Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Read online

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  CONTENTS

  ONE VEGAS MEETS ELVIS

  TWO HOW VEGAS HAPPENED

  THREE THE COOL GUYS

  FOUR THE ENTERTAINMENT CAPITAL

  FIVE CHANGES (ELVIS RISING)

  SIX COMEBACK (ELVIS REBORN)

  SEVEN AFTERMATH (ELVIS FOREVER)

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Live from Vegas

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  Insert Photograph Credits

  One

  VEGAS MEETS ELVIS

  In a town addicted to building things, blowing them up, and then building them all over again, the New Frontier Hotel in 1956 was a fine example of Las Vegas progress. It was originally built in 1942 and called the Last Frontier, the second resort to open on what would become known as the Las Vegas Strip. Like its predecessor, El Rancho Vegas, the Last Frontier was a luxury resort in old Western garb—“The Early West in Modern Splendor,” as its promotional slogan put it. Rifles and stuffed animal heads decorated the hotel lobby; wagon-wheel chandeliers hung on chains from the timber ceilings; cow horns were mounted above the beds in the guest rooms. There was even an ersatz Western village next door, filled with frontier artifacts and populated by life-size papier-mâché characters like Rabbit Sam and Sheriff Bill McGee.

  But as ever more modern and luxurious hotels opened along the Strip, the Last Frontier decided it was time for an update, and in early 1955 the hotel closed down, gave itself a makeover, and reopened as the New Frontier. Gone were the stuffed animal heads and wagon-wheel chandeliers. Instead, visitors were greeted by a sleek new brick-and-glass façade, with a long canopy in front and a 126-foot-high steel-frame tower that bathed the hotel in colored lights at night. Inside, the old Western-themed showroom was transformed into the spiffy new thousand-seat Venus Room, with five tiered rows of booths and an expansive stage, “with sides running to such length that the whole thing looks like a gigantic cinemascope screen,” in the words of one awed reporter.

  The hotel’s grand reopening in April 1955 was something of a disaster. Mario Lanza, the internationally renowned opera singer and movie star, was booked as the opening headliner, but he suffered a meltdown before the show—an attack of stage fright compounded by drinking—and never set foot onstage. After an hour’s delay, the hotel announced that Lanza had laryngitis, and Jimmy Durante appeared as a last-minute replacement. (Too last-minute for Las Vegas Sun columnist Ralph Pearl, who filed his review early to make his deadline and raved about Lanza’s phantom performance. “Seldom in the history of this town,” he wrote, “has a star done a greater show or received a greater standing ovation.”)

  One year later the New Frontier played host to the Las Vegas debut of another, very different performer. He was nervous, too, but he did show up—though many in the audience were probably mystified as to what he was doing there. On April 23, 1956, Elvis Presley came to town.

  The twenty-one-year-old rockabilly sensation from Memphis was in the midst of his phenomenal breakthrough year. Elvis Aron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi (in later years he began using the more common spelling of his middle name, Aaron), the son of a doting mother and a sporadically employed father who once served jail time for check fraud. The family moved to Memphis when Elvis was thirteen. In high school he was a greasy-haired, flashy-dressing misfit, who played the guitar and entertained in school talent shows. He began hanging out at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio, making a few country and gospel recordings. When one of them, a rocking version of Arthur Crudup’s old blues song “That’s All Right, Mama,” caught on with country-music stations in the South, Phillips signed him to a recording contract. Soon Elvis was touring with the Louisiana Hayride and creating a frenzy among teenage audiences across the South. He was mainly a regional phenomenon until December 1955, when RCA Records bought out his Sun contract and launched a major campaign to sell America on this white country boy who sounded black, drove teenage girls wild, and was pioneering a new kind of music—a revved-up mix of country and rhythm and blues that people were starting to call rock ’n’ roll.

  He recorded his first RCA single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” in January. By April he had the No. 1 record in America; his gyrating TV appearances, on Tommy Dorsey’s variety show and The Milton Berle Show, were the talk of the country; and Paramount Pictures had signed him to a movie contract. Still to come was The Ed Sullivan Show (where he was shown, notoriously, only from the waist up), a string of chart-topping hits like “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “All Shook Up,” and a virtual revolution in popular music and American culture.

  But first, Elvis played Vegas.

  The idea was his manager Colonel Tom Parker’s, and not a very good one. Elvis’s frenetic rock ’n’ roll performances, which were causing such a sensation in the rest of the country, were hardly geared for a crowd of middle-aged Vegas showgoers. Yet there he was at the New Frontier, touted as “The Atomic-Powered Singer” (in a town where people could watch real atomic tests taking place in the Nevada desert nearby), the “extra added attraction” on a bill headed by Freddy Martin’s orchestra and comedian Shecky Greene. Elvis got paid $15,000 for the two-week gig, and the Colonel asked for it in cash. “No check is any good,” he said. “They’re testing an atom bomb out there in the desert. What if someone pushed the wrong button?”

  The audience at the New Frontier must have thought someone had pushed the wrong button. Freddy Martin, whose “sweet music” orchestra was known for its pop versions of classics like Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in B-flat, opened the show with several of his instrumental hits and a medley of songs from the musical Oklahoma! Next came Shecky Greene, a Chicago-born comedian just gaining notoriety for his raucous Vegas lounge act; Variety called him “easily the talking point of this show.”

  Elvis was the closing act. Backed by his three-piece rhythm group—guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and drummer D. J. Fontana—Elvis performed four songs and was onstage for just twelve minutes. The response was polite at best. One high roller sitting at ringside, according to a witness, got up midway through the show, cried, “What is all this yelling and noise?,” and fled to the casino. The critics weren’t much kinder. “Elvis Presley, coming in on a wing of advance hoopla, doesn’t hit the mark here,” wrote Bill Willard in Variety. “The loud braying of the tunes which rocketed him to the big time is wearing, and the applause comes back edged with a polite sound. For the teenagers, he’s a whiz; for the average Vegas spender, a fizz.” Newsweek said the young rock ’n’ roller was “like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party.” For Elvis and his backup group, accustomed to the pandemonium they were causing in concerts across the country, the response was sobering. “For the first time in months we could hear ourselves when we played out of tune,” said Bill Black. “They weren’t my kind of audience,” Elvis would say later. “It was strictly an adult audience. The first night especially I was absolutely scared stiff.”

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p; Shecky Greene got friendly with Elvis during the run and could see that the kid was out of his element—unable to relate to the audience and lacking the stage experience to win them over. He didn’t even dress right. “He came out in a dirty baseball jacket, just shit,” Greene recalled. “I went to Parker and I said, you can’t let him come out on the stage like that.” The Colonel apparently took Greene’s advice; for the rest of the engagement, Elvis and his band wore neat sport jackets, slacks, and bow ties. But after the first night, they no longer closed the show. Shecky Greene did.

  By happy chance, a recording of Elvis’s 1956 Vegas show exists—taped by an audience member on the last night of the two-week engagement. Freddy Martin makes a polite, if rather patronizing, introduction, noting that it’s Elvis’s last performance: “We hate to see him go; he’s a fine young lad and a fine talent.” Elvis opens his set with “Heartbreak Hotel”—slower and bluesier than the recorded version, with Elvis playfully changing the lyric to “Heartburn Motel” in the last verse. His patter with the audience is disarmingly modest; Elvis is acutely aware that he’s a fish out of water. “We’ve got a few little songs we’d like to do for you,” he says at the outset, “in our style of singing—if you want to call it singing.” He alludes to the difficulties he’s been having in the engagement: “It’s really been a pleasure being in Las Vegas. We had a pretty hard time—uh, a pretty good time. . . .” He makes a few awkward, country-boy jokes, asking the orchestra at one point if they know his next song, “Get out of the Stables, Grandma, You’re Too Old to Be Horsin’ Around.” After three more numbers—“Long Tall Sally,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “Money Honey”—it’s over.

  Elvis’s only chance to connect with his real audience came on a special Saturday matinee, scheduled by the hotel expressly for the teenagers who weren’t allowed into the casino for the evening shows. For a $1 admission (the proceeds donated to a local Little League baseball program), the kids got a free soft drink and a chance to shower Elvis with the kind of screaming adulation he was getting almost everywhere but in Las Vegas.

  “The carnage was terrific,” reported Bob Johnson in the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “They pushed and shoved to get into the one-thousand-seat room and several hundred thwarted youngsters buzzed like angry hornets outside. After the show, bedlam! A laughing, shouting, idolatrous mob swarmed him; he fled to the insufficient sanctuary of his suite. The door wouldn’t hold them out. They got his shirt, shredded it. A triumphant girl seized a button, clutched it as though it were a diamond. A squadron of police had to be called in to clear the area.”

  A few of the old-timers in Vegas tried to get hip to the new music phenom. “This cat, Presley, is neat, well gassed and has the heart,” wrote Ed Jameson in a tongue-in-cheek column for the Las Vegas Sun entitled “A Cat Talks Back.” “His vocal is real and he has yet to go for an open field. He is hep to the motion of sound with a retort that is tremendous. These squares who like to detract their imagined misvalues can only size a note creeping upstairs after dark. This cat can throw ’em downstairs or even out the window. He has it.”

  Though it was a tough engagement for him, Elvis enjoyed Las Vegas. He didn’t gamble much, but he checked out other entertainers in town (among them Johnny Ray, the Four Aces, and Liberace), went to the movies, and rode the bumper cars at the Last Frontier Village next door. He kept company with Judy Spreckels, a sugarcane heiress from Los Angeles, and Vampira, the campy TV horror-show host who was appearing in Liberace’s show at the Riviera. An Elvis fan from Albuquerque, Nancy Kozikowski, was on a vacation in Las Vegas with her parents and ran into Elvis several times during her stay—in the hotel lobby, at the restaurant, and one afternoon when he was wandering alone at the Last Frontier Village. “He recognized me and was very nice,” she recalled. “We took pictures in the twenty-five-cent picture booth together and alone. We also made a very funny talking record together. . . . Elvis was very nice, very gentle, a perfect gentleman.”

  Elvis’s first visit to Las Vegas had one unexpected by-product. Among the lounge acts Elvis went to see was Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a sextet from Philadelphia that did a kind of slicked-up, finger-snapping, nightclub-friendly version of early rock ’n’ roll. (The group had a bit role in the movie Rock Around the Clock, which had just opened in theaters.) One of the highlights of their show was an up-tempo version of “Hound Dog,” a blues number that had been a hit in 1953 for Willie Mae (“Big Mama”) Thornton. Elvis was so taken with Bell’s performance that he began doing the song in his own act and recorded it later that summer. “Hound Dog” became Elvis’s fastest-selling record yet, and his signature hit.

  His 1956 Las Vegas engagement is regarded by most Elvis chroniclers as a rare misstep in a year of meteoric success, otherwise orchestrated to perfection by Colonel Parker, the onetime carny promoter and manager of country star Eddy Arnold, who became Elvis’s manager and career guru early that year. The Colonel would later defend the booking, saying it gave Elvis a chance to reach a new audience and pointing out that the New Frontier couldn’t have been too disappointed, since the hotel asked him back for a return engagement. Shecky Greene—who thought Elvis was a “wonderful kid,” but turned down an offer from Colonel Parker to tour with Elvis as his opening act, finding the prospect faintly absurd—never quite understood what all the fuss was about. One day he ran into Bing Crosby, who was in Vegas during Elvis’s engagement. “What is the thing about this kid?” Shecky asked the elder statesman of American pop singing. “He’s a nice kid, but . . .”

  “Shecky,” Bing replied, “he’ll be the biggest star in show business.”

  “Man, I really like Vegas,” Elvis told a reporter when he got home to Memphis. “I’m going back there the first chance I get.” And he did. He returned to Las Vegas later that year, in November, just before flying to New York for the premiere of his first movie, Love Me Tender. He stayed again at the New Frontier and saw a few shows, including Liberace’s at the Riviera; the popular Vegas headliner introduced Elvis in the audience and later posed for some publicity photos with him. And for the next thirteen years—with an enforced break for his two-year hitch in the Army—Vegas became Elvis’s favorite getaway and playground. He would typically go there to unwind after his movie shoots were finished. He was there in the summer of 1963 filming Viva Las Vegas, probably the most famous of all Vegas movies. He got married there in 1967, to Priscilla Beaulieu, the daughter of a US Air Force officer whom he had met while stationed in Germany. And in July 1969, after nearly a decade away from the stage, he would make his long-awaited return to live performing in Las Vegas, at the newly opened International Hotel.

  Elvis’s comeback show was a landmark event, both for Elvis and for Las Vegas. For Elvis it was a big gamble, a last-ditch attempt to revitalize a career that had fallen into disrepair—treading water in a sea of bad movies, records that no longer made the charts, and a decade of increasing irrelevance in the fast-changing world of rock ’n’ roll. For Las Vegas, it was a transformational moment: the biggest show (Elvis was backed by a six-piece rhythm band, two vocal groups, and a forty-plus-piece orchestra), in the biggest venue (the International’s two-thousand-seat showroom was double the size of any other room in Vegas), heralded by the biggest publicity campaign (Colonel Parker’s handiwork, naturally) that Vegas had ever seen.

  And it was a monumental success. A record-breaking 101,000 people saw Elvis during the engagement—two shows a night, seven nights a week, for four solid weeks, every show sold out. The reviews, from the trade press to some of the nation’s top rock critics, were nearly all ecstatic. Rolling Stone pronounced Elvis “supernatural, his own resurrection.” The show not only revived Elvis’s career, but it changed the face of Las Vegas entertainment.

  The years in between Elvis Presley’s two Las Vegas appearances—up-and-coming rock ’n’ roller in 1956, reborn superstar in 1969—spanned the golden age of Vegas entertainment. They were the heyday years of the classic Vegas show, an era of high-rolling gla
mour, all-night excitement, and a convergence of show-business talent—stars from Hollywood, television, Broadway, nightclubs, burlesque, Paris music halls—that fully justified the title this self-promoting city loved to bestow upon itself: the entertainment capital of the world.

  Vegas entertainment was born in the 1940s, when the few hotels that had popped up along US Route 91, the highway leading south from downtown Las Vegas toward Los Angeles—soon to be known as the Strip—discovered that star entertainers were the key to attracting customers to their lucrative casinos. It came of age in the 1950s, as the hotels multiplied and the city became a gathering place for the biggest names in show business. By 1960 it was entering its glorious maturity. The city’s first great building boom was over, the Strip now lined with nearly a dozen resort hotels, all competing for top entertainment. Nonstop air travel from the East Coast, inaugurated in 1960, was making Las Vegas more accessible for visitors from across the country. (And Havana, once a rival destination for high-rolling gamblers, was now off-limits, following Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s takeover in 1959.) Big-city nightclubs were on the wane, hurt by changing tastes in music and growing competition from television. Yet television was actually helping Vegas—providing a fresh pool of stars to fill the showrooms, home-screen favorites who were instantly recognizable to folks from the Midwest who never went to nightclubs.

  The event that really ignited Vegas’ 1960s golden age, however, was the famous Rat Pack shows in January and February of 1960. Frank Sinatra, a top draw in Vegas since the early fifties, was booked to appear at the Sands Hotel during the filming of Ocean’s 11, a caper film about a band of former Army buddies who plot a Las Vegas casino heist on New Year’s Eve. At night, after the day’s shooting was over, he would be joined onstage by four of his costars—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop—for a freewheeling session of songs, jokes, drinking, and ad-libbed antics. Their four-week run at the Sands’ Copa Room was a sensation: the hottest ticket in Vegas history, a magnet for celebrities (among them the handsome Massachusetts senator running for president, John F. Kennedy), and a stroke of promotional genius. Over the next few years, separately and together, the Rat Pack ruled Las Vegas and came to embody the swinging, boozing, broad-chasing image of Vegas cool.