Excerpt from The Magnificent Esme Wells by Adrienne Sharp, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But in Ben Siegel's mind, this highway, Highway 91, sprouted one extravagant hotel after another, all of them in possession of casinos and restaurants and pools. And nightclubs, too, apparently, for after a while, Mr. Siegel called to me, waved me over from where I was pouting and flapping my hands at my hot face, saying, "Esme, come here and have a look at where your stage will be."

I guess it was a given even then that, like my mother, I would need a stage. Partly it was because I wore my mother's gorgeous face, which begged to be looked at, though I didn't know that yet. And partly it was because all the way out to Vegas I'd chattered myself silly as a parrot, as my mother would say, about how I was taking tap and ballet lessons at Daddy Mack's studio up on Melrose and how I was going to dance in the Daddy Mack Revue in August, where talent scouts and casting directors and newspaper reporters made up the audience. Every kid in that revue wanted more than anything to be noticed by one of those men, wanted to be picked to be in pictures. As did I, without thought, without question. Because that's what my mother had wanted.

Yes, I'd talked and talked because the drive was so long, and I didn't even think Mr. Siegel had been listening to me. But apparently he had been.

Hence, his grand gesture with his arm to my square of sand.

Command performance. My own fault.

I looked at my father, who nodded.

So, inspired, probably, by the western landscape around me, I refashioned my head scarf into a bandanna and took my place to perform a number to "Ragtime Cowboy Joe," which my class was polishing up for the revue. I flapped my elbows and bent my knees like a bow-legged cowboy and crowed,

Out in Arizona where the bad men are
And the only friend to guide you is an evening star
The roughest and the toughest man by far
Is Ragtime Cowboy Joe.
He's a high-falutin',
rootin', shootin',
Son of a gun from Arizona
Ragtime Cowboy Joe!

I went through the entire song, complete with do-si-dos and pretend lasso twirls and a lot of clomping around in my imaginary boots, and when I finished, Mr. Siegel frowned.

A western number was not really part of his vision for his new casino, not really the right sort of bait for the type of person Mr. Siegel was hoping to draw here. In his casino, he didn't want the scruffy locals from the Henderson magnesium mines or the workers from Boulder City who had settled in the desert once the dam was completed or the ranch hands who watched after the grazing horses or the airmen the war would leave behind at the old Las Vegas Gunnery School. Las Vegas was then still pretty much enmeshed in its cowboy past—men with sunburns despite their ten-gallon hats, sweaty, unshaven prospectors—and it had not yet met its future filled with new men, like Benny Siegel, with their wide-lapel silk suits and shiny shoes, men who imagined a whole city with hotels as glamorous as the nightclubs on Sunset Boulevard, which Vegas would eventually drain of talent and audiences, desert hotels that filled its pockets with human desire.

Right from the start, there was to be nothing of the El Rancho, which billed itself as the Queen of the West, or the Last Frontier, which needed no special billing to explain itself, about Benny's Flamingo Club. There were to be no sawdust floors, no slot machines painted to look like cowboys. The showgirls weren't going to dance like Indians or twirl lassoes and they wouldn't wear sombreros or bandanas. As Mr. Siegel imagined it, a stay at the Flamingo would be a glamorous event, like going to Monte Carlo, but even better, Hollywood style, where guests would rub shoulders with Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante. The staff would wear tuxedos, and the girls would wear feathers, pink high heels, and glass jewels.

From the book: The Magnificent Esme Wells by Adrienne Sharp. Copyright © 2018 by Adrienne Sharp. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.