Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
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F ront Runners Her face bruised and swollen, Jane Russell— ever the showbiz trouper—leaves the stage at her Vegas premiere. The Las Vegas (Back) Story GLAMOROUS JANE RUSSELL ARRIVED AT HER LAS VEGAS FILM NOIR PREMIERE WITH A NOIRISH (AND BLEU-ISH) SECRET OF HER OWN. BY ANDREA BENNETT 4 PHOTOGRAPHY BY AP PHOTO S ome movies are nothing like real life; others can be startlingly reminiscent. Perhaps nobody knew this better than Hollywood star Jane Russell, whose film The Las Vegas Story premiered on Fremont Street on February 12, 1952. In the classic film noir, produced by Howard Hughes and Robert Sparks, Russell stars as Linda Rollins, the wife of an inveterate gambler and shady businessman (played by Vincent Price) who she suspects (rightly) is in financial and perhaps criminal trouble. The complicated plot twists involve Linda's meeting with an old flame, the theft of her valuable necklace, the murder of a casino owner, and her kidnapping into the Nevada desert. But it turns out that trouble was something Russell herself knew plenty about. At the time, she was embroiled in a somewhat noirish situation of her own—as evidenced by the artfully concealed black eye she wore to the premiere. The evening before, Russell and her real-life husband, pro football player Robert Waterfield, had gotten into an epic dustup, during which Waterfield slugged the starlet in the face several times. RKO Pictures executives, loath to cancel the premiere, had Russell appear anyway, with a severely swollen and bruised face. A story was concocted for the press corps that the previous night a car door had swung into her face due to an intense windstorm. And while hi-def television and Twitter would have quickly debunked such a story today, in Russell's case it would be a while before the truth came out, beginning with hints dropped in a Newsweek magazine article. Russell divorced Waterfield in 1968. V VEGASMAGAZINE.COM 004_V_FOB_FR_Winter14.indd 4 1/13/14 2:09 PM