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

  The bounty of top entertainers who could be found on the Las Vegas Strip on almost any given week in the 1960s would be hard to imagine today. A visitor on the last week of June in 1964, just to pick a typical example, could have seen George Burns headlining at the Riviera Hotel, joined by Hollywood glamour girl Jane Russell; movie song-and-dance man Donald O’Connor at the Sahara; television favorite Red Skelton at the Sands; jazz great Ella Fitzgerald at the Flamingo (with Jewish-dialect comedian Myron Cohen as her opening act); and legendary French entertainer Maurice Chevalier making a rare US appearance at the Desert Inn. And that was just in the main showrooms; among the acts filling the smaller, open-all-night lounges were jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, insult comic Don Rickles, Bob Hope’s longtime sidekick Jerry Colonna, and Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra featuring a new boy singer named Frank Sinatra Jr. All that plus three lavish, French-accented production shows—the Folies Bergere, Lido de Paris, and Casino de Paris—and a full-scale Broadway musical, High Button Shoes.

  Nearly every major nightclub performer in America turned up on a Vegas stage at one time or another during the 1960s. Show-business legends like Marlene Dietrich and Ethel Merman. Broadway stars like Carol Channing and Anthony Newley. Virtually all the great pop singers of the era, from Judy Garland to Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole to Barbra Streisand. Most of the top comedians—not just Vegas regulars like Don Rickles, Shecky Greene, and Buddy Hackett, but the new wave of more cerebral satirists, like Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman, and Woody Allen. Baseball stars like Maury Wills and Denny McLain would hang out in Vegas, and sometimes even entertain. Muhammad Ali defended his heavyweight boxing title against Floyd Patterson in Las Vegas in 1965. Evel Knievel staged one of his most famous daredevil stunts there, an attempted motorcycle leap over the Caesars Palace fountains on New Year’s Eve, 1967. Evel crashed, but Vegas soared.

  Vegas’ population in 1960 was just fifty-nine thousand (plus an average twenty thousand visitors a day), and in many ways it was still a small town. The entertainers would hang out together and go to one another’s shows; if one star got sick and had to cancel a performance, another was usually there to fill in at the last minute. Sammy Davis Jr. would host all-night parties for the showgirls, dancers, and other performers in town, often capped off by a breakfast of Chinese food in the Garden Room at the Sands. Singer Buddy Greco was leaving a party late one night when he heard a local DJ’s voice on the radio: “Buddy Greco, if you’re hearing this, get home, your wife is looking for you.”

  “The town was so much fun,” said Norm Johnson, a former newspaper reporter who came to Vegas in 1965 and did publicity for Robert Goulet and other Vegas entertainers. “It was friendly, looser. Everybody knew everybody. Nobody had an entourage. The stars hung out after the show. Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin would be dealing cards in the casino. Pearl Bailey would kick off her shoes onstage at the Flamingo. It was glorious.”

  Flush with profits from the casinos, the Vegas hotels could pay their stars more than anywhere else in the country. And treat them like royalty: lavish suites or bungalows for their stay, spreads of food and drink in the dressing rooms, liberal credit at the casinos. “You told ’em what you wanted for dinner, it was waiting when you came off after the first show,” recalled Pete Barbutti, a trumpet-playing comedian who moved to Vegas in 1960 and entertained there for years. “There was always a setup in your dressing room with all your booze, hors d’oeuvres. Anybody you wanted to get comped got comped. Needed a car to drive, had a car. There was nothing like it in the world.”

  Vegas in the sixties was an exciting last hurrah for the fading world of swanky, big-city nightclubs. The stars wore tuxedos onstage, and the audience dressed up too—the men in jackets and ties, the women in their fanciest outfits. Gorgeous, feathered showgirls adorned the stage in almost every show—and stayed around afterward to decorate the casinos and attract the big gamblers. The mob-connected tough guys who were often on hand added a frisson of danger. The town buzzed. “Vegas was kind of an adult Magic Kingdom,” wrote Paul Anka in his autobiography, My Way. “It was another world, a dream world, the Sh-Boom Sh-Boom Room where everything is mellow and cool, where life could be a dream sweetheart. The soft pink glow from the little lamp on your table, hot chicks, champagne on ice. Torch-song paradise. It’s my version of the American Dream.”

  Yet Vegas entertainment never got much respect. Even in its 1960s heyday it was all too often patronized, made fun of, dismissed as schlocky, mass-audience kitsch—almost the definition of bad taste. Vegas in the 1960s was where every showroom singer seemed to have a syrupy rendition of “The Impossible Dream” or “What the World Needs Now Is Love (Sweet Love).” Where cuff-linked comedians told stale gambling jokes and complained about their nagging wives. Where Eddie Fisher would open his show from the back of the showroom, sashaying down the aisle singing “Let Me Entertain You.” Where Liberace, the all-time champ of Vegas glitz and schmaltz, would send middle-aged matrons into ecstasy by parading around in red-white-and-blue hot pants, or being lowered onto the stage by wire from the rafters, the Peter Pan of camp overkill.

  Every hip magazine writer took a shot at the place. “It’s syrup city, soppy city, woozy, sentimental city,” wrote Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire. “People go there for nostalgia: to help them make it through the night, to cry a tear for the good times they’ve lost.” Hunter Thompson didn’t have much time for showgoing in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but he was predictably appalled when he saw Debbie Reynolds at the Desert Inn—“yukking across the stage in a silver Afro wig . . . to the tune of Sergeant Pepper, from the golden trumpet of Harry James.” (“Jesus, creeping shit!” cried his attorney-companion. “We’ve wandered into a time capsule!”) Among the burnt-out cases that John Gregory Dunne encounters in his semiautobiographical novel Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season is a desperate stand-up comic named Jackie Kasey (modeled on a real stand-up comic, Sammy Shore, who opened for Elvis), who has worked his way up from dives in Peoria to the showrooms in Vegas, only to realize that “his act was not working and there was still no one who knew his name.”

  “Dante did not write in the age of malls,” wrote the journalist and Dean Martin biographer Nick Tosches, “but he would have recognized Las Vegas, in any age, for what it is: a religion, a disease, a nightmare, a paradise for the misbegotten. It is a place where fat old ladies in wheelchairs, like wretched, disfigured supplicants at Lourdes, roll and heave in ghastly faith toward cold, gleaming maws of slot machines. A place where Jerry Lewis maketh the heart merry with the guffaw of the abyss, where Barbra Streisand lendeth wings to the soul with the unctuous simulacrum of pay-as-you-go sincerity.”

  And that doesn’t even count Wayne Newton, “Mr. Las Vegas,” a homegrown product who started out as a teenage singer in the downtown Fremont Hotel and grew up to become the longest-running headliner in Vegas history. His phenomenal success in Las Vegas was as much of a mystery to outsiders as it was an inspiration to the fans who flocked to his over-the-top shows, which often ran past two hours and featured everything from Wayne singing “God Bless America” accompanied by a patriotic slide show, to his soupy version of “MacArthur Park,” complete with a cake being drenched in a fake rainstorm. “The biggest no-talent dork to simultaneously be the biggest thing in contempo-squaresville make-believe,” wrote the rock critic Richard Meltzer—and who had the nerve to argue?

  Yet there was something irresistible, even essential, about Vegas entertainment in its glory years. Listen to any of the “Live from Vegas” albums from the 1960s and you can hear some of the greatest pop singers of the century—Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin—at their very best, backed by sumptuous, swinging orchestras and energized by live, appreciative audiences. Watch any of the flamboyantly over-the-top musical numbers on the annual Grammy Awards telecast, and you can see Vegas glitz and bombast updated for the hip-hop era. Even when it’s used as a pejorative (“He’s so Vegas”), the Las Vegas esthetic has become ingrained in American culture,
its influence seen in everything from Broadway megamusicals to Super Bowl halftime shows. No one with a love of all-out, all-American showmanship can hate it. No one who appreciates the craft of putting together an hour’s worth of music and patter for an audience of cocktail-sipping nightclub patrons can dismiss it. No one who wants to understand the enduring appeal of American popular entertainment can ignore it.

  What was Vegas entertainment? First of all it was big: big voices, big productions, big emotions. Vegas shows were brash, upbeat, and high-energy—particularly in the freewheeling (and for many years free-of-charge) lounges, where constant action, ad-libbing, and audience participation were part of the package. Tumult was the word used to describe high-voltage acts like Louis Prima and Keely Smith—the raspy-voiced bandleader and his deadpan vocalist wife, who rocked the Sahara lounge in the late fifties, probably the most influential of all Vegas lounge acts.

  The comedians were fast, loud, and in-your-face. The singers tugged at the heartstrings and cuddled up to the audience—but were careful not to put a damper on the heady, high-spirited atmosphere. Vic Damone, the Sinatra-influenced singer who performed in Las Vegas and nightclubs across the country throughout the 1950s and ’60s, discovered that he had to cut down on the love songs for the Vegas crowd. “You gotta do a lot of up things,” he said. “Nothing that’s maudlin or a downer. Because it’s a party. When people go to Vegas, they want to have a good time.”

  Despite the slick presentation and packaged emotions, Vegas shows had an appealing intimacy and informality. In between numbers, the singers would talk to the audience—about the hotel, the gambling, the desert heat, all the experiences they were sharing in this exotic resort town. The stars would talk about one another too: introducing fellow performers in the audience, sometimes even bringing them up onstage. It’s no accident that impressions were a big part of so many Vegas acts (Sammy Davis Jr., Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, Bobby Darin—even José Feliciano, for gosh sakes, did impressions). It was a way of making the audience feel clued in, with it, part of the showbiz crowd too.

  Vegas entertainment was comforting and familiar—never edgy or disruptive. “There was no experimenting,” said Dennis Klein, a TV comedy writer (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; The Larry Sanders Show) who began his career writing jokes for Vegas comics such as Jack Carter and Pat Henry. “Vegas is about smoothing out the rough edges, doing only what you think the audience wants or expects.” Yet Vegas entertainment also had a transgressive side, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in the broader, mass-audience culture. Comedians like Buddy Hackett and Don Rickles used words and racial epithets you could never hear on television. Nudity made its first appearance on a mainstream Las Vegas stage in 1957, when the Dunes Hotel introduced a new edition of Minsky’s Follies featuring a chorus line of topless showgirls. The Lido de Paris, Folies Bergere, and other production shows followed, making bare-breasted showgirls a Las Vegas staple. It was “naughty” entertainment for sheltered Middle America, helping to loosen the puritanical standards of the Eisenhower-era fifties and opening the door to the more audacious taboo-breaking of the late sixties.

  By that time, however, Vegas was struggling to keep pace. The arrival of the Beatles, the rise of the counterculture, the era of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, all combined to make Vegas in the late sixties look dated and square, your parents’ entertainment. Vegas singers might cover a Beatles song or two, but they stuck mainly to the pop standards from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. None of the major rock groups or solo stars of the era—the Rolling Stones or the Doors, Bob Dylan or Janis Joplin—wanted anything to do with Las Vegas. Hip young comics like George Carlin and Richard Pryor took a stab at Vegas early in their careers, but either got drummed out of town or left in frustration. At the beginning of the 1960s, Sinatra and the Rat Pack were the coolest guys in show business. By the end of the decade they were looking stale and worn, like a cigarette-stained shag rug from last night’s party.

  Vegas itself was changing as well. In 1967 Howard Hughes began buying up hotels on the Strip, replacing the old mob bosses and initiating a new, more cost-conscious corporate era. Caesars Palace opened in 1966, the first of the “themed” hotels that would ultimately remake the Strip and transform Las Vegas into a more family-friendly tourist destination. Even Sinatra, the town’s most celebrated star, was losing his luster—as his mob ties drew unflattering scrutiny, his longtime relationship with the Sands Hotel came to an abrupt end, and his cultural preeminence was threatened by a new generation of singers who wrote their own songs, styled themselves as anti-establishment rebels, and were idols of a younger audience who had no interest in Las Vegas.

  So, in a town that got blindsided by the rock revolution, it was only fitting that Vegas would turn to the original rock ’n’ roller, Elvis Presley, as the agent of its reinvention. With his spectacular 1969 comeback show at the International Hotel, Elvis supplanted Sinatra as Vegas’ signature star and most bankable attraction. He would return to the hotel—later the Las Vegas Hilton—every six months for the next seven years, and each of his sellout engagements was a bonanza for the city, bringing in visitors from around the world and giving a boost to business all over town.

  Las Vegas was also a witness to Elvis’s sad, oft-chronicled decline: the ballooning weight, the mounting drug use, the gradual deterioration of a star who grew increasingly bored and isolated in the Hilton’s thirtieth-floor penthouse suite—a prisoner of the town as well as its savior. His shows grew more bombastic, his performances more lazy and undisciplined. Even before his death in Memphis from a drug overdose in August 1977, Elvis had become a parody of himself. “For many,” wrote Dylan Jones in Elvis Has Left the Building, “Vegas Elvis was already Dead Elvis.”

  Yet, in that 1969 comeback show and for at least a year or two after it, Elvis was at his peak as a stage performer: trim and still impossibly handsome, his voice richer and more expressive than ever, his onstage charisma undimmed by age and the years of absence. He was no longer the transgressive young rock ’n’ roller of the 1950s. But he reinvented himself, expanded his range, and deepened his artistry in a way that few other entertainers have.

  Elvis’s comeback show at the International Hotel had a huge impact on Las Vegas. It raised the stakes, both in terms of money (his $125,000-a-week salary was a record at the time, soon to be surpassed) as well as production scale and promotional hype. He showed that Vegas audiences could be receptive to a broader range of music than the city was usually accustomed to—not just rock (at least in limited, nonthreatening doses), but also country, rhythm and blues, and even gospel. Most crucially, he created the model for a different kind of Vegas show: no longer an intimate nightclub encounter for an audience of a few hundred, but a big-star extravaganza, playing to thousands. He paved the way for the lavish shows of stars like Cher and Dolly Parton—and, much later, Céline Dion, Elton John, and a new generation of pop stars enlisted for Vegas “residencies.”

  Elvis, moreover, attracted a new kind of audience to Las Vegas. His fans were not the high rollers and sophisticated nightclub patrons who came to see Sinatra or Dean Martin. They were middle-class folks on a budget, thirtyish housewives who had screamed for Elvis when they were teenagers, families from the heartland who made Elvis the centerpiece of their once-a-year vacation splurge. It was the same audience that would later flock to Vegas for the extravagantly staged magic shows of Siegfried and Roy, the acrobatic spectacles of Cirque du Soleil, and the theme-park hotels re-creating the canals of Venice, the pyramids of Egypt, and the streets of Paris. In a sense, Elvis sounded the starting gun for all the changes that would transform Vegas over the next couple of decades, from a gambling-and-nightclub town for adults into a vacation destination for the whole family.

  Elvis, of course, never really left the building. Decades after his death, the city’s most famous star still looms over Las Vegas—in the Elvis impersonators and Elvis wedding chapels still sprinkled around the city, in the Elvis tribute
shows and Elvis festivals that keep his memory and music alive. And why not? It was a fruitful relationship for both. Las Vegas saved Elvis, at least for a little while. And Elvis showed Vegas its future.

  Two

  HOW VEGAS HAPPENED

  The Las Vegas Valley, with its abundant freshwater springs, was a convenient way station for travelers on the road to California in the nineteenth century. The Mormons briefly established a missionary outpost there in the 1850s. But permanent settlers in the area were rare until 1905, when the town of Las Vegas was officially incorporated, designated as a major division point on the newly completed railroad line connecting Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

  The town grew slowly over the next couple of decades. With a dearth of local industry but a steady stream of railroad passengers using the town as a stopover, Las Vegas early on marketed itself to tourists, who were drawn to its downtown hotels, bustling saloons, and houses of prostitution. Then, in 1931, two events helped set the stage for Las Vegas’ modern development. In March, Governor Fred B. Balzar signed a bill making Nevada the first state in the nation to allow legalized gambling. And a month later, on April 20, construction began on Boulder—later known as Hoover—Dam. This mammoth public works project, approved by Congress in 1928 to harness water from the nearby Colorado River, brought thousands of construction workers to the area. Most were housed in a new community, Boulder City, built expressly for the workers. But nearby Las Vegas, with its casinos and wide-open downtown, gave them a place to relax, let off steam, and spend their money.