“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”—Hunter S. Thompson
In 1955, Las Vegas is at the crossroads.
The Autumnal Swarm is inserting itself into world politics. It is ensuring that the tools it needs will be available in the seventies to destroy the world. From the ashes of alcohol prohibition, a new prohibition is born to ensure that acolytes such as Charles Manson will be able to infiltrate to levels of power they otherwise would have no hope of reaching.
Racial tension was tightened. The cold war was heightened. The Korean war continued and the seeds were being planted for world war in Vietnam.
This is meant to be a short adventure: a running fight through the Moulin Rouge and then an attempt to get back into the Paradice Island Lounge.
The Moulin Rouge
“Somebody was always across the railroad tracks.”
The Moulin Rouge is one of the most famous hotels of the fifties. It is on the cover of Life magazine. It is a first-class hotel with first-class food, first-class entertainment, and state-of-the-art equipment. It advertises itself as “the first truly cosmopolitan hotel in this famous city”. Its doctrine of racial integration among its employees, clientele, and entertainment threatens the Autumnal Swarm’s plans for Vegas. For the first time in Vegas, whites and blacks can place their bets together.
It will exist for less than six months. Whether the Moulin Rouge’s creation or closing will have any effect on the future of this world is in the hands of the player characters.
The Moulin Rouge is at the edge of Westside, the black side of Vegas. Vegas was fully segregated, and the Westside contained the black casinos, businesses, and people. Black entertainers weren’t allowed to stay in the Strip hotels they played in; they weren’t allowed to roam the Strip casinos when their shows closed. They had to retreat to the Westside.
When the Moulin Rouge opened at 900 West Bonanza Road on Tuesday, May 24, 1955, it provided black entertainers with a place to stay and a place to go in the early hours after shows. White entertainers followed. The show-girls came, and the gamblers followed.
If you want to mingle with the cool crowd in 1955, the Moulin Rouge is the place to be. William Bailey, one of the producers at the Moulin Rouge, described it this way:
The African-American stars that worked on the Strip could not entertain and work with their white contemporaries in those establishments, so everybody came to the Moulin Rouge to do it. And after the working hours of the last show on the Strip, everyone gathered at the Moulin Rouge to have a ball. And it went on till seven, eight, nine o’clock in the morning. It was just something out of a storybook. You would have to have been there to really be able to properly articulate the kind of atmosphere, the kind of electricity that was generated at this hotel.
I stumble over myself verbally when I start thinking about the wonderful times that we used to have and the thrill I used to get when I’d walk out on the stage for a third show. They started at, I think, two o’clock in the morning. It would be nothing to walk out and see Gregory Peck, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra. You name it and they were there. And it was so exciting to be able to entertain people at this level that had come over to the Westside to enjoy themselves and have a good time, let their hair down and just be people.
It was a glorious six months.
The Moulin Rouge appeared to be a great success. It attracted standing-room only crowds, opening a third show where Strip hotels had only two. But on Wednesday, October 19, 1955, employees came to work to discover the doors chained shut. Within a week, one of the partners moved to the mob-run Desert Inn casino. In the bankruptcy proceedings, it was alleged that the other hotels pressured financiers into bringing short-term notes due when they otherwise would have let the notes ride. And other money was simply disappearing. “Somebody was milking the pig.”
There was odd trouble in the Moulin Rouge from the start. On April 7, 1955, while still under construction, one wing was destroyed, supposedly when a construction worker’s torch started a fire which went out of control and took out the entire wing. Another fire is destined to destroy the abandoned Moulin Rouge in 2003.
The Moulin Rouge: Employees
Almost everyone who works at the Moulin Rouge is black. The security staff is interracial. The chorus line is black. The dealers are white: there were no experienced black dealers in Vegas. But this all made the casino floor that much more exotic. Most are dressed in some sort of costume. The doormen, waiters, dealers, and guards, for example, dress in the “gaudy colors” of the French Foreign Legion. The greeter replacing Joe Louis is dressed in a Foreign Legion uniform. Louis himself wears an ordinary suit when he greets visitors.
The Watusi Dancers
The floor show dance is billed as the Tropi Can Can; one of the dances they do is “the Watusi” in which the dancers come out “in feather tails to writhe through a violent sequence of jumps and contortions. At the climax of the dance a medicine man [comes] bounding out brandishing two live squawking chickens.”
Their signature number, of course, is the Can-Can.
There are 23 floor show dancers. In real life, some of the dancers’ names were Dee Dee Jasmine, Anna Bailey, Oberia Coleman, and Mary Louise Williams. The captain of the chorus line is Carrie Adams Pollard. The floor show is produced by Clarence Robinson, from New York, who also directed shows at the Paris Moulin Rouge.
The Moulin Rouge: Music
Backing up the special guests who stream into the Moulin Rouge is Benny Parson and his band, with Bob Bailey as master of ceremonies and stage manager Wally Ogle.
A feast of friends
Everyone shows up at the Moulin Rouge, so whoever you want your characters to meet or see can be here: Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, Harry Belafonte, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tallulah Bankhead. Even a twelve-year-old Maurice and nine-year-old Gregory Hines will be there as one of the opening acts along with the Platters.
The partners
There are several partners behind the scenes, but the most visible partners in the day-to-day operation of this fictional Moulin Rouge are Joe Louis, Hadrian “Haddy” Reuben, and Phillippe “Biz the Boss” Bismeaux.
Haddy Reuben is a Harlem restaurateur who wants to expand his empire, and sees the integrated clientele of the Moulin Rouge as the future of entertainment. Reuben is a tough man, who started as a chef before becoming a restaurant owner and nightclub mogul. He’s basically honest, but is not above getting into a brawl when his future is at stake or he knows he’s right. Growing up black in the thirties, however, he also recognizes the need for discretion and the usefulness of appearing to back down in order to regroup and come back stronger. Reuben and Louis have hit it off very well and have become good friends.
Bismeaux has a checkered past, having come out of construction in New Orleans. If that sounds like he’s got mafia connections, there’s a reason: he does. He doesn’t know about the mafia’s connection with the Autumnal Swarm (and wouldn’t believe it even if he found out) but he does assist them in little ways. He creates bad shares of ownership in the Moulin Rouge, and sells them according to the mob’s instructions. He’ll move to the Desert Inn after the Moulin Rouge fails. Bismeaux is a great talker and con artist, the kind of man who can happily shake your hand and slip off your watch in the process.
A feast of friends: Joe Louis
The Brown Bomber was 41 in 1955. He had retired from boxing, but by this time he had run into trouble with the IRS and had returned to boxing despite being out of shape. Harry Reuben offered him part ownership in the Moulin Rouge in return for his being a greeter at the hotel.
After the Moulin Rouge closes, and continually hounded by the IRS, Louis will go on to become a professional wrestler. He will remain friends, however, with Frank Sinatra.
That’s in our “real” world. During this period in 1955 in the game, Louis is aware that there are problems in the Moulin Rouge financial structure, although he doesn’t know exactly what they are. He knows that money is disappearing, and he knows that there’s a mafia connection with Bismeaux (although he’s also pragmatic enough to realize that just about every successful casino has some sort of mafia connection). He’s making contact with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. to see if they would like to take part ownership and use their influence to clean the place up.
If the player characters block the swarm murder run and save Louis, Sinatra, and Davis from the swarm, the trio will form a far more important organization. Their “Summit” will try, and often fail, to oppose the swarm in this world. And hopefully they’ll learn enough from the player characters for Deanna to know where to be in 1969.
Frank Sinatra
“The highest aspiration of man should be individual freedom and the development of the individual. Weigh everything that is proposed to you, everything in the line of government and law and economic theory, on this one scale: that it should at all times not offer you sanctuary or security in exchange for your right to fly as high and as far as your own strength and ability will take you. Plenty of room for a floor underneath so that no one should live in degradation, but reserve the right for yourself to be free.”
The Summit grew from the ruins of the Moulin Rouge. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, assuming things go well in this adventure, will form a counterforce to the True Family and the Autumnal Swarm. They will work behind the scenes to end racism as well as alleviate the nuclear tensions of the cold war.
They will be more successful at the former than the latter. They will first support John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy will sever ties with the Summit once he takes office. He will escalate the cold war in South America and in Asia. He will also encourage Congressional harassment of Sinatra.
The Summit will then support Richard Nixon, who will campaign to end the Vietnam war. Nixon will maintain relations but will also extend the war into Cambodia at the same time as he tries to defuse tension between the United States, Russia, and China. Nixon eventually will end the Vietnam war in a manner that ensures at least another decade of cold war tension.
After Vietnam, the Summit’s behind-the-scenes power will wane along with their entertainment draw, and they will retire from fighting the Autumnal Swarm. In the end, however, Summit support in the sixties for Ronald Reagan in California will have paved the way to his successful White House bid in 1980 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Summit will be more successful in its support for integration. Sinatra and Davis will refuse to stay at hotels and perform at clubs that don’t accept black patrons. They will encourage their friends in the wider rat pack to do the same. Their activism will lead clubs and casinos throughout the United States to end their racist policies and usher in the integrated United States of the seventies.
Sinatra, while volatile, is loyal to his friends. He will remain friends with Joe Louis, paying Louis’s medical bills several times, and will similarly help Spiro Agnew after the Vice President’s disgrace.
While some of his best movies and his greatest performances involve people at odds with the mafia, Sinatra will be hounded by rumors of mafia connections throughout his life. Most of these rumors will be created by the mafia itself.
Sammy Davis, Jr.
“Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.”
Of the Summit members who met at the Moulin Rouge, the crucial members will be Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. With the Moulin Rouge experience behind him, Davis will campaign against segregation, and be the first black actor to star in episodic television—a show which the Autumnal Swarm will fight to keep off the air. He will also marry a white actress in the sixties.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, Davis will help defuse the race riots that sweep the nation. In 1969 he will be on the Manson Family’s hit list of blacks who need to be killed to usher in a new America.
When things become informal, he enjoys getting up on stage and taking over the drums for a bit.
Deanna Carmen
Deanna Carmen is eight years old in 1955, and is one of the opening acts at the Moulin Rouge along with tap dancers Maurice and Gregory Hines.
The Paradice Island Lounge
In Las Vegas, Red Jack’s Gambling House enters in the basement of the Paradice Island Lounge and Casino. The Paradice is located across the tracks from the Moulin Rouge at 111 North Main Street.
The Paradice Island Lounge is a Pacific Island-themed casino and nightclub. New York mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel founded the Paradice in 1946 backed by Meyer Lansky. Siegel opened the Paradice on December 26, 1946, closed it again, and re-opened it in March 1947. During the building of the casino, Siegel was prone to outbursts; after one tirade, noticing that his construction foreman was nervous about making a known mobster (and one of the founders of Murder, Inc) angry, Siegel said, “don’t worry, we only kill each other.” He should have listened to himself: Siegel was murdered by the mob in June 1947.
Siegel’s death, and the publicity around it, glamorized Las Vegas as a place of risk and ruthlessness.
The mafia continued running the Paradice through True Family managers throughout the fifties and up to at least 1967 (assuming it survives the player characters).
The Paradice Island Lounge: Backdoors
The basement of the Paradice Island Lounge is filled with doors, to anywhere you’d like. Doors to anywhere important will be locked, but since the swarm don’t have magic, they’ll be locked normally and easily bypassed using an “open” spell or a thief’s skill. The basement is an Ordered Evil place of power.
Other Places
These casinos and other places may play a part if the characters spend time in Vegas. More likely, they’ll be part of the background. Vegas in 1955 is not as bright and neon-covered as it is today, but it is pretty amazing compared to Highland.
Other Places: Eldorado
The Eldorado (City of Gold) Club is just down the street from the Paradice, at 128 East Fremont Street. The owner, Benny Binion, is currently in jail for federal tax evasion. Eldorado is known as the first downtown club to install carpeting in the gambling hall. The restaurant serves a Texas chili recipe that Binion acquired in a Texas prison. The Eldorado serves free alcohol to gamblers and will accept any bet a player can put on the table.
“If you want to get rich, son, make little people feel like big people. Good food cheap, good whiskey cheap, and a good gamble. That’s all there is to it.”
Binion is ruthless. Vegas legend has it that he hires hit men to kill anyone caught cheating at his casino.
Other Places: Disneyland
In Anaheim, Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955. It probably won’t be a part of the adventure, but giant talking mice might be on the news. Ronald Reagan was there, but the current governor of California is Goodwin J. Knight. Sinatra, Davis, and much of the rest of the rat pack were also at the opening.
Other Places: El Cortez
Bugsy Siegel’s first casino was at 600 Fremont Street. He sold it to finance his purchase of the Paradice.
The Riviera
The Riviera, a nine-story high rise, opened on April 20, 1955 on the south side of the strip. It was the first, but far from the last, Vegas high-rise. It will stand out, despite its distance from the Paradice and Moulin Rouge.
Hour for magic
What’s real? What’s fantasy? There really was a Moulin Rouge in Las Vegas in 1955. Scraps of it remain, though it’s been through several starry-eyed owners and a massive fire. It really was the cool place to be after hours. And employees really did arrive on an October morning to find the doors chained shut. The people in this fantasy Moulin Rouge, however, are not the people who worked in the real one. With the exception of Joe Louis they’re composites and outright new characters. Even Louis did not really become a secret warrior against an extra-dimensional insect hive. At least, as far as I know. When it comes to the Moulin Rouge, myth and reality mesh.
