CHAPTER 8

VIVE LES GIRLS (IT’S SHOWTIME!)

It was 1969. The summer of love was coming to a close. The flower children had come and gone, taking peace and love along with them.

My parents insisted Aunt Lorrayne travel with me to Vegas so I didn’t have to make the three-day road trip alone. That was fine by me. My aunt, the oldest of my dad’s siblings, was the one person in my family who had always supported me in everything I chose to do, and I adored her. Even though her belief system was that of an old-fashioned schoolmarm, which she’d actually been at one time, she always encouraged me to follow my dreams, no matter how screwy.

When Aunt Lorrayne and I arrived in Las Vegas, she stopped by my new temporary home to meet the Circus Circus cocktail waitress and her kid sister. My Aunt was relieved to find that, although they were complete strangers, they seemed like very nice, normal people. After a tearful goodbye, my favorite aunt flew back to Colorado and my Las Vegas adventures began.

Rehearsals were held in a massive space the size of an airplane hangar, approximately twenty minutes off the Strip, on Spring Mountain Road. In those days it was way the hell out in nowhere land, surrounded by nothing but cacti and lots and lots of sand.

Costume fittings were held there each day, with several busy French ladies taking measurements of every inch of our bodies, from head to toe. The rehearsal hours were long, the heat stifling, and the girls were as bitchy as could be. To top it off, we got only half our regular pay while we rehearsed.

Even though I thought the girls were mean in the beginning, they were angels compared to the choreographer. Ron Lewis’s shows were considered the best on the Strip, but he had a reputation for being a beast to work with. His means of getting performers to do what he asked was to be cruel and degrade them. I was feeling way out of my league as the newbie and was nervous, shy, and more than a little scared. Here I was in a strange new place, really strange, surrounded by much older people I didn’t know who treated me like a child and an outsider.

A big problem for me was that my eyesight was terrible. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to wear my glasses on stage and I was having an awful time with my hard contact lenses because of the dry Vegas air. I wasn’t great at following directions in the first place, but not being able to see made everything that much more challenging.

After demonstrating which foot I should stand on for the umpteenth time, Ron stormed to within inches of my face and screeched, “This foot!” simultaneously stomping down on my foot with all his might. I don’t really think he meant to come down directly on it, at least I hope not. Ever the drama queen, I limped through the rest of the day with my foot wrapped in ice packs and let everyone know how unhappy I was.

That night I called my parents. “I hate it here!” I sobbed. “I’m quitting the show and coming back home!” To their credit, instead of saying, “We told you so,” which was what I had expected, they gave me their best pep talk ever and convinced me not to give up. After all, they’d just gone through a miserable four months of my whining and spent money on a lawyer, so they weren’t about to see it all go down the dumper.

A second choreographer was brought in to stage a couple of numbers. His name was Jerry Jackson, and for every horrible thing Ron said and did, Jerry did something kind and helpful. He had a mild Texas accent and was soft-spoken, funny, and patient. Jerry made up for Ron in spades and became a friend for life.

Four grueling weeks later, our rehearsals came to an end and opening night arrived. I was over-the-moon excited and scared shitless—one big bundle of nerves. More unnerving than the paralyzing fear of forgetting my dance moves or falling on my face were the behind-the-scenes quick changes. At the end of each number, and just like in a NASCAR pit stop, my costumes and headdresses were whipped off and the next one flung on at warp speed by the wardrobe mistress—an older lady we called “Grandma”—and several other dressers. After each change we raced down the stairs and onto the stage for the next number with only seconds to spare.

You’d think the first time I showed up onstage baring my boobies would have been traumatic, but I was totally fine with it. I knew what being a showgirl entailed, and I was ready to show it! More than once I was approached by tourists who recognized me from the show to ask where I’d had my breasts done. Without their realizing I was only seventeen or eighteen, trying to convince them that my boobs were real usually ended with them stomping away calling me a liar.

Vive Les Girls took place in the Dunes Hotel lounge. It was a hipper, sleeker, sexier version of the mainroom show, Casino de Paris, and although it was smaller, “Vive,” as it was referred to (pronounced “Veev”), was very prestigious. It won the award for Best Las Vegas show ten years running and was packed every night.

I shared a dressing room in the upstairs backstage area with seven other showgirls. The “serious” dancers, or “ponies” as they were called because they were shorter and more compact than the showgirls, had their own room downstairs. They danced “covered” because having your fun-bags flopping all over the place during energetic dance moves isn’t that classy.

As showgirls, our goal was to display our elaborate, exaggerated costumes, along with our bare breasts, with dignity and poise. Although the showgirls danced too, what we mainly did was “move.” We wore lots of big costume pieces, high heels, and huge headdresses that were heavy and hard as hell to balance, so we performed a lot of smoother, more graceful movements like swiveling our hips and “slow-quick-quicks”—one long gliding step followed by two short ones, repeat as needed, while thrusting our pelvis forward and twisting at the waist to face frontward, giving the tourists their money’s worth.

I recently realized that the standing pose I do as Elvira is a throwback to my Vegas days. I generally stand in the iconic showgirl “bevel stance”—achieved when one knee is bent and pulled in toward the body’s centerline and the forward toe is pointed and facing out, which apparently makes for a flattering, feminine silhouette. At least it’s always worked for me.

Our upstairs dressing room had low ceilings; plush, red carpeting; and a nice, warm, golden glow from the makeup mirror lights. Even though we were in the desert, the hotel air conditioning was always set at a frosty temperature that rivalled the Antarctic. Each girl had her own vanity table. Rows of glittery costumes hung from hangers and hooks that lined the walls.

In her early twenties, Sunny was the showgirl closest to my age. She had long, straight, white-blonde hair, and her athletic body was perennially tanned. A Florida girl who had spent a lot of time on “Muscle Beach,” Sunny drove the other girls crazy because whatever dance moves we did, she did bigger and with a lot more energy. Her exuberance had the effect of making the rest of us look like we were on Valium, and she received endless notes from the director about toning it down. She and I were the comedians of the group and spent a lot of time entertaining the other girls backstage between shows. Once, during the between-show breaks, Sunny and I reenacted the entire movie Wizard of Oz in twenty-minute increments over several nights, playing all the characters, singing all the songs, and doing it all while wearing only our flesh-colored G-strings. It was a hit! (For a while, anyway, until our shenanigans started getting on some of the girls’ nerves and we had to cool it.)

Kathleen was the tough one, and rumors of former days as a call girl abounded. She had a major attitude and a bleached-blonde Jean Harlow hairdo with dark roots. She made it plain from the first day that you wouldn’t want to cross her. Despite her New Jersey upbringing, Kathleen spoke in an affected foreign accent—English? French? Spanish? I had no idea. She was married to Washington (or “Washing-tone,” as she pronounced it), the lead performer of the Argentinian Gauchos, a hugely popular act on the Strip, so she was living la vida loca.

Maria was a stunning French-Italian woman from Corsica. Dark- skinned and exotic, she had the sexy, pouty mouth of Brigitte Bardot combined with the striking almond eyes of Sophia Loren. She spoke with a thick French accent and although she could come off as quiet and aloof, she often surprised me with how really wild and zany she could be.

Gabby hailed from London and, in her early thirties, was the oldest of the girls. She wasn’t unattractive, just slightly plain, with an average body and bust. Tall and blonde with pale skin and a sprinkling of freckles across her turned-up nose, she came off more like Mary Poppins than a Vegas showgirl. She spoke with a very aristocratic British accent, which, even when she’d say something nice, always made me feel as if I was being talked down to. She could be a doll, and was always polite and pleasant enough; however, she sometimes came off a bit aloof—maybe it was the accent. It sometimes gave me the feeling she was worried about getting cooties from the other girls. Gabby knitted and crocheted on the breaks and God help you if you got trapped alone with her because she loved to regale anyone who’d listen with the dreary details of her home life: what she and her hubby were doing the next day, what she’d baked for him the day before, when and what she was going to buy for her home, blah, blah, blah. They didn’t call her Gabby for nothing.

Joan, in her mid-twenties, was the tallest and thinnest of the girls and had the smallest breasts. She looked more like a high-fashion model than a showgirl, stunning in makeup, but gangly and boyish without it. She was engaged to be married, so she led a pretty quiet life, leaving the partying to the rest of us.

Hugette was an attractive “older” redhead from France who barely spoke English. She was friendly, but because of the language barrier, never quite fit into the other showgirls’ social circle.

Jennifer, hands down the most beautiful showgirl in Vegas, had pitch-black hair and pale, almost translucent skin. Her perfectly arched eyebrows and aristocratic bone structure gave her a queenly elegance that I envied. People often remarked that she resembled a young Elizabeth Taylor. She had a body to die for and carried herself with a ballet dancer’s posture and grace. Jennifer spoke in a soft, husky English accent and had a wide-eyed, almost childlike quality. She was kind and funny and took me under her wing, teaching me the ropes and sometimes defending me. Jennifer is the one who taught me how to glue three pairs of eyelashes together for my top lids and two pairs for the bottom and apply them just above and below my real lashes to make my eyes look bigger from the stage. She’s the one who showed me how to create the illusion of cheekbones, which my baby face still lacked, using a combination of dark and light shading powder. She’s also the one who explained alternatives to using Nair hair-removal cream on my bikini line, something I’d tried and regretted big time. Despite our ten-year age difference and my hormonal teenage bullshit, which at times must have driven her crazy, she was my friend and ally from the beginning.

In addition to comedienne Elmarie Wendall (who brought the house down with her number, “I’m the Oldest Living Showgirl in Las Vegas”) and the Columbo Brothers, five charming Italian acrobats, Vive Les Girls starred the singing-dancing duo of Vest and Clark. Buddy Vest and Sterling Clark were former dancers of stage and screen, and ex-lovers who had formed a stage act together. Before coming to Vive, they had been the opening act for talented performer Juliet Prowse, who I was especially impressed by since she had played Elvis’s love interest in the movie G.I. Blues. Coincidentally, Buddy had also been a featured dancer in Sweet Charity, the film I adored as a teen. Now, forced to share a dressing room, they fought like bastards. Well, to be honest, Buddy did most of the screaming and yelling. Sterling remained annoyingly calm, which only served to make Buddy even more hysterical. I fell madly in love with both Buddy and Sterling the moment I met them. Not only were they talented and gorgeous as hell, but they were also sweet and fun to be around, and treated me like something special. I had such a crush on them both that I followed them around like a puppy dog the entire run of the show. My 1969 diary was filled with professions of love—one day for Sterling, the next for Buddy.

The costumes, designed in Paris by José Luis Viñas, were fabulous! Because the show was comparatively small, the money went into quality as opposed to quantity. Our finale costumes were made of faux (I pray to God) leopard skin, trimmed in fox fur, and adorned with row after row of Austrian crystals and exotic plumes. (Unfortunately, PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] wasn’t around yet.) We entered the stage leading white Russian wolfhounds on glittering rhinestone leashes.

A few weeks after the show opened, my mom and dad came to see it. It was one of the most nerve-wracking nights of my life! Can you imagine dancing around in front of your dad half naked? Thank God I couldn’t see them because of the lighting or I wouldn’t have been able to step onstage. I was told later by the maître d’ that my dad cried during my performance. I’m still hoping it was because he was proud of me and not because he was embarrassed.

I only stayed with the Circus Circus cocktail waitress through rehearsals. Once the show opened, Cindy left Colorado and drove out to Vegas to join me and look for a job as a showgirl. I didn’t say anything, but I had my doubts that she’d find work in one of the shows. Although she was a great go-go girl, she’d never taken a dance lesson in her life and was a couple of inches shorter than me. And the fact that she was flat-chested didn’t help. We found an apartment that was only a stone’s throw from my job. I could actually walk to and from the Dunes across the enormous, empty desert lot that Bally’s now occupies. One time, in the wee hours of the morning, as I crossed the empty lot, dodging tumbleweeds and keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes, I encountered a snarling coyote, chewing on a large, bloody, dead thing—Jimmy Hoffa? From then on, I drove to work.

Months went by and Cindy still couldn’t find a job. I got tired of paying the rent on my own, and we began to argue a lot. We finally went our separate ways. A couple of fellow showgirls and I moved into a duplex that we shared with the Columbo Brothers. It became a big party house, and at any hour of the day you were sure to find a naked showgirl or two dozing by the pool, avoiding tan lines.

My eighteenth birthday came in mid-September, just a month or so after the show opened. I was finally going to be “legal”! The Columbos, Buddy and Sterling, and several other performers from Vive planned a big birthday bash for me at one of Vegas’s most popular restaurants, Aku Aku, in the Stardust Hotel. Sounds of ukuleles and steel guitars echoed through the tiki-themed rooms, and grass-skirted dancers gyrated on a stage in front of our long table. My friends promptly ordered me a gigantic tropical drink called a scorpion, with a sweet-smelling gardenia floating in it. I chugged it all before the pu pu platter even arrived. The last thing I remember asking was, “Does this drink have alcohol in it?” because it went down like a nice Hawaiian punch. I had to be carried out of the place and poured into someone’s car.

Back at home, I got a second wind. Several performers joined us to celebrate, among them the hottest act on the Strip, magicians Siegfried and Roy. Buddy and Sterling had taken me to see their show several times on our breaks between shows, and we had been allowed to watch their act from the wings. The highlight of the show was when a small cage stuffed with a huge Siberian tiger was hoisted several feet above the stage. Siegfried tossed a red cloth over the cage, momentarily obscuring the tiger, then, seconds later, whipped it off. In the tiger’s place was Siegfried’s dark, sexy partner, Roy. I’d watched the trick from the audience before, but seeing it from this angle was doubly impressive because it was easy to tell there were no strings, no trapdoors, nothin’! After the show I asked the chiseled, blond, German magician how it was done and I’ll always remember his answer: “Dahling,” he whispered, coming within inches of my face and staring me straight in the eye, “If I tolt you, it vouldn’t be magic.” I had a huge crush on him from that moment on. And as hard as it may be to believe, the night of my eighteenth birthday, Siegfried pulled me into my bedroom, locking the door behind us, laid me across the bed, and after a few minutes of heavy, inebriated kissing, asked to be my “first.” Even in my drunken stupor, and as turned on as I was, I managed to once again avoid losing my virginity. Now that’s magic!

During the Vive Les Girls finale, I was featured along with Vest and Clark in my very first “comedy” performance. Jerry Jackson, our extremely astute choreographer, had the good sense to capitalize on my nearsighted eyes and young age and gave me a short bit to do that turned out to be a high point of the show. While Buddy or Sterling alternately sang an abbreviated version of a song, each showgirl, one by one, danced seductively around them. My song was the 1957 Ray Charles hit “Hallelujah, How I Love Her So.” While Buddy sang, I danced onstage wearing my elegant fur-trimmed jumpsuit that covered pretty much everything but my boobs and butt. Sashaying across the stage toward Buddy, I “slow-quick-quicked” right past him, oblivious of his outstretched hand, ostensibly because I couldn’t see (which I couldn’t!). Buddy ran over to lead me back to where I was supposed to be. I pranced around him momentarily, then wandered off in the wrong direction again, squinting like a semi-naked female Mr. Magoo. At one point I got trapped in the side stage curtains, requiring Buddy to rescue me, and a moment later, I hurtled toward the front of the stage, Buddy snatching me back from the edge in the nick of time, all while he attempted to sing and smile as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The audience always roared because they’d never seen a showgirl behave like such a klutz.

We played six nights a week, two shows a night and three on Saturday, with a “swing girl” who took each girl’s place on a rotating basis, so we were allowed an extra day off per month plus a week’s vacation per year. Child labor laws had obviously not been introduced.

This was my routine: wake up around 8:00 p.m., shower and eat whatever I could find in the fridge that wasn’t moldy, get to the Dunes by 9:00 p.m.

During the summer, especially during rehearsals, getting into my car was a whole process. My orange Firebird had a black vinyl top and a black interior. There was only street parking, so my car sat in the sun all day. Being Las Vegas, that sun was hot. Hotter than hell. It made the interior of my car hot enough to slow-cook a pork butt. One time, Sunny and I experimented with frying an egg on the hood of my car. Not only did it fry, but the edges turned crisp and burned within moments.

So, I always opened my car door with oven mitts on my hands. I’d wait a few minutes while little waves of scorching desert heat wafted out of the car and hit the cooler air. I then spread a beach towel over the blazing-hot, black vinyl driver’s seat. If I was coherent enough the night before, I’d remember to store the towel in the freezer, which helped. Carefully, carefully, I hopped into the car, turned the key, and revved the engine. I then jumped back out and waited in the shade for a couple of minutes more.

I lunged back into the car, this time turning the air conditioning to its fullest capacity before the hot air scorched my eyebrows off. I jumped back out, and finally, after another minute or so, got back in the car still wearing the oven mitts to protect my hands from the blistering hot steering wheel and drove to the Dunes. Ahh, the glamorous life.

I had to arrive an hour before the other girls so Grandma, the wardrobe mistress, could cover the scars on my neck, back, stomach, and shoulders in heavy pancake makeup.

Then I did two or three shows: 11:00 p.m., 1:00 a.m., and, depending on the night, 3:00 a.m. The 45-minute breaks in between flew by on some nights, while on other nights they stretched into endless, boring eternity. To pass the time, Sunny and I would often do things like use the house phones on the casino floor to page fictitious hotel guests with names like “Jack Meehoff” or “Lois Rates,” then laugh our asses off when we heard their names announced over the PA system throughout the casino. Good times, good times.

After the second or third show, I’d shower off the body makeup before dressing if I wasn’t feeling especially lazy. On the occasions I skipped that step, I’d wake up the next day with “buff beige” sheets. We rarely bothered to take off our makeup after work in our rush to get out of the hotel and hit the bars by 4:00 a.m., so all the showgirls traveled around town looking like circus clowns. Tourists eyed us with a mixture of respect and awe; the dealers and other hotel employees, indifference or downright scorn.

The show had rules. Lots of rules. They had a “three strike” policy just like prison. If you were caught disobeying, your ass was grass.

1. No horseback riding, skiing, or any other sport where you could break an arm or a leg and be out of work for an extended time.

2. Must wear bright-red lipstick at all times, even though bright lips were so not in! The hot lip color of the day was the palest noncolor you could find, the closer to white the better. I hated wearing red lipstick because it made me look like my mother.

3. Must always smile while on stage. Not just a friendly, closed-mouth, pleased-with-yourself smile, but a big, wide, open-mouthed, toothy grin.

4. No tan lines. (I didn’t have to worry about that rule because I only freckled or turned red, so I avoided the sun like poison ivy.)

5. No visiting any casino bar, not in the hotel where you worked or any other hotel. Unlike in the ’50s and early ’60s, when showgirls were encouraged to “mix,” we were never allowed to fraternize with the customers or drink in a casino bar without a male escort present. This was so you wouldn’t be mistaken for a whore.

6. Must maintain your current body weight. We were weighed when we signed our contracts and every week thereafter. If you strayed five pounds over your original weight, hotel management issued a “warning slip” letting you know that if you didn’t shed the pounds, “immediate action would be taken.”

I still had plenty of baby fat, so I was always walking—or dancing—a fine line. That’s why most of the girls were forced to resort to diet pills, or “whites” as they were called, just like truck drivers (although I’m pretty sure they don’t use them for weight purposes). They had the added bonus of keeping us wide awake all night and buzzed out of our brains. I was already a pretty hyper, high-strung individual, so it wasn’t the best drug for me. I drove the other girls crazy with my blabbing and whining nonstop about nothing. I was forced to stop taking the whites when every one of the girls in my dressing room stopped speaking to me. From then on it was pretty much cottage cheese and naked hamburger patties for me.

It turned out that there were unspoken rules as well, like no fraternizing with Black people. I learned this when Sunny was spied out to dinner one night at the Dunes “Dome of the Sea” with basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain. The next day she received a pink slip on her vanity table. Naturally, no reason was given for firing her, but all the older girls knew the truth. After much crying, begging, and pleading, she was given a second chance, but it was understood she’d be watched closely by the management.

Back then, Vegas had a very creepy racist underbelly. Racism was more blatant there in the ’50s, but even into the late ’60s and early ’70s, when I was there, it still permeated the culture, or lack thereof. In the early ’60s many of the most popular and highest-paid acts, like Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, and Sammy Davis Jr., were forced to leave the casinos through the back door, then escorted to hotel rooms literally across the tracks that were dumpier and more expensive than rooms on the Strip. Of course, their white counterparts enjoyed gambling in the casino and drinking in the bars after their shows. You may have heard the infamous stories about Sammy Davis Jr.’s treatment by the casinos when he was in the “Rat Pack.” When he dared marry a white woman, Swedish-born actress May Britt, the only thing that stood between him and a shallow grave in the desert was his pal Frank Sinatra.

I would never have imagined racism existed in Las Vegas. Many of my favorite performers on the Strip were Black: The Fifth Dimension, The Jackson Five, Little Richard, Dionne Warwick, and Ike and Tina Turner. After all, it was the era of “Black is beautiful.” As far as I was concerned, nothing was groovier than being “Afro-American.” Boy, was I naïve.

In those days, gangsters still ruled Vegas. Every casino head or pit boss I met was either Italian or Jewish and had mob ties. There were lots of rumors about people who hadn’t paid their gambling debts mysteriously disappearing in the desert, never to be seen again.

The Dunes owners, Major Riddle and Jake Gottlieb, were two businessmen who had dealings with the infamous crime syndicate “The Outfit,” based out of Chicago. In the late ’60s, Morris Shenker, a successful defense lawyer, became the chairman of the board of the Dunes. Shenker had made a name for himself representing a slew of underworld figures, including Jimmy Hoffa. There was quite a hubbub at the Dunes when Morris or Major were on the casino floor. I love the film Casino, which stars Robert De Niro playing a Jewish gangster, because it perfectly captures the look and feel of Vegas back when I worked there.

I was introduced to Morris only once, but I often saw Major, and he was always very kind to me. Later, when my contract was up, he had one of the casino bosses, “Big Julie” Weintraub, arrange an extremely discounted airfare to Europe for me. As far as I was concerned, they were all good fellas.

The Baccarat pit boss, a short, pockmarked man in his fifties who looked and sounded a lot like the actor Edward G. Robinson, was as old-school mobster as you could get. He had a serious crush on me and when I walked by the Baccarat pit on my way into work each night, he’d always call out in his gravelly Brooklyn accent from the height of his pit boss chair, “How ya doin’, Clara Bow?” He often asked me to be his girlfriend, and one late night over drinks he confided that he’d “taken a fall” for one of the Casino bigwigs and had spent twenty years behind bars. For this service, he received a very large cash settlement and one of the top positions in the casino-floor hierarchy. But he was old enough to be my grandpa, so the idea of dating him completely grossed me out.

After the show, I’d often join a group of show kids and go to a bar. Our favorite spot was Le Café, a little dive tucked into a corner mini-mall far from the Strip. It was one of the few places where locals could get away from the tourists to relax and dance for fun, not work. It was a mixed crowd, but largely gay because it was frequented by so many male performers from the Strip. It wasn’t uncommon to see Liberace, Rip Taylor, Paul Lynde, or other stars there, letting their hair down.

During my time in Vegas, I met dozens of guys at Le Café who I fell madly in love with and went after with a vengeance, but as one might guess, it didn’t always work out.