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

by Zoglin, Richard

  But they needed to leave the stage before a new kind of Vegas entertainment could emerge. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley represented two opposite poles in American popular music: the suave, largely urban, jazz-influenced tradition that dominated radio, recordings, and nightclubs for decades, and the unruly, largely rural, blues-and-country-influenced music that would first catch on in the mid-1950s and virtually take over in the next decade. That seismic shift, in music as well as in the rest of the culture, was mirrored in the changes that would come to the Las Vegas Strip. In a sense, it took the Rat Pack’s breakup and Sinatra’s flameout to make Las Vegas safe for Elvis Presley.

  But first, there was a lot of livin’ to do.

  Four

  THE ENTERTAINMENT CAPITAL

  The Rat Pack show at the Sands Hotel was just one of several events that made 1960 a pivotal year in Las Vegas’ emergence as the nation’s live-entertainment capital. In August 1960, TWA inaugurated nonstop flights from Chicago to Las Vegas—the beginning of transcontinental jet service that would make Vegas much more accessible to visitors from the East Coast and give a fresh boost to tourist traffic into the desert city. In June, El Rancho Vegas, the oldest hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, was destroyed in a fire, a disaster that marked a symbolic end to the city’s formative early years and the dawn of a new era. The Chez Paree in Chicago, one of the country’s most celebrated nightclubs, closed its doors in 1960—a distant event with no direct impact on Vegas, but another milestone in the steady demise of nightclub entertainment, leaving Las Vegas as one of its last remaining outposts.

  Television was, meanwhile, strengthening its hold on the American public. In 1952, when the Sands and Sahara hotels opened, 34 percent of US households had a television set. By 1960 over 87 percent did. Though competition from television was a big reason why nightclubs were losing their audience, the new medium was a net plus for Las Vegas, since it created a bigger pool of potential stars to help fill the showrooms, from veteran prime-time favorites like Milton Berle and Red Skelton, to relatively new, TV-created personalities like Johnny Carson.

  As Las Vegas moved into the 1960s, its long tradition of racial segregation was starting to break down as well. Through the 1940s and ’50s, African Americans were not welcome to stay at the major Strip hotels, or to work there in any but the lowest-level jobs. There were no black chorus girls or black dealers in the casinos. African American entertainers at the Strip hotels were no longer forced to stay in segregated housing across town (the Sands in 1955 became the first resort to allow its black performers to stay at the hotel while they were appearing there), but even they still faced barriers.

  Ruth Gillis, a showgirl-turned-singer from Chicago, found that out when she was appearing in the Sands lounge in the late 1950s, alternating sets with jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. The two got friendly, and one day Ella asked Ruth if she would take her to see Pearl Bailey, who was headlining at the Flamingo. Ruth called up a friend at the hotel, who got them comp seats and told her to come in through the front door. Gillis was puzzled at the remark, but after they saw the show—from great seats, where they were introduced by Bailey from the stage—she understood why.

  “We left the showroom, walked back out through the front door,” Gillis recalled. “Ella turned to me and said, ‘I’m your friend for life.’ I asked her why. She said, ‘You took me through the front door.’ I hadn’t realized until then that black people were not allowed to enter through the front door.”

  That benighted era ended, at least officially, on March 26, 1960, when the City of Las Vegas, following threats of protests by the local NAACP chapter, agreed to outlaw segregation in all public places. Though the Strip hotels were outside the city limits and thus not in its jurisdiction, they voluntarily agreed to abide by the agreement. Unequal treatment of racial minorities would linger through the 1960s, until a 1971 consent agreement finally outlawed discrimination in accommodations and hiring. Yet by 1960 Las Vegas was at least beginning to move beyond its Jim Crow past.

  Five big hotels on the east side of the Strip were the primary competitors for big-name talent in the early 1960s. First among equals was the Sands, where Jack Entratter assembled the most impressive lineup of stars on the Strip: not just the Rat Pack, but also Jerry Lewis, Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Nat King Cole, and the husband-wife singing duo of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. The Sahara, the first hotel on the Strip heading south from downtown, was probably its closest competitor, known especially for top comedians like George Burns, Victor Borge, Buddy Hackett, Bob Newhart, and the bullet-headed insult machine who ruled over the Casbar Lounge, Don Rickles.

  The Desert Inn was something of the grande dame of the Strip, known for its high rollers and a classy lineup of old-school stars such as Jimmy Durante, Danny Kaye, and Eddie Fisher. The elegant, nine-story Riviera was home to Liberace, Debbie Reynolds, and, for years, lounge-show wild man Shecky Greene. The Flamingo no longer enjoyed the preeminence it had in the old Bugsy Siegel days, but was still a formidable competitor, booking top acts ranging from Bobby Darin to Ethel Merman, the Broadway star who made her one Vegas appearance there in 1962.

  Other Strip hotels, like the Dunes, Thunderbird, and Tropicana, also booked major stars, but they were more apt to counterprogram with splashy production shows, like the Lido de Paris and Folies Bergere, or the occasional Broadway musical, like Flower Drum Song, the Rodgers and Hammerstein show that had a successful ten-month run at the Thunderbird in 1961. The hotels downtown were still focused primarily on gambling, but they were beginning to book entertainers, too, among them a teenage singer named Wayne Newton, who debuted with his brother, Jerry, in the Fremont Lounge in 1959.

  Despite the intense competition, salaries for top stars were relatively stable in the early sixties. The Riviera had paid Liberace a record $50,000 a week to open the hotel in 1955, and Judy Garland surpassed him when she got $55,000 from the Sahara a year later. But for the next several years, the salary inflation abated, mostly topping out at $25,000 to $30,000 a week. Whether due to collusion or just good business sense, bidding up salaries “is now virtually unknown in Las Vegas,” the Sahara Hotel’s Stan Irwin told Variety in 1961. The Sands’ Entratter even bragged that he was able to pay less for top stars because they preferred to remain loyal to him and his hotel.

  Still, Vegas was the big-money payday for nightclub entertainers. Along with top salaries, they could expect luxury accommodations, lavish perks, and usually a little extra under the table—easy to do at the mob-run hotels, where skimming money from the casino take was standard operating procedure. “Everybody had two salaries,” said George Schlatter, who booked acts for the New Frontier. “Your official salary, and a little salad on the side.”

  Nearly everybody wanted to play Vegas in those years. For an entertainer on the rise, it was a high-profile gig that brought you to the attention of agents and producers, which in turn could lead to TV guest appearances, concert tours, even movie and Broadway roles. “I think the fact that you were playing Vegas put you at a certain level,” said Bob Newhart. “There was a pecking order, and playing Vegas was part of the pecking order.” For a touring performer, moreover, Vegas was a welcome chance to get off the road and settle down in one place for a while. “For four weeks you had a normal life,” said Newhart, “or as normal a life as Vegas gets. It was like your second home.”

  Most important, Vegas was a place to work—to hone your craft in front of live audiences, night after night, week after week. “You really found out who you were as an entertainer,” said Paul Anka. “What you were capable of doing, how to get up there and feel comfortable, to really work an audience and all that goes with it. Because you’re only going to be as good as the mileage.”

  For a singer, Vegas offered the best of everything: top facilities, fine acoustics, first-class musicians. Each hotel had a house orchestra, usually sixteen or eighteen pieces, often augmented by the singer’s own conductor or arranger and sometimes extra players. “There isn’t an
y deal that you can’t have if you’re a performer to make sure the job is done right,” said Tony Bennett. “The sound, the carpenters, the lights, the orchestras—there’s not one bad organization on the Strip.”

  Bennett knew practically all of them. He may well hold the record for headlining in more hotels than anyone else in Vegas history. Discovered in 1950 by Bob Hope, who took him on his first national tour, Bennett began his Vegas career at El Rancho Vegas in the early fifties and later played the Dunes, the Sahara, the Sands, the Riviera, and eventually Caesars Palace, which gave him a “contract for life” in 1969. He recorded an album in Las Vegas, Live from the Sahara, in 1964, and his signature hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” was covered by dozens of Vegas singers in the sixties. He was one of the few singers of the era who managed to keep his jazz credibility while also turning out popular hits, and a rare Italian American vocalist who seemed relatively free of Frank Sinatra’s influence—Sinatra without the angst, or the attitude.

  Vic Damone, on the other hand, openly acknowledged his debt to Sinatra. He grew up in Brooklyn trying to imitate Sinatra, filled in for him once on radio’s Your Hit Parade, and years later became part of Sinatra’s steam-room cabal at the Sands (nicknamed Little Dago, to distinguish him from Big Dago, Dean Martin). Damone had a smooth, appealing baritone and good taste in accompanists. His first music director was future pop songwriter Burt Bacharach. Later, after Bacharach left to work with Marlene Dietrich, Damone replaced him with a young pianist named John Williams—years before he became one of the top movie composers in Hollywood.

  Sinatra once said Damone had “the best pipes in the business.” But he never had Sinatra’s stage charisma or emotional conviction, and Vegas could give only so much gas to a career that had trouble surviving rock ’n’ roll. Damone turned down the role of Johnny Fontaine, the Sinatra-like singer in The Godfather (he thought the part was too small to justify the long break it would have meant in his touring), and had to declare bankruptcy after his savings were cleaned out by two shady investors he had enlisted to help launch his own record label. But Vegas came to the rescue: Damone signed a long-term contract with the Frontier Hotel, guaranteeing him $30,000 a week to appear in the lounge for sixteen weeks a year—a steady gig that helped save his career.

  The lounges were an increasingly important venue for singers in the 1960s. After the success of acts like the Mary Kaye Trio and Louis Prima and Keely Smith, the hotels began to see the lounges as traffic drivers. Patrons could come and go as they pleased, which kept the crowds circulating in and out of the casinos. And with shows scheduled continuously through the night, the showroom stars would often stop in after their own sets were finished, thus bringing more attention and buzz to the lounges.

  “The cocktail lounges no longer take second place to the major rooms as far as b.o. [box office] is concerned,” Variety reported in 1965. “In many cases they have become the major operation.” Several hotels enlarged their lounges and gave them new names to reflect their enhanced status. The Flamingo’s lounge became the Driftwood Room and booked top jazz artists like Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, and Lionel Hampton. The Tropicana Hotel brought in Maynard Sloate, the owner of a jazz club in LA, to take over its five-hundred-seat lounge, which he renamed the Blue Room and filled with such jazz and big-band luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, and George Shearing.

  The Vegas lounges were a launching pad for some, a full-time home for others. One of the most durable lounge performers in Vegas was Sonny King, a thick-necked former boxer from Brooklyn, who once roomed with Dean Martin, and for years appeared in Jimmy Durante’s stage shows as his singing “junior partner.” King spent thirteen years in the Sands lounge, where Sinatra and the Rat Pack would often come in to heckle him. He was a schmaltzy, old-style performer, who would flash his cuffs like Jolson and dish out the sentiment with songs like “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.” “He could sing ‘My Way’ in a way that made you forget Sinatra; it was gut-wrenching,” said Dennis Klein, who saw King often while writing for Vegas comedians in the sixties. “He captivated a room.”

  Buddy Greco was another singer who flourished in Vegas lounges, but who also graduated to a substantial TV and recording career. Born in Philadelphia, Greco spent four years as a pianist with Benny Goodman’s orchestra and had a jazzy, easygoing vocal style that he parlayed, most memorably, into a hit 1960 recording of “The Lady Is a Tramp.” But his supercool, finger-snapping image became a prototype for the kind of lounge-lizard slickness parodied by Bill Murray on Saturday Night Live—and the model, reputedly, for Jerry Lewis’s smarmy Buddy Love character in The Nutty Professor. (Greco was a golfing buddy of Jerry’s at the time and claimed that Lewis wrote the part for him, before deciding to play it himself.)

  Virtually every major popular singer of the era played Vegas during the sixties: jazz singers like Peggy Lee and Mel Tormé; 1950s hitmakers like Patti Page and Kay Starr, easy-listening favorites like Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis; the romantic belter Robert Goulet, who segued from Broadway’s Camelot to Vegas showrooms, making his hit song from that show, “If Ever I Would Leave You,” his ubiquitous closing number; the husband-wife team of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, who got married at El Rancho Vegas in 1957 and became part of Jack Entratter’s powerhouse stable at the Sands.

  Audiences got to know the performers up close and personal, and some of them brought their offstage soap operas with them. Judy Garland played Vegas often during the fifties and sixties, in between her bouts with drugs, alcohol, and marital problems. She walked out of an engagement at the Flamingo Hotel on New Year’s Eve 1957 when she couldn’t handle the rowdy crowd. She appeared at the Sahara in 1962, but was so nervous that Stan Irwin, the hotel’s entertainment director, would put her in a hypnotic trance (a skill he had learned in his days as a comedian) to calm her down before each night’s show. Garland got standing ovations and did such strong business that her four-week engagement was extended by two weeks—just one show a night at two thirty in the morning, to accommodate her insomniac schedule.

  Yet when Garland returned to the Sahara in 1965, she was so shaky that spotters were stationed on either side of the catwalk on which she entered, to make sure she didn’t fall off. “There are times when her voice assumes somewhat of a brittle quality that is not reminiscent of the old Garland voice, but this is comparatively inconsequential,” Variety’s reviewer observed diplomatically. “She is the Crown Princess of Song, and there is hardly anything that she can do wrong.” Her last Vegas engagement, at Caesars Palace in December 1967, was even more fraught. Before one show, she learned of the death of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz, and refused to go on. Another night she caught a glimpse of her ex-husband Sid Luft in the wings (she had banned him from the premises) and lashed out onstage at her bosses: “Ladies and gentlemen, I need help. I am working for two people who are worse than Goebbels and Göring.” Variety called her show a “curiously unsettling experience,” but still made allowances: “Whether in voice or not, there is always a supercharged authority present in sometime awkward, often disturbing, yet never dull or lackadaisical delivery of any song, ballad or uptempo.” A year and a half later she was dead of a drug overdose.

  Eddie Fisher was another Vegas star whose offstage antics seemed to shadow his performances. The Philadelphia-born singer, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, began turning out hits like “I’m Walking behind You” and “Oh! My Papa” in the early fifties, displaying a rich, romantic tenor that made teenage girls swoon the way Sinatra had a decade earlier. In Vegas Fisher would typically open his show by strolling down the aisle from the rear and canoodling with women in the crowd. But it was his own complicated love life—he married Hollywood sweetheart Debbie Reynolds, left her for Elizabeth Taylor, only to have Liz dump him for Richard Burton—that seemed to follow him around onstage.

  When Fisher played the Tropicana in 1957, Debbie surprised him one night by donning a headd
ress and gold-lamé top and joining the line of chorus girls. She thought it was a hoot; Eddie was furious with her for upstaging him—another fight in a marriage that was hitting the rocks. Two years later, after their split, he was back at the Tropicana, serenading Liz Taylor at a front-row table with songs like “Tonight” and “Makin’ Whoopee.” They got married in Las Vegas on the last day of his engagement. (When Eddie discovered he had no cash for the license, he tried to pay with casino chips.) A couple of years later, after Taylor and Burton’s much-publicized affair on the set of Cleopatra, Fisher was back at the Desert Inn making jokes about it. “They started that Cleopatra picture so long ago they could have used the original cast,” he said. “And I wish they had.”

  Fisher’s offstage troubles went beyond his messy love life; he was also a prolific gambler, drinker, and, in later years, coke and meth addict. Yet he continued to be one of Vegas’ top-earning stars, and Caesars Palace signed him to a three-year contract in 1966. By the end of the sixties, however, he was forgetting song lyrics and playing to half-empty houses. Caesars dumped him in 1969, and he declared bankruptcy the next year—a poster boy for Vegas’ perils as well as its promise.

  Garland and Fisher were the kind of out-there, heart-on-their-sleeve performers that Vegas embraced. The young Barbra Streisand was different. The Brooklyn-born singer was making a splash in New York nightclubs, on Broadway in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and in TV guest appearances. But when Liberace brought her to Vegas in July 1963 as his opening act at the Riviera, her spare New York style didn’t go over well with a crowd accustomed to Vegas pizzazz. “Instead of warming up the audience, her designated job,” said one observer, “Barbra left Liberace with a cold stage and a frigid, frustrated crowd.”

  But Liberace liked Streisand, and the old showman figured out a way to help. Instead of letting her open the show cold turkey, after a couple of nights Liberace began opening the show himself, with a couple of upbeat numbers, then giving her a big buildup, introducing Streisand as his new “discovery” from New York. Given proper warning, and Liberace’s endorsement, the Vegas crowd suddenly warmed to her. In the middle of her four-week engagement, Streisand was signed to star in the new Broadway musical Funny Girl, and the Riviera offered her an open-ended contract to return.