From the Vault of Art Shay: That's Entertainment

Here in the late Fifties, Frank Sinatra , Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin and Joey Bishop grace the stage of the Mafia\'s showplace - the late Sands - between shows, drinks, girls and fans. My wife Florence had just arrived to serve as cover while I hunted the Dons for \<em\>Life\<\/em\> magazine, and I explained hat this would be my second Rat Pack show - the first having been rife with missed queues, spilled drinks, Sammy-slamming by the gang, etc. But whadya know! This show was an exact duplicate. Every spilled drink, every lurch, every bump, every put-down gag... was done again. We were witnessing a show designed to look pick-up and pedestrian, in which every moment was rehearsed and reprised. A performance worthy of the super-rehearsed classic French theater in which Marcel Marceau once told us at The Greek Islands restaurant that he had once seen a French director get hysterical when his leading lady forgot to drop her fan in her lap during a seduction scene.\"How else,\" he screamed, \"can I get the audience to realize that her flirting fan was connected to her flirting lap?\"

In the 60\'s Judy Garland filled the Crown Theater with magical music, and filled the dressing room with the coltish laughter and dressing room antics of a star and entertainer forever, in this case for the \<em\>Time\<\/em\> photographer - and a dozen ardent Judy collectors including the Harvard Judy expert, Martha Steketee.

Liberace was my first assignment after coming back from an African safari. At the Ambassador East he good-naturedly played mock quarterback for some wives of Chicago Bears players. Carrying his spiel a little too far as always, entertainer Liberace regaled us all with tales of how he loved football because of the huddles and the exciting odor of male perspiration. It was for charity and Liberace was charitable, ending his gig playing a candleabra-topped piano at a window looking out at some 2000 mostly middle-aged lady fans.

Hugh Hefner assigned me to cover the DJ Convention in Nashville for his then-new magazine \<em\>Showbiz Weekly\<\/em\>. For some reason collectors of my pictures have always liked this single frame I did of Johnny Cash as he strummed away in the hospitality suite awaiting questioning by DJ\'s of the South who had built his reputation as a songbird and a jailbird. One of the prizes doled out by at least one music publisher was free waiting-room blowjobs for DJs. For some reason my picture of a beehive hairdoed gentile Monica Lewinsky-type bending to her task didn\'t get into the layout.

The New York Times, wary of the Dolly Parton phenomenon, sent me to Indiana to photograph her in a roadshow. My friend Billy Corgan told his then-girlfriend Jessica Simpson about this picture and she bought it, bad pun and all, from the Thomas Masters Gallery to give to her friend, Dolly.

Having a notoriously sexual movie star brother probably made it easy for long and strong-legged singer-dancer Shirley MacLaine to quixotically hit the tabloids last week with the silly boast that she once blew a single day (part of one anyway) having sex with three different men. I have no idea if this is a modern record, but as a young reporter I used to listen with awe to tales told by old \<em\>Life\<\/em\> fotogs of desire under and over the stars. Like the time Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, together on this one accidental occasion, enhanced the life of a handsome Hispanic bartender who had never seen them in the movies.

It was a day in 1963 to remember for a certain neighborhood in Detroit. The Supremes, shown relaxing here after a tough day at Motown, were each going to buy a $46,000 house in their old neighborhood, near their high school. I was shooting the story for \<em\>Life\<\/em\>, but just two years ago \<em\>Rolling Stone\<\/em\> tagged it as one of the 50 greatest pictures of the Rock & Roll era, and the demand for it has skyrocketed. When Diana Ross, foreground, pirated 13 of my \<em\>Life\<\/em\> pictures for her autobiography without paying for them (even giving me a byline), my LA-based daughter, Jane Shay Wald, who is an internationally known intellectual property lawyer, put me in touch with a sharp Chicago law firm who got me a gratifying out-of-court settlement I was not at liberty to disclose, except to the IRS.