A Vegas Goodby : Praise for Sammy Davis Jr. Is Extravagant in the City Where He Adorned Marquees

Claude Trenier could not contain himself. Even before the gold lame curtain lifted over the stage of the Sinbad Lounge in the Aladdin Casino, the 70-year-old entertainer delivered the announcement that almost every act in town would make before the long desert night ended.

“We’d like to dedicate this show,” he barked, “to a great showman who will surely be missed!”

It was the night that Sammy Davis Jr. died, and Las Vegas, an outsized place where gambling halls are transformed into castles and praise swells into adoration, was awash in an effervescence of tribute. In darkened lounges and club rooms up and down the Strip, the luckless and the eternal optimists of this gambling capital paid fealty to “Mr. Entertainment,” each in his or her own grandiose fashion.

Middle-aged gamblers who once envied Davis and his Rat Pack pals as the embodiments of eternal finger-snapping nonchalance paused to mull their generation’s approaching mortality. Chorus-line dancers and hotel maids grew teary-eyed, recalling Davis’ words of encouragement--and the cases of Dom Perignon he sometimes sent to chase the words down. Even inside the drab office corridors hidden away from the neon-lit caverns of slot machines, casino officials turned away--however briefly--from their counting books to voice their respects.

“Hey, man, it’s worth it,” explained Claude Trenier as he took the stage. “We’re talking about Sammy.”

When the curtain lifted, Trenier was not quite the dynamo of four decades ago on what he described as the chitlin circuit. In his prime, he and his four brothers would turn hardwood stages into trampolines with their frenetic song-and-dance act.

But as Trenier--who said he knew Davis well--negotiated his creaky soft-shoe routine, he and his group honored the entertainer the way any seasoned lounge act would honor a fallen star. They honored him often.

“We lost one of our great friends today!” he reminded his audience as the Treniers worked their way through the “Sheik of Araby.”

“We lost a dear friend today,” he noted before performing “Hava Nagila.”

And on it went as they sang and danced and paid homage through a collection of the sort of standards that Davis did so well.

The part of this town that was Davis’ struts its stuff at night, and during the day of his death the tributes were somewhat muted. Casino marquees bore no mention of his passing, frozen in their usual promotions of performing chimpanzees and army-sized chorus lines.

As night approached, however, the casino chieftains collectively declared a tribute that only Las Vegas could announce--plans to darken all the marquees for 10 minutes tonight, the first time that the massive neon billboards will dim since the death of President John F. Kennedy.

At Bally’s, orders went out to move a framed portrait of Davis from its honored place in the hotel-casino’s Celebrity Room--where it hangs with photographs of Rat Pack buddies Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and other stars who have played the showroom--to a prominent place at the casino’s front entrance.

“Remember to get some flowers with it,” hotel publicist Tom Bruny told an assistant.

Karen Nelson Bell, 46, a titian-haired piano player, did her part to make sure casino visitors knew just whose day it was. Seated serenely at an ebony piano, Bell played Davis’ most popular hits, reproducing “Candyman” and “Mr. Bojangles” in endless rippling glissandos.

After playing a medley requested by a Davis fan, Bell said she had “tried to make it as exquisitely tender as I could. Each of us ought to thank that man for the joy he brought to this city. We all knew he was ill, but I kept thinking that somehow, he’d go on forever.”

In the casino’s penthouse, 26 floors up, hotel maid Maria Sudbury, 62, repeatedly removed a crumpled slip of paper from her apron pocket, read it and stuffed it away.

Sudbury, a Belgian native who has worked nearly 20 years as head maid in the penthouse, asked a “lady on the switchboard” to help her write a short message that she wanted to wire to Davis’ widow, Altavoise.

“Mr. Davis, he was my baby,” Sudbury said, shaking her frosted head of hair sadly as she took a break in a newly cleaned suite. Next door in the “Ziegfield,” a penthouse suite that was always held open for Davis, hotel parking attendants were being fitted for new uniforms.

Sudbury joined them, poking her way past racks of gray and scarlet uniforms to point out where the entertainer’s favorite furniture could no longer be found.

“He was so neat and so clean,” she said. “A fine gentleman Mr. Davis was.”

She examined the carefully printed note one more time. “Dear Mrs. Davis,” it said. “My deepest sympathy. I am so sorry that Mr. Davis passed away. I hope I see you one day.”

It was signed, “Maria on the 26th floor.”