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

  The first establishment to bring topflight entertainment to Las Vegas was the Meadows Club, a hotel and casino opened in 1931 on the highway connecting Las Vegas and Boulder City by a couple of bootleggers from Los Angeles, Frank and Louis Cornero. Hoping to lure big spenders from LA, they hired a former Broadway producer named Jack Laughlin to book entertainment for the club. Opening night was a gala black-tie affair that drew a crowd of five thousand and featured music by Jack Liddell and his band, the Meadow Larks. Among the nightclub acts that played the Meadows Club over the next few months were the singing Gumm Sisters—featuring nine-year-old Frances, later known as Judy Garland.

  But when a fire destroyed much of the hotel just a few months after opening, the Corneros sold out, and the Meadows closed down within a year. Las Vegas, meanwhile, looked for other ways of luring visitors to the thriving town. In 1935 it hosted the first Helldorado Days, an annual festival and parade celebrating the town’s Western heritage. Hollywood celebrities also discovered Las Vegas; some, like silent film star Clara Bow and her husband, Rex Bell, bought houses there. Another big draw was Nevada’s liberalized divorce laws (also instituted in 1931), which required only six weeks of residency to obtain a divorce decree. When Ria Gable spent a six-week vacation in Las Vegas in 1939 to secure a divorce from her husband, Clark (who was having an affair with film star Carole Lombard), Vegas reaped even more publicity and Hollywood cachet.

  Then, in 1940, a San Diego hotel man and former big-band musician named Thomas Hull decided that Las Vegas needed a first-class resort hotel. Rather than build it in the busy downtown, however, Hull had the novel idea of situating it just outside the city limits (thus avoiding city taxes), on thirty-three acres of land on US Route 91, the highway leading to Los Angeles. He called the place El Rancho Vegas, after a chain of El Rancho hotels he operated in other cities. The rambling, dude-ranch-like complex had sixty-three bungalow-style rooms, along with a casino, swimming pool, riding stables, and, towering above the hotel, a windmill with neon-lit blades, which served as a beacon for travelers approaching the desert town from the southwest.

  El Rancho Vegas promised not only luxury accommodations, but also top entertainment. Its grand opening, on April 3, 1941, featured former vaudeville star Frank Fay and Garwood Van’s orchestra. Among the acts that followed in the next few months were comedienne Fifi D’Orsay, singer Martha Demeter, and the comedy-dance team of Burton and Kaye—not major stars, but first-class nightclub entertainment was now coming to Las Vegas regularly.

  El Rancho had managerial problems, and Hull sold out after a year. But the hotel was enough of a success to quickly attract a competitor. In October 1942, Texas movie-theater magnate R. E. Griffith opened another hotel on Route 91, a mile south of El Rancho, which he called the Last Frontier. Determined to outdo El Rancho in both entertainment and luxury accommodations, Griffith hired Maxine Lewis, a singer from Los Angeles, to book acts for the hotel’s six-hundred-seat Ramona Room. She used her Hollywood connections (and a hefty talent budget) to bring in such well-known entertainers as comedian Bert Wheeler and country singer Jimmy Wakely. But her biggest coup came in January of 1944, when Lewis hired an old friend from vaudeville for a two-week engagement, at the then-lofty salary of $5,000 a week: Sophie Tucker.

  Tucker, the brassy, zaftig “Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,” was an internationally known vaudevillian who remained a popular figure in nightclubs and on radio through the 1930s and ’40s. The biggest star yet to appear on a Las Vegas stage, she was greeted with much hoopla: escorted from the train station to the hotel on a hook-and-ladder fire truck, her opening night hailed with sirens and sky-sweeping searchlights. In terms of world-class entertainment, it was Las Vegas’ coming-out party.

  With World War II came a temporary halt in hotel construction—though not in Las Vegas’ rapid growth. A giant magnesium plant was built nearby, in the newly created town of Henderson, to manufacture the metal alloy needed for planes, bombs, and other war matériel. An Air Force flight-training facility was opened just north of the city, on what later became Nellis Air Force Base. The defense workers and military men who poured into the area provided yet more customers for the town’s busy clubs and casinos. The now-completed Hoover Dam—no longer a job creator, but by this time a big tourist attraction—drew even more visitors to the area. By the end of the war, Las Vegas was ready for its next big leap forward. And a new group of investors were there to cash in: the mob.

  According to (somewhat romanticized) Vegas legend, it was all Bugsy Siegel’s idea. The New York hoodlum—born Benjamin Siegel, one of the most ruthless members of New York’s organized-crime syndicate—had moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s to oversee the mob’s West Coast operations. There he became a gregarious, sharp-dressing, if borderline psychotic, fixture on the Hollywood scene. But in 1941 his sights turned toward Las Vegas, when he was sent there by Meyer Lansky to get mob control over the local race-betting operations. Seeing the possibilities in the booming gambling town, Siegel (or by some accounts it was Lansky) came up with the idea of opening a mob-controlled luxury resort there. Thus was born the famous Flamingo.

  Actually, it was already being built—by Billy Wilkerson, an LA nightclub owner and founder of the Hollywood Reporter. In 1945 he had begun construction of a luxury hotel on a parcel of land farther south on Route 91 than either El Rancho or the Last Frontier. But he ran out of money and went for help to his friend Siegel, who convinced his mob partners to invest $1 million in the hotel. In short order, Siegel took over the project and began spending wildly. He paid premium prices on the black market for scarce wartime materials, added needless frills like a separate sewer line for each room, and paid thousands of dollars in overtime in an effort to get the place ready by Christmas of 1946.

  The Flamingo just about made it: though only partially completed, it opened on December 26, 1946. The new hotel marked a departure for Las Vegas in a number of ways. Instead of the Old West decor of El Rancho and the Last Frontier, the Flamingo had an LA-inspired Sunbelt-modern design—sleek lines, pastel colors, a glass façade, and a signature flamingo sitting atop its tall entry sign. Inside, too, the Flamingo broke with tradition, establishing the design strategy for virtually every Vegas hotel-casino to come. Unlike El Rancho, where the casino was almost hidden away behind the restaurant, the Flamingo made the casino the hub of the action, forcing everyone who entered or left the hotel to pass through it. The casino had no windows or clocks: a sunless, timeless netherworld where the gambling, booze, and good times could continue nonstop.

  Determined to make the Flamingo the prime Vegas destination for big spenders from Los Angeles, Siegel brought in a first-class array of talent for opening night: Jimmy Durante, the big-schnozzed veteran of Broadway, movies, and nightclubs, along with emcee George Jessel, singer Rose Marie, and Xavier Cugat’s orchestra. Despite a rainstorm that grounded some of the celebrities who planned to fly in from Los Angeles, the opening was a glittery, star-studded affair. “The town has been converted to an opulent playground,” AP’s Bob Thomas reported.

  But after the splashy opening, traffic at the half-finished hotel dropped off, and Siegel closed the place after just four weeks so construction could be completed. “The third day all the stars went back, and we were working to nine or ten people in the dining room,” Rose Marie recalled. The Flamingo reopened in March, the most luxurious hotel with the biggest stars in Las Vegas. But Siegel’s overspending had ballooned the total cost to around $6 million (from an initial projection of $1.5 million), and the bosses back East were not happy. They suspected that Siegel was pocketing some of the money and that his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, was spiriting it out of the country to Swiss bank accounts. True or not, Siegel’s tenure as a Vegas entrepreneur would come to an abrupt halt. On June 20, 1947, just six months after his dream project opened, Siegel was shot to death in Virginia Hill’s Beverly Hills bungalow. One bullet knocked his eye clean out of the socket.

  The Flamingo carried on under the new, mor
e efficient mob management of Gus Greenbaum and Dave Berman, and for the rest of the 1940s it set the pace for Vegas glamour and big-name entertainment. Siegel had hired Maxine Lewis away from the Last Frontier as entertainment director, and she opened the checkbook for such major stars as the Andrews Sisters, Abbott and Costello, Lena Horne, Frankie Laine, and (in 1948, when they were the hottest nightclub act in the country) the comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

  The Flamingo’s older rivals on the Strip had to ratchet up their own entertainment to compete. El Rancho booked top acts like the Ritz Brothers and saloon comic Joe E. Lewis, who remained a fixture at the hotel throughout the 1950s. The Last Frontier, meanwhile, introduced a flamboyant, wavy-haired pianist who would become one of Vegas’ most popular stars, then going by the name of Walter Liberace.

  Even as big-name entertainers began coming to Las Vegas, the city retained much of its frontier, small-town vibe. Fremont Street downtown had an old-time, honky-tonk charm. The few hotels along Route 91 were still lonely outposts separated by expanses of desert. Locals and tourists alike flocked to the cheap, all-you-can-eat “chuckwagon” buffets. “The fun of Las Vegas then was its smallness, its rustic, Old West quality,” said singer Mel Tormé, who first appeared at El Rancho Vegas in 1946. “In those days, I got the feeling that people might have had in old Virginia City, or Tombstone, Arizona. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to see guys walking down the street with six-guns strapped to their hips.”

  But the Old West town was growing rapidly. In 1948 a fourth hotel opened on what would soon become known as the Strip—the Thunderbird, with a Native American theme and headliners like Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. Then, in 1950, came the biggest, most elegant Vegas resort yet: Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn.

  Clark, a former bellhop, craps dealer, and bar owner from San Diego, started building the hotel in 1946, on a parcel of land he had bought across the street from the Last Frontier. But like the Flamingo’s Billy Wilkerson, he ran short of money, had to stop construction, and only finished it with backing from a group of Cleveland investors headed by racketeer Moe Dalitz. Clark remained the hotel’s ubiquitous front man (it would always be known as Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn), a popular civic leader and public-relations spokesman for the city—“one of the greatest handshakers in all of Las Vegas,” as columnist Ralph Pearl put it. The Desert Inn was another modern pleasure palace, with Bermuda-pink buildings, curved swimming pool, and a glass-enclosed third-floor bar with a panoramic view of the desert. The hotel’s opening in April 1950 (with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy as headliners in the showroom, the largest in Vegas) was the splashiest, most widely covered event yet in Las Vegas’ short history—“probably the turning point in the nationwide acceptance of Las Vegas as the entertainment as well as the gambling center of the country,” noted longtime Vegas columnist Bill Willard.

  National attention was also being focused on the men behind the scenes. For organized crime, the Las Vegas casinos were a golden opportunity: an ideal place to launder money and skim off some of the casino profits (tax-free) for themselves in the process. The mob presence was an open secret in Las Vegas, benignly accepted by the entertainers and the locals alike. “The boys,” after all, invested big money in Las Vegas, brought in top entertainment, and were careful to keep the most unsavory stuff out of town. “The rule was, in fact, that nobody gets killed in Vegas,” said Susan Berman, daughter of the Flamingo’s manager Dave Berman.

  The mob’s involvement in Vegas made national headlines in November 1950, when Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver brought his traveling hearings on organized crime to the city. (Wilbur Clark was among those who testified; he denied knowing anything about the criminal background of the Desert Inn investors.) But the hearings had little immediate effect. Not until several years later, in 1955, did Nevada finally establish a Gaming Control Board, to approve new licenses for casinos, and a few years after that a “Black Book” of undesirables who were banned from any casino in the state. In fact, Kefauver’s investigation may actually have helped spur Vegas’ growth: by highlighting mob involvement in illegal gambling operations around the country, it led to a crackdown on unlawful betting elsewhere, which made Las Vegas more attractive as a relative safe zone.

  Las Vegas’ rapid growth as an entertainment center reached a critical mass late in 1952, with the opening of two more Strip hotels, boasting perhaps the savviest entertainment operations yet. In October, Los Angeles jeweler Milton Prell, with the help of Phoenix builder and part owner Del Webb, opened a new hotel on the site of the old Club Bingo, which they named the Sahara. Two months later came yet another desert-themed hotel, the Sands, owned by Texas oilman Jake Friedman, with backing from an array of mob-connected figures from back East and run by one of the nation’s top nightclub men, Jack Entratter.

  Entratter, a charismatic, six-foot-two-inch impresario who had been manager of New York’s renowned Copacabana, brought an infusion of New York glamour and sophistication to Las Vegas. The Sands opened in December 1952 with a four-day orgy of festivities—“a hunk of promotion surpassing the palmy days of P. T. Barnum,” Variety reported—with nightclub star Danny Thomas as the opening headliner. When Thomas had to bow out one night with voice problems, his replacements were Jimmy Durante, Frankie Laine, Jane Powell, and the Ritz Brothers. Entratter brought in key staffers from the Copa (including a crackerjack PR man named Al Freeman) and signed up many of the stars he had established relationships with back in New York, among them Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis. In short order the Sands became the premier entertainment venue on the Vegas Strip. “Jack Entratter is responsible for the transformation of Las Vegas from a little desert village to a town boiling over with glamour,” wrote journalist John Gunther.

  To compete with the Sands for talent, the Sahara had to be more creative. Entratter and others had snapped up many of the biggest nightclub stars, so entertainment director Stan Irwin hired a top booker, Bill Miller—a onetime vaudeville hoofer and owner of the famed Riviera nightclub in Fort Lee, New Jersey—to go after new attractions, many of them Hollywood stars who had never done a nightclub act before. Ray Bolger, the Broadway and Hollywood song-and-dance man (the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz), was the opening headliner. Mae West, the sixty-one-year-old former Hollywood sex queen, came out of retirement for a Sahara show, surrounded by a chorus line of male bodybuilders. In perhaps its biggest coup, the Sahara convinced film legend Marlene Dietrich to make her nightclub debut at the hotel, for a record $30,000 a week. (“It’s worth any price, if it’s a first,” Bill Miller liked to say.) She caused quite a stir with her revealing gown, a skintight black net affair that appeared to be transparent above the waist. Show business’s first “topless grandmother” got a standing ovation.

  By 1953 Vegas was riding high. The city’s population had grown to forty-three thousand, up from just eighty-four hundred in 1940. Eight million tourists were visiting annually. Seven resort hotels now lined the Strip, with several more in the planning stages. Top entertainers were tripping over one another in the showrooms. “Las Vegas, as now constituted, is the No. 1 cafe town in America, which means the world,” Variety editor Abel Green wrote. “No resort, spa, or capital has as much big-league, top-name talent concentrated in one spot as this gambling Gehenna.”

  Las Vegas had come up with an ingenious, almost-foolproof business plan. The hotels needed big stars to attract visitors to their moneymaking casinos. And they could pay those stars top salaries by using the profits from the moneymaking casinos. By the mid-fifties Vegas hotels were routinely shelling out $25,000 a week for the biggest stars—and charging patrons next to nothing to see them. (Most Vegas showrooms had no cover charge in the 1950s, and in many cases not even a minimum on food and drink.) No ordinary nightclub in New York or Miami or Chicago could compete with that.

  Concerns about the escalating salaries for top stars were raised almost from the start. As early as 1950 the casino bosses talked about banding together
to centralize booking in an effort to eliminate bidding wars. But this prompted a backlash from the performers and their agents, who threatened to boycott Las Vegas altogether if the hotel owners colluded to hold down salaries. Another worry was that the gold rush for star headliners would soon deplete the pool of talent. “Failure of the entertainment industry to develop new names will eventually affect the growth of Las Vegas, according to local bonifaces,” Variety reported in December 1952. “At this point the hotel owners believe that the insufficient supply of top talent for all the inns will cause a diminishing of interest in the hotels.”

  But Vegas proved amazingly resourceful in finding new talent to keep the showrooms filled. TV comedians like Red Buttons and Phil Silvers were lured out to Vegas during the summer breaks of their popular shows. Hollywood stars on the downswing of their movie fame—Betty Hutton, Esther Williams, Ginger Rogers, Van Johnson—found new life (and a fat payday) as Vegas performers. For virtually every top nightclub singer in the country—Nat King Cole, Dinah Shore, Rosemary Clooney, Vic Damone—Vegas was an essential stop.

  The scramble for new acts led to some strange bookings. In 1954 a down-on-his-luck movie actor named Ronald Reagan debuted his own nightclub show at the Last Frontier Hotel. “We put him with a musical group called the Continentals,” recalled George Schlatter, the future Laugh-In producer, who was then booking talent for the Last Frontier. “The act was terrible.” The Sands brought in the formidable Broadway diva Tallulah Bankhead for a much-publicized Vegas show in 1953. She croaked out a few songs (“I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Bye Bye Blackbird”), made some jokes about Vegas casinos, and did a dramatic reading of a Dorothy Parker story about a woman waiting in vain for a phone call from her lover. “The artistry of her delivery carried it unfailingly, and brought her a near ovation from the capacity crowd,” raved Variety. “Why do we do it?” Bankhead said in an interview with Time. “Dahling, for the loot, of course.”