The Vegas not-so-high life

Movies about Vegas tend to depict one of Sin City's two extremes -- glitz and giddiness or dirt and despair. It's either "Viva Las Vegas" or "Leaving Las Vegas." As a call girl to the high-rollers of the original "Ocean's Eleven" era, Jane McCormick says she ran the gamut, and the distance between the two was shorter than she imagined when she first laid her wide teenage eyes on the Strip.

McCormick was an in-demand casino hostess (a euphemism of the time) in the 1960s and early '70s, making big bucks to keep wealthy men happy at blackjack tables and in hotel bedrooms. She claims to have entertained marquee names such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Arnold Palmer. Now she's just happy to be a great-grandmother living in a modest Vadnais Heights townhouse -- and a memoirist.

"Breaking My Silence: Confessions of a Rat Pack Party Girl and Sex Trade Survivor" is an "as-told-to" book written with her longtime friend, Patti Wicklund. The self-published tell-all details a life that began with years of childhood abuse by an ex-Marine stepfather, followed by a too-early escape marriage and two babies before she turned 16.

After being drawn into turning tricks with Los Angeles businessmen by a handsome, slick-talking car salesman, she accompanied him to Las Vegas. She told herself hooking was the only way she could earn enough money to support her two daughters. She soon lost custody of them to her ex-husband's mother.

It wasn't long before she met Sinatra, McCormick recounts in the book, and he became one of her "regulars," a couple of times a year over the next nine years.

Despite quite a bit of titillating material included in the book, she says "I didn't mean it to be a sex book. Looking back, I don't find it all that sexy."

Beneath the glamorous veneer of her casino nightlife, McCormick underwent a horrifying illegal abortion not long after she moved to Vegas. In her late 30s, she had to have both breasts removed after silicone injections became gangrenous. And at a low point during her transition to normalcy, she attempted suicide.

McCormick, now 65, is still bubbly and platinum blond but walks with a pronounced limp from a bum hip. She wears flats, not heels, and loose-fitting pants and tops rather than tight, bosomy dresses. Her long orange fingernails, plenty of gold jewelry and a gravelly, boisterous laugh are reminders of her party-girl past.

There's one more reminder -- her red-haired poodle, Lucy, named after Lucille Ball, who makes an appearance in the book (greeting McCormick's date du jour William Frawley, the actor who played Fred Mertz on "I Love Lucy"). The dog does bear an uncanny resemblance to Ball.

"Just between you and me and the wallpaper, it's not a fun life," McCormick said, sinking into an easy chair in the modest home she shares with Wicklund. "All the parties and celebrities and attention paid to me, I still never enjoyed what I had to do for money. I never wanted to be someone just used by men."

On the backstretch of her decade in Vegas, McCormick fell hard for an unemployed man she'll only identify as Johnny, who soon became her "old man."

"That's what they called guys who lived off prostitutes, but didn't pimp them out themselves," she said. Johnny bought property, a boat and expensive cars with the money Jane earned on her back, but none of the purchases was ever put in her name. Johnny soon turned out to be a repeat of the abusive male relationships she had in her youth, and she says that after he tried to kill her three times, she left Vegas with nearly nothing.

"They taught me that I could be happy -- I hadn't been happy in so long," she said.

Speaking out

Decked out in mink stoles, elaborate bouffants and opera gloves, McCormick had learned how to draw every eye in a room when she entered, but never how to manage money. The only education she got was table manners (she once drank from a finger bowl, thinking it was soup, before Sinatra discreetly stopped her, she recalls in the book). And the only doubles she rolled were double standards.

Although she herself was never arrested, "they only go after the girls, not the johns or pimps," she said. "To stop prostitution that's what you have to do."

To that end, McCormick is now speaking out on how to discourage young women from being lured into hooking -- and how to help those already in the trade get out. The back of her book lists several resources, including the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

Last week, she signed a contract with Hollywood producer Jon Gentry of Yes No Maybe Media (a new company with no credits to its name as yet) for a film or TV production based on her life. She said she's giving them "a year to get it done," following a previous experience with former Mafia cop Louis Eppolito, whom she says took $45,000 from her, promising a similar deal, but never followed through.

Because most of McCormick's famous liaisons are now dead, readers must take her word on how well Sinatra was endowed and whether he had a habit of hiring multiple playtime partners.

And since her ex Johnny burned most of her photos, the remaining visual evidence in her possession provides no solid proof, either. But the book has, as libel law attorney Mark Anfinson puts it, "a ring of authenticity," as does McCormick herself. She comes across as a survivor who has squarely faced her past, with all the contradictions it continues to bring to her present.