Rolling the Dice

 

The Moulin Rouge is one of the most fascinating tales of the golden years of Vegas.

In the 1950s, black performers were more than welcome to sing and play on the stages of the various casino hotels. However, kowtowing to Southern high rollers, the casinos maintained a strict segregationist policy. Thus, 'colored' singers and musicians could not stay at the hotels, play in the casinos, eat in the restaurants, or even walk through the front door...they had to come and go through the service entrance in the back.

(When Ella Fitzgerald finally managed to secure a contract that allowed her to swim in the hotel pool, if nothing else, she had to do so alone, and when she was done, the pool was drained and refilled with new water for the white guests!)

This still being the era of 'separate but equal' (hah!), some African-American financiers decided to create a little equality for themselves, and they bankrolled the Moulin Rouge, a casino that catered specifically...but not exclusively...to black patrons.

It was an immediate success, for although this was still the era of Jim Crow, a black middle class was nevertheless emerging in America, with disposable income they were looking to dispose of, and the Moulin Rouge fit that bill perfectly.

At first the other casinos were thrilled with its success, as it took the pressure off of them from the likes of the NAACP to desegregate their own facilities. And it wasn't as if they were losing any money because of it...all of those black gamblers weren't even allowed in their own casinos.

But then their attitude changed.

One of the reasons why the hotels booked such high powered performers for their showrooms was because guests knew that after the shows, the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Louis Prima would hit the casino floors themselves and mingle to all hours of the early morning. That helped ensure the casinos kept a large crowd at the tables and slots from midnight to dawn.

But with the Moulin Rouge boasting the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington on their stage, Sinatra and the others would decamp from their own hotels immediately after their own performances and head over there, usually to jump on stage for impromptu jam sessions. Word quickly got out, and white gamblers flocked to the Moulin Rouge to catch the action, leaving the casinos of the other hotels quiet and, ominously, not earning money.

This was not acceptable, and it would be stopped.

The mob bosses who ran the casinos also controlled such industry franchises as food and liquor suppliers. Suddenly the Moulin Rouge found itself unable to get either. And then city inspectors began showing up and hitting them with fines for previously non-existent code violations. And no one was willing to risk the LVFD not showing up if a fire were to mysteriously break out at the casino.

Seeing the writing on the wall, the Moulin Rouge shut down just a few months after opening, and with it went Vegas's first and only attempt at a black casino.

POSTSCRIPT: Having tasted some of the Vegas high life, African-Americans weren't about to let it slip away again, and they had some powerful white allies. If they couldn't have their own pie, they'd demand a slice from the others. Sammy Davis, Jr. told the casinos that if he was good enough to sing there, then he was good enough to stay there, eat there, and gamble there, too. Sinatra insisted that from then on, he would only perform for de-segregated audiences. Tony Bennett was told by one blatantly racist hotel exec that he "hoped" Bennett wouldn't hire any black musicians when he came to perform; Bennett reacted to this by promptly hiring Count Basie and his Orchestra to back him up. "That motherf*cker doesn't want to see one black face on stage?" Bennett said. "Well, now he's going to have to look at twenty of them!"

Most of the guys running the casinos were from the East, and they personally didn't have any real problem with letting blacks stay and play, but they understood the power of appearances, so they contrived to make it look as if they had no choice but to desegregate. "It would be really helpful if you could arrange some protest marches outside of the hotels," one mobster told Sammy Davis, Jr. He did just that, and the hotels promptly 'caved in', allowing people of color to come and leave their money in the casinos just as freely as any white person could. When bigots complained, the wise guys just shrugged their shoulders and said, "Whaddya gonna do? Our hands were tied."

In a sense, the Moulin Rouge was the spark that helped light the fire. It deserves to be remembered and honored.