Numbered among the scores of celebrities who call Malibu home are many social activists. Hidden among them, however, is a largely unknown woman who was one of the first social activists in America. Long before the freedom marches of the late 1960s, more than just speaking out against segregation, she also put all the money she could gather together where her heart and mouth were.
Today, Lillian Arneste is remembered mostly from her credit line on old, yellowing Hollywood celebrity photographs. But in 1955, she was a major investor in a significant social experiment of the era-the first integrated hotel and casino in Las Vegas. It was named the Moulin Rouge, and it only lasted less than six months, but it pointed the way to the future.
“I lost all of the $15,000 I put into it,” she says during a recent poolside interview at the Malibu condominium where she has lived since 1972. “And it was mostly borrowed money. My purpose buying into the project was to try to change an unfair system.”
Lillian Arneste was born in Brooklyn, one of eight children of Joseph and Sophie Arneste. Her dad died when she was six months old, and her mother followed when Lillian was only 12.
“I was then raised by Catherine and Frank Smith, superintendent of the apartment building where we lived,” she says.
They were black, and the experience of being raised in a multiracial home created a life-long anger over discrimination in Arneste. Following graduation from Brooklyn College, she moved to Hollywood and lived in the Studio Club (where other residents included Marilyn Monroe and Shelly Winters). Eventually disappointed in her dream of becoming an actress, Arneste opened Lilli-Anne’s, a photo studio on Western Avenue. She made most of her money, however, as an early paparazzi, shooting celebrities for the newspapers and fan magazines of the era.
Most people know that during the first half of the 20th century, discrimination existed everywhere, not just in the South. Until the Yankees hired Jackie Robinson in 1947, baseball was exclusively a white man’s sport. The Army wasn’t integrated until after World War II, and the Navy only ended segregated housing in 1954. But the idea that a Las Vegas casino might be segregated-even then-seems weird; after all, much of the talent that casino owners employed to bring in the gamblers was black. But, until things began changing in 1960 under pressure from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), such was the case.
Why Arneste invested the equivalent of more than $100,000 in today’s money in the Moulin Rouge is an object lesson in just how far America has come in its race relations in the past half-century.
“I was friendly with Pearl Bailey,” she recalls of the late legendary singer who would, years later, serve as special ambassador to the United Nations and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Once, in 1954, when she was headlining at the Flamingo, she walked out of the showroom with her husband, Louis Bellson, and into the casino and put a chip down at a roulette table. But the dealer wouldn’t spin the wheel. No blacks allowed. Another time, when I went with Billie Holiday’s manager (who was black) to see Nat King Cole at the Sands, we were turned away. Cole himself, who brought in millions in gambling money, had to go in the back door.”
In the 1950s, the west side of Las Vegas had developed a sizable black population, and the Moulin Rouge, originally built to cater to that constituency, opened on May 24, 1955. It was “fronted” by heavyweight champion Joe Louis, but built by three white men who were partners in a local construction company. The casino immediately attracted a far broader patronage because of the now-legendary entertainers it employed.
“One could look into the audience and everybody who was anybody, especially in Hollywood, was there,” Lillian says. “I was a working stockholder.”
The hotel built a photography studio for her, and she soon started the now common practice of photographing guests at the shows. (According to Arneste, photographing guests in showrooms of the other hotels was not permitted because of the fear that a Mafia member, then common in Las Vegas, would be seen in the background).
And, it is the Mafia Lillian blames for the abrupt closing of the Moulin Rouge at the end of the summer of 1955.
“They were very much in control of things then, and if the Mafia wanted something done, it was done,” she says. “One problem was that the great entertainers at the Moulin Rouge were attracting white gamblers from the hotels on the Strip.”
In any event, one day, when employees came to work, they found the doors covered with chains and padlocks, and the casino’s license revoked. Within a week of its closing, though, one of the Rouge’s partners became an executive at the Desert Inn, then a notorious mob-run casino. Lillian eventually returned to Los Angeles as a freelance photographer, augmenting her celebrity coverage with advertising and product work. The casino later reopened under different management.
The Moulin Rouge, which was made a national historic site in 1992, and recently served as a low-income hotel/apartment, burned down seven weeks ago. Arson is suspected and the matter is presently under investigation. Although the casino is gone (plans are to develop the site as a gated community), the Moulin Rouge’s place in the history of American social progress is secure, thanks to such people as Malibu’s Lillian Arneste.