Black entertainers had to take road to ‘different Nevada’

It was nearly midnight, and the cab carrying Sammy Davis Jr. moved easily through Las Vegas streets that grew darker by the mile.

With his uncle Will Mastin and father Sammy Sr. next to him in the back seat, the entertainment dynamo stared out the window straight into the shadowed reality for black performers in the so-called "golden era" of Las Vegas. The Will Mastin Trio had just landed a big break at the El Rancho, and they were on their way to taking the town by storm. Trouble is, they couldn't sleep or eat where they packed the house.

The bosses of the "entertainment capital," forever motivated by profit over progress, wouldn't dream of letting even the greatest black singers stay on the property.

"We can't let you have rooms here," the El Rancho manager told the trio, as recounted in Davis' memoir, "Why Me?" "You'll have to find a place on the other side of town."

And so they caught the cab, left the glittering Strip of the mid-1950s and descended through the heart of the place they would help make famous.

"The hotel rooms we passed in downtown Las Vegas looked awful compared to El Rancho but even they were out of bounds to us," Davis wrote. "In Reno we could stay at the Mapes. But Vegas was a different Nevada for us. The cab continued to Westside. 'There's a woman name of Cartwright takes in you people.' It was Tobacco Road. A child, naked, was standing in front of a shack made of wooden crates and cardboard.'"

The Westside was so bad, even the white cabdriver shrugged.

"Guess ya can't say much for the housing here," he said. "Not much cause for your kind t'come to Vegas. Just a handful of porters and dishwashers they use over on the Strip."

They brought the house down at the El Rancho, but after the show, the free-flowing booze and rattle of lively dice were off limits to the Strip's rising stars.

"We rode to Mrs. Cartwright's in silence," he wrote. "As we passed under the viaduct, leaving the million-watt excitement of the Strip, we disappeared into a darkness broken only by the headlights of our cab. There were no streetlights, the shacks did not have electricity."

Instead, they found a little action at the Westside's old El Morocco club, where the games were rumored to be almost on the square. The more famous Moulin Rouge hadn't been built yet, but late night at the El Morocco found other black stars from the Strip such as Billy Eckstine rolling the bones and living large.

In a 1985 interview with historian R.T. King, former Last Frontier publicity man and host Morton Saiger would recall the indignities Davis and others suffered. If the show let out late, cabs wouldn't travel to the Westside, and Saiger played chauffeur.

"When the weather was nice, it was beautiful, but after a rain, my station wagon used to sink in there because there was no paved roads in the Westside," he recalled. "We had the entertainers such as the black people — Sammy Davis Jr. and his father and uncle, the Mastin Trio. ... So many of the black (entertainers) all worked here, but they could not stay in the hotel. It was unfortunate, but that was the law; they could not stay in this hotel or in any other. I remember Eddy Anderson, 'Rochester' from Jack Benny's fame. I was so hurt that I couldn't see straight, because this is the way I was treated in Poland, as a Jew, so I just ached."

Last week, the Clark County Commission renamed part of a local street in honor of Sammy Davis Jr. It reminded me of that cab ride he took back in the "golden era" of Las Vegas, where all that glittered could break a man's heart.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Contact him at 702 383-0295, or jsmith@reviewjournal.com. On Twitter: @jlnevadasmith.