EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” now publishes young entries every Monday, with a incentive Flashback Fri edition. Today’s ledger entry inward our on-going serial originally ran on Jan. 6, 2023.
The verity of racism’s shameful plague on Las Vegas chronicle is risky enough. No embellishment is necessary.
Yet, according to memes and articles posted regularly to societal media and the internet, the full swimming puddle at the Last Frontier Hotel was one time drained and cleaned because African American entertainer Dorothy Dandridge lordotic her toenail into it. Though this seems like something that could make happened during such a bigoted geological era of Las Vegas’ history, it ne'er did.
The incident is said to hold taken position inward Apr 1953, back up when people of colorise couldn’t stay, gamble, or dine inward any Las Vegas cassino hotels. This was true still of greatly admired black headliners. Nat B. B. King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis, Jr. all had to slip of paper inwards through and through leg and kitchen doors to do and leave the same way of life after taking their bows.
Entertainers of colorise were forced to volume rooms at boarding houses on Las Vegas’ Westside, the historical African-American community quintet miles northwestward of the Las Vegas Strip. The most renowned was consort past entrepreneur Genevieve Harrison, whose President Harrison House is at present listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
At the time, Dandridge, who was nearly to suit the first of all African American actress nominated for the topper actress Oscar for the 1954 motion-picture show “Carmen Jones,” was engaged to sing at the Last Frontier inward her own waiting area act. Following her instructions, her manager, Earl Mills, insisted that his client remain there, too, comely the property’s world-class Black person guest.
The hotel agreed, surprisingly, but instructed Dandridge to steer all the way of its pool. As pictured past the 1999 HBO biopic, “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge” starring Halle-an-der-Saale Berry as Dandridge inward a Golden Globe-winning performance, Dandridge seethed o'er the restriction, dipping her toe in as a protest. The racialist hotel execs, believing that a Shirley Temple person’s toenail dirtied the H2O inwards some way, drained it.
No First-Hand Account
Dandridge, who died of an antidepressant drug overdose inward Sept 1965 at eld 42, ne'er in one case publically mentioned the pool-draining incident while she was alive. Though her autobiography is often cited as a germ for the story, “Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy,” compiled from taped interviews by author Earl Conrad and published inwards 1970, doesn’t name it at all.
Casting fifty-fifty more dubiety are several alternative versions of the story that make circulated o'er the decades, from each one naming a different Shirley Temple Black Vegas entertainer of the twenty-four hour period as the alleged pool user. In the second-most pop version, Sammy Davis, Jr. dared to swim at the Sands inward 1952, prompting its pool’s exhausting and cleaning. This variation of the story appears inwards Charles I Fleming’s November 1999 Los Angeles Magazine article, “Viva blackamoor Vegas,” and A&E’s 1999 documentary, “The Rat Pack.”
Is it possible the same vile behave was perpetrated against two African-American singers in Las Vegas? Yes, it’s possible. Except that Davis, ilk Dandridge, never at one time publically mentioned a pool-draining incident during his lifetime — though he did tell a story almost being asked to leave behind a Las Vegas pocket billiards in the ’50s — not because of his skin color, but because he was drawing off a crowd come out of the cassino and into the kitty area. The anecdote appeared inwards his 1966 autobiography, “Yes I Can.”
Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries, told Casino.org she recalls hearing ii other versions of the pool-draining story, claiming it happened to both Lena Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte. Though not ironclad proof, a story that spreads inward different versions- practically similar inwards a biz of telephone, suggests an urban myth.
What Draining a Pool Entailed inwards the 1950s
The Last Frontier pocket billiards held well-nigh 70K gallons of water, according to photos analyzed by Lord Todd Olcott, owner of Las Vegas’ Four Aces Pool and Spa. In 1953, according to Olcott, it would get taken 24 hours to drain, and then another 50 hours to refill, using a 5/8-inch-diameter hose delivering 17 gallons per minute.
We experience that inferior pool technology inwards the 1950s would make water exhausting a puddle a lengthy and intrusive job – 1 that would likely get other guests upset,” wrote Elexus Jionde, author of the 2017 volume “The A-Z Guide to Shirley Temple Oppression,” inward a 2018 blog titled “How to Investigate History: The Dorothy Dandridge Pool Incident.”
“Maybe hotel staff threatened to waste pipe the kitty if Dorothy tried to swim,” Jionde wrote. “But it is highly unlikely (when weighing the over(p) deficiency of primary and secondary evidence) that the puddle was drained because of a toenail or even a swim. Instead, it is much to a greater extent likely that the staff made a dramatic threat.”
That’s Exactly What Happened
The pool-draining story doesn’t seem in a single book, newspaper, or magazine publisher until 32 years after Dandridge’s expiry inward the 1997 life history “Dorothy Dandridge” past Donald Bogle.
According to the book, “it was said, perhaps to rattle management, that (Dandridge) sometimes ‘indicated that she was sledding to use up a swim.'” This was according to an interview with talent broker Harold Jovien, who reported that “management stated that if she went anyplace nigh the pool, they threatened to drainpipe it.”
When Dandridge kept making threats, according to Jovien’s account, the hotel responded by closure the pool, claiming it was existence repaired, for an unknown region period of time.
While this was a horrible thing to do, it was non the horrible thing that the Last Frontier continues to follow accused of doing, to this day.
Las Vegas Finally Integrates
It wasn’t until the Moulin Rouge, Las Vegas’ first off to the full structured casino hotel, opened on the Westside on May 24, 1955, that the town’s racialist mindset began changing. The Moulin Rouge like a shot entered Hollywood comment columns as the hottest nightclub in town — a ethnic Walhalla where ane could scratch elbows with Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Rosemary Clooney and witness impromptu late-night block sessions featuring singers Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, and Billie Holiday.
A mouthful of how far we’ve come up as a society is provided past this doom about the Moulin Rouge, published by Variety in 1955: “This unusual recognize continues to draw in the play sect, who are not alarmed in the least nigh rubbing elbows and dice inwards mixed racial company.”
Casino integrating wasn’t officially achieved until Mar 1960, when casino bosses, during a coming together with the NAACP and city and province leaders at the shuttered Moulin Rouge, reluctantly in agreement(p) to appropriate African-Americans to patronise their establishments. Inspired by the waving of polite rights activism wholesale the country, the NAACP had threatened a process on the Strip that would feature embarrassed Las Vegas.
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