Vegas had other talented (and easier-to-work-with) choreographers, such as Jerry Jackson, a former lounge-show dancer who began choreographing numbers for Vive Les Girls and Folies Bergere and took over as the Folies’ director in 1975. Top choreographers from Hollywood and Broadway also made their way to Vegas: Hermes Pan, famous for staging Fred Astaire dance numbers in the 1930s, directed a Folies Bergere show in the mid-1960s, and Ron Field, the Tony-winning Broadway choreographer of Cabaret, staged acts for a number of Vegas headliners. Vegas choreography was often dismissed as schlocky, and some of it surely was. But at its best, it had a mix of precision, style, and splash that outsiders often missed. “People from New York or Los Angeles thought they were so much better than Vegas,” said Jerry Jackson. “Very often they would come in and say, ‘Anything I could do is better than what they have.’ And they would bomb out. You can’t just throw people doing generic dance steps onstage. They didn’t understand what Vegas was and how difficult it was.”
Dancers, too, were proud of their work in Vegas. “I came to Las Vegas from New York in 1965 for six months. I stayed forever,” said Sal Angelica, who danced for years with Juliet Prowse. “From the day I got here I never stopped working. Broadway is actually less stressful than Vegas. On Broadway, the dancing isn’t the star. Here, dancing was the star.”
Big stars, great singers, lavish production shows, bare breasts—all of them helped make Las Vegas the nation’s hottest entertainment center in the 1960s. But what gave Vegas its special sizzle was comedy.
Many of Vegas’ top headliners were longtime funnymen from the movies, radio, and television. Jack Benny, Milton Berle, and George Burns were all Vegas regulars in the sixties, headlining TV-style variety shows in which they would often introduce new talent. Jerry Lewis, after his breakup with Dean Martin, continued as a solo headliner at the Sands Hotel with an act that featured slapstick, songs, audience-participation stunts, and Jerry’s sometimes overbearing ego. Danny Thomas, the nightclub entertainer from Toledo, Ohio, who became one of TV’s best-known fathers in the 1950s sitcom Make Room for Daddy, was a favorite at the Sands for years, as was Red Skelton, the genial clown who reprised many of the characters and pantomime bits from his popular CBS comedy show.
Television was the springboard for other, more unlikely Vegas comedy stars. Carol Burnett had just won an Emmy for her sketch-comedy work in Garry Moore’s comedy-variety series on CBS when she came to Vegas in the summer of 1962 with her own show—featuring sketches, songs, parody numbers, and some of her familiar characters from TV—and set an advance-sale record at the Sands. But nothing demonstrated more clearly the power of television to create new Vegas stars than Johnny Carson’s smash debut at the Sahara Hotel in July of 1964.
Carson had been host of the Tonight show for less than two years and had virtually no experience as a nightclub entertainer. He was strictly a television phenomenon; some were skeptical that he would be able to sustain a Las Vegas show. But when the Sahara’s Stan Irwin (who also produced the Tonight show for two years) brought Carson to Vegas for a four-week run, he broke the hotel’s attendance record, previously set by Judy Garland.
Carson put together a Vegas act that expanded nicely on his familiar Tonight show monologues and sketches. He had new set pieces, including a takeoff of Edward R. Murrow reading “The Three Little Pigs,” and a showcase bit, “Deputy John’s Fun House,” in which he played a sour children’s show host battling a hangover. He could be just a bit naughtier on the Vegas stage than he was on TV. (He joked about the hotel maid who burst into his room when he was coming out of the shower in flagrante. Quipped Carson, “Have you ever tried to hide behind a silver dollar?”) Carson would return to the Sahara for four weeks every summer during his Tonight show break—selling out shows, dropping in on lounge performers like Don Rickles, and creating more buzz in town than anyone but Frank Sinatra.
The patron saint of Vegas stand-up comics—a regular at El Rancho Vegas throughout the 1950s—was Joe E. Lewis, a doughy, slow-paced nightclub comic who would amble out onstage with a glass of Scotch and make jokes about his gambling and drinking. (Dean Martin, who modeled much of his drunk act on Lewis, loved to quote one of his lines: “You’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.”) But the stand-up comedians who succeeded Lewis in the 1960s were a louder, faster, more in-your-face bunch. They had honed their skills in the nightclubs and presentation houses of New York and the resort hotels of the Catskills, known as the Borscht Belt. In Vegas they mostly worked the lounges, or as opening acts in the main room, though a few became headliners. They had to battle restless crowds and drunk hecklers and rival comics stealing their material. “The audiences in Vegas demanded a certain kind of energy,” said comedy writer Dennis Klein. “They didn’t like comedians who take their time and relate to the audience in a personal way. To them, subtle comedians were comedians who weren’t funny enough.”
Jack Carter, who headlined at the Flamingo for several years, was perhaps the archetype: an aggressive, neurotic, raspy-voiced tummler who did songs, impressions, put-downs of the audience, and a barrage of jokes about wives, kids, gamblers, hookers, and any ethnic group he could get his hands on. (“Did you hear about the Polish rapist? He was standing in the lineup, they brought in the girl, and he says, ‘That’s her!’ ”) For insult comedy, there was the portly, acerbic Jack E. Leonard (“Hello, opponents,” he would say, by way of greeting). For manic improvisation, Dick Shawn, a singer-dancer-comic who had a popular Vegas act well before Mel Brooks cast him as Hitler in The Producers. For a change of pace, the gentle, Yiddish-dialect storyteller Myron Cohen. For the rest, a gaggle of seemingly interchangeable Jackies, Buddys, and Mortys. (Women were rare. The few who did well in Vegas were self-deprecating gagsters like Phyllis Diller, who joked about her string-bean figure and ineptitude at housework, and Totie Fields, who traded mostly in fat jokes. Sample: “I’ve been on a diet for two weeks, and all I’ve lost is two weeks.”)
Yet Las Vegas also welcomed many of the more cerebral, “new wave” stand-up comedians who emerged in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Bob Newhart, the Chicago comic who specialized in deadpan satirical bits with telephone in hand (a PR man advising Abraham Lincoln on the Gettysburg Address, for example, or a night watchman at the Empire State Building on the night King Kong climbs up), found that he had to cut them down a little to suit the shorter attention span of Vegas audiences. Reviewing his Sahara debut in October 1963, Variety thought his material “possibly will zoom over the head of the non-hip.” But Newhart worked successfully in Vegas throughout the decade. Shelley Berman, another conversational satirist with roots in Chicago improv theater, also became a Vegas headliner—though the famously volatile comedian would throw screaming fits in his dressing room out of frustration with the audiences. (Maynard Sloate, who booked him at the Tropicana, called Berman “vicious” and “temperamental without hope.”)
Even Woody Allen played Las Vegas. His Jewish-neurotic-shlemiel stand-up act was gaining a hip following in New York nightclubs, on record albums, and from his TV guest appearances when Caesars Palace booked him as a headliner in 1966. Though Vegas might have seemed an unlikely venue for him, Allen found the offer hard to refuse. “It was an achievement,” he said. “Because I’d started out in the Village, and people thought, ‘Oh, this guy will never get out of the Village.’ Then when I was playing uptown places like the Blue Angel, they said he’d never get out of New York. So it was an achievement for me to go into places like Caesars in Las Vegas.”
Allen got good reviews, and he returned for several more appearances at Caesars. But he was disappointed that he was never able to fill the house. Chagrined at the many empty seats during his first engagement, he offered to give back part of his salary. “I felt guilty about taking their money,” he said—surely a Vegas first.
But comics like Woody Allen and Bob Newhart were the outliers. Vegas comedy in the 1960s was defined mainly by a triumvirate of comics who made Vegas thei
r home base; had acts that perfectly suited the raucous, anything-goes environment; and were among the city’s top attractions for decades.
Stan Irwin, entertainment director at the Sahara, was a former comedian himself and a good judge of talent. But he had to see Don Rickles five times in Los Angeles before deciding to take a chance and book him into the Sahara’s lounge. Rickles, a native of Queens who served in the Navy during World War II, had spent more than a decade bouncing around clubs up and down the East Coast. He made his first appearance at the Slate Brothers’ club in LA in 1957 as a last-minute replacement for Lenny Bruce, who was fired for cursing out the audience. Rickles was soon a regular at the club, building an act out of insult jokes, aimed at members of the audience as well as the many celebrities, like Frank Sinatra, who came to see him.
Brought into the Sahara’s Casbar Lounge in 1960 to alternate sets with Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Rickles caused almost as much tumult as they did. He would pummel the audience with barbs playing on every racial, religious, and ethnic stereotype imaginable. “I know you’re Italian—nothing matches,” he’d say to a man in the front row. Or: “You gotta be a Jew, lady; you’re the only one with a stole on.” Black people ate watermelon and sang spirituals; Mexicans always had the runs. A fat guy in the audience? “Hey buddy, there’s a new thing out there. It’s called a diet.” A really tall woman? “Give her a basketball and let her dribble around.” To a gentleman sitting with a pretty younger woman: “Is that your wife? Oh, I didn’t recognize you, Trixie.”
Some claimed that Rickles stole his act from Jack E. Leonard, the leading insult comedian of an earlier day. (Leonard apparently agreed: “He’s doing me!” he would complain to friends.) But Rickles’s comedy was both more incendiary and more canny. He got away with his crude, politically incorrect jokes because they were so brazen, so all-embracing, so obviously an act. He loved shocking the straitlaced crowd—“That’s right, lady, you heard it. What the hell you think you’re gonna see here, high mass?”—and then reassuring them that it was all in fun. He would typically close his slash-and-burn sets by thanking his mother and making a plea for tolerance and understanding. “Laugh at bigotry, that’s what I do,” he’d say, harking back to his experiences in the Navy, where all races, creeds, and colors worked together for one purpose. “When our time is up, we’ll all be on one team. So why do we need bigotry and nonsense?”
Rickles knew that the key in Vegas was not to cross the line between irreverent and threatening. It was the same strategy employed by another top Vegas comic—a more versatile performer than Rickles, a veteran of TV, movies, and Broadway, who sounded like a Brooklyn cabdriver crossed with Betty Boop and looked like a Munchkin who had eaten too many lollipops. But he became known as the dirtiest comic in Vegas.
Buddy Hackett—another Jewish New Yorker, born in 1924 in Brooklyn, the son of an upholstery salesman—began his career in the Catskills in the late forties and made his Vegas debut in 1952 at the Desert Inn, as part of something called the International Revue. His most famous early routine was an impression of an exasperated waiter in a family Chinese restaurant, trying to get the wonton- and egg-drop-soup orders straight. But eventually he developed a more fractured, free-form style, often juggling three or four stories at the same time—like flipping channels with a TV remote, he liked to say. By the 1960s Hackett was headlining at the Sahara, one of the hottest comedians in town. After the death in 1966 of his friend Lenny Bruce—the taboo-busting comedian who was often under fire for his “obscene” material—Hackett’s material took a blue turn. “When he worked clean, everybody started stealing his material,” explained his son, Sandy Hackett. “So he said, ‘I’m gonna do stuff nobody’s gonna steal.’ ”
He started out mildly enough, riffing on the word ass, wondering why people considered it dirty. Hand can be a dirty word, if it’s holding a gun, Hackett would say: “Guy has a gun in his ass, not so frightening.” Before long he was spouting nearly all the forbidden four-letter words, and by 1968 the hotel was advertising his shows as “adults only.” “Hackett has a definite mission in his nitery life now,” wrote Variety’s Bill Willard in January 1969. “He obviously opts to break all the forbidden word barriers, to be the spokesman for the new nitery morality. . . . Withal, he’s very funny doing his little naughty word thing, and all his ephemera convulses the majority of the audience.”
His impish personality helped him get away with it. At the end of his act he would apologize for his rough material with a humble mea culpa, like a little boy apologizing to his schoolteacher. Noted Shecky Greene, his friend and sometime rival, “Buddy had the ability to say fuck onstage, and then say, in that endearing voice, ‘I really didn’t mean to sound that way, I hope you people forgive me.’ That little-boy quality sucked you in.” As Hackett once put it, “I want to get the audience to hate me—and then see how long it takes to win them back.”
Hackett reputedly pulled in more high rollers than anybody else in Vegas but Sinatra, and he understood the business. In 1969 Sahara owner Del Webb made him a vice president of entertainment for the hotel, where he worked at least fifteen weeks out of the year and had a house next to the seventh green on the golf course. But offstage, Hackett’s wild behavior became the stuff of Vegas legend. He collected guns, always carried one around with him, and sometimes used it. Pete Barbutti claimed he was once in the Sands greenroom when Hackett, unhappy to hear that Totie Fields was doing good business, shot her picture off the wall. Hackett and Shecky Greene once got in an argument that ended with Greene tossing Buddy’s gun and car keys into the desert in the middle of the night. Hackett called him up at seven the next morning to say he didn’t mind losing the gun—he had plenty more at home—but still couldn’t find his keys. “He was like the devil,” said Shecky. “You never knew what was going to happen with Buddy. But he was a brilliant comedian.”
Pretty much the same could be said of Shecky Greene. Unlike Rickles and Hackett, Greene was almost entirely a Las Vegas creation. He lived in Vegas, worked nearly full-time there, and (unlike Hackett and Rickles, both of whom had more successful TV and movie careers) never made much of a mark anywhere else. His wild, improvisational material changed every night, and none of his Vegas performances were ever recorded. As a result, his gift is the most difficult to pin down. But for many Vegas aficionados, Shecky Greene represented the high point of Las Vegas comedy.
He was born Fred Sheldon Greenfield in 1926 on the north side of Chicago. He learned to do dialects from his older brother, began playing clubs in the Midwest, and spent six years at the Prevue Lounge in New Orleans, before the club burned down. He worked in Reno (where he met his first wife, a blackjack dealer, who, he claimed, turned him into an alcoholic) and made his first appearance in Vegas at the Last Frontier in 1953. He moved to the Riviera lounge in 1957, was hired away by the Tropicana in 1960, and returned to the Riviera five years later. Wherever he went, business picked up.
In the lounge, Greene was a free-form, improvisational force of nature—mixing jokes, songs, parodies, impressions, dialect stories, and spontaneous mayhem. An opera lover with a beefy frame and a booming voice, Greene might break into a burlesque of Madama Butterfly, or a takeoff of Fiddler on the Roof, or wheel himself around in a trolley in a parody of Porgy and Bess. “His act had no beginning, no middle, and no end,” said Pete Barbutti, who first saw Greene at the Tropicana in 1960. “He did everything wrong. Going from point A to point D and back to C and F, starting a story about rabbits and going into his Jewish mother and the Army and something he did with Buddy Hackett. He’s the funniest human being I’ve ever seen. There’s never been anybody that powerful onstage.” “When you saw a Shecky Greene show, you had the sense that this was a onetime performance, never to be repeated,” said Dennis Klein. “He was very immediate, very visceral, very big. Onstage he was on fire. He would overpower an audience. He was to comedy what Jerry Lee Lewis was to music.”
Greene could craft a great line, or ad-lib an even bet
ter one. One of his oft-repeated jokes was about the time Frank Sinatra saved his life. Some thugs were beating him up, Shecky said, and Sinatra finally told them, “OK, boys, that’s enough.” The former king Edward VIII of England and his wife, Wallis Simpson, were once in the audience for Greene’s show in Miami and left in the middle of his act. “I don’t feel bad,” Greene called out as they departed. “You walked out on a whole country.” He was doing a show in 1972, around the time Sammy Davis Jr.—an African American convert to Judaism—was photographed hugging Richard Nixon, and Greene spotted Pearl Bailey in the audience. “Are you proud of Sammy Davis?” he asked her from the stage. “Because we’re not.”
Offstage, however, Greene could be a terror: a manic-depressive who seemed to undergo a Jekyll-Hyde personality change when he was drinking. He went on binges, got into fights, and was constantly feuding with his bosses at the Riviera, who fired him more than once. In January 1965 the hotel called the police and had him arrested for insulting guests. One night when Shecky went on a tear and was turning over blackjack tables in the Riviera casino, Milton Berle tried to calm him down and Shecky flattened him with a punch in the jaw. Then there was the night Shecky was driving drunk on the Strip, lost control of his car, and wound up in the fountain at Caesars Palace. When the police got there, Shecky quipped, “No spray wax.” (Some thought the line was apocryphal—but who cared?)
Greene always felt misunderstood as a comedian. People compared him to Rickles, but he wasn’t an insult comic. “I never worked like Rickles,” he said. “I do dialects, I do singing, I do all kinds of things—Rickles never had one fuckin’ iota of my talent.” People thought Greene worked dirty, like Hackett, but Shecky used four-letter words in his act only rarely. He eventually graduated from the lounge to the main showroom, but he didn’t like it: “I couldn’t be Shecky. I couldn’t be free.” Years later he sobered up and looked back with regret on his crazy Vegas years: “Vegas was very, very good for me. But Vegas was very, very bad for me. I drank in Vegas. I got a reputation. When I think of my life, I get frightened. I got a check once for six thousand dollars, went to the table, and blew it—lost the six thousand dollars in fifteen minutes. As much as this town was good for me, that’s how much I hated it. I hated what it did to me. I hated what I saw happen to other people. Millions of guys in the garment business came to this town and lost their business because of the gambling. I would like to bomb every one of these fuckin’ places. And you can quote me on that.”
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