Elvis, in the middle of rehearsals for his own opening, came to see Streisand on her next-to-last night. The first thing that struck him was how big the stage was, and how poorly her stripped-down show seemed to fill it. He was also put off by her wisecracking Jewish New Yorker shtick. Midway through the show he turned to one of his Memphis pals and muttered, “She sucks.”
As a courtesy to the hotel and its opening headliner, Colonel Parker waited until Streisand finished her last show on her last night before turning the International into an Elvis Presley fun zone. By the next morning, seemingly every wall in the hotel was plastered with Elvis photos, banners, and posters. A souvenir stand in the lobby suddenly materialized, hawking Elvis merchandise—photos, pennants, Elvis records, miniature teddy bears. Dealers in the casino were given Elvis straw hats; the waitresses wore Elvis buttons (ELVIS NOW and ELVIS IN PERSON, they read). “It looked like a political convention, like ‘Elvis for President,’ ” said Terry Blackwood. The giant marquee in front of the hotel now broadcast the name ELVIS in ten-foot-high block letters (with BILL MILLER PRESENTS above them), so big that they had to be put up in sixteen different pieces and wired down, rather than clipped as normally, so they wouldn’t blow off in the desert wind.
There was a full dress rehearsal in the afternoon. An eighteen-year-old Elvis fan named Ian Fraser-Thomson, who had come all the way from Britain to see the show and managed to sneak into the balcony to watch some of the rehearsals, reported that Elvis was “dressed in black pants and puffed-sleeve green shirt” and sat on a barstool through most of the session, calling out numbers for the run-through. “Sometimes they’d run through an entire song, other times they’d work on an intro or work on the ending of a song. There was a lot of fine-tuning going on,” Thomson observed—before one of Elvis’s people spotted him and chased him out of the room.
Elvis was as ready as he could ever be: well rehearsed, backed by first-rate musicians, and heralded by the biggest publicity campaign in Vegas history. Yet his show still had something of a homemade, seat-of-the-pants quality. Elvis hadn’t been on a concert stage in years and knew little about modern sound systems and other technical matters. “We went in there in ’69 not knowing a damn thing,” said Lamar Fike. “He didn’t even have an act, much less a Vegas act. We literally designed that show from scratch—made it up as we went along.” Fike, who had spent some time as road manager for Brenda Lee, was in charge of the lighting. Charlie Hodge not only helped Elvis put together his set, but was kind of an adjunct member of the band—playing a guitar (which wasn’t hooked up to an amplifier) and joining in the backup vocals, but onstage mainly to hand Elvis water and scarves, and generally to make him feel comfortable.
Elvis was scheduled to do two shows a night—a dinner show at 8:00 p.m. and a late show at midnight. (The minimum charge for each was fifteen dollars, top of the Vegas scale at the time.) But for the opening night on Thursday, July 31, there would be only one show, at 8:00 p.m. The audience was filled mostly with invited guests: Hollywood celebrities, other Vegas entertainers, assorted high rollers and local VIPs, along with the many rock critics and entertainment reporters from around the country that Colonel Parker had invited (many of them flown in from New York City on Kerkorian’s private jet). Even in a town used to star-studded opening nights, the array of celebrities—Cary Grant, Sammy Davis Jr., Tom Jones, Ann-Margret, George Hamilton, Paul Anka, Carol Channing, Juliet Prowse, Henry Mancini, Dionne Warwick—was impressive.
Backstage before the show, in his smoke-filled dressing room, Elvis was a nervous wreck. “I can remember Elvis sitting on a couch,” Jerry Scheff recalled, “his knee going up and down like a piston, his hands dancing like butterflies.” “He was pacing back and forth, back and forth,” said Joe Esposito; “you could see the sweat just pouring out of him before he went onstage. He was always nervous before a show, but he was never nervous like that again.” Everybody tried to keep him calm. “If you get lost, just turn around and we’ll start playing louder,” John Wilkinson reassured him. “Don’t worry about it, your friends are here.” Elvis had someone fetch his Memphis friend Sonny West—Red West’s cousin—who was sitting in the audience with his wife. When Sonny came backstage, Elvis asked him to stand in the wings during the show; it would make him feel safer. (Elvis later asked Sonny to serve as his chief of security for the rest of the engagement.) “He was scared to death,” said James Burton. “Just before we went onstage, Elvis walked up to me backstage, and he said, ‘James, I’m so nervous, I don’t know if I can do this.’ I said, ‘Elvis, don’t worry, all you gotta do is walk out there.’ ”
The Showroom Internationale was filling up, anticipation building. The room was immense, twice as large as any other showroom in Vegas (and the first one with a balcony), with room for fifteen hundred people at the dinner show, two thousand for the late show. The expansive stage was sixty feet wide, with a ten-thousand-pound, Austrian-made gold-lamé curtain. The ornate decor featured crystal chandeliers and figurines of angels hanging from the ceiling and a hodgepodge of ancient Greek, Roman, and Louis XIV–era paintings and statuary arrayed around the room. A setting fit for a returning king.
The Sweet Inspirations opened the show at 8:15 p.m. They kept their set short, just three or four numbers—pop songs and show tunes like “Born Free” and “The Impossible Dream,” along with their own hit, “Sweet Inspiration.” “The audience was very good to us,” Myrna Smith recalled. “We knew that they were there for Elvis, and we knew they wanted us to get off the stage as fast as possible.”
The same went for Sammy Shore, the comedian who came next. Shore was facing the toughest assignment imaginable for a stand-up comic: trying to keep an audience desperate for Elvis Presley from hooting him off the stage. It got even tougher when Sammy took the microphone, began talking, and nothing came out.
“The microphone was dead. No sound. I panicked,” Shore recalled. He vamped for a couple of minutes—doing some Shakespearean gibberish, shouting at the top of his lungs, “They spend fifty-three million bucks to build this hotel, and fourteen dollars for a microphone!” Then, when a new microphone was finally handed to him, he began mouthing his words, pretending that the new mike was dead too. That got him a big laugh and eased the way into his twenty-minute routine, with jokes on everything from gambling to bullfighting (the Colonel liked Sammy because he worked clean), and closing with his showcase “Brother Sam” bit, in which Sammy impersonated a Southern evangelical preacher, beating a tambourine and imploring people in the balcony to jump out and “be saved.”
Backstage, the band was listening for another of Sammy’s bits, the one about eating lobster in a restaurant. Whenever he had to pick a live lobster out of the tank for his dinner, Sammy would say he felt all-powerful, like “God among the lobsters.” That line was the band’s cue to start setting up. It would become a running joke among them; whenever they had to start setting up for an Elvis show, it was “God among the lobsters” time.
As he finished his routine and walked offstage, Sammy ran into Elvis and shook his hand; it was cold and clammy. “I saw in his face the look of terror,” Sammy said. Usually in Vegas the headliner would be announced by a disembodied voice—“Ladies and gentlemen, direct from the bar—Dean Martin!” But as the band started its rocking intro music and the curtain rose, Elvis simply walked out to center stage, an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, grabbed the microphone in his right hand—which was visibly trembling—paused for a moment, then launched into the familiar lyrics: “Well, it’s one for the money, / Two for the show, / Three to get ready / Now go, cat, go . . .”
As he sang “Blue Suede Shoes,” the crowd erupted. It was the old Elvis, rocking as hard as ever on one of his classic hits, a song they hadn’t heard him sing in over a decade. He was wearing one of Bill Belew’s two-piece karate outfits, dark blue, with flared pants and a sashlike belt that whipped around as Elvis moved. His high-collared shirt was unbuttoned nearly to his navel, with a scarf loosely kn
otted around his neck. (Larry Geller claimed that Elvis wore high collars to imitate the spiritual masters in David Anrias’s book Through the Eyes of the Masters. Priscilla said it was because Elvis thought his neck was too long and always wanted it covered.)
Even for a non-Elvis fan in the audience—Margot Hentoff, writing about the show in Harper’s Magazine—he was a sight to behold:
Elvis comes onstage wearing a midnight-blue karate tunic and trousers. His hair is black and Indian-straight. He is skinny as a knife and looking very good. It is perhaps the first time I have ever seen him look good. He has lost the look they loved—that old sensual quality of being “grease,” a truck driver from Memphis who could shake that thing. The oily wavy hair is gone and the pouty baby-round face. There are planes on this face, creases in his cheeks, and he has been a superstar for so long that he glows just standing there. . . . I wish for a moment that he had been one of my heroes, envy the delicious shiver of the sense of time gone, the awareness of what time can do which is sweeping over those who screamed for him as schoolchildren and are now grown up, sitting at a ringside table with the grown-ups in Las Vegas.
The frenzied reaction from the crowd startled the performers onstage. “They wouldn’t shut up,” John Wilkinson recalled; “all through the first song they kept shouting and cheering, they couldn’t get enough of him.” As he finished his opening number (in a brisk minute and a half), Elvis let the cheers and applause wash over him, then turned around to face the musicians behind him and sort of shrugged his shoulders—as if to say, “Maybe this isn’t going to be so bad.”
Then he roared on, doing a hard-driving version of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman,” followed by a string of his biggest fifties hits: “All Shook Up,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Heartbreak Hotel”—and “Love Me Tender,” during which Elvis planted kisses on as many female fans in the front row as he could reach. He did the up-tempo songs faster than in the old days—with a certain distance, almost self-parody, as if he were trying to get through them as quickly as possible. “I think he did them because people expected those songs,” said drummer Ronnie Tutt. “You could tell he just wanted to rush through them. He wasn’t necessarily thrilled with who he was in the fifties. Because he had become a different man.” When he got to “Hound Dog” (a song he didn’t like anymore), he prefaced it with a long, tongue-in-cheek buildup, telling the audience he wanted to do a “special song” for the evening, a song that “says something,” a song just right for a “tender, touching moment”—before the sudden explosion: “YOU AIN’T NOTHIN’ . . .” He raced through that one so fast it was almost disrespectful.
After the trip down memory lane, Elvis changed the pace with several numbers that showcased his more mature, emotional, ballad-driven style: “Memories,” the sentimental Mac Davis song that he had introduced on his 1968 special; “In the Ghetto,” the Davis number that had given him his biggest hit in years; the angsty ballad “I Can’t Stop Loving You”; and in a nod to the Beatles, a medley of “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude.” The set reached a climax with Elvis’s feverish, seven-minute, no-holds-barred performance of a song almost no one in the audience had heard before (the single would be released during his Vegas run), “Suspicious Minds,” which nearly brought the house down.
In the last part of the show, Elvis circled back to the 1950s, with an energetic cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” and one of his early Sun releases, “Mystery Train” (that favorite of all Elvis classicists), which slid neatly into “Tiger Man,” featuring the same rhythm line. Then he revved up the jets for the old Ray Charles rouser “What’d I Say,” before closing the show (as he would nearly every live show for the rest of his career) with “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” his ballad from the 1961 film Blue Hawaii—the only one of his sixties movie songs that Elvis would regularly perform in Las Vegas.
The show lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, and Elvis worked himself to a frazzle: pacing the stage like a panther, crouching, lunging, leaping, doing karate kicks and punches. He was audibly huffing and puffing after just a few minutes. He gulped water and Gatorade and mopped his sweat with towels handed to him by Charlie Hodge, or handkerchiefs and napkins tossed onstage by women in the audience. “He was like a wild man,” recalled Felton Jarvis, his RCA record producer. “He was all over that stage. I mean, he almost hurt himself—he was doing flips and cartwheels and all kinds of stuff; on ‘Suspicious Minds’ he’d be down on one knee and do a flip across stage and just roll.” The cartwheels may have been an exaggeration, but no one could doubt that Elvis was giving it everything he had. In one show later in the run, he actually split his pants doing one of his kick moves and had to retreat offstage, where his entourage formed a protective ring around him while he changed quickly into a new pair. (This prompted Bill Belew to switch to the one-piece jumpsuits—more forgiving in the crotch—that Elvis wore for his later Vegas shows.)
He talked to the audience in between numbers—nervously, self-consciously, with a few awkward jokes. He noted that this was “my first live appearance in nine years. Appeared dead a few times. . . .” He joked about the garish showroom—“Welcome to the big, freaky International Hotel, with those weirdo dolls on the walls and those funky angels on the ceiling”—and its owner, Kirk Kerkorian, whose name he pretended to have trouble pronouncing. “I’d like to get him and Howard Hughes in a crap game,” he quipped. The same lines would be repeated almost every night, but the evening had a loose, spontaneous quality too. On opening night Elvis saw entertainment columnist Rex Reed at one of the front tables and exclaimed, “I saw you on TV the other night!”
The awkwardness and spontaneity were refreshing. This was no slick Vegas headliner, with polished stage patter, well-crafted jokes, and fake effusions of love for the audience. Elvis was still the overgrown, overawed kid from Memphis, as anxious about talking (as opposed to singing) to an audience as the audience was eager to make him feel welcome. But musically, he was a revelation, not least to the musicians onstage. “Elvis surprised us with his range and his stamina,” said Joe Moscheo, of the Imperials. “We were blown away by how good he was.” When the show was over, Elvis got a standing ovation—“one of the rare occasions,” Myram Borders reported in the Nevada State Journal, “when a Las Vegas standing salute was sincere rather than rigged with a few cronies of an entertainer planted down front to stamp and scream approval.” The show was a clear triumph.
“Good God! You are something!” cried Sonny West, the first to greet Elvis as he walked offstage. Elvis responded with a grin, “It felt good.” Surrounded by his entourage, he went downstairs to his dressing room, where the mood was ebullient. Colonel Parker got there a little late and had to wait while Elvis was changing clothes. When he emerged, the two embraced, for one of the only times anyone could remember. “We did it!” the Colonel said. Some claimed they saw tears in his eyes.
Friends and fellow performers streamed into Elvis’s dressing room to congratulate him. Sammy Davis Jr., who had led the cheers from a ringside table, gave him a big Sammy Davis Jr. hug. Cary Grant told Elvis he’d never seen a show to match it. Pat Boone—who first met Elvis in 1955, when they appeared on the same bill at a Cleveland sock hop—brought along his twelve-year-old daughter, Debby, who used to climb all over Elvis when he came to visit at their Bel Air home. Carol Channing laughed when Elvis greeted her with a joke: “Ain’t you in show business?” Bobby Vinton, the silky-voiced young crooner of “Blue Velvet” and other sixties hits, came by with his agent, who asked if Elvis would pose for a photo with Bobby. The Colonel, who frowned on that sort of thing, was a little annoyed, but Elvis happily obliged.
Everyone knew they had witnessed something extraordinary, possibly historic. “It was absolutely spectacular, totally electric from beginning to end,” said Terry Blackwood. “This was a new venue and a whole new image for him, but it all worked.” “Musically and energy level, there was nobody to compare to him,” said Bobby Morris, who spent
sixty years in Las Vegas and worked with practically everybody. “There was nothing to match that particular evening and that engagement at the International.” It was the first time Priscilla Presley had ever seen her husband perform live on a concert stage, and she was knocked out: “I got it. He owned that stage.”
“I never saw anything like it in my life,” said Mac Davis, who was in the audience, flattered when Elvis gave him a shout-out—“Hiya, Mac”—before singing “In the Ghetto.” “It was unbelievable. He was physically beautiful at that age, just a specimen. You couldn’t take your eyes off the guy. It was just crazy. Women rushing the stage, people clamoring over each other. I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face the entire time.” Ann Moses, editor of the teen magazine Tiger Beat, said, “I saw the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, and the Rolling Stones at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. But there was something about that night that was so special. The overall excitement in the room was overwhelming. Every aspect of his performance was dead-on. Everyone was dumbstruck and didn’t want the night to end. It was one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.”
Steve Binder, director of the 1968 NBC special that resuscitated Elvis’s career, was there too. Though he had nothing to do with the Vegas show, he was thrilled to see Elvis fulfilling the promise of his TV comeback. “I thought he was fantastic, every bit as good as I had seen and worked with him in ’68,” said Binder. “I had been in Vegas for other projects, but I never saw that kind of energy in the air. And he delivered.” But when Binder tried to go backstage to congratulate Elvis, the guards turned him away, saying his name wasn’t on the guest list. He suspected it was the handiwork of Colonel Parker, who had essentially made him persona non grata after the ’68 special. Years later, Joe Esposito apologized to Binder, saying Elvis didn’t know he was there.
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 20
