The private train was slowly chugging across Nevada one day last week on the final stretch of a six-hour trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The 150 passengers, guests of West Coast Mobster "Big Jim" Valenti, had lunched on a buffet of "selected Sicilian meat and cheese cuts," and they were looking forward to an evening at Valenti's hotel speakeasy, The Boiler Room. Big Jim, trigger-tempered head of the notorious "Doo Dah" gang, had arranged the party for the opening-night floor show starring his bride, a former Detroit showgirl named Boo Boo O'Hare. Boo Boo could warble like a thrush, it was said, and Valenti told one and all that she would be "the next Clara Bow."
Big Jim, resplendent in white linen suit, white shoes and lavender tie, had planned for everything, down to the brass band waiting to toot out a welcome at the Las Vegas station. Or had he? Passengers taking in the scenery suddenly noticed a 1923 Chrysler touring car and a 1925 brewery truck following the train on an adjacent road. Rival Hoodlum Barney Weiss apparently had dispatched his own welcoming party to greet Big Jim. From a machine gun mounted on the back of the truck, a Weiss torpedo named Charley Ice fired several bursts at the passing coaches. Two other goons opened up with shotguns. Valenti and his bodyguard, Tony Robozo, fired back at the attackers until they dropped their pursuit.
Strange Amusement. A Hollywood gangster shoot-'em-up in the making? Not on film, in any case. In fact, the whole thing is an elaborate fantasy produced and paid for by Multimillionaire Artist Bob Graham, who acts on the conviction that all the world's a stage. Big Jim, Boo Boo and the rest of the Doo Dah gang are actors getting paid $450 a week to portray gangland characters from the Roaring Twenties, primarily for the entertainment of Patron Graham—and anyone else who happens by. So far, this strange amusement has cost Graham some $600,000, with no end in sight.
The saga of the Doo Dahs is a succession of polyptychs that Graham somewhat grandly refers to as his "living canvases." "I call it Doo Dah art as a takeoff on Dada art," he says. "I didn't set out to create an art form, although I think it has become one." What he did set out to do was to "inject vitality and fun onto the national scene after the dark years of war and scandal."
Tastes Indulged. With a fortune inherited from his father, who invented a pressure valve for jet engines, the lanky young Graham had the means to indulge his tastes. After graduating from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in art, he opened a gallery in London. In 1968 he staged an exhibition of tableaux vivants called "The Americans." He imported an Alabama dirt farmer, a California fisherman, a stockbroker and an Oklahoma oil driller to stand around and represent themselves, but his pièce de résistance was a New York cab driver complete with yellow cab and nonstop monologue for anyone who ventured to enter it. Says Graham: "It seemed an interesting thing to do."