Tony Bennett RIP -- a historical footnote

In the NPR tribute to Bennett, his long time pianist, Ralph Sharon, mentioned he had first performed his signature tune in Hot Springs, Arkansas. That's true, but there's more to the story.

The club was the Vapors, the most popular and successful of the town's many illegal casinos.

 Sean Clancy writing for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

At one time, though gambling was illegal in Arkansas, the city of 28,000 had four major gambling clubs and 70 more casinos, bookmaker shops and establishments with some form of gambling, writes Hot Springs native David Hill in his new book, "The Vapors" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28).

"On a per capita basis, Hot Springs was perhaps the most sinful little city in the world," Hill, 42, writes.

In the world? Maybe that's a stretch, but Hill certainly makes a case that skirting the law was de rigueur in Hot Springs. This is the place, after all, where a stunned New York detective, in town picking up another suspect, ran into mobster Lucky Luciano, the most wanted man in America, strolling along Bathhouse Row with the Hot Springs chief of detectives. 

...

There's Owen "Owney" Madden, the suave, English-born gangster, killer and owner of the famed Cotton Club in New York who moved to Hot Springs in 1934, married the postmaster's daughter and became a sort of benevolent crime-world kingpin.

Dane Harris, the quiet, ambitious son of a Cherokee bootlegger, became Madden's protege, eventually rising to the role of Hot Springs' boss gambler and who in 1960 opened The Vapors, the dazzling nightclub and gambling operation that rivaled those in Las Vegas and that was bombed on Jan. 4, 1963.

And Hazel Hill, David Hill's paternal grandmother, who was a teenager when she came to Hot Springs from Ohio in 1935 with her father, a diabetic, down-on-his-luck horse trainer and was left there by him as part of a used-car deal. Hazel's life would become entwined with Madden and Harris as she grew up and the bright lights and allure of the gambling halls became too powerful to ignore.

And there are appearances throughout from Robert Kennedy, Al Capone, Mickey Rooney, Virginia Clinton, Tony Bennett and others, including prizefighters, B-list starlets and various and sundry Arkansas politicians, many of whom are on the take. And Hill also addresses how religion and race played a crucial part in the town's history of vice.

Back many years ago when I was teaching math and English in the Delta , my principal told me a story of living in Hot Springs many years before that. It's unverified, but I have no reason to doubt it. 

One night at one of the town's casinos (probably one smaller than the Vapors), the manager stepped out and said everyone would have to take a break. The staff and some of the male customers gathered up the gambling equipment and loaded it into a storeroom in the back which the manager then padlocked and covered with a screen. Drinks were passed around and about five minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was the sheriff's department conducting a raid. The sheriff and the deputies stepped in looked around, and declared there was obviously no gambling going on. They shook hands with the manager and left, at which point the manager unlocked the back room and the staff quickly set up the tables and everyone picked up where they had let off.

Orval Faubus's corruption was as much of an open secret as was the gambling in the Vapors, and over his time in office, millions of dollars (and, that's pre-inflation) made its way from Hot Springs to the governor's mansion. According to the definitive biography, Faubus's fear of losing his office and the cash that came with it gave the hard-line segregationist/white supremacist "Justice Jim" Johnson leverage to push the governor to take increasingly extreme positions with famously tragic results.

(The national press corps would eventually be willing to overlook "Justice Jim"s bigotry and general evil, even elevate him to elder statesman status thanks to his supplying rumor and innuendo on Bill Clinton during the Whitewater years, but that's a rant for another day.)