Question of the Day - 11 February 2023

Lola Falana was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1942 into an Afro-Cuban family. She started singing and dancing when she was three, joined the church choir at five, danced in Philadelphia nightclubs while she was still in junior high, and dropped out of high school to move to New York to pursue performing.

There, she was seen by Sammy Davis, Jr., who offered her a role in his 1965 musical, Golden Boy. He also mentored her music career and she cut her first single, “My Baby,” a year later. She was 23. Sammy was 40.

Davis next got her a part in his film A Man Called Adam, which also starred Ossie Davis and Cicely Tyson. In the meantime, she went on tour with Sammy for a few years and they became romantically involved, which led to the second of Davis’s three wives, May Britt, divorcing him in 1968. Lola married singer-guitarist Feliciano Tavares Jr. in 1970, which lasted five years.

Lola’s first big movie was The Liberation of L.B. Jones, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year – Actress. She also posed for Playboy, appeared on numerous TV shows, and was nominated for a Tony Award for her role in the Broadway musical Doctor Jazz; she won a Theater World award for that in 1975.  

Again with the help of Sammy Davis, Jr., she had a years-long residency at the Sands, Riviera, and original MGM Grand in the late '70s and early '80s. When she wound up at the Aladdin, she was earning $100,000 a week, making her the highest-paid female performer in Las Vegas at the time. 

Then, in 1987 at the age of 45, Lola was felled by a severe case of multiple sclerosis, which left her partially paralyzed and impaired her voice. Her struggles with the nerve disease led to a religious conversion and epiphany; she shifted between show business and evangelism for the next dozen or so years until she abandoned performing entirely. 

She moved back to Las Vegas in 1999 to live quietly, occasionally venturing out to speak to church groups around the country.

From there, the trail essentially goes cold, at least publicly. A long online bio written recently ends with, “She no longer appears in the limelight and does not feature on social-media handles. Thus, there is no information about her current whereabouts.”

However, we put out the word with some showbiz people of our acquaintance to see if anyone knew where Lola might be now. The first thing that came back was this. “She's no longer living in Las Vegas. She moved back to the East Coast, probably Camden where she has family. She's still got her Ministry, but she’s not very active.” The source admitted that it’d been awhile since he last heard about her. 

But then, Karen Leslie, author of Eyes in the Sky, one of our favorite Las Vegas offbeat-history books, and a long-time performer here during Lola’s era, told us, "A dear friend of mine who is a singer and is friends with people close to Lola found out from a Cuban musician friend of hers that Lola is in Atlanta, Georgia, where she's being taken care of by her niece, who's her caregiver."

Though it's third-hand information, it's about as close as we'll get and, in fact, it's good enough for us. It's comforting to know that 80-year-old Lola Falana, a huge star in her day, is well cared for.