His performances first began to be affected, by most accounts, during his August 1971 engagement. Elvis looked puffy and seemed listless onstage. His sets were rarely longer than forty-five minutes, and filled with so many fits and starts and distracting karate displays that some audience members actually walked out. “Those shows in Vegas in August of ’71, that’s when you saw the first signs that things were starting to fall apart,” said Lamar Fike. “Elvis would be so ripped his tongue would be thick, and he’d tell the audience, ‘I’m sorry, folks, I just got up. I’m not really awake yet.’ ” The critics began to notice. “As performances go,” wrote Mark Tan in the Hollywood Reporter, “Elvis Presley’s at the Las Vegas Hilton is sloppy, hurriedly rehearsed, mundanely lit, poorly amplified, occasionally monotonous, often silly, and haphazardly coordinated. Elvis looked drawn, tired, and noticeably heavier—weight-wise, not musically—than in his last Vegas appearance. He wasn’t in his strongest voice, his costume of studded white slacks and vest with black satin high collar and scarf was not his sexiest or most flattering. And do you know what? The packed to over-capacity audience—the first 2,000 of the usual 120,000 he’ll draw for his monthlong engagement—positively couldn’t have cared less.”
That was part of the problem. The fans loved him, no matter how he looked or what he did. The adulation seemed to go to his head. The shows became more bombastic; the white suits more garish. Elvis began wearing a jewel-studded cape, spreading it wide and bowing his head dramatically, like some weird cross between Dracula and Jesus. He began performing a medley of patriotic songs—“Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the spiritual “All My Trials”—that he dubbed “An American Trilogy,” delivered with a sober grandiloquence that was a far cry from his splashy but still self-deprecating early performances.
The strange thing was, he could still sing. Live recordings from his Vegas shows as late as 1974 reveal a vocalist of still formidable power: still hitting the high notes on “It’s Now or Never,” rocking with just as much authority on old numbers like “Trying to Get to You” or Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land.” And Elvis was still the toast of Las Vegas. Other performers came to see him, hang out with him, claim him as a friend. Marty Allen, the frizzy-haired half of the comedy team of Allen and Rossi, was flattered when he first met Elvis and the King told him how much he enjoyed Marty on game shows like Hollywood Squares. They would trade practical jokes: once, just as he was about to go onstage, Elvis had some of the guys handcuff Marty to Elvis’s dressing-room door. After Marty finally got a security guard to free him, he barged in on the show, wearing a scarf and clamoring for a kiss while Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender.” Pop singer Vikki Carr, who was appearing at the Tropicana Hotel, came to see his show for the first time with her fiancé, Elias Ghanem—Elvis’s own Vegas doctor. When she went with Ghanem backstage after the show, Elvis told her to close her eyes and slipped a pavé diamond star ring on her finger as an engagement gift.
An occasional project could rouse Elvis’s interest, like his January 1973 TV special Aloha from Hawaii, which was the first music concert ever beamed live around the world by satellite. But a few days after the broadcast he was back in Las Vegas, appearing worn-out and overweight, and more dependent than ever on drugs, which now included injections of liquid Demerol. Health problems forced him to cancel five midnight shows in February. Then, on the night of February 18, in another security scare, four Peruvian men in the audience suddenly rushed the stage. They turned out to be just overeager, overlubricated fans, but a melee ensued as several members of Elvis’s entourage jumped onstage to fight off the intruders; Elvis even knocked one back with a karate kick of his own. He was fuming after the incident. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the crowd. “I’m sorry I didn’t break his goddamn neck is what I’m sorry about.”
Elvis was still upset after the show, and he insisted that the attack must have been the work of Mike Stone, the karate instructor with whom Priscilla was having an affair. (She and Elvis would be divorced in October.) Elvis startled even his jaded inner circle by demanding that they hire a hit man and have Stone killed. The Memphis Mafia, not exactly relishing the idea of behaving like the real Mafia, made a show of looking into it, before Elvis cooled down and decided to let the matter slide.
His behavior onstage grew more and more erratic. For one show in August 1973 he came out riding Lamar Fike’s back, with a toy monkey attached to his neck. He sang “What Now My Love?” while lying on a bed rolled out onstage and interpolated X-rated lyrics into “Love Me Tender.” The Hollywood Reporter found it “one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, and most disheartening performances of his Las Vegas career.” On the last night of the run, Elvis launched into an off-the-cuff rant in which he criticized the Hilton Hotel for firing a waiter named Mario, who often brought him room service. “He needs the job, and I think the Hiltons are bigger than that,” said Elvis. Colonel Parker was furious that Elvis would publicly embarrass the hotel like that and chewed him out after the show. They had a brutal argument that ended with Elvis actually firing the Colonel—only to make up a few days later, after Parker toted up how much money he claimed Elvis owed him, and Elvis and his father decided they couldn’t afford the breakup.
In October 1973 Elvis, semicomatose, was rushed to a Memphis emergency room and spent three weeks in the hospital, as doctors attempted to wean him off at least some of his drugs. He took a couple of months to rest, and when he returned to Vegas in January—his engagements now shortened from four weeks to two—some saw an uptick, his best performances since 1970. But soon he was back to his unpredictable behavior onstage. In August 1974, he rambled on endlessly about his passion for karate, his divorce from Priscilla, and his anger at press reports of his drug abuse: “I hear rumors flying around. I got sick in the hospital. In this day and time you can’t even get sick; you are . . . strung out! By God, I’ll tell you something, friend, I have never been strung out in my life, except on music. . . . If I find or hear an individual that has said that about me, I’m going to break their goddamn neck, you son of a bitch!” Priscilla, who was in the audience, was shocked that he would air his grievances so publicly. “It was like watching a different person,” she said.
Even the occasional glimmers of hope for a new challenge were quickly snuffed out. Elvis wanted to tour overseas, but the Colonel (hiding his passport problems) always made excuses for rejecting the idea. Barbra Streisand visited Elvis backstage at the Hilton one night and offered him the costarring role in a remake she was planning of the film classic A Star Is Born. Elvis, who still had hopes of making a mark in movies, was excited by the prospect. But Colonel Parker, peeved that Streisand made the offer directly to Elvis and not to him (and possibly realizing that Elvis wasn’t capable of such a challenging role at this point), made so many demands on the deal that it was soon abandoned. Kris Kristofferson eventually played the role.
Health problems forced more show cancellations in 1975. In August, overweight and ill, Elvis was so weak he couldn’t walk from his dressing room to the elevator; at times he had to call for a chair onstage. He cut the engagement short, rested up, and came back in December, when he seemed a bit revived. But live footage of his last Vegas engagement, in December 1976, shows his deterioration with painful clarity. Elvis looks bloated and is nearly immobile onstage—all the dynamic energy of his early Vegas years reduced to a little leg jiggling and half-hearted swaying to the beat. He seems distracted, depleted, simply going through the motions. Even tossing out scarves to his female fans—Charlie Hodge hands them to him, one after another after another—now looks like a mechanical, joyless ritual.
“After sitting through Elvis Presley’s closing night performance at the Las Vegas Hilton,” wrote the Memphis Press-Scimitar, in an eerily prophetic review on December 15, 1976, “one walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes, perhaps suddenly, and why the King of Rock ’n’ Roll would subject himself to possible ridicule by
going onstage so ill-prepared.”
Eight months later at Graceland, on the afternoon of August 16, 1977, after a night in which he visited his dentist, played racquetball at 3:00 a.m., and swallowed three packets of the sleep medication his doctors had prepared for him, his girlfriend, Ginger Alden, found Elvis lying on the bathroom floor, unconscious and not breathing. He was rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital, and an hour later, at 3:30 p.m. central time, he was declared dead. The cause was officially cardiac arrhythmia, but an autopsy revealed traces of fourteen different drugs in his system, at least five of them in potentially toxic doses.
Elvis’s demons were of little concern to Las Vegas, so long as he kept bringing in the crowds. And he did. His fans continued making the pilgrimage to Las Vegas to the bitter end: Elvis did 636 shows in Vegas over seven years, and every one of them, according to the hotel, was sold out. He was the city’s undisputed superstar, a shot in the arm for business all over Las Vegas whenever he came to town. Yet Bill Miller, the veteran Vegas booker who signed him for the International Hotel in 1969, predicted that Elvis’s show would mean “the end of Vegas”: his record-breaking salary, Miller feared, would make big-star entertainment in Vegas economically unsustainable. Miller was only partly wrong. Elvis didn’t kill Vegas, but he did change it. His triumph in Las Vegas helped hasten the demise of the old nightclub shows and sounded the starting gun for a very different era of Las Vegas entertainment.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Las Vegas. The transition from the old mob factions that had dominated the casino business to a new era of corporate owners was gaining steam. On Thanksgiving eve in 1970, Howard Hughes left town, as suddenly and surreptitiously as he had arrived four years earlier: spirited out of the Desert Inn on a stretcher, driven to Nellis Air Force Base, and flown to the Bahamas, never to return. In 1971 Kirk Kerkorian sold his International Hotel to the Hilton organization—the first national hotel chain to get a foothold on the Las Vegas Strip—and moved on to an even bigger project. Having just acquired a controlling interest in Hollywood’s MGM film studio, he set out to build a namesake hotel in Vegas: the MGM Grand. Constructed in a quick eighteen months and opening in December 1973, the $106 million concrete-and-glass behemoth had no particular architectural distinction except for its size: with 2,084 rooms (and a building volume as large as that of the Empire State Building), it was not only the biggest hotel in Las Vegas, but the biggest in the world at the time.
The MGM Grand would, however, be the last major resort to open on the Strip for more than a decade—and would be ravaged by a disastrous fire in November 1980 that killed eighty-five people. (The hotel had not bothered to install a fire sprinkler system in the casino or the restaurant, where the fire started.) Several of the older Strip hotels built new high-rise additions during the 1970s; downtown got a major facelift; and the city’s national profile grew, as TV hosts like Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas brought their popular daytime talk shows to Las Vegas and Jerry Lewis in 1973 made Vegas the permanent home for his annual Labor Day telethon for muscular dystrophy. Yet Las Vegas, increasingly, seemed to be living off the glory of a fading show-business era.
Many of the stars from the golden age were still around, but they were well past their prime. Frank Sinatra announced his retirement from show business in June 1971, only to return two years later—still a big draw in Las Vegas, but no longer the cultural force he once was. Dean Martin’s lazy-hazy drunk act, overexposed for nine seasons on his NBC variety show, was past its sell-by date. Sammy Davis Jr., with his hip Nehru jackets, flashy jewelry, and cool-cat lingo, was verging on self-parody. Their old patron at the Sands, Jack Entratter, was gone too: dead of a cerebral hemorrhage following a bike accident in March 1971. (His former wife Corinne Entratter Sidney always had suspicions about the death, since it followed a trip Entratter made to New York, when the hotel’s mob bosses summoned him to explain some alleged financial improprieties.)
Nor did Elvis’s comeback in Las Vegas do much to attract a new generation of rock stars, most of whom still shunned the city as a haven for nightclub has-beens. A few younger, middle-of-the-road pop singers, like Olivia Newton-John and Engelbert Humperdinck, became Vegas headliners during these years. Following Elvis’s success, Vegas became more receptive to other vintage rockers (like Jerry Lee Lewis, who followed Elvis into the International Hotel’s showroom in 1970) as well as to country music: once confined mainly to downtown, country stars like Johnny Cash, Barbara Mandrell, and Willie Nelson now became top attractions on the Strip.
Yet Elvis’s white jumpsuits and bombastic stage shows came to symbolize the gaudiness, fakery, and middlebrow bad taste that people identified with Las Vegas. The city in the seventies was “an uncool polyester dump” (Time), a “blight to spirit and soul” (New York Times), an object of parody—like Bill Murray’s unctuous lounge-singer character on Saturday Night Live, crooning the theme to Star Wars (and Elvis’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra). “Gradually between 1968 and 1975, Vegas found itself pushed across the generational line that divides cool from laughable,” wrote Mike Weatherford in Cult Vegas, “Without a new generation of headliner-types to draw from, Vegas became an elephant’s graveyard of has-beens or dependable B-teamers.”
Arena concerts and tours were the preferred (and more lucrative) route for the major rock stars of the era. Vegas was regarded as a sellout; the hip agents steered their clients away. Mac Davis, who was trying to make the jump from songwriting to performing in the early seventies, recalled his first meeting with music-industry power broker David Geffen. “Why in hell are you playing Las Vegas?” Geffen said. “That’s the worst thing you can do!” Even among the more traditional Vegas stars, the city was no longer considered the essential stop that it had been a decade earlier. “There are a lot of performers who don’t want to work here,” Petula Clark told reporter Mark Tan in 1976. “Ten years ago everybody would kill to get here, and now it’s ‘Who needs it?’ Concerts have really cut into the prestige of Vegas. People feel they can go out in concert and make more money and work less.”
The glamour and cachet of the early sixties were long gone; the high rollers and Rat Pack–era hipsters replaced by a new crowd of budget-conscious, Middle American tourists. (The “flood victims,” as some of the old-timers referred to them.) Texas columnist Molly Ivins, on her first trip to Las Vegas in 1979, was both amused and appalled: “Genuine Pa Kettles, wearing overalls and straw farmer’s hats, stand pouring quarters into slot-machines bookended by characters sent from Central Casting to give Californians a bad name. Shirts open to the navel, razor-cuts, indelible tans, and little gold coke spoons around their necks. They in turn are bookended by blue-rinse perm grandmas in print dresses wearing cat-eye glasses with sequins on the top.”
But that, by and large, was Elvis’s audience. And it was Elvis’s show, in all its glorious excess, that seemed to presage Vegas’ new era.
He gave the Vegas show a makeover and pointed it in a new direction. He turned the Vegas show into an event and set the high bar that the next generation of headliners tried to top. After Elvis, everything got bigger: higher salaries, gaudier productions, more musicians onstage, splashier publicity campaigns. For rock and pop singers who had finished their run in the Top 40 but still had creative (and commercial) ambitions, Elvis showed that Las Vegas could be a viable career option: a little nostalgia for the old fans, then a move into fresh territory, a chance to show off new artistic maturity and range—accompanied by the sort of Vegas hoopla that certified the presence of an authentic superstar.
Cher, already a Vegas veteran from her years with Sonny Bono, came back to Caesars Palace as a solo in 1979, with an opulent show in which she modeled twelve different Bob Mackie outfits (from cowgirl chic to Folies-Bergère feathers), rode a mechanical bull, and sang a medley of rock ’n’ roll hits starting with Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Two years later Dolly Parton got a record $350,000 a week for her massively hyped Vegas debut at the Riviera Hotel, making her entrance across a d
rawbridge from a fairy-tale castle, and supplementing her country hits with “House of the Rising Sun” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Wayne Newton, who considered himself Elvis’s heir in Vegas, pumped up his own show with a bigger orchestra, more backup singers, and a tribute segment to Elvis. One night at the Hilton Hotel, in the middle of singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” Wayne claimed he saw Elvis’s ghost watching him from the balcony. (In 1976 Las Vegas got its first arena-sized venue for rock shows, when the Aladdin Hotel opened its seventy-five-hundred-seat, $10 million Theater for the Performing Arts, with Neil Diamond as the opening attraction.)
The broad-based, Middle American audience that Elvis attracted, moreover, was precisely the target audience for Vegas’ own reinvention a decade or so later. The modern era began in 1989 with the opening of Steve Wynn’s Mirage Hotel. Situated next door to Caesars Palace, the Mirage was the first resort in Vegas to offer not just a theme, but a veritable theme park. Inside the hotel Wynn created a giant rain forest, enclosed in a glass dome, featuring real palm trees and orchids and twenty thousand square feet of fake plants. Behind the registration desk was a twenty-thousand-gallon aquarium filled with sharks and rays. Outside the hotel, visitors gaped at a fake mountain range, with grottoes, waterfalls, and—the spectacular pièce de résistance—a fifty-foot-high volcano that erupted with fiery fake lava every fifteen minutes. “It’s what God would’ve done if he’d had the money,” said Wynn.
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 24
