Worse, their meal ticket was being threatened. One day, when Elvis and the entourage were driving through the Arizona desert to California, Elvis suddenly looked up into the sky and saw Joseph Stalin’s face in the clouds. He stopped the van and ran into the desert in ecstasy, dragging Geller with him. “The face of Stalin turned right into the face of Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it!” Elvis cried. “For the first time in my life, God and Christ are a living reality!” When they got to LA, Elvis told Geller he wanted to quit show business and go into a monastery. Geller told him to get some sleep. “Remember, you’re Elvis Presley,” he said. “You have a responsibility to the world.”
Elvis’s spiritual quest continued in earnest for the next couple of years. He dabbled in meditation and experimented with LSD. He spent hours with Sister Daya Mata, the leader of a spiritual group called the Self-Realization Fellowship, with headquarters outside Pasadena. The trips to Las Vegas were less frequent now: no more two-week binges, just a few days here or there, in between his movie shoots.
In March of 1967, Colonel Parker put his foot down. After a health scare, when Elvis suffered a concussion following a mysterious fall in the middle of the night (probably drug related), the Colonel banished Geller from the group, made some other cutbacks in the bloated entourage, and moved to reassert control over all of Elvis’s affairs. Among the first things on his agenda was Elvis’s wedding.
Though he had promised to marry Priscilla ever since she moved to Memphis in 1963, Elvis was clearly ambivalent about marriage. Yet, just before Christmas in 1966, he surprised her with a three-and-a-half-carat diamond ring and a formal proposal. No one was exactly sure what prompted this. Some suspected Priscilla’s father had demanded that Elvis finally make good on his promise, now that Priscilla was twenty-one. Others figured it was the Colonel, who felt Elvis needed to legitimize the relationship or risk damaging his image. Most likely it was a combination of both. In any event, Colonel Parker set about making arrangements for the wedding. It would take place on May 1, 1967—in Las Vegas, at his friend Milton Prell’s new hotel, the Aladdin.
News of the impending wedding was kept under wraps, and planning was done in strict secrecy while Elvis was in LA shooting the movie Clambake. The day before the wedding, he and Priscilla drove to Palm Springs, to throw reporters off the scent. (Gossip columnist Rona Barrett got wind of the plans and reported that a wedding was imminent, but mistakenly said that it would take place in Palm Springs.) Then, in the middle of the night, they flew to Las Vegas aboard Frank Sinatra’s Learjet, got a marriage license at the Clark County courthouse at 7:00 a.m., and showed up at Prell’s private suite at the Aladdin at 9:40 a.m. for the wedding.
Elvis was dressed in a satin tuxedo, and Priscilla in a white organza dress she had purchased at a Westwood bridal shop a few days before. Nevada Supreme Court justice David Zenoff had a private chat with the couple before conducting the vows. “I was simply amazed at the boy’s modesty,” the judge recalled. “He was low-key, handsome as a picture, very respectful and very intense . . . and so nervous he was almost bawling.” After the eight-minute ceremony, the couple were whisked into a press conference that had been arranged by the Colonel. “Well, I guess it was about time,” Elvis said, when asked why he took the plunge. Then everyone adjourned to a banquet room for a brunch reception, where a hundred guests picked from a buffet offering ham and eggs, southern-fried chicken, and roast suckling pig. By the evening, Elvis and Priscilla were back in Palm Springs.
The rushed wedding left some hurt feelings. The Colonel wanted to keep the event small, and only fourteen people were at the ceremony—Priscilla’s family, two best men (Joe Esposito and Marty Lacker, the “co-foremen” of Elvis’s entourage), along with George Klein, an old friend from Memphis, and Harry Levitch, Elvis’s jeweler. Some of his friends (including Larry Geller) learned of the wedding only later, when they read about it in the newspaper. Red West, Elvis’s old high school friend and sometime bodyguard, had flown to Vegas for the event, only to learn at the last minute that he was not invited to the ceremony, just the reception. He flew into a rage, got a flight back to Los Angeles, and quit his job with Elvis. (He returned a few years later, but the resentment may have lingered; West was one of the authors of Elvis: What Happened?, the 1977 book that first revealed the extent of Elvis’s drug use.)
“Elvis and I followed the colonel’s plan,” Priscilla wrote in her memoir, “but as we raced through the day we both thought that if we had it to do over again, we would have given ourselves more time.” It might not have mattered, for the marriage was probably doomed from the start. Priscilla became pregnant instantly (their daughter, Lisa Marie, was born on February 1, 1968, nine months to the day after the wedding). When Priscilla was in her seventh month, Elvis suggested that they “take a little time off, like a trial separation.” They stayed together, but after their daughter’s birth Elvis no longer wanted to have sex. (He was never sexually attracted to women who had given birth.) He and Priscilla remained a couple, at least officially, until their 1973 divorce, and Elvis was a doting father. But that hardly stopped him from returning to his outside dalliances—or, once she realized the situation, Priscilla from starting her own.
A bad marriage certainly didn’t help Elvis’s state of mind as he sank deeper into his career funk. But the glimmers of an escape route were starting to appear, and it would run through Las Vegas.
Five
CHANGES
(Elvis Rising)
By the late 1960s, Vegas was beginning to lose its juice. Beatlemania was hardly the passing fad that Vegas thought—hoped—it might be. The rock ’n’ roll craze of the 1950s had been easier for Vegas to ignore; it appealed mostly to teenagers, not the adult gamblers who constituted the bulk of Vegas’ audience. But the second rock revolution, sparked by the arrival of the Beatles, was of a different order. It was part of a much broader cultural and social upheaval, encompassing not only music, but also politics, fashion, sexual mores, and a whole antiestablishment ethos. And it was embraced by far more than just kids.
Yet Las Vegas, in almost every way, represented the old guard. The boozing, macho Rat Pack still embodied Vegas’ ideal of cool. The music in Vegas showrooms was still dominated by pop standards and Broadway show tunes, along with a few of the mellower contemporary hits. Yet the city was falling out of step with the fast-changing times. The old stars were starting to look dated, and younger audiences, plugged into the new rock sounds and shunning the bourgeois values that Vegas seemed to embody, were staying away in droves.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Las Vegas was undergoing its own transformation. The era of the free-spending, mob-run hotels was coming to an end, and a new set of players was moving in.
In the early morning hours of November 27, 1966, a van pulled up to a rear entrance of the Desert Inn Hotel. In the darkness, a frail man in blue pajamas was carried on a stretcher into a service elevator and whisked up to the ninth-floor penthouse. The suite there had already been outfitted with an array of electronic and medical equipment, and the windows sealed and blacked out, for its finicky new resident.
Howard Hughes’s stealth arrival in Las Vegas marked the start of a new chapter for the entertainment capital. Hughes, the famous aviation pioneer, Hollywood mogul, and business titan (ranked by Fortune magazine in 1968 as the richest man in America), had recently sold his majority stake in Trans World Airlines for a profit of $547 million and was looking for something to do with his money. Hughes had been a frequent visitor to Las Vegas since the 1940s, often seen in the casinos and lounges around town doling out $100 tips to musicians who would play the songs he requested. By the time he moved to Vegas in 1966, however, he was deteriorating both mentally and physically.
Suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, hooked on codeine and Valium, Hughes refused to cut his hair or fingernails and stored his urine in mason jars, while surrounded by mounds of trash in a room that was rarely cleaned. His dietary de
mands were exacting and bizarre. He obsessed over the size of his peas and the shape of his slices of chocolate cake. When he learned that Baskin-Robbins was about to discontinue his favorite flavor of ice cream, banana nut, he had the Desert Inn kitchen order 350 gallons of it. Then he switched to French vanilla, and the kitchen was stuck with the stockpile. Paranoid and depressed, Hughes never went out of his room, communicating with his top aide, former CIA operative Robert Maheu, by telephone or handwritten memos scrawled on yellow legal pads.
A couple of weeks after Hughes’s arrival, Desert Inn owner Moe Dalitz ordered the reclusive new guest to vacate: the hotel needed the top-floor VIP suites for its high-rolling customers expected to descend on the hotel during the Christmas holidays. But Hughes refused to leave—and offered to buy the hotel instead. Following several weeks of negotiations, a $13.2 million deal was struck, and on April 1, 1967, Hughes became owner of the Desert Inn.
It was a measure of the weirdness of Las Vegas that the arrival of a nutty billionaire who kept his pee in mason jars was seen as a step up in respectability. With growing federal scrutiny of Vegas’ links to organized crime—Dalitz had been indicted on tax charges, and the FBI was investigating illegal skimming in Nevada casinos—Hughes was “greeted with messianic enthusiasm,” as one journalist put it, “by Las Vegas desperately waiting to be redeemed from the stigma of Bugsy Siegel and his heirs.” Hughes’s application for a casino license was approved swiftly, with the state Gaming Control Board waving even the usual requirement that the applicant make a personal appearance. “This is the best way to improve the image of gambling in Nevada by licensing an industrialist of his stature,” said Clark County district attorney George Franklin. “It will be an asset and a blessing.” (Hughes, a shrewd political manipulator, cultivated state officials like Nevada governor Paul Laxalt and didn’t hurt his cause by pledging to donate up to $300,000 a year to support the University of Nevada Medical Center.)
Hughes’s purchase of the Desert Inn was just the first strike in what would be the greatest buying spree in Las Vegas history. In August 1967 he acquired the Sands Hotel from the mob interests that ran it. Next he bought the Frontier, the smaller Castaways, and the Silver Slipper casino, as well as the unfinished Landmark Hotel, a circular high-rise in the Convention Center area that was mired in bankruptcy. “Did you hear that Hughes just bought the Sahara?” went a joke going around town. “Not the hotel, the desert.” Only when he made a move to add the Stardust Hotel to his portfolio did the Justice Department’s antitrust division raise red flags, objecting to a deal that would have put more than 20 percent of the city’s economic activity in the hands of one man.
Though blocked from buying more hotels, Hughes continued to gobble up everything else in Las Vegas he could get his hands on. He purchased TV station KLAS (which he ordered to program his favorite old movies all night long), the North Las Vegas Airport, and hundreds of acres of vacant land in prime areas along the Strip. He announced plans for a vast expansion of the Sands, to create a four-thousand-room mega-resort, with one floor of retail stores open twenty-four hours a day and another devoted to family recreation, including a bowling alley, ice-skating rink, movie theater, and computerized indoor golf course—“a resort so carefully planned and magnificently designed that any guest will simply have to make a supreme effort if he wants to be bored,” wrote Hughes. The project never got off the ground, but Hughes anticipated Vegas’ theme-park future more clearly than he probably realized.
Hughes wanted to clean up Vegas, to push out the mob elements that controlled most of the hotels, to make the town “as trustworthy and respectable as the New York Stock Exchange.” He arrived at the right time, both for civic leaders eager to improve Vegas’ image, and for the mob owners themselves, who were feeling the heat and saw in Hughes an opportune exit strategy. “The increased governmental scrutiny may be becoming too much of a headache for some who would rather sell out now than have it forced upon them,” noted Variety in March 1967. Some Vegas historians have pointed out that, even after Hughes’s buying spree, the mob bosses remained in the picture, continuing to manage his operations and secretly siphoning off money for years. (The Sands and the Desert Inn both lost money after Hughes took over.) “Dalitz and other members of his Las Vegas clique saw Hughes’ arrival for what it was,” wrote one journalist, “an opportunity to take an unbelievably wealthy mark to the cleaner’s.”
Still, Hughes began to supplant the old mob bosses and opened the door to a new era of corporate ownership in Las Vegas. In 1967 the Nevada legislature made a significant revision in the rules that governed the granting of casino licenses. Previously, corporations were effectively barred from owning casinos because of the requirement that every prospective owner—which, in the case of a corporation, meant each individual stockholder—be vetted by the state authorities. Once that onerous requirement was removed, corporate owners—from Kirk Kerkorian, the LA mogul who would soon challenge Hughes’s supremacy in Vegas, to national hotel chains like Hilton and Holiday Inn—had a clear path to invest in Las Vegas.
Most immediately, Hughes changed the way Las Vegas hotels were run. He installed new managers, many of them from his circle of Mormon advisers, who instituted a more corporate, bottom-line approach—a major change for the high-flying, free-spending Vegas hotels. Big-name showroom entertainment, for example, had always been treated as a loss leader. The lofty salaries for top stars (combined with low cover charges and minimums in the showrooms) were hard to justify on the ledger books. But they drew customers into the casinos, which in turn provided the gambling revenue that supported the high-priced entertainment.
Under Hughes’s regime, however, each element of the operation—showroom, restaurant, hotel rooms—was expected to pay for itself. That led to a kind of belt-tightening Vegas had never before experienced. The chorus lines of glamorous showgirls, for example, were now seen as expensive frills, and the hotels started to drop them. The lounges, where top comedians and singers could be seen for the price of a Coke, were not moneymakers either, and they began to close down. Hughes tried to hold the line on star salaries and also put a clamp on many of the perks and fringe benefits that the entertainers had grown accustomed to.
To veterans of the Vegas entertainment scene, all this was heresy, the beginning of the end of the golden age. “When the bean counters in the suits came in, all of a sudden everything had to go by the book,” said Lorraine Hunt-Bono, a onetime lounge singer whose family owned a popular Vegas restaurant for years. “They knew nothing about hospitality or running a bar or a restaurant or gaming. But Howard Hughes knew they’d watch everything.” “It was the new bureaucratic regime,” said Paul Anka, “where you had all these rules and lists, and functionaries were running around with clipboards, all obeying the great eye in the sky over there at the Desert Inn. A cold, new impersonal wind was blowing.”
Hughes had his defenders in the entertainment community. “Howard Hughes maintained the quality,” said Vera Goulet, who managed the career of her husband, Robert, for many years. “He lifted the Desert Inn up. He lifted the standard of class and elegance. What he did was positive.” Hughes was a champion of some performers—among them Vegas superstar Wayne Newton—and a behind-the-scenes fan of many others. Bob Newhart recalled an encounter with Hughes’s aide Robert Maheu during an engagement at the Landmark. “Mr. Hughes is very happy with the business you’re doing,” Maheu told him. “He sees the reports every night.” Impressionist Rich Little got a compliment one night from Hughes’s entertainment director, Walter Kane: “The old man thought you were great tonight.” Little looked confused, then realized Kane was talking about Hughes. “He had the shows piped up to his room every night,” said Little, “and I guess he must have watched a lot of them.”
Hughes did plenty of things to alienate people in Vegas. He was virulently anti-union, in a town where unions had a lot of power. He was a footdragger on civil rights, opposing efforts to end racial discrimination in hiring, which w
as rampant in Las Vegas throughout the sixties. “I can summarize my attitude about employing more Negroes very simply,” Hughes wrote in a memo to Maheu. “I think it is a wonderful idea for somebody else, somewhere else.”
But what rankled the show-business community most was the strict, impersonal corporate approach that Hughes brought to Vegas. Abel Green, Variety’s editor and a longtime observer of the Vegas scene, lamented in 1969, “In a community of brigand beginnings, which long yearned for and, even the most grudging diehards will concede, eventually earned respectability, there is something about the Hughesian and concomitant corporate brand of businesslike operation that has taken away a lot of the glamour.” The old mob managers may have been thieves and thugs, but they loved being part of the showbiz world. They catered to the entertainers, made them feel respected and protected. “When the so-called gangsters were in there, you could leave anything in your room,” said Florence Henderson. “I left jewelry and nothing was ever stolen. When Hughes took over, I had things stolen.”
“Hughes had all these little crew-cut idiots come in from all over the country,” Eydie Gormé griped in a 1976 interview. “One was a water commissioner in Buffalo, and another guy was a plumber someplace else, and they came in to run the casinos. These were the assholes of the world.” One night, when she was appearing at the Sands with her husband, Steve Lawrence, Gormé asked for a $200 marker in the casino—credit to gamble with, routinely given to the hotel’s stars. The pit boss asked to see her identification first. “I’m Eydie Gormé!” she cried. “I’m appearing here at your hotel!” No matter, he said; he still needed to see ID. A furious Gormé complained the next day to hotel boss Jack Entratter and refused to do her show that night until he advanced her $25,000 in chips. She said she kept them in her purse for the rest of her stay.
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 14
