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

by Zoglin, Richard

  Perhaps the unlikeliest Vegas headliner of the fifties was British playwright, songwriter, and raconteur Noël Coward. He had urged Dietrich not to demean herself with a Vegas show, but nonetheless agreed to appear at the Desert Inn for three weeks in June 1955, serving up witty songs and patter to an audience filled with celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, and Cole Porter. “This is a fabulous, extraordinary madhouse,” Coward wrote in his published diaries. “I have made one of the most sensational successes of my career and to pretend that I am not absolutely delighted would be idiotic.”

  By the mid-1950s, the popular image of Vegas—gambling capital, celebrity playground, mob hangout, entertainment Valhalla—was firmly fixed in the national consciousness. Hollywood stars came there to get married: Arlene Dahl and Fernando Lamas, Rita Hayworth and Dick Haymes, Joan Crawford and Pepsi Cola chairman Alfred N. Steele. Vegas became a popular location for Hollywood musicals and crime dramas—Las Vegas Story (with Jane Russell and Victor Mature) in 1952, Meet Me in Las Vegas (with Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse) in 1956. Ed Sullivan and other TV hosts brought their variety shows out to Las Vegas, where big-name guest stars were always plentiful. The bright-light city seemed a perfect symbol of postwar optimism, prosperity, and progress. Even the most ominous force of the age, the atomic bomb, couldn’t darken the mood. When atomic testing began in the Nevada desert in 1951, Vegas turned it into just another tourist attraction: the hotels organized rooftop viewing parties and packed “atomic box lunches” for guests who wanted to make an outing of it. The radiation fears would come later; for now Vegas radiated only glamour, excitement, and good times.

  The shows themselves, for the most part, adhered to the standard nightclub format of the era: an opening production number, usually featuring a chorus line of scantily clad showgirls; an opening act (often a comedian if the main act was a singer, or vice versa); followed by the headliner. Two performances a night (dinner show at 8:00 p.m., late show at midnight), with engagements typically lasting for two weeks—until the Sands’ Entratter came up with the idea of extending the runs to four weeks, to reduce the number of acts that needed to be booked. In return for their tops-in-the-business salaries, the performers had to abide by just one rule: keep the show to a strict time limit, usually an hour or less, to make sure patrons weren’t away from the casino for too long.

  For keeping people in the casino was the key to Vegas’ whole business model. That led to one of Las Vegas’ great innovations of the 1950s: the lounge show.

  In addition to the main showroom, most of the hotels also had bar-lounge areas inside or adjacent to the casino, with a small stage where music groups often played. In the early days, this was simply background music for the casino action. Then some hotel operators hit on the notion of turning the lounge entertainment into an attraction itself—a way to keep the party going (and customers in the casino) all through the night.

  The first Vegas act to really exploit the possibilities of the lounge was the Mary Kaye Trio, a vocal group made up of singer-guitarist Mary Kaye Kaaihue and her brother Norman (children of a Hawaiian-born vaudeville entertainer who called himself Johnny Ukulele), along with comedian-accompanist Frank Ross. They were working nightclubs in the Midwest and West and had just finished a popular engagement in the main room at the Last Frontier in 1953 when the hotel offered to extend their run by moving them over to the hotel’s Gay Nineties lounge.

  At the time, entertainment in the lounge could not include singing or talking, only music; otherwise, the casino would incur a 20 percent entertainment tax. To get around that, the Last Frontier curtained off the lounge, separating it from the casino, so that Mary Kaye and her group could do their full act. Even then, the trio got complaints that their singing was too loud. “[Hotel boss] Jake Kosloff wanted them to stop singing, to avoid distracting the gamblers,” recalled George Schlatter, who booked the trio into the hotel. “I convinced him to let them do one song every fifteen minutes. Then I told them to make it a medley—he’ll never know.” The audiences were soon clamoring for more. “They came on after midnight, invited all the chorus girls to come see them,” said Schlatter. “By the third night the place was packed. That was the first real lounge act.”

  The Mary Kaye Trio was a close-harmony group with a bright, upbeat, early-fifties pop sound (Time compared them to “the Andrews Sisters doing a Pepsodent commercial”). But what made the act click was the third member of the trio—Frank Ross, who played the accordion, harmonized in the vocals, and added freewheeling comedy. He would improvise bits, do parody versions of their songs, ad-lib with the audience. “Frank Ross stirred the pot. He made it a party,” said Lorraine Hunt-Bono, who grew up in Las Vegas, worked as a lounge singer for years, and later became lieutenant governor of Nevada. “Frank would see some goofy-lookin’ guy at the bar, and he’d go, ‘Hey, do you want me to make a drink for you?’ And Frank jumps down behind the bar, and he gets a big mixing glass, and he puts in this and that, and pretty soon the whole thing is fuming, smoking. And this cowboy would drink it, and the audience would just go crazy.”

  “Mary Kaye was incredible,” said comedian Pete Barbutti, who appeared in Vegas lounges throughout the sixties. “She played the guitar like a guy—just monster. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, they would all go to see Mary Kaye. And Frank Ross was the first comic I ever saw to actually work a Vegas lounge the way it was worked for forty or fifty years. The bartender would walk by and he would do a routine with the bartender, or somebody would sit down up front, a real tall guy, and he would become part of the next routine. To this day, I think they were the strongest act I’ve ever seen.”

  The Mary Kaye Trio introduced the elements that would define Vegas lounge entertainment for decades: improvisation, music mixed with comedy, and interaction with the audience. “You could shout out requests,” wrote Las Vegas Review-Journal entertainment reporter Mike Weatherford in Cult Vegas. “You could joke with the act. It was the place with no wall between performer and audience, no pretense and seemingly no script.” Said Sonny King, a singer who started out as a sidekick to Jimmy Durante and later became one of Vegas’ most popular lounge acts, “The lounges were freedom.”

  That often meant freedom to experiment musically. While singers in the main room stuck primarily to pop standards, Vegas lounge groups were dabbling in the newfangled sounds of rock ’n’ roll. One of them was Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, the bopping sextet that introduced Elvis to “Hound Dog” in 1956. Perhaps even more important in the development of rock ’n’ roll were the Treniers, a black group that delivered a rollicking mix of rhythm and blues and swing, and (with songs like “It Rocks! It Rolls! It Swings!” in 1952) was one of the first to actually popularize the term rock ’n’ roll.

  The group was started by Claude and Cliff Trenier, identical twin brothers from Alabama, and eventually grew to eight or nine members, most of them part of the extended family. The Treniers had a playful, rambunctious act, with lots of synchronized choreography and comical stage business. One of their props, for example, was a giant wooden straight razor, which they would wield menacingly at any member of the group who fouled up. They had a novelty number called “The Suitcase Song,” full of lewd double entendres (“I saw her snatch . . . her suitcase from the window”). Once, in the middle of a set, Cliff looked up at the keno board, saw that his numbers had come up, and raced out of the lounge to collect his winnings. “It was like a three-ring circus. You didn’t know who to watch,” recalled Skip Trenier, a nephew who joined the group in the late fifties. “Everybody loved the Treniers,” said Joe Darro, a longtime Vegas musician. “They had energy, they were funny, great music. If you were in a bad mood, you went to see the Treniers. When you came out, man, you felt terrific.”

  Black entertainers like the Treniers, however, were not treated so well offstage. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, Las Vegas was one of the most segregated cities outside the South—the Mississippi of the West, some called it—with b
lacks forbidden to work in the Strip hotels, except as menial busboys, maids, and dishwashers. African American performers could not stay in the hotels where they entertained, eat in the restaurants, or gamble in the casinos. Even big stars, like Sammy Davis Jr., were forced to stay in run-down rooming houses and motels on the predominantly black west side and had to enter and leave the hotels through the kitchen entrances. “The other acts could move around the hotel, go out and gamble, or sit in the lounge and have a drink,” Sammy wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can, “but we had to leave through the kitchen, with the garbage, like thieves in the night.”

  This was a concession to the high-rolling Southerners, who were a big segment of Vegas’ clientele in the early days. “There was a color line in Vegas,” said Stan Irwin, of the Sahara Hotel. “Headlining black performers could not stay or eat at the hotel. At that time, many of the money people that came in were Southern, Texas, and [the hotel owners] catered to their people’s whims, regardless of what their own standards were. At the Sahara in those days, we had a luxurious trailer placed outside in our parking lot, which had an immediate entrance to the back stage of the Casbar Theater. For many major artists, I’m sorry to say, their dressing room and their living quarters, for the time they were there, was that trailer. At night they still had to go to the west side. Being a New Yorker and not understanding this, I tried to compensate, but you feel like an idiot.”

  Most black entertainers gritted their teeth and tolerated the indignities; a few rebelled. When Josephine Baker, the expatriate American chanteuse living in Paris, appeared at the Last Frontier during a US tour in 1952, she had a clause written into her contract ensuring that black people would be allowed to attend the show—making her probably the first Vegas entertainer ever to perform before an integrated audience. When Harry Belafonte made his Las Vegas debut at the Thunderbird Hotel in 1952, he was shocked to discover that he was expected to stay across town, at a fleabag motel in a room that smelled of dog urine. “What’s wrong with it?” the proprietor asked. “It was good enough for Pearl Bailey’s dog—it’s good enough for you.” After one night there, Belafonte recalled in his autobiography, he phoned a mob-connected friend and got the Thunderbird to relent and give him a room. The next day, he celebrated by taking a dip in the pool, to gasps from some white guests—and requests for autographs.

  The racial barriers were challenged again in 1955 with the opening of the city’s first integrated hotel—the Moulin Rouge, located on the largely black west side. Aiming to rival the big hotels on the Strip in both luxury and entertainment, the Moulin Rouge hired former heavyweight champ Joe Louis as host and jazzman Benny Carter’s orchestra as the house band. It opened in March 1955 with much fanfare and over the next few months drew big crowds from both sides of the tracks, including many Strip patrons who would rush across town to catch the last show at 2:15 a.m. “We were the only ones in town doing a late show,” recalled Anna Bailey, who danced in the chorus line. “All of the Strip would empty out and come over to the Moulin Rouge. You’ve never seen so many stars—Tallulah Bankhead and Belafonte and Sammy Davis, all of them would hang out there.”

  But the Moulin Rouge soon ran into trouble. Two nights after the opening, Wardell Gray, the highly regarded tenor sax player in Benny Carter’s orchestra, left after the second set and never came back. His body was later found dumped in a weed field, with a broken neck. (The murder, which was suspected of being drug-related, was never solved.) Six months later, the Moulin Rouge abruptly closed, under mysterious circumstances. Some claimed financial mismanagement; others contended that the hotel owners on the Strip, upset at the business they were losing to the new club, made sure the Moulin Rouge didn’t stay open for long. In Vegas, anything was possible.

  Along with stars, Vegas in the 1950s offered splash—and plenty of skin.

  With the competition for big-name talent at a fever pitch, Vegas entertainment directors were constantly on the lookout for alternatives to what Variety called the “tyranny of names”—that is, entertainment that didn’t depend on high-salaried stars. Broadway shows were one potential solution, and a few hit musicals, like Guys and Dolls and Pajama Game, made their way to Vegas showrooms in the 1950s. But for a long-term answer to the shortage of big stars, Vegas soon turned not to Broadway, but to Paris.

  The French music-hall revue was born, by most accounts, in 1887 at the Folies-Bergère theater in Paris. The theater had opened in 1869, and for the first several years offered mainly concerts, operettas, and pantomime. But in 1887 it introduced a new show called Place aux Jeunes, which featured, for the first time, a chorus line of beautiful, ornately costumed dancing girls, along with a potpourri of acrobats, jugglers, singers, comedians, and other variety acts. The show was a spectacular success, and it made the Folies-Bergère the most popular music hall in Paris. Nudity began to appear on the Folies stage a few years later, and by the 1920s, Folies shows were famous for their chorus lines of topless dancers, in their feathered costumes and elaborate headdresses, as well as for some of the most celebrated stage entertainers of the era, such as Maurice Chevalier, Josephine Baker, and the popular French singer Mistinguett.

  In the years just after World War II, the Folies had a popular new rival in Paris: a club on the Champs-Élysées called Le Lido, best known for its chorus line of Bluebell Girls. Where the Folies dancers were petite, the Bluebells were tall and statuesque (a minimum of five feet nine inches), all handpicked and trained by a former Folies-Bergère dancer from Liverpool named Margaret Kelly, known as Madame Bluebell. The Lido shows had an especially international flavor. Most of the Bluebell Girls came from Britain or other English-speaking countries such as South Africa. There were lots of highly visual, circus-style acts, designed to appeal to an audience of non-French-speaking tourists. And its shows were staged by, of all things, an American: a St. Louis–born choreographer named Donn Arden, who had established a relationship with the Lido while doing shows for US troops in Europe during World War II.

  In 1958, Desert Inn owner Moe Dalitz was getting ready to open a new hotel in Las Vegas, the Stardust. With eleven hundred rooms, it was the largest hotel yet in Vegas, a bland, barrackslike structure that aimed more for mass than class: a big casino for low rollers, rather than a small casino for high rollers. The Desert Inn’s entertainment director, Frank Sennes, was put in charge of booking acts for the new hotel—a tall order, given that most of the top stars had already been snapped up by other hotels. So Sennes came up with the bright idea of getting Donn Arden, who had been staging dance numbers for the Desert Inn since the early fifties, to bring over his Lido show from Paris to the Stardust.

  It would be the most elaborate production Las Vegas had ever seen. Arden fashioned a new show out of numbers from past Lido productions, along with new elements created especially for Vegas. Rehearsals were held in Paris, using the French costumes and sets and a troupe of more than fifty, including twelve Bluebell Girls. Back in Vegas, the Stardust’s seven-hundred-seat showroom was redesigned, expanded, and outfitted with three hydraulic lifts, and the orchestra was moved off to the side to open up more space for the mammoth show.

  The Lido de Paris opened at the Stardust on July 1, 1958, with a splash, literally. For the opening number, a curtain of showgirls lined the revolving stage, while others descended from the ceiling and dove into an eleven-by-thirty-foot swimming pool. One eye-popping number was set in ancient Rome, with a giant mirror reflecting the aquatic maneuvers for the audience. Another was a re-creation of Maxim’s in turn-of-the-century Paris. A giant ice rink rose to stage level for a skating display by Olympic figure skater Jacqueline du Bief. Interspersed with the production numbers was a parade of variety acts, including a magician, a pair of singing acrobats, and a juggler who kept bowls and plates spinning simultaneously on poles.

  What got most of the attention, however, were the topless Bluebell Girls. Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Les Devor described what was at the time a startling sight: “From the ceil
ing descend platforms, each with a bare-bosomed beauty, standing cool as you please, and before the surprise has caused nearsighted gentlemen to repair their thoughtlessness by putting on glasses, the girls are whisked upward into the rafters. . . . Being bashful by disposition tends to inhibit anything but professional analysis of the plenteous expanse of anatomies presented.”

  Nudity was not entirely new to the Las Vegas stage. Strippers had long been part of the burlesque shows downtown, and one of the most famous strippers, Lili St. Cyr—known for her onstage bubble baths—was still appearing regularly at El Rancho Vegas, often paired with comedian Joe E. Lewis. In January 1957, the Dunes Hotel, in a last-ditch effort to turn around its struggling fortunes, brought in a new edition of Minsky’s Follies, Harold Minsky’s racy burlesque shows that had gotten drummed out of New York City during the reformist administration of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Minsky’s Goes to Paris, the new Dunes show, featured topless showgirls for the first time ever on a mainstream Vegas stage. The show was a smash hit and almost singlehandedly saved the hotel.

  Minsky’s Goes to Paris, however, was in the lowbrow burlesque tradition—where bump-and-grind strippers were frankly meant to be titillating and intended for a mostly male audience. The Lido de Paris was a classy show, aimed at a general audience, and its great triumph was to make its nudity look tasteful and artistic. “Even with bare-breasted beauts all over the place, even dripping from ceiling wells, there is nothing overly sexy in the production numbers,” Variety said. “It’s done with refinement and an accent on art.” Even gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, certainly no libertine, called the show “the most spectacular I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in perfect taste.”