The Mirage was an instant success, and a spate of other theme park–like hotels quickly followed: the Excalibur, designed to look like a medieval Arthurian castle; the Egyptian-pyramid-shaped Luxor; the kid-friendly Treasure Island, where a sea battle between pirate ships was staged every ninety minutes. And more: hotels re-creating the canals of Venice, the streets of Paris, the skyline of New York City. It was dubbed the Disneyfication of Las Vegas—but there were designer shops and gourmet restaurants for the grown-ups too. Wynn’s Bellagio, opened in 1998, featured a re-creation of Italy’s Lake Como, with a giant musical fountain display every fifty minutes, plus a $300 million collection of art by Cézanne, van Gogh, and other modern masters. Las Vegas was now a full-service vacation spot, both mass-market and upscale, amusement park and designer shopping mall, something for the whole family. With gambling, too—only now it was called gaming.
The entertainment changed as well. As headliners in the Mirage’s main showroom, Wynn installed the glam illusionists Siegfried and Roy. The two had met in the 1960s aboard a German cruise line, where Siegfried Fischbacher was working as a steward and doing magic shows for the passengers, and Roy Horn, another ship employee, convinced him to incorporate a pet cheetah (which Roy had smuggled on board) into the show. The two developed a unique magic act that they were soon performing in nightclubs across Europe. Eventually they moved to Las Vegas, where they appeared in the Lido de Paris and other production shows, before headlining their own show, Beyond Belief, for seven years at the Frontier Hotel. For the Mirage, they enlisted directors John Napier and John Caird—the Royal Shakespeare Company team responsible for Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables—to fashion a $28 million, effects-laden extravaganza, featuring a menagerie of white tigers, elephants, and other jungle animals, that set a new standard for Vegas spectacle.
Then came Cirque du Soleil, the new age Canadian circus troupe, founded in 1984 by a couple of street performers in Montreal, which opened its first Vegas show, Mystére, on Christmas Day 1993, in a specially designed, fifteen-hundred-seat theater at the Treasure Island resort. The Cirque shows, with their mix of aerial acrobatics, circus stunts, clowns, puppetry, music, and special effects, were an entirely new kind of spectacle for Las Vegas: hugely expensive to stage, but capable of running forever. A half dozen more Cirque shows would soon be fixtures on the Strip—the water-themed O, the erotic Zumanity, tributes to the Beatles and Michael Jackson—reinventing the city’s family-friendly entertainment for the new millennium.
The new Vegas was an astonishing success. Twenty-eight million people visited Las Vegas in 1994, more than double the number just ten years earlier. The critics who once scorned Vegas as the bad-taste capital of America suddenly saw the town in a new light. The over-the-top stage spectacles and theme-park hotels were now viewed as an authentic, and somehow lovable, expression of all-American kitsch. “How can a large-spirited American not love Las Vegas, or at least smile at the notion of it?” wrote Kurt Andersen in a 1994 Time cover story, which celebrated all the ways in which the Vegas esthetic had transformed American culture, from postmodern architecture to Michael Jackson concerts. Even Wayne Newton was now corny enough to be hip.
The Cirque du Soleil spectacles, along with other production shows, magic acts, and performance troupes like Blue Man Group, all but pushed out the traditional Vegas headliners. But in the early 2000s came the stirrings of a revival. Colonel Tom Parker himself—who settled in Las Vegas after Elvis’s death and became a consultant to the Hilton—heard a young Canadian singer named Céline Dion perform Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” on a 1994 Disney TV special and urged her manager-husband, René Angélil, to bring her to Las Vegas. He demurred, saying she wasn’t ready. But nine years later, in 2003, Caesars Palace signed Dion to a blockbuster three-year contract—five shows a week, forty weeks a year, in the hotel’s new $95 million, four-thousand-seat Colosseum theater.
Dion’s high-tech show (created by former Cirque du Soleil director Franco Dragone) featured more than fifty dancers, a huge LED screen displaying vistas ranging from ancient Rome to New York’s Times Square, shooting stars, meteor showers, and a tree blooming onstage—along with Céline’s rafter-raising soprano, belting out everything from “I’ve Got the World on a String” to her signature hit, “My Heart Will Go On.” Her show was a huge success, and the inspiration for a new wave of Vegas “residencies,” from Elton John to Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, and Lady Gaga—all pop stars with big followings, at least one foot in the rock world, and a flair for spectacle. Just like Elvis. Said Dion in a 2007 Vegas tribute, “Elvis was Las Vegas. If it wasn’t for him, so many performers like myself would probably never have had the chance to do what we do in this town.”
Their shows were more extravagantly staged than anything Elvis Presley could have imagined. But they all owed a debt to Elvis’s comeback show in 1969. He taught Las Vegas to think big.
On August 16, 1977, the day Elvis Presley died, the Hilton Hotel lowered its flag to half-staff. Barron Hilton, in a perfunctory statement, called Elvis “more than just a great talent, he was a good friend to all of us at the Las Vegas Hilton.” Elvis’s doctor, Elias Ghanem, expressed shock at his death; he had given Elvis a physical exam only recently, he told reporters, and “why, he was in perfect health.” That night, shortly after midnight, a weeks-long drought in Las Vegas ended when an inch and a half of rain poured down in just three hours. Could even the heavens be weeping?
The first formal tribute to Elvis in Las Vegas came a year later, in September 1978, when Colonel Parker and Elvis’s father, Vernon, coproduced the Always Elvis Festival at the Hilton Hotel. It featured an audiovisual tribute to Elvis’s career, a display of his costumes and other personal effects, and the unveiling of a bronze statue of Elvis, given a place of honor outside the hotel’s rechristened Elvis Presley Showroom. Las Vegas had found its most enduring icon, and the Elvis industry was underway.
Elvis impersonators had been around since before the King’s death. Elvis himself reportedly went to see singer Brendan Bowyer, who did an impersonation of him as part of the Royal Showband’s act in the Stardust Hotel’s lounge. The spangled jumpsuits, curled-lip sneer, and jet-black, aging-greaser hairdo made Elvis easy to imitate, or at least approximate, and soon Elvis impersonators were as ubiquitous in Las Vegas as quarter slot machines. They starred in tribute shows, entertained in hotel lounges, competed in Elvis Tribute Artist contests, appeared at conventions, rode in parades, and played in celebrity golf tournaments. The winner of the 2016 Las Vegas Marathon was a man in an Elvis costume.
At least three museums or exhibitions of Elvis memorabilia have opened and closed in Las Vegas in the years since his death. (The Elvis estate in Memphis owns most of Elvis’s costumes and personal effects, but there’s still plenty of freelance memorabilia to go around.) Visitors to the Westgate Hotel—the former Hilton—can tour the thirtieth-floor suite where Elvis once stayed, since redecorated and divided into luxury suites for paying customers. A troupe of skydiving Elvis impersonators, dubbed the Flying Elvises, were the comedic highlight of the 1992 movie (and later Broadway musical) Honeymoon in Vegas. Fans of the King congregate every July for the annual Las Vegas Elvis Festival, one of several such fan gatherings around the country that keep his legacy alive among the faithful. The street leading from the Strip to the Westgate Hotel has been renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard.
One Elvis impersonator, Jesse Garron (real name Jesse Grice, before he adopted the name of Elvis’s twin brother, misspelled), was given a key to the city by former mayor Oscar Goodman; now Jesse calls himself the Official Elvis of Vegas, appears as Elvis in various shows and events, and gives tours of the Strip in his 1955 pink Cadillac. Donny Edwards, who played the King for years at the now-defunct Elvis-A-Rama Museum, has toured with former Elvis backup musicians D. J. Fontana and the Sweet Inspirations and stars in an Elvis tribute show at the South Point Hotel and Casino. Vegas has a “Big Elvis”—aka Pete Vallee, a four-hundred-pounde
r who sits in a chair while delivering Elvis songs on weekday afternoons in Harrah’s piano bar. And there’s “Little Elvis,” a pint-size Greek immigrant named Dimos Greko, who dons a red-and-black jumpsuit and hires himself out for weddings and parties.
Quickie weddings have been a major Vegas attraction since the city’s earliest days. But it took the Gretna Green Wedding Chapel (opened in 1947 and supposedly visited by Elvis in 1967, just before his wedding to Priscilla) to come up with the bright idea, just after Elvis died, of changing its name to the Graceland Wedding Chapel and making Elvis part of the ceremony. Now it conducts more than four thousand Elvis weddings or renewals of vows a year and is one of several chapels lined up along Las Vegas Boulevard, between the Strip hotels and downtown, that will furnish an Elvis impersonator to walk the bride down the aisle, serenade the happy couple with Elvis songs, and maybe even conduct the ceremony.
Ron Decar spent twenty years singing on the Strip in such shows as the Folies Bergere and Moulin Rouge before donning a studded black jumpsuit, sunglasses, and jet-black wig as the resident Elvis (and owner) of the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel. “Elvis changed the whole idea of what you could do with a Vegas show,” said Decar. “People expect to see him here.” For each couple, he’ll sing two or three Elvis songs (usually “Love Me Tender” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—and he pays royalties), administer the vows (he’s licensed as a minister), and close out the ceremony in the proper campy spirit: “Do you promise to adopt each other’s hound dog? Not to wear your blue suede shoes in the rain? To always be each other’s teddy bear? And to give each other a hunka-hunka burnin’ love?” Then he escorts the couple down the aisle, out the door, and into the bright Vegas sunlight, where their names, at least for a few minutes, are emblazoned in neon lights on Las Vegas Boulevard.
The couples at the Viva Las Vegas chapel were streaming in like patients in a busy doctor’s waiting room on the hot August afternoon I visited. Benito and Miriam Villanueva, a young couple from Madrid, Spain, were inspired to tie the knot there by a Spanish TV reality-show couple, Alaska and Mario, whose Vegas wedding was televised on their popular show a few years ago. David and Denise Law, a middle-aged couple from Minnesota, stopped in to renew their vows on their twenty-fifth anniversary. Steven and Karen Coling came all the way from Brisbane, Australia, so that Elvis could help them celebrate thirty-four years of marriage. “Just a bit of fun,” Steven explained—but also a tribute to his mother, who died a few months earlier. “My mum was the world’s number one Elvis fan. Her one and only trip outside of Australia was to Graceland.”
There have been signs in recent years that Vegas’ long infatuation with Elvis may have peaked. A Cirque du Soleil tribute show, Viva Elvis, produced in collaboration with the Elvis estate, opened at the Aria Hotel in 2008, but closed after two years of lackluster ticket sales. An Elvis exhibit and tribute show at the Westgate Hotel opened to much fanfare in 2015 (also in conjunction with the Presley estate), but shut down abruptly after just a few months, when the third-party producer pulled out because of disappointing business, prompting a lawsuit.
Yet Elvis remains an unavoidable presence in Las Vegas, everywhere from souvenir shops to the nostalgic tribute shows that populate the smaller venues on the Strip, helping visitors fill the downtime in between the slot machines and Cirque du Soleil.
I went to see one of the Elvis tribute shows, All Shook Up, and brought along Pat Gill, one of my favorite sources for this book. Pat grew up in South Africa, began performing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris at age fifteen, and came to Vegas in 1967, a striking five-foot-eight-inch blonde, for a role in the Casino de Paris. She was lead dancer in the topless lounge show Vive Les Girls in 1969, when Elvis Presley came to see the show, went backstage to meet her, and invited her to his opening night at the International Hotel. Pat, an Elvis fan ever since she saw him in G.I. Blues as a teenager, sat at one of the VIP tables and went backstage after the show for some photos with Elvis. The two generated some gossip and continued to see each other for years afterward, whenever Elvis came to town. Pat always insisted they were “just friends,” but she was smitten. “I adored him,” said Pat. “He was charming, kind, generous—a true Southern gentleman.”
Pat was almost surely the only person in the audience of eighty or so in the tiny V Theater on that Tuesday evening who actually knew Elvis Presley. The show itself was passably entertaining. Star Travis Allen, re-creating an Elvis Vegas concert, didn’t so much do an impression of Elvis as simply wear his clothes (gold jacket in the first half, white jumpsuit in the second) and sing his songs. “Elvis never did moves like that,” Pat said, turning to me early in the show. She was right: Allen’s swivel-kneed, moonwalking gyrations were more Michael Jackson than Elvis Presley. When he sang “Return to Sender,” both Pat and I noted that Elvis never performed that song in concert. Allen closed, predictably enough, with “Viva Las Vegas,” and here we disagreed. There’s no record that Elvis ever performed the song in Las Vegas. But Pat claims she saw him do it.
Pat spent twenty years as a Vegas dancer, working with some of the top choreographers in town. When her performing days were over, she remained in Vegas and worked as a photographer and blackjack dealer, before retiring. At seventy-two, she’s had her health issues. She survived a bout with cancer many years ago (Liza Minnelli and Joan Rivers helped pay for her therapy), and when I saw her, she was still moving slowly after knee-replacement surgery. She never married and lives alone in a two-bedroom condo a few blocks off the Strip. She goes to church three times a week. Most of her friends have left Vegas or died. She gets depressed, but stopped taking her antidepressants because she couldn’t handle the side effects. She complains that Las Vegas is a bad place to grow old.
But like many of the people I interviewed for this book, she embodies the vibrant, hard-headed, irrepressible spirit of Las Vegas. She is smart, talkative, unsentimental, not so much nostalgic for the old days as simply appreciative of the privilege she had to be part of one of the great eras of American entertainment. “I was blessed,” she says. She was friends with Sammy Davis Jr., who helped her get a green card so that she could remain in the country after her work visa expired. She played a Bond girl in Diamonds Are Forever, starring Sean Connery, which was shot in Las Vegas. (Her one line was cut, but she still gets residuals.) Cary Grant once threw her a twenty-first birthday party. And she fell for Elvis Presley.
So did Las Vegas.
1 Las Vegas was still being built when Elvis Presley debuted there in 1956 at the New Frontier Hotel, which had opened a year earlier with a famous no-show.
2 The hip-shaking rock ’n’ roller was the “extra added attraction” on a bill with Freddy Martin’s orchestra and comedian Shecky Greene.
3 Teenage girls were screaming for him around the country, but Elvis’s act baffled most of the middle-aged Vegas crowd.
4 Liberace, one of Vegas’ most popular stars, helped out with some publicity shots—and a little advice about showmanship.
5 Classic Vegas: Frank Sinatra climbed out of a career slump and became a fixture at the Sands Hotel during the 1950s.
6 Louis Prima and Keely Smith electrified the Sahara lounge with an act dubbed simply the Wildest.
7 While shooting Ocean’s 11, the Rat Pack would gather each night in the Sands’ Copa Room for the show that launched the 1960s golden age.
8 From left, Lawford, Sinatra, Martin, Davis, and Bishop, along with (second from right) their patron and Vegas’ leading impresario, Jack Entratter.
9 Sinatra hated rock ’n’ roll, but when Elvis returned from the Army, Frank gave him a welcome-home party on his ABC-TV special.
10 Davis, Martin, and Sinatra, the pared-down Rat Pack, reunited often in Vegas, the boozing, broad-chasing embodiment of Vegas cool.
11 Elvis had no thought of performing in Las Vegas (or anywhere else) for most of the 1960s, but the city became his favorite getaway.
12 Celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday in January 1962 wi
th the Colonel’s friend Sahara Hotel owner Milton Prell.
13 Elvis was back in Vegas in the summer of 1963 to shoot Viva Las Vegas—with a costar who came close to outshining him, Ann-Margret.
14 The two were a hot couple offscreen as well: “We both felt a current,” she said. “It would become a force we couldn’t control.”
15 For virtually every pop singer of the 1960s, Vegas was an essential stop; Eddie Fisher was one of the big crowd-pleasers.
16 Shecky Greene, who helped introduce Elvis to Las Vegas in 1956, was an improvisational force of nature in the lounges—and offstage as well.
17 Bobby Darin, like many other young rock ’n’ rollers of the early sixties, didn’t want to change Vegas; he wanted to be Vegas.
18 The Beatles, who made Las Vegas the second stop on their first US tour, sparked the musical and cultural changes that would leave Vegas behind.
19 Elvis married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel in 1967, amid much secrecy and some hurt feelings among his entourage.
20 Tom Jones’s sexy, high-voltage Vegas act was an obvious influence on Elvis; the two came to see each other’s shows and traded tips.
21 Elvis signing the contract for his comeback show (with hotel boss Alex Shoofey and booker Bill Miller) at the still-under-construction International Hotel.
22 His ’69 show, which followed Barbra Streisand’s in the International’s two-thousand-seat showroom, set a new record for Vegas hype.
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