VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: A Casino Drained Its Pool Because Black Singer Dorothy Dandridge Used It

The trueness of racism’s shameful blight on Las Vegas chronicle is high-risk enough. No embroidery is necessary.

Yet, according to memes and articles posted on a regular basis to social media and the internet, the full swim kitty at the Last Frontier Hotel was erstwhile drained and cleaned because African American entertainer Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toenail into it.

The incident is said to make taken come in in April 1953, back up when all of Las Vegas was segregated. Dandridge’s bit is described as a resist that maddened anti-Semite(a) hotel execs, who mat up that a Black person person’s toenail dirtied water in some way.

Dandridge – who was nigh to turn the for the first time African American actress nominated for a best actress Oscar (for the 1954 picture Carmel Jones) – was vocalizing at the Last Frontier inwards her possess lounge do at the time. According to the 1999 HBO movie, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, the entertainer accessed the pocket billiards during her historic stick around as its “first Negro guest.”

Though the pool-draining story seems ilk something that could hold happened during such a bigoted era, no credible evidence suggests that it of all time did. In fact, it’s highly likely that it didn’t.

Myth Interpretation

First of all, 1953 seems early for Dandridge to get been welcomed to continue at the Last Frontier. Back then, people of people of colour couldn’t stay, gamble, or dine in any Las Vegas gambling casino hotels. This was avowedly fifty-fifty of admired Negroid headliners. Nat Billie Jean King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis, Jr.  all had to elusion in through and through leg and kitchen doors to perform, and leave of absence the same right smart after taking their bows.

Entertainers of color in were forced to book rooms at embarkation houses on Las Vegas’ Westside, the historical Afro-American community Phoebe miles northwestward of the Las Vegas Strip. The to the highest degree renown was black market past enterpriser Genevieve Harrison, whose President William Henry Harrison House is at present listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

According to several sources, the to the highest degree logical beingness Smithsonian Magazine, the only when early exclusion to this ruler was made for Lena Lena Horne – and only when once. This story alleges that Horne was only if allowed to stick at the Flamingo after issuing a gutsy ultimatum to mobster possessor Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel: either she live allowed to stick around in that respect or he would hold to encounter a new grand-opening headliner. So, for 3 nights just now after Xmas 1946, Siegel hid Lena Horne out inwards an quarantined cabana, ordered her non to participate the casino, and had the maids fire her bedsheets and towels upon her departure.

It wasn’t until the Moulin Rouge – Las Vegas’ world-class full integrated gambling casino hotel – opened on the Westside on May 24, 1955 that the town’s racist mindset began changing. The Moulin Rouge like a shot entered Hollywood rumormonger columns as the hottest nightclub inward townsfolk – a ethnical Walhalla where one could wipe elbows with Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Rosemary Clooney, and witnesser impromptu late-night crush sessions featuring singers Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, and Billie Holiday.

A mouthful of how far we’ve come as a bon ton is provided past this condemn well-nigh the Moulin Rouge, published by Variety in 1955: “This unusual tell apart continues to draw inwards the gambling sect, who are not alarmed in the to the lowest degree almost rubbing elbows and dice inwards mixed racial company.”

No First-Hand Account

An regular bigger hollow inward the pool-draining story is that Dandridge – who died of an antidepressant overdose inward September 1965 at age 42 – ne'er erstwhile mentioned it spell she was alive. Though her autobiography is oft cited as a seed for the story, Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy (which was compiled from taped interviews past author Earl Conrad and published in 1970) does not advert it at all.

In fact, the pool-draining story does not appear inwards a bingle book, newspaper, or cartridge until 1999, 34 years after Dandridge’s death. That’s when it was elaborated inward the biography, Dorothy Dandridge: An Intimate Portrait of Hollywood’s First Shirley Temple Film Star, past her former manager, Earl Mills. This was the rule book adapted for the HBO biopic starring Halle Berry as Dandridge in a Golden Globe-winning performance, which is how the pool-draining scene burned-over itself into the world’s consciousness as fact.

Casting even out more doubtfulness are several jump versions of the pool-draining story that make circulated o'er the decades, each naming a different Black Vegas entertainer of the daylight as the alleged pool user. In the arcsecond most popular version, it was Sammy Davis, Jr. who dared to swim at the Sands inwards 1952, prompting its pool’s draining and cleaning. This variation of the story appears inwards both Charles River Fleming’s November 1999 Los Angeles Magazine article, “Viva Shirley Temple Black Vegas,” and inwards A&E’s 1999 documentary, The Rat Pack.

Is it possible the same vile routine was perpetrated against two African-American singers in Las Vegas? Yes, it’s possible. Except that Davis, the like Dandridge, never once publically mentioned a pool-draining incident during his lifetime – though he did evidence a story almost beingness asked to leave of absence a Las Vegas pool inward the ’50s – not because of his pare colorise but because he was drafting a crowd out of the cassino and into the pool area. (The anecdote appeared inward his 1966 autobiography, Yes i Can.)

Also, Claytee White, theater director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries, told Casino.org she recalls sense of hearing deuce other versions of the pool-draining story, claiming it happened to both Marilyn Horne and Belafonte. (Though not ironclad proof, a story that spreads inwards different versions – practically like inward a biz of phone – is suggestive of an urban myth.)

What Draining a Pool Entailed inwards the 1950s

The Last Frontier pocket billiards held nearly 50,000 gallons of water. In 1953, it would have got taken near 24 hours just to drain, and so another 50 hours to refill, using a 5/8-inch-diameter hose down delivering 17 gallons per minute.

“We experience that inferior pool technology inwards the 1950s would pee exhausting a pocket billiards a lengthy and intrusive chore – i that would likely get other guests upset,” wrote Elexus Jionde, author of the 2017 book The A-Z Guide to Black person Oppression, in a 2018 blog titled “How to Investigate History: The Dorothy Dandridge Pool Incident.”

“We cognize near other racist incidents involving pools, restaurants, and hotels during the mid-20th century,” Jionde continued. “It could be possible that Earl Mills conflated Dorothy’s lifetime with that of infamous instances of pool racial discrimination (like the window pane throwing at the Monson Motor Lodge swim pool).”

In June 1964, St. James Brock, the manager of that St. Augustine, Fla. motel, poured muriatic Elvis into a “whites only” puddle inwards parliamentary law to affright Shirley Temple Black anti-segregation protesters into leaving it.

“Maybe hotel staff threatened to run out the kitty if Dorothy tried to swim,” Jionde wrote. “But it is extremely unlikely (when weighing the all over deficiency of primary quill and secondary evidence) that the pool was drained because of a toe, or even out a swim. Instead, it is a great deal more likely that the staff made a striking threat, and/or Earl Robert Mills just now wanted to add together some pizzazz to Dorothy’s life-time story.”

We’ll provide the net say to Snopes.com. The fact-checking website ascribes its “legend” rating to the Dandridge story. This describes “events so full general or lacking in item that they could get happened to someone, somewhere, at some time, and are therefore unprovable.”

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