”

“What are those?”

“Ten through fifteen, and thirty-three. They are spread evenly along the wheel.”

“What difference does that make? I mean, the odds are still the same, right?”

The only answer my question got was Lilian discarding a couple of hundred bucks onto the table. “Black,” she said, and the
dealer swapped the bills for two hundred-dollar chips. Those got placed, by Liliah, on twenty-three, red.

“Black inside! ” the dealer called.

“What about the action numbers?” I asked.

Liliah held up a cigarette before her. “Light me.”

With her lighter, which I still had, I did as asked.

The dealer spun the ball.

A tap on my shoulder. I turned. Jack Entratter.

“Jackie!” His arm was around me long-lost-buddy-style. “How you been, kid?”

“Good. I've been real—”

The ball dropped.

The dealer called: “Seventeen, black.”

Chips got scooped in. Some bets got paid out.

Liliah let another couple of hundred float down to the table.

Looking at me, Jack tilted his head a little toward her.

“Liliah, I'd like you to meet Jack Entratter. He runs the place.”

Liliah smiled, nodded. “Hallo.” Her attention got returned to her betting.

“Black inside!”

“Well, listen, Jackie, if there's anything you need, anything at all, you just let me know,” Jack said to me but for Liliah's
benefit. “I'll take care of it personally.”

If Liliah heard him, it didn't show.

“You, uh, you enjoy yourself.” Feelings hurt, Jack slipped back into the crowd of people who wandered the floor, clutching
money, just looking for a good spot to lose it.

I looked back to the table as the ball dropped.

“Double zero, green.”

Chips got scooped in. Some bets got paid out.

“In Europe, in the casinos, they have only one zero on the wheel,” Liliah sighed. “That's all right, having one zero. Zero
is a number. Everything begins at zero, yes? Not positive or negative, good or bad. It is
zhust
there.

“But Las Vegas is different,
Zhaqué.
Las Vegas has double zero. Why is that? Double zero is not a number. What is two times nothing? More nothing. You cannot
have more nothing. To be zero is as nothing as something can be.”

Liliah was in rare form, as far beyond my cognizability as ever.

Rushing to Lady Las Vegas's defense, I gave the only response I could come up with on the quick. “Double zero, that's just
… that's the edge. You know, the house has got to have an edge. One more chance they've got to win and you've got to lose.”

Liliah took herself a look around the casino, all the people scurrying from table to table, the hard count being dropped and
racked in and on occasion paid out just to be dropped and raked in again.

She said: “It is the hole that this city was built upon.”

I nodded to that. “I guess.”

“And it is what fills it, a tribe of double nothings. What other kind of person would make this hell a home but twice the
fool one would find anywhere else?”

She held up a fresh cigarette.

I lit it.

Well, let me tell you: When a woman talked the way Liliah did, all deep and philosophical, whether she's making sense or not,
there's something in her lingo that makes you just want to sex her.

From somewhere in the casino came the call: “Money plays!”

I
WAS IN MY ROOM
, on the phone. On the other end, a good chunk of the country away, was Tammi.

“The guys are crazy,” I was telling her. “Stand up onstage, drinking, telling jokes to themselves. They don't do a thing,
and it's still a hell of a show. You should see it.”

“I'd like to.”

“Well … it's a spectacle, I mean. I don't think you'd much enjoy it.”

“The show's not what I'd be coming out there to see.”

“I know. I know, but, you know, now's not a real good time. Frank, he's like a … He likes to do a lot of boys' stuff, just
the guys. Forty-something, and the cat's like a kid. And he … when he says do something, you've got to be there.”

“So when do I get to see you?”

The phone was getting warm in my hand. “I've got another week here in Vegas, then … I was thinking of going back to L.A. for
a little bit.”

“You're starting to like L.A.”

“… I'm making some connections. But it's not like I have anything I can't skip,” I offered with just a touch of reluctance.

“No. You should be there. I can meet you in New York after that.”

“It's a date, baby.”

Tammi gave a sigh. “I miss you, Jackie. I miss you, and I love you.”

“I love you more.”

We both hung up.

“That was very good of you,” Liliah said.

I turned to her, her body naked under the sheets of the bed. “That was good of me? Lying to my girl was—”

“You did that for her. You did that so she would not hurt, told her that you miss her, you love her.”

“It's the truth.”

“Then you weren't lying. Even better.”

“Better still if I wasn't cheating on her.”

“It would be, yes, but it would be impossible.”

Liliah stretched her arms above her, revealing her brown areolas and thumb-sized nipples. No, there was no dismissing those.

“So,” she said in summation, “the second best thing to do is to lie. It's all right. It is her you love. Not me.”

“That doesn't mean I—”

“It's good of you to worry about my feelings, but you said that you love her.”

“… I do. I'm going to marry her. I already have the ring.”

“Then why have you not given it to her?”

“Because it wouldn't be fair. You should hear her sing. Her voice is like … I couldn't do that, you know. I couldn't take
her away from people.”