(Elvis Rising)
By the late 1960s, Vegas was beginning to lose its juice. Beatlemania was hardly the passing fad that Vegas thought—hoped—it might be. The rock ’n’ roll craze of the 1950s had been easier for Vegas to ignore; it appealed mostly to teenagers, not the adult gamblers who constituted the bulk of Vegas’ audience. But the second rock revolution, sparked by the arrival of the Beatles, was of a different order. It was part of a much broader cultural and social upheaval, encompassing not only music, but also politics, fashion, sexual mores, and a whole antiestablishment ethos. And it was embraced by far more than just kids.
Yet Las Vegas, in almost every way, represented the old guard. The boozing, macho Rat Pack still embodied Vegas’ ideal of cool. The music in Vegas showrooms was still dominated by pop standards and Broadway show tunes, along with a few of the mellower contemporary hits. Yet the city was falling out of step with the fast-changing times. The old stars were starting to look dated, and younger audiences, plugged into the new rock sounds and shunning the bourgeois values that Vegas seemed to embody, were staying away in droves.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Las Vegas was undergoing its own transformation. The era of the free-spending, mob-run hotels was coming to an end, and a new set of players was moving in.
In the early morning hours of November 27, 1966, a van pulled up to a rear entrance of the Desert Inn Hotel. In the darkness, a frail man in blue pajamas was carried on a stretcher into a service elevator and whisked up to the ninth-floor penthouse. The suite there had already been outfitted with an array of electronic and medical equipment, and the windows sealed and blacked out, for its finicky new resident.
Howard Hughes’s stealth arrival in Las Vegas marked the start of a new chapter for the entertainment capital. Hughes, the famous aviation pioneer, Hollywood mogul, and business titan (ranked by Fortune magazine in 1968 as the richest man in America), had recently sold his majority stake in Trans World Airlines for a profit of $547 million and was looking for something to do with his money. Hughes had been a frequent visitor to Las Vegas since the 1940s, often seen in the casinos and lounges around town doling out $100 tips to musicians who would play the songs he requested. By the time he moved to Vegas in 1966, however, he was deteriorating both mentally and physically.
Suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, hooked on codeine and Valium, Hughes refused to cut his hair or fingernails and stored his urine in mason jars, while surrounded by mounds of trash in a room that was rarely cleaned. His dietary demands were exacting and bizarre. He obsessed over the size of his peas and the shape of his slices of chocolate cake. When he learned that Baskin-Robbins was about to discontinue his favorite flavor of ice cream, banana nut, he had the Desert Inn kitchen order 350 gallons of it. Then he switched to French vanilla, and the kitchen was stuck with the stockpile. Paranoid and depressed, Hughes never went out of his room, communicating with his top aide, former CIA operative Robert Maheu, by telephone or handwritten memos scrawled on yellow legal pads.
A couple of weeks after Hughes’s arrival, Desert Inn owner Moe Dalitz ordered the reclusive new guest to vacate: the hotel needed the top-floor VIP suites for its high-rolling customers expected to descend on the hotel during the Christmas holidays. But Hughes refused to leave—and offered to buy the hotel instead. Following several weeks of negotiations, a $13.2 million deal was struck, and on April 1, 1967, Hughes became owner of the Desert Inn.
It was a measure of the weirdness of Las Vegas that the arrival of a nutty billionaire who kept his pee in mason jars was seen as a step up in respectability. With growing federal scrutiny of Vegas’ links to organized crime—Dalitz had been indicted on tax charges, and the FBI was investigating illegal skimming in Nevada casinos—Hughes was “greeted with messianic enthusiasm,” as one journalist put it, “by Las Vegas desperately waiting to be redeemed from the stigma of Bugsy Siegel and his heirs.” Hughes’s application for a casino license was approved swiftly, with the state Gaming Control Board waving even the usual requirement that the applicant make a personal appearance. “This is the best way to improve the image of gambling in Nevada by licensing an industrialist of his stature,” said Clark County district attorney George Franklin. “It will be an asset and a blessing.” (Hughes, a shrewd political manipulator, cultivated state officials like Nevada governor Paul Laxalt and didn’t hurt his cause by pledging to donate up to $300,000 a year to support the University of Nevada Medical Center.)
Hughes’s purchase of the Desert Inn was just the first strike in what would be the greatest buying spree in Las Vegas history. In August 1967 he acquired the Sands Hotel from the mob interests that ran it. Next he bought the Frontier, the smaller Castaways, and the Silver Slipper casino, as well as the unfinished Landmark Hotel, a circular high-rise in the Convention Center area that was mired in bankruptcy. “Did you hear that Hughes just bought the Sahara?” went a joke going around town. “Not the hotel, the desert.” Only when he made a move to add the Stardust Hotel to his portfolio did the Justice Department’s antitrust division raise red flags, objecting to a deal that would have put more than 20 percent of the city’s economic activity in the hands of one man.
Though blocked from buying more hotels, Hughes continued to gobble up everything else in Las Vegas he could get his hands on. He purchased TV station KLAS (which he ordered to program his favorite old movies all night long), the North Las Vegas Airport, and hundreds of acres of vacant land in prime areas along the Strip. He announced plans for a vast expansion of the Sands, to create a four-thousand-room mega-resort, with one floor of retail stores open twenty-four hours a day and another devoted to family recreation, including a bowling alley, ice-skating rink, movie theater, and computerized indoor golf course—“a resort so carefully planned and magnificently designed that any guest will simply have to make a supreme effort if he wants to be bored,” wrote Hughes. The project never got off the ground, but Hughes anticipated Vegas’ theme-park future more clearly than he probably realized.
Hughes wanted to clean up Vegas, to push out the mob elements that controlled most of the hotels, to make the town “as trustworthy and respectable as the New York Stock Exchange.” He arrived at the right time, both for civic leaders eager to improve Vegas’ image, and for the mob owners themselves, who were feeling the heat and saw in Hughes an opportune exit strategy. “The increased governmental scrutiny may be becoming too much of a headache for some who would rather sell out now than have it forced upon them,” noted Variety in March 1967. Some Vegas historians have pointed out that, even after Hughes’s buying spree, the mob bosses remained in the picture, continuing to manage his operations and secretly siphoning off money for years. (The Sands and the Desert Inn both lost money after Hughes took over.) “Dalitz and other members of his Las Vegas clique saw Hughes’ arrival for what it was,” wrote one journalist, “an opportunity to take an unbelievably wealthy mark to the cleaner’s.”
Still, Hughes began to supplant the old mob bosses and opened the door to a new era of corporate ownership in Las Vegas. In 1967 the Nevada legislature made a significant revision in the rules that governed the granting of casino licenses. Previously, corporations were effectively barred from owning casinos because of the requirement that every prospective owner—which, in the case of a corporation, meant each individual stockholder—be vetted by the state authorities. Once that onerous requirement was removed, corporate owners—from Kirk Kerkorian, the LA mogul who would soon challenge Hughes’s supremacy in Vegas, to national hotel chains like Hilton and Holiday Inn—had a clear path to invest in Las Vegas.
Most immediately, Hughes changed the way Las Vegas hotels were run. He installed new managers, many of them from his circle of Mormon advisers, who instituted a more corporate, bottom-line approach—a major change for the high-flying, free-spending Vegas hotels. Big-name showroom entertainment, for example, had always been treated as a loss leader. The lofty salaries for top stars (combined with low cover charges and minimums in the showrooms) were hard to justify on the ledger books. But they drew customers into the casinos, which in turn provided the gambling revenue that supported the high-priced entertainment.
Under Hughes’s regime, however, each element of the operation—showroom, restaurant, hotel rooms—was expected to pay for itself. That led to a kind of belt-tightening Vegas had never before experienced. The chorus lines of glamorous showgirls, for example, were now seen as expensive frills, and the hotels started to drop them. The lounges, where top comedians and singers could be seen for the price of a Coke, were not moneymakers either, and they began to close down. Hughes tried to hold the line on star salaries and also put a clamp on many of the perks and fringe benefits that the entertainers had grown accustomed to.
To veterans of the Vegas entertainment scene, all this was heresy, the beginning of the end of the golden age. “When the bean counters in the suits came in, all of a sudden everything had to go by the book,” said Lorraine Hunt-Bono, a onetime lounge singer whose family owned a popular Vegas restaurant for years. “They knew nothing about hospitality or running a bar or a restaurant or gaming. But Howard Hughes knew they’d watch everything.” “It was the new bureaucratic regime,” said Paul Anka, “where you had all these rules and lists, and functionaries were running around with clipboards, all obeying the great eye in the sky over there at the Desert Inn. A cold, new impersonal wind was blowing.”
Hughes had his defenders in the entertainment community. “Howard Hughes maintained the quality,” said Vera Goulet, who managed the career of her husband, Robert, for many years. “He lifted the Desert Inn up. He lifted the standard of class and elegance. What he did was positive.” Hughes was a champion of some performers—among them Vegas superstar Wayne Newton—and a behind-the-scenes fan of many others. Bob Newhart recalled an encounter with Hughes’s aide Robert Maheu during an engagement at the Landmark. “Mr. Hughes is very happy with the business you’re doing,” Maheu told him. “He sees the reports every night.” Impressionist Rich Little got a compliment one night from Hughes’s entertainment director, Walter Kane: “The old man thought you were great tonight.” Little looked confused, then realized Kane was talking about Hughes. “He had the shows piped up to his room every night,” said Little, “and I guess he must have watched a lot of them.”
Hughes did plenty of things to alienate people in Vegas. He was virulently anti-union, in a town where unions had a lot of power. He was a footdragger on civil rights, opposing efforts to end racial discrimination in hiring, which was rampant in Las Vegas throughout the sixties. “I can summarize my attitude about employing more Negroes very simply,” Hughes wrote in a memo to Maheu. “I think it is a wonderful idea for somebody else, somewhere else.”
But what rankled the show-business community most was the strict, impersonal corporate approach that Hughes brought to Vegas. Abel Green, Variety’s editor and a longtime observer of the Vegas scene, lamented in 1969, “In a community of brigand beginnings, which long yearned for and, even the most grudging diehards will concede, eventually earned respectability, there is something about the Hughesian and concomitant corporate brand of businesslike operation that has taken away a lot of the glamour.” The old mob managers may have been thieves and thugs, but they loved being part of the showbiz world. They catered to the entertainers, made them feel respected and protected. “When the so-called gangsters were in there, you could leave anything in your room,” said Florence Henderson. “I left jewelry and nothing was ever stolen. When Hughes took over, I had things stolen.”
“Hughes had all these little crew-cut idiots come in from all over the country,” Eydie Gormé griped in a 1976 interview. “One was a water commissioner in Buffalo, and another guy was a plumber someplace else, and they came in to run the casinos. These were the assholes of the world.” One night, when she was appearing at the Sands with her husband, Steve Lawrence, Gormé asked for a $200 marker in the casino—credit to gamble with, routinely given to the hotel’s stars. The pit boss asked to see her identification first. “I’m Eydie Gormé!” she cried. “I’m appearing here at your hotel!” No matter, he said; he still needed to see ID. A furious Gormé complained the next day to hotel boss Jack Entratter and refused to do her show that night until he advanced her $25,000 in chips. She said she kept them in her purse for the rest of her stay.
At least Entratter was still there. The Sands’ longtime entertainment chief, a friend to Sinatra and so many of the hotel’s top stars, was given a five-year contract to remain with the Sands when Hughes took over. But even Entratter couldn’t prevent the inevitable clash between the hotel’s new management and the Sands’ most valuable asset.
Frank Sinatra and Howard Hughes had crossed paths before in Hollywood and once competed for the affections of Ava Gardner. But the mogul’s acquisition in 1967 of the hotel where Sinatra had reigned for fourteen years was not something the king of Las Vegas could easily swallow. It came at a vexing time in Sinatra’s life and career. Now past fifty, with the rock revolution in full swing and his classic pop style decidedly out of favor, Sinatra was hitting both a career slump and a midlife crisis. In 1965 he began dating Mia Farrow, a child of Hollywood twenty-nine years his junior. After keeping the gossip columnists busy for months, the couple got married on July 19, 1966, in Entratter’s suite at the Sands—in a ceremony just as secretive, perfunctory, and devoid of romance as Elvis and Priscilla’s vows at the Aladdin would be a year later.
The marriage was stormy from the start—Sinatra quickly grew jealous of his bride’s budding film career—and only seemed to exacerbate Sinatra’s volatile moods and sense of dislocation. In November 1966 he appeared at the Sands for the first time since his marriage. Mia was in the audience, and the two gazed lovingly at each other as he opened the show with “Strangers in the Night,” his latest hit single. “Yeah, I sure got married,” Frank said after introducing Mia from the stage. “I had to—I finally found a broad I can cheat on.” The crowd gasped, Mia hung her head in embarrassment, and Sinatra knew he had made a faux pas: “I guess I’d better sing. I’m in a lot of trouble.”
His troubles only seemed to mount. “During this period Sinatra seemed to be constantly angry and frequently flew into rages,” Paul Anka recalled. “The problem was that Sinatra was no longer the god he had once been.” There were ugly incidents. In June 1966 Sinatra was having dinner at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills with some friends to celebrate Dean Martin’s birthday. The group got loud, and two businessmen seated nearby asked them to tone down their language. Tempers flared, and one of the men, Hunt’s Food president Fred Weisman, wound up in a bloody pool on the floor—clubbed by a house telephone, wielded either (accounts vary) by Sinatra or by his pal Jilly Rizzo. Weisman was rushed to the hospital and lingered in critical condition for days, before recovering. He declined to press charges.
Jackie Mason was another alleged target of Sinatra’s anger. One night at the Aladdin Hotel, with Sinatra in the audience, the acerbic comedian made several jokes about the singer’s May-September romance (“Frank soaks his dentures, and Mia brushes her braces”), and Sinatra didn’t appreciate them. Afterward, the comedian got a threatening phone call, and a few days later three gunshots were fired into his hotel room. The police found no evidence linking Sinatra to the attack, but Mason remained convinced the singer was behind it. “I don’t think he actually shot the gun, but there is no doubt that someone was mad about the incident,” Mason said years later. “He was heckling me and interrupting my act; I abused him back from the stage. He was mad that I fought back. I don’t think other comedians at the time dared to do that.”
All this was mere prelude, however, to Sinatra’s infamous blowup at the Sands.
He was opening there for a four-week engagement on Labor Day weekend in 1967, just a few weeks after Hughes’s acquisition of the hotel. Opening night was a relatively good-humored affair: Sinatra made some mild jokes about the mogul (“You’re wondering why I don’t have a drink in my hand? Howard Hughes bought it”) and gave a playful twist to the lyrics of his song “Young at Heart”:
Fairy tales can come true,
It can happen to you,
If you’re Howard Hughes.
But Sinatra wasn’t laughing the following weekend, when he ran smack into the new hard-line policies of the Hughes regime at the Sands.
Sinatra had long enjoyed privileged status at the Sands. He was always given unlimited credit in the casino; he rarely paid off his losses and typically kept his winnings. After Hughes took charge, however, a new edict was handed down: Sinatra was to be given no more credit until he paid back what he owed the hotel.
On Friday night, September 8, Sinatra was at a baccarat table with six Apollo astronauts, who had come to see his show. When he asked for a marker, Sinatra got the bad news: no more credit. With guests present, he swallowed the insult, but it gnawed at him all night. Sometime near dawn, angry and drunk, Sinatra was driving a golf cart back to his hotel suite, with Farrow in the passenger seat, when he suddenly swerved the cart around, headed back to the casino, and smashed it into a plate-glass window. Neither he nor Farrow was injured, but Sinatra wasn’t finished. “He was already out of the cart and striding into the casino as I trotted after him, clutching my little beaded evening purse,” Farrow recalled in her memoir. “He threw some chairs into a heap and with his golden lighter he tried to set them on fire. I watched the rising commotion as people gathered around and casino guards rushed over. When he couldn’t get a fire started, he took my hand and we walked out of the building.”
Sinatra canceled the rest of his Sands engagement and left for Los Angeles the next day. But that night, still fuming over the incident, he abruptly flew back to Vegas (without Farrow this time) and stormed into the Sands at five in the morning, demanding to see casino boss Carl Cohen. “He threatened to kill anyone who got in his way, used vile language, and said he would beat up the telephone operators if they did not connect him with Cohen,” Maheu reported to Hughes later. Cohen was roused from his bed, grudgingly got dressed, and strode into the Sands Garden Room to meet with Sinatra. There the aggrieved star launched into a torrent of abuse—culminating, in some accounts, with a Jewish slur. Cohen, a formidable 250-pounder, but a well-liked boss not known for his temper, threw a punch that knocked out the caps on Sinatra’s two front teeth.
The fracas was headline news. “Singer Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco, and Frank Sinatra left his teeth—at least two of them—in Las Vegas,” began the Review-Journal’s story. Much of the town secretly cheered that Sinatra, whose high-handed antics had been tolerated for years, had gotten his comeuppance.
Jack Entratter was angry the next morning that no one had awakened him. (His DO NOT DISTURB sign was on for the night—but it didn’t apply when Sinatra was in town.) Yet it’s doubtful even Sinatra’s old friend and patron could have averted the disaster. “Frank picked a fight,” said Corinne Entratter. “He wanted an excuse to leave.” Two days later Sinatra announced that he was ending his fourteen-year relationship with the Sands. He was going to Caesars Palace.
For all that Howard Hughes did to transform Las Vegas, he was only a buyer, not a builder. The most important new addition to the Las Vegas Strip in the 1960s came a few months before his arrival, with the opening of Caesars Palace in August 1966. It was the first entirely new hotel to open on the Strip in eight years (the other major newcomer, the Aladdin, was an expansion of the defunct Tally Ho), and the one that launched the city’s modern era—Las Vegas’ first “themed” resort.
Caesars Palace was the brainchild of Jay Sarno, a builder from St. Joseph, Missouri, who thought Vegas hotels needed a fresh approach. Rather than copying the desert-resort style so prevalent on the Strip, Sarno conceived of a hotel that would have the opulent decor and luxury accoutrements of ancient Rome. Architecturally, it broke with Vegas tradition in a number of ways. The hotel was set far back from the street, with a palatial entryway lined with fountains and Roman statuary. The egg-shaped casino was a grand space with a high domed ceiling and a crystal chandelier in the center, in sharp contrast to the densely packed, low-ceilinged casinos in other hotels. The Roman motif was carried throughout the hotel, from the swimming pool shaped like a centurion’s shield to the Bacchanal restaurant, where beautiful servers fed patrons grapes and gave them back rubs. The hotel cost a record $25 million (mostly financed by loans from the Teamsters Union pension fund), had twenty-five thousand square feet of meeting space for conventioneers, and boasted a lavish eleven-hundred-seat showroom, the Circus Maximus.
The hotel’s entertainment aimed for the wow factor too. Dave Victorson came over from the Thunderbird as entertainment chief, and he opened the checkbook for big names. Some were familiar Vegas stars like Andy Williams (the hotel’s opening headliner), Tony Bennett, and Harry Belafonte. Others were newcomers to Vegas, among them Broadway star Anthony Newley, comedian Woody Allen, TV favorite Andy Griffith, and even the campy, falsetto-voiced phenom Tiny Tim. Victorson brought in Broadway shows, like Sweet Charity and Fiddler on the Roof; filled the hotel’s 250-seat Nero’s Nook lounge with top names like Eartha Kitt and Sarah Vaughan; and even scored with a popular afternoon girlie show, Bottoms Up. Landing Sinatra—as well as his Rat Pack pal Sammy Davis Jr., who followed Sinatra to Caesars Palace a little later—sealed the deal: Caesars Palace would quickly become the premier star showcase in Las Vegas.
The arrival of a deep-pocketed new hotel on the Strip—along with fresh competition from arenas around the country, which were paying big bucks for concert performers—helped ratchet up the Vegas salary wars once again, after a period of relative stability. Sinatra got a record $100,000 a week to jump from the Sands to Caesars Palace. Dean Martin finished out his contract at the Sands and then moved to the Riviera, also for $100,000, plus a 10 percent share of the hotel and the title of entertainment consultant. (Riviera shows would henceforth be advertised as “Dean Martin presents.”) The Frontier even offered $100,000 to an act that had never played Vegas, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, but they turned it down, figuring they could make more money doing one-nighters.
When Sinatra finally made his debut at Caesars Palace on November 27, 1968, more than a year had passed since his departure from the Sands, and it seemed like a new era was at hand. He agreed to do only one show a night, except on the weekends, and the $12.50 minimum was the highest yet for a Vegas show. His opening acts—no fewer than four of them—included José Feliciano, singing “Light My Fire,” and the pop-soul group the 5th Dimension. Sinatra ditched his usual tuxedo for a trendy white turtleneck and medallion underneath a dark suit. He sang old standards like “I’ve Got the World on a String,” but also new numbers that reflected a more sober mood of middle-aged reflection, such as “That’s Life” and “It Was a Very Good Year.” Some thought his Caesars shows lacked the electricity of his appearances in the more intimate Sands Copa Room. But the critics were glad to have him back. “A virtuoso display of Sinatra at the top of his form,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin, “the kind of evening which comes along only now and then. It was very now, but also splendidly then.”
Just a few weeks after his Caesars opening, Sinatra was in a Los Angeles studio, recording a new song written for him by Paul Anka. It was inspired by a conversation the two had had months earlier in Miami Beach, in which Sinatra told Anka he was thinking of retiring. The younger star, who worshipped Sinatra and had long wanted to write a song for him, was so upset at the notion that he spent a sleepless night writing new lyrics to a French song called “Comme d’habitude,” for which he had bought the US publishing rights. When he finished a final draft of the song, he brought it out to Sinatra in Las Vegas. A few weeks later, on December 30, 1968, Frank recorded it, and “My Way” went on to become his signature late-career hit—his anthem of survival in a town where he still ruled in name, if no longer in spirit.
Las Vegas never knew quite what to do with rock ’n’ roll. In the early years, when even Elvis Presley couldn’t excite a staid audience at the New Frontier, the music was either dismissed as kids’ stuff or treated as comedy material. Nat King Cole, the revered jazz singer and balladeer who appeared regularly at the Sands, had a number in his act around 1960 called “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock ’n’ Roll,” in which he poked fun at the trendy new music—
One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock rock
You gotta sing rock or you go in hock
—and went on to do rock ’n’ roll parody versions of some of his best-known songs, like “Mona Lisa.” When the Twist dance craze was sweeping the country in the early sixties, Vegas made merry. Dick Shawn introduced his own Twist-like dance called the Cockamamie. Gogi Grant sang “When They Begin to Twist the Beguine.” Peter Lawford joined Jimmy Durante at the Desert Inn in what Variety described as “a beatnik Twister routine.” (Chubby Checker, who recorded the song that launched the craze, made it to Vegas himself in 1964, when the fad was largely spent.)
Several of the early rock ’n’ roll singers—the clean-cut white ones—showed up on the Vegas Strip in the late fifties and early sixties. But far from trying to change Vegas, they wanted to be Vegas. Frankie Avalon, the pretty-boy teen idol who had a No. 1 hit with “Venus,” made his Vegas debut at the Sands in 1961 as Joey Bishop’s opening act, singing classics like “Ol’ Man River” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” Connie Francis, perhaps the leading girl singer of the early rock era (“Who’s Sorry Now?,” “Lipstick on Your Collar”), was a popular headliner at the Sahara for much of the 1960s. She would sing her American Bandstand hits during the week, when ordinary folks—“the hayshakers”—made up most of the audience, but sprinkle in Italian love songs and “Hava Nagila” on the weekends, for the high rollers.
Brenda Lee, a four-foot-nine-inch sprite from Georgia who became a teenage hit machine with songs like “I’m Sorry” and “Break It to Me Gently,” made her debut at the Sahara in 1961, at age sixteen, in a conscious effort to remake her image. “My manager’s vision was to coif me over gently, from my rockabilly/rock roots, into a more adult audience and situation, for longevity,” said Lee. A lover of big-band music, she hired conductor-arranger Peter Matz to do orchestrations and choreographer Richard Barstow (who had worked with Judy Garland on A Star Is Born) to stage her show, which included tributes to Sophie Tucker and Jimmy Durante. “It’s too early to know just how a teenage femme chirp whose records sell mainly to teenagers will affect the population of a casino,” said Variety, “but Brenda Lee had the adults in her opening night audience on her side from the first song.”
Paul Anka made his Vegas debut at the Sahara in 1959 as Sophie Tucker’s opening act and got such a raucous reception on opening night that the old vaudevillian asked him to close the show for the rest of the engagement. But Anka didn’t want to remain merely a teen sensation. “A lot of us had a good run as teen singers in the ’50s, but we weren’t going to be teenagers forever,” said Anka. “Those of us who wanted to survive knew we had to do something else to prove ourselves.” Within a couple of years Anka was palling around with Sinatra, recording an album of standards, and headlining at the Sands.
The arrival of the Beatles, and the British invasion that followed, was initially viewed in Vegas with a mixture of amusement and disdain. “If the rock ’n’ roll craze ever ends,” Paul Anka quipped of the Beatles in 1964, “they’ll be stuck with four lousy haircuts.” When the Rolling Stones appeared on the Hollywood Palace TV show in 1964, guest host Dean Martin could hardly have been more dismissive. “They’re going to leave right after the show for London,” he cracked. “They’re challenging the Beatles to a hair-pulling contest.” Frank Sinatra found the Beatles only slightly less objectionable than he had Elvis Presley. “At least they’re white,” he would joke to friends.
Elvis Presley liked the Beatles, especially their hard-rocking early songs, which reminded him so much of his own music in the early, groundbreaking years. But as their popularity skyrocketed, he felt threatened by them—the hot new phenoms who were making teenage girls scream the way he used to, while he drifted further into irrelevance as a force in the rock world.
They met one time. John Lennon and his bandmates idolized Elvis, acknowledged his profound influence on their music, and wanted to meet him. After some delicate negotiations, their manager, Brian Epstein, and Colonel Parker worked out a plan to bring them together during the group’s second US tour in 1965. The Beatles, paying deference to the former king, agreed to meet Elvis on his turf. Following their concert at the Hollywood Bowl on August 27, 1965, the foursome scheduled a drop-in at Elvis’s Bel Air home for a strictly private (no photographers, no reporters) get-together.
Most of Elvis’s entourage, along with wives and girlfriends (including Priscilla), were on hand when the Beatles arrived in their limousine, a little after 10:00 p.m.; despite elaborate security precautions, hundreds of fans were crowding the gates of Elvis’s Bel Air home. When the four were shown inside, Elvis was sitting on the living-room couch, watching TV with the sound turned down. (Paul was impressed; it was the first time he had ever seen color TV.) There were several minutes of strained chitchat and awkward silences. Then Ringo adjourned to play pool with some of Elvis’s pals, George went off to smoke dope, and John and Paul finally got Elvis to pick up a guitar and join them in a jam session.
For the Beatles, the evening was something of a letdown. “To be honest, I’d describe Elvis on that showing as a boring old fart,” their press agent said later. But when three of Elvis’s friends paid a reciprocal visit to the Beatles a few days later, at their rented house in Benedict Canyon, John made a point of telling them how much the meeting with Elvis had meant. “If it hadn’t been for him,” John said, “I would have been nothing.”
Elvis was pleased to hear it, but he couldn’t disguise a certain wistful envy. “There’s four of them,” he said. “But there’s only one of me.”
As the culture began to shift, concerns grew that Vegas entertainment was not keeping pace, or doing enough to attract younger audiences. Many of the top headliners who had dominated the town for years—Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, George Burns—were getting old and waning in popularity. Where were the younger stars who would replace them? Virtually none of the hard-rock bands or singer-songwriters who were transforming popular music in the late sixties would come anywhere near Las Vegas. “The hotels didn’t want them, and the acts didn’t want to play Vegas,” said one agent. “If you played Vegas, you were selling out.” Lamented Variety in early 1968, “Only a handful of new acts and groups are making the transition by having that ‘older appeal.’ ”
A few of the younger pop singers did become Vegas regulars during these years, including such hitmakers as Petula Clark (“Downtown”), Trini Lopez (“If I Had a Hammer”), and Roger Miller (“King of the Road”). And for the most part, they were happy to be there. “At that time Vegas was the thing to do,” said Lopez, the Texas-born Latino singer who made his Las Vegas debut in 1965. “It was prestigious. If you were doing Vegas, you were doing well.” The Supremes were a popular act at the Flamingo during the late sixties, adding Cole Porter songs to their familiar repertoire of Motown hits. Playing Vegas was “huge for us,” said Mary Wilson, one of the group’s founding members. But the Supremes had a commercial sheen that made them well suited to nightclubs—and an artist-development team behind them at Motown that groomed them for Vegas. “We were not an R and B act,” said Wilson. “We were doing standards before we were doing Motown. We were known as a classy kind of act, so it was a perfect match.”
But Vegas was also trying to look hip, in an effort to attract the tie-dyed, peace-and-love generation—what Variety liked to call the “juve market.” The lounges featured trendy dance shows like Watusi Stampede and Mad Mod World, and young music groups with a more contemporary vibe, like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Mod Squad (fronted by future country star Lee Greenwood). “Las Vegas, the bastion of adult-appealing entertainment, is going contemporary,” reported Billboard in 1967, “reaching out for the sounds and sights of the ‘now’ generation.” The older, more traditional lounge acts had to “get out or get groovy,” as Mike Weatherford put it in Cult Vegas. Freddie Bell, the lounge-show rock ’n’ roller from the fifties, came out of retirement to try to catch the new wave, returning to Vegas with a band called Action Faction. “I wore the bells, I wore all the outfits, trying to be what was happening at that time,” Bell recalled. “But for me it didn’t work.”
One younger performer for whom it did work was Ann-Margret. The sexy musical star had first appeared in Las Vegas in 1960, as George Burns’s hot-wired opening act at the Sahara. (“George Burns has a gold mine in Ann-Margret,” raved Variety.) After a stretch in Hollywood, including her costarring role with Elvis in Viva Las Vegas, she came back to Vegas in July 1967 as a headliner at the Riviera, with a flashy show choreographed by David Winters, who had staged her dances in Viva Las Vegas (and had also choreographed three other Elvis films). Winters had barely even seen a Vegas show before. “I wanted to bring a Broadway mentality to Vegas,” he said. “I wanted to blow everyone away.”
And he did. Ann-Margret’s show at the Riviera had a mod-sixties-psychedelic opening, with multiple film projections on a giant screen, flashing strobe lights, and pounding electronic music, as the star and eight male dancers raced out on motorcycles and Ann made a full costume change onstage, hidden by the strobes. The fast-paced show also featured a salute to the miniskirt, with Ann in go-go boots inside a gilded cage, and a tribute to old-time Broadway, with Ann tap-dancing like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street. “It’s not often that a different kind of show hits the Strip like the Ann-Margret show,” said Variety. “It’s avant-garde, it’s old-fashioned, and it’s modern . . . with brilliant gimmicks never before seen in a nitery, which are certain to be copied by wise producers.” “Avant-garde” might have been stretching it, but Ann-Margret’s Riviera show was a landmark for Vegas, the first big show to capture the vibe and visual energy of the new “youth culture.”
Contemporary rock and R&B artists were hardly unknown in Vegas during these years. Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ike and Tina Turner, the Temptations, the Righteous Brothers, Little Anthony and the Imperials—all of them played Vegas lounges during the mid- and late 1960s. Wayne Cochran, the pompadour-haired soul screamer, shook up the Flamingo lounge in August 1968 with “possibly the highest decibel count on the Strip,” Variety reported. The flamboyant early rocker Little Richard did surprisingly strong business at the Aladdin Hotel in the spring of 1968—“the sleeper of the year,” according to Variety. Even the godfather of soul, James Brown, headlined a show at the Flamingo, easing the crowd into his act with Vegas-friendly numbers like “I Wanna Be Around” and “That’s Life.” “The lewd stuff will come later,” he announced. “This is Dr. Jekyll—stand by for Mr. Hyde.”
Las Vegas also spawned at least one standout R&B group of its own in the 1960s. The Checkmates were a mixed-race group (three blacks and two whites), headed by honey-voiced lead singer Sonny Charles. They came to Vegas in 1964 to work at the Pussycat A-Go-Go and developed a high-energy act strongly influenced by the Treniers, the popular fifties Vegas lounge group, which featured covers of R&B hits, spiced with comedy antics. They would don cowboy hats and ride stick horses, say, or put on boxing trunks and gloves for a spoof of the Sonny Liston–Cassius Clay heavyweight bout. After Sinatra invited them to entertain at his New Year’s Eve party at the Sands, they were booked into the Sands’ lounge. From there they moved to Caesars Palace, recorded with Nancy Wilson, and made several national TV appearances, even before they had a hit record. (They made the charts in 1969 with “Black Pearl,” produced by Phil Spector.)
The Checkmates were one of the most popular Vegas lounge acts of the sixties, proof that R&B in a relatively undiluted form could work in Vegas if it was showcased with enough razzle-dazzle. “We were such an oddity because we were doing straight-out rhythm and blues,” said Charles. “The Temptations, Four Tops, Gladys Knight, and all those people would come to town, and their Vegas act would be a bunch of show tunes. The Temptations came to see us and they went, ‘They’re doing our songs and packing the place, and we’re doing “42nd Street.” We should be doing our show!’ ” The outsiders taught the Checkmates some lessons too. When Sly Stone was booked into the Pussycat A-Go-Go, he refused to appear after discovering that blacks in the audience were segregated and relegated to a side section. “He’d come from San Francisco, and they didn’t do that there,” said Charles. “After that we looked at it and go, ‘You know, Sly’s right.’ ” They insisted that the club end the practice and got their way.
The changing musical winds were reflected in the shows of more mainstream Vegas singers as well. Vic Damone sang “MacArthur Park” and “For Once in My Life.” Everyone from Wayne Newton to the Lennon Sisters (“no relation”) was covering Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday.” Yet there were perils for a performer who tried to update his act and image too drastically. The major cautionary tale was Bobby Darin.
He was born in East Harlem in 1936, a sickly child raised by his maternal grandmother and an older sister—who he discovered in later years was actually his mother. He worked his way into the Brill Building group of pop songwriters and wrote and recorded such early hits as “Splish Splash” and “Queen of the Hop.” But Darin slid into a more sophisticated jazz groove with his swinging 1959 take on Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife.” George Burns brought Darin to Las Vegas in May 1959 as his opening act at the Sahara. “Self-assured, almost cocky in manner, young Bobby Darin cradled a sophisticated house in the palm of his hand,” said Downbeat, “and made his bid as leading contender to the title, Young Sinatra.”
Darin became a popular headliner at the Flamingo (recording an excellent live album there in 1963, unreleased until after his death) and proved to be one of Vegas’ most versatile and dynamic young performers. He specialized in jazzy, up-tempo versions of old songs like “Beyond the Sea” and “Artificial Flowers” and also dabbled in folk, country, and gospel. He even did impressions. For a while he seemed the front-runner to inherit Sinatra’s mantle as the swinging, swaggering king of Vegas—with an ego to match.
But he left Las Vegas for three years in 1963 and returned as a more serious, politically committed performer, adding folk and social-protest numbers to his act. He worked on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for president; then, after Kennedy’s assassination (Darin was with him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6, the night he was shot), he retreated to a cabin in Big Sur and rethought his career. When he returned to Vegas in 1969, he dumped the tuxedo in favor of jeans and a denim jacket, replaced his orchestra with a rhythm quartet, and insisted on being billed as Bob (not Bobby) Darin.
The makeover did not sit well with the Vegas audience. Darin filled his set with socially conscious message songs, including his own composition, “A Simple Song of Freedom.” When someone in the audience called out for “Artificial Flowers,” Darin shot back, “That was yesterday!” His appearance at the Sahara Hotel in December 1969 was something of a disaster. “Bobby sat on a stool for forty-five minutes and bored everyone to death,” recalled his agent, Don Gregory. “Everyone came out in shock.” Darin’s friend Dick Clark tried to knock some sense into him: “Go back and put on the tuxedo and go to work. Do what the people expect of you.”
Darin eventually compromised, restoring some of his old hits to the act, and when he appeared at the Landmark Hotel a few months later, his two-week engagement was extended to six weeks. His career had a mild uptick after that—he returned several more times to Vegas and got his own NBC variety show in 1972—until his premature death in 1973, from a congenital heart ailment, at age thirty-seven.
The cultural upheavals of the sixties were felt especially acutely by the younger generation of stand-up comics influenced by Lenny Bruce, the rebel-satirist who died of a drug overdose in August 1966 (and was one of the few major comedians of the era who never played Vegas). Richard Pryor made his Las Vegas debut that same month, opening for Bobby Darin at the Flamingo, and got a warm welcome: “The young comedian scored consistently with first-nighters,” said Variety, “through the Bill Cosby school of reminiscing and identifiable storytelling.” But Pryor was moving into rougher, more overtly racial material, and when he appeared at the Aladdin Hotel a year later, he was fired after ignoring warnings about his explicit language. Pryor described his last performance there as a kind of drug-fueled epiphany, triggered when he saw Dean Martin staring at him from the audience.
“I imagined what I looked like and got disgusted,” he wrote in his memoir, Pryor Convictions. “I grasped for clarity as if it were oxygen. The fog rolled in. And in a burst of inspiration I finally spoke to the sold-out crowd: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Then I turned and walked off the stage.” Marty Beck, the Las Vegas–based agent for GAC (General Artists Corporation), who represented Pryor and many other performers in Vegas, remembered a somewhat more colorful walk-off: Pryor singing new lyrics to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song—“F-U-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E”—crying “Fuck you!” to Aladdin owner Milton Prell, and storming out. The entertainment booker for the hotel, sitting at a table with Beck, turned to him and said, “You just cost me my job.”
George Carlin was another young comic who was experimenting with more provocative material and testing the boundaries of Vegas acceptability. At the Frontier Hotel in 1969 he did a routine about his small ass: “When I was in the Air Force, black guys used to look at me in the shower and say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t got no ass.’ ” Some conventioneers in the audience complained, and the hotel cut his engagement short. Comedians like Buddy Hackett were getting away with much stronger language on the Strip, but the long-haired Carlin seemed a different, more dangerous kettle of fish. A few months later he was back at the Frontier to fill out his contractual obligation and got into more trouble with a routine about the word shit: “Buddy Hackett says ‘shit’ right down the street. Redd Foxx says ‘shit’ on the other side of the street. I don’t say ‘shit.’ I’ll smoke a little of it. . . .” This time he was fired for good.
Even as the sixties revolution was challenging old taboos and freeing up artists of all kinds, Vegas was still a conservative place. Its mostly middle-aged, Middle American audiences didn’t want to be provoked or lectured to or unsettled in any way. They wanted warm, comfortable, reassuring entertainment; they wanted to feel the love. They wanted Wayne Newton.
He was the quintessential Vegas entertainer of the post–Rat Pack years: a corny, crowd-pleasing avatar of an earlier show business era. He wasn’t cool and edgy like Sinatra and his Rat Pack cohorts, but old-fashioned, sentimental, eager to please—more like Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor, or that old Vegas schmaltzmeister Liberace. He was Vegas’ greatest homegrown star: a performer who came of age in Las Vegas, who spent virtually his entire career there, and who never approached the same level of success anywhere else.
Carson Wayne Newton was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on April 3, 1942, one of two sons of half–Native American parents. He began playing the piano at age four, and by six was singing regularly on a local radio show. His chronic allergies forced the family to move to Phoenix when Wayne was ten. While still in high school, he and his older brother, Jerry, appeared on a local TV variety show and caught the attention of a booker for the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas. He brought them up for an audition and hired them for two weeks in the hotel’s lounge. Wayne was only sixteen, not old enough to step into the casino.
Their two-week gig was extended, and the Newton brothers spent the next five years in the downtown Fremont lounge—Wayne singing, Jerry making jokes and accompanying him on guitar. They made their national TV debut on Jackie Gleason’s CBS variety show, and Bobby Darin signed them to a recording contract, handing Wayne the song that would become his first big hit, “Danke Schoen.” In 1965, after a couple of years touring with Jack Benny, they were big enough to headline their own show in the main room at the Flamingo Hotel.
They were still a brother act, but Wayne was clearly the star: a pudgy, cherub-faced singer with a velvety, androgynous soprano. He could swing on oldies like “Swanee” or “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey,” or belt out a Broadway showstopper like “What Kind of Fool Am I?”; he ranged easily from country (“Your Cheatin’ Heart”) to contemporary (“Goin’ Out of My Head”) and often closed the show with a roof-raising “When the Saints Go Marching In.” While Wayne did the singing, his brother provided a kind of Greek chorus of acerbic commentary. “I want to do something that we’ve never tried before,” Wayne might announce, and Jerry would quip, “Who are you kidding? We do the same bloody thing every night.” Jerry would taunt him with nicknames like “Fig” Newton, or “Hey, you with the pompadour hairdo and shoulder pads.” The show would always include a segment in which Wayne would show off his musical versatility by playing five or six instruments in a row—guitar, banjo, violin, trumpet—and Jerry would crack, “I’d take off my coat, but I’m afraid he’d play that too.”
Newton nuzzled up to the audience, teased it, flattered it by promising to entertain until the cows came home: “We got no place to go—I’d just as soon stay here with you, is that all right?” He was hammy and sentimental. For one closing number, he donned clown makeup and had a conversation with himself in a mirror, lamenting all the friends who didn’t come to his birthday party, before closing with “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.” In another maudlin bit, Wayne would sing “Danny Boy” while his brother read a letter written by a slain serviceman to his mother. “When he sings ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,’ women in the audience do everything but fetch him cookies and milk right there in the nightclub,” Time said in a 1970 profile. “Wayne is square and he knows it. . . . American mothers get precious little filial devotion these days, and Wayne represents an age when boys loved their mamma and weren’t afraid to show it.”
Vegas audiences went wild for him. “The Flamingo is charged with a near revivalist hysteria as Wayne Newton exhorts his flock of glory-be’s into pandemonium and standing ovations,” said Variety in a 1968 review. The Frontier Hotel hired him away from the Flamingo for $52,000 a week, and he became one of Howard Hughes’s favorite stars—the kind of wholesome, all-American entertainer that Hughes thought Vegas needed more of. Walter Kane, Hughes’s veteran entertainment director, became such a close friend and benefactor that Wayne referred to him as Grandfather. Newton never saw Hughes (nobody did), but he felt like a favored son. “Many nights there would come a knock on the door,” Newton wrote in his autobiography, “and a guy would appear in my dressing room and say to me, ‘Mr. Hughes wants you to know he knows what you’re doing and he’s proud of the kind of entertainment you’re representing. He’s happy that you’re a member of his family.’ ” (Newton, a lifelong Republican, was the one performer James Watt, President Reagan’s interior secretary, picked to entertain at the July 4, 1983, celebration on the Capitol Mall, after he banned rock groups for promoting drug use.)
Newton was a longtime Las Vegas resident and booster, buying a forty-acre ranch he called Casa de Shenandoah, where he raised Arabian horses. His weight ballooned (up to 275 pounds at one point, before he began working out with Hollywood muscleman Steve Reeves), and so did his shows, which often ran two hours or more, flouting the hotels’ customary time limits. Ron Rosenbaum, who profiled Newton for Esquire in 1982, saw this as the key to his popularity: his ability to create the illusion that every show was a unique personal gift to the audience: “Everyone leaves The Show feeling totally satisfied, thinking how hip, how simpatico, how special the whole evening was, how they’ve been present at one of those rare moments when the rules went by the board; how Wayne drove himself past his own limits, knocking himself out just for them.”
Not everyone in Las Vegas was in love with Wayne Newton. He seemed to collect enemies. Paul Anka, Totie Fields, and comedian Jan Murray were among the performers he had feuds with. He hated Jack Entratter because the Sands chief supposedly once told his manager, “Get that fag out of here.” When Johnny Carson began making gay jokes about Newton on the Tonight show (the girlish voice always raised eyebrows—though Newton was married twice and had two daughters), Newton stormed into Carson’s NBC office and threatened him if he didn’t stop. Many Vegas musicians found Newton arrogant and difficult to work with and hated doing his extralong shows. “The one show I found I had to drink to get through was Wayne Newton,” recalled one player. “It was like giving a pint of blood.”
Newton and his brother had an acrimonious split in 1971. Jerry was clearly overshadowed by his brother, and Wayne later admitted he had grown resentful of Jerry’s constant mockery. “It got to the point in the late ’60s where, no matter what I was doing onstage, he would either interrupt or make jokes about it,” Newton said. “It was driving me crazy.” Newton claimed the settlement left him $3 million in debt, and the two didn’t speak for ten years. (Jerry Newton was later convicted of bank fraud, in a case unrelated to his brother, and sentenced to six years in prison.) Most notoriously, Wayne Newton filed a much-publicized libel suit against NBC, over a story that linked him to mob figures, stemming from his purchase of the Aladdin Hotel in 1980. (Newton won a $19.3 million verdict from a federal jury in Las Vegas, but it was overturned on appeal.) None of which seemed to matter to Newton’s fanatically loyal fans, who continued to flock to his Vegas shows. By the mid-1990s he had made more than twenty-five thousand Vegas appearances, a record that will probably never be broken.
“Vegas is unto itself,” Stan Irwin, the Sahara Hotel’s entertainment director, liked to say. “In those days it set no precedent and followed no precedent. It just was.” Wayne Newton might have been Exhibit A. He was, if nothing else, an original: he seemed to inhabit his own musical world, an imitator of no one who came before, a model for no one who came after. But Vegas in the late sixties was also opening its doors to singers who reflected more of the changes taking place in contemporary music. One was Tom Jones.
He was born Thomas John Woodward, in the coal-mining country of South Wales. He dropped out of high school at age sixteen to marry his pregnant girlfriend and by his early twenties was fronting a local rock band, Tommy Scott and the Senators. A London manager and songwriter named Gordon Mills discovered him, changed his name to Tom Jones, and guided him to overnight stardom in 1965 with his first hit, “It’s Not Unusual.” Jones had a husky, raspy baritone, redolent of the fifties rock ’n’ roll and blues singers that he listened to growing up. (Elvis Presley, like many others hearing Jones for the first time, assumed he was black.) Onstage he was a galvanic, openly sexual performer—his shirt unbuttoned to the navel, hips gyrating in his skintight pants. “I’m trying to get across to the audience that I’m alive,” he told an interviewer. “All of it, the emotion and the sex and the power, the heartbeat and the bloodstream, are all theirs for the asking.”
By 1968, after several hit singles and TV guest appearances, he came to Las Vegas. “There was a strong sense at the time that playing Vegas was something you earned the right to do—that it was something you had to qualify for,” Jones said in his memoir, Over the Top and Back. Not everyone in Vegas was ready for him. Jack Entratter turned down a chance to book him at the Sands. “Entratter could no more relate to Tom Jones than he could to Mötley Crüe,” recalled GAC agent Marty Beck, who represented Jones in Las Vegas. “He said, ‘I don’t want this kind of act in my hotel.’ ”
Jones wound up at the Flamingo, which gave him a big promotional push, touting the engagement as “Tom Jones Fever” (partly to distinguish it from Tom Jones, a bawdy musical-comedy show based on Henry Fielding’s novel, which was doing good business at the Desert Inn). His debut in March 1968 drew sellout crowds and stirred up a kind of frenzy that Vegas had never before seen. Variety found him “different in both sound and delivery; he puts both voice and body into each song, the anatomical animation giving tablers an interesting visual treat.” Observed John Scott in the Los Angeles Times, “The tall, ruggedly handsome young man from Britain held first-nighters in the palm of his hand with a dynamic, temperature-raising performance. As he bounced and wriggled his way around the Flamingo’s theater-restaurant stage, Jones had mink-clad matrons and mini-skirted maids screaming with excitement.” When he played the Copa in New York, women in the audience threw their panties onstage. In Vegas they started throwing room keys.
Much of that electricity onstage is captured in an album he recorded at the Flamingo in 1969, Tom Jones: Live in Las Vegas. (“That album is steaming, if I say so myself,” Jones said.) He holds back nothing with his angsty, tonsil-straining performances of “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”; pushes the Beatles’ “Yesterday” further over the top than anyone thought possible; and does a version of the Irish ballad “Danny Boy” so bombastic it could frighten small children. The soft-spoken, Welsh-accented lilt of his stage patter only accentuates his fevered, breath-defying performances. You almost sweat while listening to him.
Tom Jones was a belter for a new Vegas era. And the person who would come to embody that new era was paying attention. Indeed, if there was one entertainer who laid the groundwork for Elvis Presley’s comeback in Las Vegas, it was Tom Jones.
The two had first met on the Paramount lot in 1965, where Elvis was finishing up the filming of Paradise, Hawaiian Style, and the young Welsh singer, in Los Angeles for a TV appearance, stopped by for a visit. Tom was flattered when Elvis greeted him by singing “With These Hands,” one of the songs on Tom’s new album. Three years later Elvis drove up from Los Angeles with Priscilla to see Tom’s debut at the Flamingo and went backstage afterward to congratulate him. He wanted to see Tom’s show, Elvis said, because he was thinking of returning to live performing himself.
They met again a couple of months later in Hawaii, where Elvis was vacationing and Tom was appearing at the Ilikai Hotel. The two spent a long afternoon together at Elvis’s rented beach house, jamming to fifties rock ’n’ roll songs, talking about the Beatles and Tom’s childhood in Wales, and comparing stage moves on the lawn.
Jones’s influence on Elvis’s Vegas show was obvious to many of those who saw them both. “What Elvis got from Tom was the trick of working the Vegas stage,” said the International Hotel’s publicity director Nick Naff. “Tom showed him you have to be sensual in a way that gets through to the overthirties. Tom gave Elvis the freeze poses at the end of songs, the trick of wiping the sweat with a cloth and then throwing it out in the house.” Jones was the kind of magnetic stage performer that Elvis used to be and longed to be again.
He had not done any live performing since a benefit concert in Hawaii in March 1961—an entire decade had essentially passed him by. Colonel Parker was the main culprit, keeping him on a nonstop movie treadmill, while steering him to the bland pop songs that Elvis’s publishing company, Hill & Range, owned the rights to. But Elvis’s own inertia was also to blame. “The Colonel behind the scenes controlled a lot,” said Jerry Schilling, Elvis’s Memphis friend and sometime employee. “But Elvis was really in charge of his career. If he had wanted to tour, he could have. But most of the time he was doing three movies a year. And the music business had changed drastically. He didn’t have a hit for seven years. When you’re not having hit records, when nine or ten months of the year you’re on a movie set, and you’ve got to record for those films—I don’t think he had time to really think about it that much.”
By the end of 1967, however, Elvis was nearly at the breaking point. And the Colonel, too, was finally ready for a change. He had little choice. Elvis’s last few films had barely made enough money to cover their costs, and when his current contract with MGM was fulfilled, it was doubtful that any major studio would sign Elvis for more films—at least, not for the money Colonel Parker thought his star deserved. So the Colonel switched gears and went to NBC in December 1967 with a proposal that Elvis star in his first-ever television special, to air the following December. A deal was quickly made; Singer sewing machines was lined up as sole sponsor; and taping was set to begin in June.
The Colonel’s original idea was for a conventional Christmas special—Elvis singing holiday songs, like Andy Williams or Bing Crosby. But NBC hired a hip young director named Steve Binder, who had a more ambitious idea. Binder—who had directed NBC’s rock-music show Hullabaloo, as well as a critically acclaimed Petula Clark special—wanted to showcase the full range of Elvis’s talents, to reintroduce the viewing audience to the “real” Elvis Presley. The Colonel balked, but Binder won Elvis’s confidence and essentially got free rein to put together the show he wanted.
Binder junked the Christmas idea and came up with a concept for the show that revolved around the Jerry Reed song “Guitar Man,” with Elvis playing a small-town guitar player who tries to make it in the big city. But after watching Elvis jamming with friends in his dressing room, Binder came up with the idea of trying to re-create one of those jam sessions for the show: just Elvis and a few musicians onstage, casual and unrehearsed, on a small boxing-ring-style stage, surrounded by a couple of hundred spectators. Elvis was excited by the idea, but also petrified. When the segment was preparing to tape in late June, he was so nervous that Binder practically had to push him onstage.
Singer Presents Elvis aired on December 3, 1968. The show had some fairly standard, TV-variety-show elements, including the long, choreographed “Guitar Man” sequence. But it was Elvis’s amazingly fresh and dynamic vocal performance—both in solo, concert-style segments and in the unrehearsed jam session, joined by Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana, his original guitarist and drummer—that was a revelation. Looking trim and gorgeous in a black leather suit with a high Edwardian collar (designed by Bill Belew, who would later design all of his Vegas outfits), Elvis blasted away the cobwebs on old hits like “All Shook Up” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” seemed reanimated on rock numbers he hadn’t done in years, like “Tryin’ to Get to You” and “Love Me,” and showed a softer side with new songs like the sentimental “Memories,” which he introduced on the show. (And, to placate the Colonel, one holiday number: “Blue Christmas.”)
For the closing number, the show offered a taste of things to come. Binder had asked arranger Earl Brown to write a new song to end the show, something that would connect Elvis with the social and political idealism of the times. Brown came up with “If I Can Dream”—a heartfelt, if generalized, plea for tolerance and understanding. Dressed in a white double-breasted suit, with ELVIS in giant, red-bulb-lit block letters behind him (which would become his omnipresent logo in Vegas), Elvis delivered the song with passion and power. Released as a single in November, before the show aired, “If I Can Dream” was his biggest-selling record in four years.
The Elvis comeback special, often referred to as the Singer special, drew 42 percent of the viewing audience, NBC’s highest-rated show of the season. More important, it gave notice, to fans and critics alike, that Elvis Presley was relevant once again as a rock artist. “There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home,” wrote critic Jon Landau. “He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect from a rock ’n’ roll singer.” “It was like nothing I had ever seen on television before,” recalled Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick, “both a revelation and a vindication.”
Elvis and everyone around him recognized the show as a breakthrough and turning point. “He could have done it so much earlier,” said Billy Smith, his cousin and longtime member of the entourage. “But he had to be shoved into a corner and almost kicked before he would bite.” In his dressing room after the taping in June, Elvis was excited in a way he hadn’t been in years. “I want to tour again,” he told the Colonel. “I want to go out and work with a live audience.”
Las Vegas, meanwhile, was getting ready for him.
Like Howard Hughes, the man he would soon challenge for supremacy in Las Vegas, Kirk Kerkorian began his career as an airplane pilot. During World War II he ferried transport planes across the Atlantic for the British Royal Air Force, and after the war he built a successful air-service company that leased and chartered planes. He often stopped over in Las Vegas, where he was a big gambler, and began buying up property there in the early 1960s, including the land on which Caesars Palace was later built. In 1967 he acquired the Flamingo Hotel, along with an eighty-two-acre parcel of land off the Strip, near the Convention Center. There he made plans to build Vegas’ biggest hotel yet.
The $60 million International Hotel was a perfect symbol of Las Vegas’ corporate transformation. It had no architectural distinction or theme-park gimmicks; it was simply a massive, thirty-story tower with three wings, 1,512 rooms, and the largest casino in the world. Kerkorian, a self-effacing mogul almost as shy of the press as Hughes (but without the psychoses), used the Flamingo as a training ground for the staff that would eventually move over to the International for its opening in July 1969. To run both hotels he hired Alex Shoofey, longtime vice president at the Sahara, who was known as one of the shrewdest hotel operators and toughest bean counters in town. (“He knew where every goddamn penny was spent,” said one Vegas PR man. “He counted the rolls of toilet paper.”) Shoofey, in turn, coaxed Bill Miller to come out of retirement to be his director of entertainment.
Miller—who had come to Vegas in the mid-1950s and booked entertainment for the Sahara and later the Dunes Hotel—was in his sixties now, but he was a crafty booker, willing to take chances. He hired Tom Jones at the Flamingo when Jack Entratter wanted nothing to do with him. He rescued Sonny and Cher from a career slump, booking them into the Flamingo’s main room, where they developed the bantering, bickering act that led to their popular CBS variety series. To open the International, he wanted a star who was big enough to fill the huge two-thousand-seat showroom and would set the hotel above and apart from its many Vegas competitors. His choice was Elvis Presley.
It probably seemed like a long shot at first, since Colonel Parker had for years turned down all offers for Elvis to perform in concert. After the NBC comeback special, however, the Colonel was looking for a suitably high-profile follow-up. Lamar Fike, a longtime member of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia, recalled a conversation with Colonel Parker in a limousine as they were driving into Las Vegas, not long after the taping of the NBC special. “The Colonel was in the front seat of the limo with his driver, and I was in the back with Elvis,” said Fike. “The Colonel turned around with his cigar and said, ‘You know, we can take that show you just did and put it in Vegas and make a lot of money.’ Elvis looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Sounds like we’re playing Vegas.’ ”
A couple of weeks after the NBC special had aired, to big ratings and much acclaim, Colonel Parker struck a deal with the International. Elvis would get $100,000 a week—matching Sinatra and Dean Martin at the top of Vegas’ salary scale—for a four-week engagement at the hotel. There was only one sticking point: Colonel Parker did not want Elvis to open the hotel. It was too risky, he argued, for his boy to launch a new showroom in a new hotel before all the technical kinks—the sound system, the lighting—had been worked out. Get someone else to be the guinea pig, Colonel Parker said; Elvis will come in second. So Bill Miller went after his backup choice, Barbra Streisand, and signed her (for the same $100,000 salary) to open the hotel on July 2, 1969. Elvis Presley would arrive four weeks later.
Before he could start planning for Las Vegas, however, Elvis had a couple of other obligations. One was dutiful and dreary: in the spring of 1969 he shot his thirty-first and last movie, Change of Habit, costarring Mary Tyler Moore as a nun helping out Elvis (as a doctor!) in an inner-city health clinic—a film Colonel Parker had convinced NBC to finance as part of the deal for the TV special. The other project was considerably more rewarding: in January and February Elvis went into a Memphis studio for one of the most important recording sessions of his career.
Elvis had been doing most of his recent recording at RCA’s studios in Nashville—routine sessions of mostly mediocre songs, with Elvis increasingly bored and disengaged. He was scheduled to go back to Nashville in January of 1969, but two of his Memphis friends, George Klein and Marty Lacker, told him he ought to try recording at Chips Moman’s American Sound Studio, right there in Memphis. Moman’s studio was getting a lot of buzz, having turned out a string of hits for singers like Wilson Pickett, Dionne Warwick, and the Box Tops. Elvis didn’t need much convincing. Moman was eager to work with him and postponed a Neil Diamond session so that Elvis could begin recording there on January 13.
Moman, a savvy producer who had been one of the founders of Memphis’s Stax Records, told Elvis he wanted to find some first-rate new material for him. That meant reaching out to new songwriters and picking songs that Elvis’s own company might not have the publishing rights to. Elvis said he cared more about hits than publishing rights, and he gave Moman the OK. The result was a bounty of quality songs, among them “Suspicious Minds” (written by Memphis songwriter Mark James, who had recorded it himself the year before), Eddie Rabbitt’s “Kentucky Rain,” and Jerry Butler’s “Only the Strong Survive”—all songs that suited Elvis’s big voice and flair for dramatics, songs that would form the core of his repertoire for years to come.
The most controversial number of the Memphis sessions, however, was an overt piece of social commentary called “In the Ghetto.” It was written by a young Atlanta songwriter named Mac Davis—who had also composed “A Little Less Conversation” for Elvis’s 1968 movie Live a Little, Love a Little, as well as “Memories,” which Elvis had introduced on the NBC special. “In the Ghetto” was a message song, about the vicious circle of poverty and crime facing inner-city children. (Davis had initially called it “Vicious Circle,” and he assumed it would be recorded by an African American singer. He even went to Lake Tahoe to show it to Sammy Davis Jr., who turned it down.) Elvis and others in his camp weren’t sure whether he should record it, worried that the song was too political. But when Moman said he would give it to another of his artists instead, Elvis changed his mind, and he performed it with a quiet intensity that buried all doubts. “In the Ghetto” was the first single on the album to be released, in April 1969. By June it was No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, the best performance for any Elvis song since 1965.
Mac Davis, who went on to a substantial career as a country-music singer himself, remained one of Elvis’s favorite songwriters. (The Colonel liked him too. When they first met, after “A Little Less Conversation” was recorded, Colonel Parker told Davis to bend over so he could rub his curly head. “Now you go tell everybody that the Colonel rubbed your head,” said the old carny. “You’re gonna be a star.”) Davis’s work—particularly “In the Ghetto,” “Memories,” and another of his numbers that Elvis recorded in Memphis, “Don’t Cry Daddy”—satisfied Elvis’s craving for songs of more substance, emotion, and not a little sentimentality. “Elvis was really trying to find his way out of that vicious circle too,” said Davis. “He wanted to get back to being the performer that he was.”
And soon he would.