The Lido was originally booked for six months, but with business booming the run was extended to a year, and it sparked a rush by other producers to jump on the topless bandwagon. A few weeks after the Lido opened, producer Barry Ashton added six topless girls to the chorus line of his floor show at El Rancho Vegas, and he promised more to come. “Bare chests are the coming thing here—it’s what the public wants and we’re giving it to them,” Ashton told reporters. “It will soon be nothing to see a nude girl on the Strip. All the showgirls along the Strip are going to be replaced by nudes.”
The prediction titillated some, threw the fear of God into others. Bishop Robert J. Dwyer of the Reno diocese of the Catholic Church sent a letter to pastors in the state, urging all Catholics to boycott the nude shows. Other religious leaders chimed in, hinting that the campaign against nudity might be a wedge to ridding the state of its other vices—namely, gambling and quickie divorces. “It is time that the people of Nevada protected themselves and their homes against those whose only concern is to turn a profit, at the cost of untold hurt to the citizenry,” said the Reverend Walter Bishop of Las Vegas’ First Baptist Church. “Whence are our liberal laws leading? Will legalized prostitution and the sale of narcotics be advocated next?”
Religious leaders were not the only ones with qualms about the great uncovering. Many of the hotel bosses also assailed the nudity trend. A split emerged, between the hotels on the east side of the Strip (the Sands, Riviera, Desert Inn, and other old-line Vegas resorts that had a lock on most of the major stars), and the newer upstarts on the west side (the Dunes, Stardust, and—the one old-timer—El Rancho Vegas) that were looking for new ways to compete. Jack Entratter of the Sands led the opposition, in what Variety inevitably dubbed the Battle of the Bosoms. “The spread of nude shows along the Strip is the worst thing that could happen to Las Vegas,” said Entratter. “It could destroy six years of work, expensive campaigns, and sincere efforts to make Las Vegas the top entertainment resort in the world.” Monte Proser, the former New York theater producer now overseeing entertainment at the Tropicana, warned, “Nudes are bad for this town. Family groups who might be planning to come here may think all shows come under that category.”
Beldon Katleman, owner of El Rancho Vegas, caved quickly to the pressure, removing his nude showgirls and vowing that henceforth all women on his stage would be covered up. “Please accept my reassurance,” Katleman wrote in a telegram to the state’s clergymen, “that it was at no time the intention of El Rancho Vegas to offend the public conscience or moral standard with our show presentations.” But the Dunes and the Stardust, counting their hefty box-office receipts, refused to buckle. The Dunes opened a new edition of its Minsky’s show and even added five more nude showgirls to the six original ones. “We certainly do not mean to offend anyone, and we don’t want anyone who might be offended to attend our show,” said Major A. Riddle, the Dunes’ president. “We clearly advertise that the show is for adults only.” The Stardust vowed that the Lido would continue unchanged, pointing out that the show was doing excellent business and that audience members were writing to praise its “good taste.”
Before long, Vegas set its sights on the French revue that had started it all at the Folies-Bergère. Lou Walters, the New York nightclub impresario known for his lavish floor shows at the Latin Quarter and other nightclubs (and father of TV newscaster Barbara Walters), had earlier tried to bring the Folies Bergere to the New Frontier Hotel, but the deal fell through when the hotel ran into financial trouble. Then Walters was hired to help turn around another struggling Vegas hotel, the Tropicana, and he looked once again to Paris, making a deal to bring the Folies Bergere to Las Vegas for the first time.
Billed as “The Show That Made Paris Famous,” the Folies Bergere opened at the Tropicana on Christmas Eve, 1959. Another sumptuous production, it had a cast of eighty, including fourteen topless “mannequins,” dozens of other dancing girls—performing, among other things, their trademark, high-kicking cancan number—and an assortment of variety acts, from Georges Lafaye’s marionettes to the singing Kim Sisters. The Folies Bergere was more traditional than the Lido: no high-tech stage machinery or levitating ice rinks, just an illuminated runway encircling the orchestra pit, to show off the girls in their sequins, furs, and feathered bustles, backpacks, and headdresses—all designed in Paris by Folies artistic director Michel Gyarmathy. “The Lou Walters show, which begins in a furious swirl and builds to a literal maelstrom of petticoats and pulchritude, may be around for as long as dice role in this neon jungle,” raved Cecil Smith in the Los Angeles Times. It was frothy, French, and fabulous.
The Lido and Folies Bergere created the model for the splashy, slightly racy production show that would be a staple of the Las Vegas Strip for decades. They didn’t emphasize or promote their nudity, always presenting their shows as artistic, sophisticated Continental entertainment. But once the topless Rubicon had been crossed, nudie shows were soon popping up all over Vegas—in lounges and as opening numbers in the main showrooms, with tacky, punning titles like “Naughty ’n’ Ice,” “Good Nudes of ’61,” “Around the World in Sexty Minutes,” and “Panties Inferno.” (The last, too silly even for Vegas, was soon changed to “Oriental Inferno.”) Sometimes the hotels had the girls cover up for the dinner show, when kids might be in the audience, and uncover at midnight. (In truth, they were never entirely nude: G-strings always hid the private parts, and pasties sometimes covered the nipples—though less in the interest of modesty than esthetic uniformity.) Some Vegas stars, like Marlene Dietrich, objected to the topless fad, pointing out that their own sex appeal depended on suggestion, not explicit skin. Carol Channing canceled an engagement at the Tropicana because she didn’t want to follow the Folies Bergere. “Nothing kills laughs like nudity,” she said. But everyone now seemed to have skin in the game: nudity was in Vegas to stay.
Even as the production shows thrived, however, the stars continued to reign. The Vegas headliner show was not a new form of entertainment, but a fresh iteration of an old one: a nightclub show with more splash, more action, more fun. The tony nightclubs that flourished in major cities during the 1940s and ’50s—the Copa and the Latin Quarter in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, Ciro’s in Los Angeles—catered to a sophisticated, well-mannered, big-city audience. Vegas drew a broader, more middle-class crowd—most of them people on vacation, dazzled by the casino action and showbiz electricity, eager to be entertained.
Seeing big stars they knew from movies and television—Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Martin and Lewis—was part of the thrill. But Vegas also created its own stars. Two enormously popular acts from the 1950s seemed to embody much of what made Vegas entertainment special. They weren’t invented in Las Vegas, but they honed their unique acts there, and they could not have flourished anywhere else. Even their nicknames seemed to encapsulate the Vegas style and spirit. One was a lounge act so manic and uninhibited that it became known simply as the Wildest. The other was a one-of-a-kind performer who had the temerity to call himself Mr. Showmanship. They were Vegas’ two great creations of the 1950s.
Louis Prima was born in New Orleans in 1910, the son of Italian immigrants. He learned to play the trumpet at age fourteen and by his twenties was leading a Dixieland group in New York City jazz clubs. Through the 1930s and early ’40s Prima worked with various small groups and big bands in both New York and Los Angeles, had a few hit recordings, and wrote “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the signature number for Benny Goodman’s orchestra. But by the late forties, as the big bands were breaking up, Prima’s career was suffering. Even when he added a new singer—a girl from Norfolk, Virginia, named Dorothy Smith, whom he met on the road and married in 1953—the gigs were harder to come by. Growing desperate, Prima called up his friend Bill Miller—the former owner of the Riviera club in New Jersey, who was now booking acts for the Sahara in Las Vegas—and pleaded for a job.
Miller told him the showroom was booked solid, but offered Prima and Smith (
now calling herself Keely—her last name at birth, before her mother’s divorce) two weeks in the hotel’s lounge. It was something of a comedown for the pair; they had played the main room at El Rancho Vegas two years before. But they needed the work, so they made the cross-country drive from New York to Las Vegas, opening in the 150-seat Casbar Lounge on November 24, 1954. Smith was five months pregnant, and Prima almost backed out of the whole gig when he found out no blacks were allowed in the audience. (An Italian American jazzman with a distinctively raspy voice, Prima was sometimes mistaken by listeners for black.) But they were an immediate hit—“absolutely the hottest combo to hit this town yet,” said the Las Vegas Sun—and before the end of their run, Miller offered to extend them in the lounge indefinitely.
Nobody else was like them. Prima was a swinging trumpet player, an inventive jazz singer, and a natural comedian. He gave songs like “That Old Black Magic” and “Just a Gigolo” a raucous, improvisational energy—bouncing around onstage, playing with the lyrics, making fun of the song even as he put his own, inimitable stamp on it. Soon he added a saxophonist from New Orleans, Sam Butera, who gave the act another jolt. Butera, the most animated sax man in the business, would bob up and down wildly as he played, while drummer Bobby Morris—whom Prima convinced to leave his jazz quartet at the Black Magic club and join the group—drove everything forward with a supercharged, four-four “shuffle beat” that many considered an early influence on rock ’n’ roll. “The sound, the feel, the excitement, the intensity of the group, was beyond belief,” Morris recalled. “Buddy Rich once said to me, ‘Nobody could work that hard and live.’ ”
What really made the act unique, however, was the interplay between Louis and Keely. She would typically stand impassively, waiting for her turn to sing, while Prima bounced and brayed, taunted and teased her, like a hyperactive kid trying to crack up his straitlaced sister. When she finally took the microphone, her voice was as pure and unfussy—no showy flourishes or vibrato—as Prima’s was raw and untamed. The obvious sexual heat between them added spice to the combination: it was the lady and the tiger, Tracy and Hepburn (or Sonny and Cher, whose act a few years later bore a lot of similarities). A match made in lounge-show heaven.
Prima and Smith did five shows a night at the Sahara, from midnight until dawn, six nights a week, at least thirty weeks a year for the next five years. They were the hottest lounge show in town. The Casbar Lounge (a tiny space, with the bar in between the audience and the stage) was enlarged to accommodate the crowds, which were sometimes lined up ten deep in the casino to get in. They were dubbed the wildest show in Vegas, soon shortened to simply the Wildest. They rocked the place with a “wild, relentless, driving beat that punched through the lounge’s smoke and chatter and left crowds in awe,” wrote jazz critic Scott Shea. Said Bobby Morris, “It was havoc. Absolute havoc.”
Their success in Las Vegas reignited Prima and Smith’s career. They recorded hit albums for Capitol Records, were frequent guests on Ed Sullivan’s and Dinah Shore’s variety shows, and starred in two movies together. In 1960 they graduated from the Sahara lounge to the main showroom at the Desert Inn, where some of the intimate lounge-show magic was lost, but they still drew sellout crowds. Only their divorce in 1961 ended their remarkable Vegas run together—a galvanizing blend of music and mayhem, the greatest lounge act in Las Vegas history.
Five months after Prima and Smith began cooking in the Sahara lounge, a new hotel opened down the street. The $8.5 million Riviera was perhaps the most elegant resort yet on the Las Vegas Strip: nine stories tall (the Strip’s first high-rise), with plush European decor and a state-of-the-art showroom big enough to accommodate Broadway musicals. For its grand opening in April 1955, the hotel also set a new salary record for Las Vegas, paying $50,000 a week to an entertainer who was already a Vegas favorite: Liberace.
He was born Wladziu (Americanized to Walter) Liberace in West Allis, Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee, on May 16, 1919. A child prodigy at the piano, he began playing professionally soon after high school—both classical concerts (performing a Liszt concerto with the Chicago symphony at age twenty) and popular tunes with dance bands and at cocktail lounges in the area. Gradually he developed a nightclub act that combined the two: mixing Beethoven and boogie-woogie, turning “Home on the Range” into a Strauss waltz, or doing “Mairzy Doats,” a popular nonsense song at the time, in the classical style of Bach, Brahms, and Chopin. The act was catching on in clubs across the Northeast and Midwest when Maxine Lewis booked him for an engagement at the Last Frontier in November 1944. After a smash opening night, she doubled his salary and made him a regular at the hotel, where he would appear twenty-five times over the next ten years.
Liberace soon dropped his first name and developed a flamboyant, tongue-in-cheek stage persona. He dressed in gaudy dinner jackets and always had a candelabra (a prop he picked up from the 1945 Chopin biopic, A Song to Remember) sitting atop his grand piano. He flaunted a showy, romantic, highly visual keyboard style—embellishing every piece with extravagant runs and exaggerated wrist bounces. He could turn “Chopsticks” into a concerto, slide effortlessly from Grieg to Gershwin. “I longed to please the man on the street,” he said, “the people who had relatively little appreciation of music.”
In the early 1950s Liberace became a nationwide sensation: recording hit albums, playing sold-out concerts, and starring in a popular syndicated TV series. His dimpled smile, silky voice, and over-the-top outfits (campy before people knew what camp was; gay before gay was allowed to be spoken) made him a matinee idol for millions of middle-aged women—a surrogate son, nonthreatening boyfriend, and endlessly charming tea companion, all wrapped up in one tuxedo.
By the time the Riviera lured him away from the New Frontier, he was pushing that image to the hilt. For his April 1955 opening, Liberace came out in a white silk lamé tuxedo, designed for him by Christian Dior. Midway through the act, he changed into another, even flashier outfit, a dinner jacket decorated with what was advertised as more than a million sequins. Along with piano selections ranging from “Clair de Lune” to “Beer Barrel Polka,” there were three choreographed production numbers, including a dream sequence featuring an eight-year-old dancer playing Liberace as a child. The show ran an exorbitant hour and forty minutes, and for an encore Liberace made yet another costume change, coming out in an ornate, beaded black satin jacket. “Go ahead and laugh,” he told the crowd. “You paid for it.”
Like each splashy new hotel that opened in Vegas during the 1950s, Liberace had to keep topping himself. In later years the outfits would grow more outrageous (a calf-length ermine coat trimmed in diamonds), the stage gimmicks more outré (wiring himself with twinkling lights, or being driven onstage in a Rolls-Royce), but always with a knowing wink to the audience. “Finally it was impossible to make fun of Liberace, because he was having too much fun making fun of himself,” wrote Time’s Richard Corliss. “He was in on the joke; he may have created it. In doing so he exploited the showbiz principle that nothing succeeds like shameless excess.”
Liberace liked to tell the story of an epiphany he had early in his career, at a concert in La Crosse, Wisconsin. At the end of a classical-music program, which drew polite applause, an audience member shouted out a request for him to play “Three Little Fishies.” Liberace took the popular novelty song and performed it in the style of Bach. The audience loved it. “They relaxed and enjoyed themselves and . . . they smiled,” he recalled in his autobiography. “That was the big thing, for me. They smiled a way they hadn’t for the straight classical repertoire, no matter how well I performed.” Liberace kept going for those smiles. The critics often scorned his ostentatious piano technique and Reader’s Digest treatment of the classics. But for his exuberant showmanship, his self-mocking good humor, his democratic embrace of both “high” and “low” music, and above all the sheer joy he so obviously took in performing, Liberace was the ideal Vegas entertainer. He made people happy.
In April
1956, a year after his Riviera opening, Liberace was back in Las Vegas for a second appearance at the hotel. By chance, it coincided with Elvis Presley’s own bumpy debut in Las Vegas, at Liberace’s old stomping ground, the rechristened New Frontier Hotel.
Backstage one night at the Riviera, Liberace had a visit from Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The colonel told him that “my boy” was having some problems across the street, and he wondered if Liberace might be able to help. “He admires you so much,” said Parker. “If I could bring him over for a picture, he’d really appreciate it.” Liberace obliged, posing for some publicity shots and offering a little advice. He told Elvis that his act needed more glitz.
It was the start of a long, improbable friendship between the two performers. When Elvis was back in Vegas for a couple of days in November 1956, he came to see Liberace’s new show at the Riviera. Afterward, the two posed for some famous newsreel footage—Elvis donning Lee’s gold lamé jacket while playing the piano, Liberace hamming it up while he strums Elvis’s guitar. Liberace’s style and showmanship had a clear impact on the young rock ’n’ roller. The following spring, when Elvis began a ten-day tour of the Midwest and Northeast, he was wearing a new outfit: a $2,500 gold-leaf suit, modeled on the one Liberace had worn in Las Vegas.
They stayed in touch over the years. For each of Liberace’s Vegas openings, Elvis would send him a bouquet of flowers in the shape of a guitar. In later years they had homes just blocks apart in Palm Springs, and Liberace would sometimes invite Elvis and his entourage over for dinner. Elvis even bought Liberace’s dune buggy, decorated with a candelabra on each side. “Elvis never forgot that Liberace was very supportive when he first got to Las Vegas,” said Jerry Schilling, a friend from Memphis who worked for Elvis off and on through the 1960s and ’70s. “Elvis would talk about it afterwards: ‘You know, he made me feel comfortable.’ He never forgot stuff like that.”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 5
