Old friends and colleagues from Memphis descended on Vegas to see his show and share in his triumph. Elvis told George Klein and Marty Lacker—the two Memphis friends who had convinced him to record at Chips Moman’s studio—to skip the opening and come out for the second night instead, so they could give him a better appraisal of his performance. (“The reception Elvis is getting here is incredible,” they told the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “You’ve got to see it to believe it.”) Mark James, the Memphis songwriter who had written “Suspicious Minds,” came out to see how Elvis had transformed the song into the galvanizing high point of his Vegas act. Dr. George Nichopoulos, the Memphis doctor who supplied Elvis with his prescription drugs, came to see the show, and so did Ed Parker, Elvis’s karate instructor, who used the opportunity to talk up the marketing plans for his new Kenpo karate system. Sam Phillips, his old patron at Sun Records, drove out for the opening in a limo that Elvis sent for him. They had talked during rehearsals, and Phillips had one piece of advice: never mind the big orchestra, he said; just get yourself the best rhythm section around and make sure they are right behind you, “kicking you in the ass.” Phillips was happy to see the result. “I never heard a better rhythm section in my life,” he told Elvis. He had only one complaint: “That song ‘Memories’ has got to go!”
Nearly every entertainer appearing in Las Vegas at the time made it over to the International to see Elvis, and they too were won over. “I wasn’t a fan of his until then,” said Lainie Kazan, the sexy young singer who was about to open at the Flamingo (and was drawing protests for some racy publicity photos that showed too much of her breasts). “But he was fantastic. I was enchanted, and I was moved.” Petula Clark, the British pop singer who was appearing at Caesars Palace, had heard that Elvis was nervous for the show, and she was nervous for him. “But his performance was much better than I expected,” she said. “They have an expression in French. Elvis was a bête de scène. That’s somebody who was a stage animal, and you could tell that night that’s what Elvis was born to do. There was a great animal magnetism in the way he sang, the way he moved, and the way he smiled.”
Dave Clark, of the British band the Dave Clark Five, was in town for the show and spent a couple of hours with Elvis, who had been such an important early influence on him. “I went in expecting the impossible because he changed all of our lives,” said Clark. “He was as good as I expected him to be and even better. He was magic.” Vic Damone, whom Elvis would often come to see in the Riviera lounge (usually requesting the same song: “Over the Rainbow”), thought Elvis was drinking too much water onstage and gave him an old Broadway singer’s tip: bite your tongue before you go onstage, to keep your mouth lubricated. Tom Jones came by the suite a couple of times, joining in the jam sessions and comparing notes about the toll their exhausting shows were taking. “Elvis at least knew how to do it, vocally, without wrecking himself,” Jones said. “He was better with pacing. He told me, ‘You need more singers onstage. That’s why I’ve got the fellas. When I go up at the end, they go up with me. I could virtually pull out, and the note will still be there. I’m covered.’ ” Jones said he didn’t want to be covered—and paid the price for it with voice problems a few years later.
With Priscilla around for much of the engagement, Elvis had to somewhat curtail his romantic adventures. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t surrounded by beautiful women. During the engagement he met Joyce Bova, a striking, twenty-three-year-old brunette who worked in Washington for the House Armed Services Committee. She was standing in line with a friend to see one of Elvis’s shows when a hotel employee picked her out and asked if she would like to meet Elvis. To her amazement, she was brought to see Elvis backstage, where he flirted with her, invited her to dinner in his suite, and tried to convince her to extend her stay in Las Vegas so he could “get to know her better.” (She had to return to Washington—where her House committee was investigating the My Lai massacre—but they consummated their relationship a year later, when Elvis came to Washington to get a special Narcotics Bureau badge from President Nixon.)
For many young and aspiring musicians, seeing Elvis in Vegas was a powerful, formative experience. Tony Brown was a twenty-three-year-old piano player with the Stamps Quartet, one of Elvis’s favorite gospel groups (they would replace the Imperials as his backup group in 1972), when the group’s leader, J. D. Sumner, routed their tour through Las Vegas just so he could catch Elvis’s show at the International. Sumner made the rest of the group stay on the bus while he went to see the show, but Brown got to go backstage with him afterward to meet Elvis. “Oh, man, it was like going to see the pope,” said Brown, who later played piano backup for Elvis, before becoming a Grammy-winning country-music producer. “He looked like a million bucks. I was just in awe of him. I said, ‘Damn, if I looked like him, I could get any chick I want.’ ”
Terry Mike Jeffrey was a fifteen-year-old high school kid from Kentucky, who had been singing along to Elvis records since age three, when he heard that Elvis would be returning to the stage in Las Vegas. He pleaded with his divorced mother to let him make a trip to Vegas during summer vacation to see the show. She finally agreed and even took out a loan from the bank to pay for the trip.
He flew out to Las Vegas with a family friend as chaperone, and the two had seats for Elvis’s dinner show on August 1, his first performance following the invitation-only opening night. After the show, determined to try to meet his idol, Jeffrey sneaked into the backstage area, worked his way through the kitchen and down some stairs, eluding security long enough to catch sight of Elvis emerging from his dressing room with Sonny West. Just then the security guards grabbed him. “The guards had me by the arms and were taking me upstairs,” Jeffrey recalled. “And I turned around and said, ‘Hey, Elvis!’ He looked at me and smiled. And I said, ‘I’d just love to shake your hand.’ And he called off the guards and said, ‘It’s OK, he’s just a kid.’ ”
Elvis spent ten minutes talking to his young fan, who couldn’t believe his luck. “He was very, very nice to me. Not in a hurry at all. His reaction was ‘You came all the way from Kentucky to see this show?’ It was a thrill for me, but you could tell it was exciting for him as well, because he had been away from the stage for so long.” Elvis even had Charlie Hodge arrange for an extra table to be set up at the front of the balcony so Jeffrey could come to the sold-out midnight show as well. Jeffrey—who later became a country-gospel singer and frequent performer at Elvis tribute shows—ended up seeing thirty-eight Elvis concerts, in and out of Las Vegas, over the next seven years. “But that was probably the best one I ever saw. Simply because he was so excited. It was almost like he was auditioning. It was that new to him.”
Elvis’s comeback show was a turning point for Las Vegas. It set an all-time record for attendance, drawing 101,500 people over the four weeks. Every show was a sellout, with gross ticket receipts topping $1.5 million. (And that didn’t count the $100 tips that patrons shelled out to maître d’ Emilio Muscelli for a prime table; he could make thousands a night during an Elvis engagement.) In a town where showroom entertainment was traditionally a loss leader, Elvis’s was reputedly the first Vegas show to actually make money, and it helped introduce a new business model. The people who came to see Elvis Presley weren’t high rollers—or even, in many cases, gamblers at all. But they came in volume. They were Elvis fans, not necessarily Vegas fans; an estimated 10 percent were members of Elvis fan clubs. They came from all parts of the country and the world, and from all economic strata. (They were diverse in every way except race. Then, as always, Elvis’s fan base was overwhelmingly white.) They may not have dropped thousands at the crap tables, but they plunked their quarters into slot machines, filled up the city’s hotel rooms, ate in restaurants, and bought souvenirs. When Elvis came to town, all of Las Vegas felt flush.
Alex Shoofey, head man at the International, didn’t have to wait for the final figures to realize that the hotel’s bet on Elvis was going to pay off big. The n
ight after the opening, he and Colonel Parker met in the hotel’s coffee shop and sketched out a long-term contract on a pink tablecloth. According to the deal, Elvis would appear at the hotel for two four-week engagements a year for the next five years. His salary was increased to $125,000 a week (applied retroactively to the current engagement), boosting his annual pay to Colonel Parker’s favorite round number: $1 million.
Some Elvis chroniclers claim that Colonel Parker got taken by Shoofey, since the contract didn’t provide for any pay increases over the five years (though there would be bonuses, as well as an assurance that the hotel would match the salary of any other entertainer who got paid more during the term of the contract). The Colonel even turned down an offer of stock in the hotel; he never believed in anything but cold, hard cash. Some have speculated that Parker agreed to less than Elvis could have commanded because the hotel was willing to cover at least some of his hefty gambling losses. Colonel Parker’s addiction to the casino action was well-known in Vegas; he spent long hours at the roulette table, where he could lose thousands in a single night. “The Colonel was one of the best customers we had,” Shoofey told journalist Alanna Nash. “He was good for a million dollars a year.” (Interestingly, there was never any suggestion of connections between Colonel Parker and mob figures in Vegas. And to his credit, he made sure to keep Elvis away from them too—refusing to allow him even to be photographed with known wiseguys.)
But Elvis was hardly thinking about money as he basked in the acclaim for his Vegas comeback. “We didn’t decide to come back here for the money, I’ll tell you that,” he told the British journalist Ray Connolly, who got a rare sit-down interview with him during the engagement. “I’ve wanted to perform on the stage again for the last nine years, and it’s been building inside of me since 1965 until the strain became intolerable. I got all het up about it, and I don’t think I could have left it much longer. The time is just right. The money—I have no idea about that. I just don’t want to know. You can stuff it.”
The Colonel, who was standing by monitoring the interview, interjected with a laugh, “He can flush all his money away if he wants to. I won’t care.”
When the engagement was finished, Elvis remained in Vegas for several more days; he liked the extra time to unwind, to wait out his fans, and to see some shows with less chance of getting mobbed. He went to the opening night of Nancy Sinatra’s show at the International, which followed his in the big showroom (she had trouble filling up the room, which was partially draped off to make it look less obvious), as well as to the party her father threw for her afterward, stocked with Hollywood celebrities like Kirk Douglas, Fred Astaire, and Yul Brynner. Mac Davis, who was working as a songwriter for Nancy’s company, appeared in the show as well and even got a solo spot singing “In the Ghetto,” the hit that he had written for Elvis. Davis was so nervous on opening night that he forgot the lyrics; Elvis, watching from the audience, kicked out his legs and held his stomach, he laughed so hard.
“Suspicious Minds” was released as a single near the end of August. The studio version Elvis had recorded in Memphis was overdubbed in Las Vegas with vocal and orchestral backup to match the way Elvis was performing it live. Engineers in the studio even tried to duplicate the diminuendo-crescendo effect of his live performances, by simply turning the recording volume down and then dialing it back up again, for a “false ending” before the big finish. It was a tacky gimmick (Chips Moman, back in Memphis, thought it ruined the recording), but it didn’t much matter. “Suspicious Minds” rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Elvis’s first No. 1 hit since “Good Luck Charm” way back in 1962.
In October 1969, RCA released a live recording of the Vegas show—one disk in a double album, From Memphis to Vegas / From Vegas to Memphis, which also included more material from the American studio sessions. Elvis took a vacation in Hawaii with Priscilla and a handful of friends—an all-expenses-paid thank-you gift from the International—followed by another week in the Bahamas. But he returned to Las Vegas at least three more times that fall, revisiting the scene of his conquest and having some fun without Priscilla. Spotted at the blackjack table with two beautiful women at his side, smooching with him in between hands, Elvis quipped, “That’s what a bad marriage does for you.”
Meanwhile, with the Vegas engagement winning all the hosannas he could have wished for, Colonel Parker set about making plans for Elvis’s return to national touring. After a second engagement at the International in January, Elvis did six shows in three days at the massive Houston Astrodome. Then, just after finishing his third Vegas run in September 1970, he went to Phoenix for the start of a six-city tour, his first time back on the road in a dozen years. Propelled by Las Vegas, Elvis was finally back where he had longed to be, all through those agonizing last few years in Hollywood: in front of his fans again.
Las Vegas, meanwhile, was assessing the impact of Elvis’s stupendously successful show.
Most immediately, it gave the new International Hotel instant credibility, as well as a signature star. Elvis became as identified with the International (and later the Hilton, after Kirk Kerkorian sold the hotel in 1971) as Sinatra had been with the Sands. More broadly, Elvis provided a much-needed booster shot for a city that had been trading on its old stars and formats for too long. “The International came along as the first example of Vegas thinking really big,” said Vegas entertainment reporter Mike Weatherford. “Vegas needed some help by then. It was certainly losing its luster.”
For years Las Vegas had shown little interest in reaching out to younger audiences, for the simple reason that they weren’t gamblers. But by the end of the sixties—with the radical changes in popular music, the rise of the “youth culture,” and the continuing fade-out of traditional nightclub entertainment—Vegas was realizing it couldn’t ignore the younger generation forever. Just a couple of months after Elvis’s show, the International brought in a production of the now-generation musical Hair (fending off a threat by the local DA to shut it down for indecency because of its controversial nude scene). In December, Caesars Palace, emboldened at least in part by Elvis’s rock ’n’ roll triumph at the International, booked the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears—the only musical act to play both Woodstock and Las Vegas in the same year—into its Circus Maximus showroom for three nights during the Christmas holidays.
“It is something of a test for producer Dave Victorson to determine the solidity of a jazz-rock unit versus name headliner for pulling power,” wrote Variety’s Bill Willard. “If there are sufficient amounts of people inside the showroom, will those under and over 25 who are drawn by the contemporary pop music band play the games in the casino?” The show was the biggest draw on the Strip on its opening night, and the booking was judged a qualified success. “They appeal to the younger, swinging crowds, who will soon be populating Vegas in sufficient numbers to seriously consider their entertainment preferences,” Willard wrote. “An entirely different perspective of the pop music milieu is taking place and Vegas moguls will have to view the change in a new, hard business light. The old headliners can’t last forever.”
Elvis Presley, to be sure, was a cutting-edge rock performer only by Vegas standards. He appealed mostly to the over-twenty-five crowd, who remembered him from his glory years. And his success at the International did not exactly open the floodgates for rock acts in Vegas. None of the major rock groups and singer-songwriters who were setting the agenda in popular music in the late sixties—the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel—wanted anything to do with Las Vegas. The rock critics who praised Elvis’s comeback also made clear their disdain for the venue where he chose to make it. “Like the Temptation of Saint Anthony, Las Vegas bristles with absurdities,” wrote David Dalton in his otherwise admiring Rolling Stone piece; “it reeks of unreality. Its suddenness in the desert is a thirst-demented prospector’s hallucination; the neon totems on the Strip pumping liquid light into the brain like pulsating neurons, the en
dless chrome dispensers of fate in the casinos . . .” And so on.
Still, Elvis showed that Vegas could be more than just a comfortable sinecure for aging rock ’n’ rollers at the end of their careers. Though he had been in eclipse for years, Elvis was still a powerful commercial force: releasing chart-topping hits, able to fill up huge arenas. “Before Elvis went back to performing in Vegas there was a stigma,” said Jerry Schilling, who later managed the Beach Boys (another group that shunned Vegas). “It meant you weren’t an arena artist anymore. The only reason you played Vegas was you couldn’t play anywhere else. Elvis changed that.” Sonny Charles, lead singer of the Vegas R&B group the Checkmates, was gratified to see the shift in attitude. “Before Elvis, it seemed that all these concert acts and rock acts would think of Vegas as a step down,” he said. “You played Vegas at the end of your career. But Elvis came and there was really a whole different mood.”
“I think Elvis made it OK to play Vegas,” said Tony Brown, who worked in Vegas with Elvis, as well as with other singers, like Johnny Cash. “Up until then, you thought of Vegas as shlock kinda stuff. But now, when an artist reaches the legacy level and doesn’t want to do arena tours, they come to Las Vegas. It’s an easier gig: you just come down the elevator and go do the show; the production is over-the-top, better than anything you can take on tour. Elvis started that.”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 22
