(Elvis Forever)
He got better before he got worse.
When Elvis Presley made his long-awaited return to the concert stage at Las Vegas’ International Hotel in August 1969, many people, both inside and outside his circle, assumed it would be a onetime event. But the phenomenal success of his show, and the long-term contract that Colonel Parker drew up with the hotel shortly after the opening, ensured that Las Vegas would become a recurring, twice-yearly stop on Elvis’s soon-to-be-resumed touring schedule. And for at least the first two or three of those Vegas appearances, Elvis was still engaged, energized, and musically at the top of his game.
First there were some personnel changes. Larry Muhoberac, the keyboard player in Elvis’s backup band, decided to return to session work in Los Angeles rather than continue with Elvis. So James Burton recruited Glen D. Hardin, who had passed on the job the first time around because he was too busy. An affable West Texas native who had played with Buddy Holly’s backup group, the Crickets, Hardin had a solid track record as a session player, as well as some experience as an arranger—a skill that quickly proved valuable. During rehearsals for his January show in Vegas, Elvis said he wanted to try doing the old Everly Brothers song “Let It Be Me,” but had no arrangement. Hardin showed up the next morning with one he had written overnight. Elvis was pleased, the number was incorporated into the show, and Hardin went on to become Elvis’s reliable in-house arranger.
Drummer Ronnie Tutt also opted out of the second Vegas engagement to take a better-paying job with Andy Williams. His replacement, Bob Lanning, was a competent session player, but Elvis missed Tutt’s hard-charging backup, and he made sure that Colonel Parker paid Tutt enough to lure him back for the next Vegas gig. Tutt and Hardin, along with holdovers Jerry Scheff, John Wilkinson, and James Burton, would remain the core of Elvis’s backup band for most of his Vegas years. Elvis even gave them a name, the TCB (for Taking Care of Business) Band and cemented the fraternity by giving each member a bracelet and gold pendant with TCB and a lightning bolt insignia engraved on it.
Elvis opened his second engagement at the International on January 26, 1970, and it proved the first one was no fluke. Reservations poured in even faster than they had the previous summer. The opening-night dinner show was packed with 1,780 people, 300 more than at opening night six months earlier. Elvis wore the first of his flashy, Bill Belew–designed jumpsuits—most of them white, but also in black and blue, with plunging necklines and a variety of jeweled designs. Ringo Starr was in the audience on opening night. Fats Domino came to one show, and Elvis sang “Blueberry Hill” in his honor. On closing night Dean Martin was in the audience, and Elvis acknowledged him with a few bars of “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”
Elvis’s repertoire was expanding, with several numbers that would remain part of his act for years. He still began the show with a string of his old hits (“All Shook Up” replaced “Blue Suede Shoes” as the opening number), but he added several contemporary selections: two singles from his Memphis recording sessions the previous year, “Kentucky Rain” and “Don’t Cry Daddy,” as well as several songs associated with other artists, including Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” and Tony Joe White’s country-fried dish of swamp rock, “Polk Salad Annie,” which gave Elvis a chance to deliver a little opening catechism on Southern customs. RCA released another live album from the show, and the critics were once again enthusiastic. “It was a flawless demonstration of his vocal ability and showmanship,” said Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times. “Elvis, with the uncanny guidance of Col. Tom Parker, has done what once seemed impossible. He has become king on his own terms.”
His third Vegas engagement, in August 1970, brought another key personnel change, as Joe Guercio replaced Bobby Morris as orchestra leader. (According to Morris, the hotel let him go after a dispute unrelated to Elvis: Morris had hired twenty-four string players for Julie Budd, Bill Cosby’s opening act, then had to fire them when Cosby switched to another opening act. The union objected, and the hotel blamed it on Morris.) Guercio was a fortuitous addition. He was a well-traveled and well-connected Vegas conductor, who had worked with everyone from Patti Page to Steve and Eydie, and he made his mark almost immediately. “Joe was the first one to really put the band to work,” said pianist Frank Leone. Guercio helped flesh out the arrangements, suggested new endings for some numbers, and in general got the orchestra more involved. His most notable contribution, however, came in January 1971, when he introduced a new opening for the show: heralding Elvis’s entrance with the dramatic theme from Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Stanley Kubrick had used so memorably in 2001: A Space Odyssey—a suitably majestic introduction for the new king of Las Vegas.
For his summer show in 1970, Elvis-mania in Las Vegas reached a new peak. The hotel was festooned with pennants announcing THE ELVIS SUMMER FESTIVAL. Colonel Parker shipped in tens of thousands of souvenir postcards, catalogs, photo albums, and ELVIS SUMMER FESTIVAL straw hats, which the waitresses, dealers, and other hotel employees were required to wear during the run. The old carny’s promotional ingenuity knew no bounds. Among the souvenirs on sale were expensive framed posters of Elvis, identified as “original Renaldis from Italy.” Renaldi was an Italian American employee in the International’s carpenter shop.
Colonel Parker also brought in a documentary crew to film several nights of the August 1970 engagement. The Colonel’s original idea was to broadcast one of the Las Vegas concerts live for a closed-circuit pay-per-view TV event. But when news of the planned telecast leaked to the press prematurely, the Colonel scrapped the idea and instead made a deal with MGM, the Hollywood studio that Kirk Kerkorian had recently acquired, to produce a feature documentary on the Vegas show. The result, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, directed by Oscar-winner Denis Sanders and released in November 1970, is the best record we have of Elvis’s power and charisma onstage at the height of his Vegas years.
The film begins with behind-the-scenes footage of rehearsals in Los Angeles; Elvis is loose, in high spirits, and more naturally engaging than in any of his clumsy “ad-lib” patter onstage. But the bulk of the film is simply a record of his Vegas show, shot by acclaimed cinematographer Lucien Ballard (The Wild Bunch). In his high-collared white jumpsuit, open in front with giant silver buttons, Elvis is a magnetic presence onstage: in constant motion, pacing the stage, striking karate poses, whirling one arm like a pinwheel or slashing the air to punctuate the chords. He’s sweating by the end, yet he seems more comfortable and controlled than in his often out-of-breath performances in 1969.
His rock engine still hums on old numbers like “I Got a Woman” and new ones (for him) like “C. C. Rider,” which opens the show. He tears into the big ballads with unabashed emotion and theatricality. He begins the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” with his back turned dramatically to the audience. He gives an impassioned (but not over-the-top) reading to Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” He loves the big finish, often closing songs with a dramatic freeze-frame, in karate warrior pose or with one hand thrust toward the sky. “Nobody could close a song any better than he could,” said Mac Davis. “I used to love watching other entertainers try, from Wayne Newton to Céline Dion. But nobody could. It was absolutely Elvis.”
He could take the corniest songs and put them across with the sheer force of his musical conviction. Take “The Wonder of You.” The song was originally written for Perry Como, who never recorded it, and became a minor hit in 1959 for the sweet-voiced pop crooner Ray Peterson. When Elvis began performing it in Las Vegas in the winter of 1970 (with an arrangement rustled up in one night by Glen D. Hardin), he went to lunch with Peterson and told him he wanted to record the song. “You don’t have to ask permission, you’re Elvis Presley,” Peterson said. “Yes, I do,” Elvis replied. “You’re Ray Peterson.” Elvis’s version of “The Wonder of You,” recorded live in Las Vegas and released as a single in April 1970, rose to No. 9 in the United States and No. 1 in Great Britain, one of his biggest hits of the seventies.
His performance of the song in Elvis: That’s the Way It Is is a vivid illustration of Elvis’s ability to transform a conventional love song into something grander, more emotional, almost operatic in its intensity. “When no one else can understand me / When everything I do is wrong,” go to the treacly lyrics, “You give me hope and consolation / You give me strength to carry on.” But Elvis leaves no doubt that he honestly believes them—or at least wants to. He builds the song beautifully, gathering force as the melody ascends the scale, his voice breaking ever so slightly on the word hope, his eyes closing as if imagining the wondrous woman he was never quite able to find (or maybe it’s his mother). During James Burton’s twangy guitar bridge (“Play the song, James”), Elvis joins with the swelling male-female chorus, guiding the number toward a thrilling climax and release—Elvis grabbing the air with one hand, fingers outstretched, tensed and almost trembling on the last chord, before a furious swipe of the air to end the song. It is the essence of Elvis in Vegas: schmaltz raised to the sublime.
The decline that followed is a sad, familiar story: told many times, psychoanalyzed, moralized about, recounted in books by almost everyone who had even a passing acquaintance with Elvis during his last few years. Boredom and overwork, combined with drug use that was either ignored or enabled by his circle of intimates, sapped his energy, sank his spirits, and essentially drove him crazy. It was both tragic and ludicrous, a cautionary tale and parable for the age of rock superstardom—one of the first of many similarly tragic ends for rock stars unable to cope with the perks and perils of enormous fame.
Las Vegas usually gets much of the blame, simply because it’s where the decline could be witnessed in real time. In 1969 and ’70 Elvis still looked and sounded great, buoyed by the enthusiastic crowds, critical acclaim, and renewed self-confidence. But his grueling, twice-yearly appearances in Las Vegas—two shows a night for four weeks, without a single night off—soon became a grind, and his thirtieth-floor home at the International, later the Hilton (a palatial, five-thousand-square-foot suite, complete with private swimming pool and rooftop terrace, from which Elvis and his pals would sometimes hit golf balls), a prison. “When he captured Vegas, he was the most dynamic performer in the world,” said Jerry Schilling, who worked with him during much of that period. “But what is the challenge, for an artist, after you’ve done it and done it, over and over again? To have him there twice a year, sixty shows in a row, the same place, never getting out of the hotel for maybe five weeks. In the wintertime we never saw daylight. We would go to bed, close the curtains just about sunrise. And we’d get up for breakfast, it was five o’clock; by the eight o’clock show, it was dark. It was great for two, three engagements. But then, it becomes decadent, if you will.”
An early sign of trouble came in August 1970, when the hotel’s security office received an anonymous call warning that a man would try to kill Elvis during his Saturday-night show. The FBI was alerted, armed plainclothes officers and members of the Memphis Mafia were stationed around the room for protection, and Elvis carried two pistols in his boots when he took the stage. Tension was high throughout the show. Elvis stood sideways for much of the performance to make himself a smaller target; an ambulance was parked outside just in case. Despite one scary moment, when a man yelled out from the balcony (just requesting a song, it turned out), the threat came to nothing. But it added to Elvis’s paranoia and isolation. He grew more obsessed with guns, and more reckless with them, often firing shots in fits of anger or simply for kicks. His use of prescription drugs—increasingly strong sedatives to help him sleep, amphetamines to keep him going—grew worse, and he found a new physician in Las Vegas, Dr. Elias Ghanem, to help keep him supplied. His marriage was falling apart, he was spending money as fast as he could earn it, and his moods were growing increasingly capricious and foul.
His performances first began to be affected, by most accounts, during his August 1971 engagement. Elvis looked puffy and seemed listless onstage. His sets were rarely longer than forty-five minutes, and filled with so many fits and starts and distracting karate displays that some audience members actually walked out. “Those shows in Vegas in August of ’71, that’s when you saw the first signs that things were starting to fall apart,” said Lamar Fike. “Elvis would be so ripped his tongue would be thick, and he’d tell the audience, ‘I’m sorry, folks, I just got up. I’m not really awake yet.’ ” The critics began to notice. “As performances go,” wrote Mark Tan in the Hollywood Reporter, “Elvis Presley’s at the Las Vegas Hilton is sloppy, hurriedly rehearsed, mundanely lit, poorly amplified, occasionally monotonous, often silly, and haphazardly coordinated. Elvis looked drawn, tired, and noticeably heavier—weight-wise, not musically—than in his last Vegas appearance. He wasn’t in his strongest voice, his costume of studded white slacks and vest with black satin high collar and scarf was not his sexiest or most flattering. And do you know what? The packed to over-capacity audience—the first 2,000 of the usual 120,000 he’ll draw for his monthlong engagement—positively couldn’t have cared less.”
That was part of the problem. The fans loved him, no matter how he looked or what he did. The adulation seemed to go to his head. The shows became more bombastic; the white suits more garish. Elvis began wearing a jewel-studded cape, spreading it wide and bowing his head dramatically, like some weird cross between Dracula and Jesus. He began performing a medley of patriotic songs—“Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the spiritual “All My Trials”—that he dubbed “An American Trilogy,” delivered with a sober grandiloquence that was a far cry from his splashy but still self-deprecating early performances.
The strange thing was, he could still sing. Live recordings from his Vegas shows as late as 1974 reveal a vocalist of still formidable power: still hitting the high notes on “It’s Now or Never,” rocking with just as much authority on old numbers like “Trying to Get to You” or Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land.” And Elvis was still the toast of Las Vegas. Other performers came to see him, hang out with him, claim him as a friend. Marty Allen, the frizzy-haired half of the comedy team of Allen and Rossi, was flattered when he first met Elvis and the King told him how much he enjoyed Marty on game shows like Hollywood Squares. They would trade practical jokes: once, just as he was about to go onstage, Elvis had some of the guys handcuff Marty to Elvis’s dressing-room door. After Marty finally got a security guard to free him, he barged in on the show, wearing a scarf and clamoring for a kiss while Elvis was singing “Love Me Tender.” Pop singer Vikki Carr, who was appearing at the Tropicana Hotel, came to see his show for the first time with her fiancé, Elias Ghanem—Elvis’s own Vegas doctor. When she went with Ghanem backstage after the show, Elvis told her to close her eyes and slipped a pavé diamond star ring on her finger as an engagement gift.
An occasional project could rouse Elvis’s interest, like his January 1973 TV special Aloha from Hawaii, which was the first music concert ever beamed live around the world by satellite. But a few days after the broadcast he was back in Las Vegas, appearing worn-out and overweight, and more dependent than ever on drugs, which now included injections of liquid Demerol. Health problems forced him to cancel five midnight shows in February. Then, on the night of February 18, in another security scare, four Peruvian men in the audience suddenly rushed the stage. They turned out to be just overeager, overlubricated fans, but a melee ensued as several members of Elvis’s entourage jumped onstage to fight off the intruders; Elvis even knocked one back with a karate kick of his own. He was fuming after the incident. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the crowd. “I’m sorry I didn’t break his goddamn neck is what I’m sorry about.”
Elvis was still upset after the show, and he insisted that the attack must have been the work of Mike Stone, the karate instructor with whom Priscilla was having an affair. (She and Elvis would be divorced in October.) Elvis startled even his jaded inner circle by demanding that they hire a hit man and have Stone killed. The Memphis Mafia, not exactly relishing the idea of behaving like the real Mafia, made a show of looking into it, before Elvis cooled down and decided to let the matter slide.
His behavior onstage grew more and more erratic. For one show in August 1973 he came out riding Lamar Fike’s back, with a toy monkey attached to his neck. He sang “What Now My Love?” while lying on a bed rolled out onstage and interpolated X-rated lyrics into “Love Me Tender.” The Hollywood Reporter found it “one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, and most disheartening performances of his Las Vegas career.” On the last night of the run, Elvis launched into an off-the-cuff rant in which he criticized the Hilton Hotel for firing a waiter named Mario, who often brought him room service. “He needs the job, and I think the Hiltons are bigger than that,” said Elvis. Colonel Parker was furious that Elvis would publicly embarrass the hotel like that and chewed him out after the show. They had a brutal argument that ended with Elvis actually firing the Colonel—only to make up a few days later, after Parker toted up how much money he claimed Elvis owed him, and Elvis and his father decided they couldn’t afford the breakup.
In October 1973 Elvis, semicomatose, was rushed to a Memphis emergency room and spent three weeks in the hospital, as doctors attempted to wean him off at least some of his drugs. He took a couple of months to rest, and when he returned to Vegas in January—his engagements now shortened from four weeks to two—some saw an uptick, his best performances since 1970. But soon he was back to his unpredictable behavior onstage. In August 1974, he rambled on endlessly about his passion for karate, his divorce from Priscilla, and his anger at press reports of his drug abuse: “I hear rumors flying around. I got sick in the hospital. In this day and time you can’t even get sick; you are . . . strung out! By God, I’ll tell you something, friend, I have never been strung out in my life, except on music. . . . If I find or hear an individual that has said that about me, I’m going to break their goddamn neck, you son of a bitch!” Priscilla, who was in the audience, was shocked that he would air his grievances so publicly. “It was like watching a different person,” she said.
Even the occasional glimmers of hope for a new challenge were quickly snuffed out. Elvis wanted to tour overseas, but the Colonel (hiding his passport problems) always made excuses for rejecting the idea. Barbra Streisand visited Elvis backstage at the Hilton one night and offered him the costarring role in a remake she was planning of the film classic A Star Is Born. Elvis, who still had hopes of making a mark in movies, was excited by the prospect. But Colonel Parker, peeved that Streisand made the offer directly to Elvis and not to him (and possibly realizing that Elvis wasn’t capable of such a challenging role at this point), made so many demands on the deal that it was soon abandoned. Kris Kristofferson eventually played the role.
Health problems forced more show cancellations in 1975. In August, overweight and ill, Elvis was so weak he couldn’t walk from his dressing room to the elevator; at times he had to call for a chair onstage. He cut the engagement short, rested up, and came back in December, when he seemed a bit revived. But live footage of his last Vegas engagement, in December 1976, shows his deterioration with painful clarity. Elvis looks bloated and is nearly immobile onstage—all the dynamic energy of his early Vegas years reduced to a little leg jiggling and half-hearted swaying to the beat. He seems distracted, depleted, simply going through the motions. Even tossing out scarves to his female fans—Charlie Hodge hands them to him, one after another after another—now looks like a mechanical, joyless ritual.
“After sitting through Elvis Presley’s closing night performance at the Las Vegas Hilton,” wrote the Memphis Press-Scimitar, in an eerily prophetic review on December 15, 1976, “one walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes, perhaps suddenly, and why the King of Rock ’n’ Roll would subject himself to possible ridicule by going onstage so ill-prepared.”
Eight months later at Graceland, on the afternoon of August 16, 1977, after a night in which he visited his dentist, played racquetball at 3:00 a.m., and swallowed three packets of the sleep medication his doctors had prepared for him, his girlfriend, Ginger Alden, found Elvis lying on the bathroom floor, unconscious and not breathing. He was rushed to Baptist Memorial Hospital, and an hour later, at 3:30 p.m. central time, he was declared dead. The cause was officially cardiac arrhythmia, but an autopsy revealed traces of fourteen different drugs in his system, at least five of them in potentially toxic doses.
Elvis’s demons were of little concern to Las Vegas, so long as he kept bringing in the crowds. And he did. His fans continued making the pilgrimage to Las Vegas to the bitter end: Elvis did 636 shows in Vegas over seven years, and every one of them, according to the hotel, was sold out. He was the city’s undisputed superstar, a shot in the arm for business all over Las Vegas whenever he came to town. Yet Bill Miller, the veteran Vegas booker who signed him for the International Hotel in 1969, predicted that Elvis’s show would mean “the end of Vegas”: his record-breaking salary, Miller feared, would make big-star entertainment in Vegas economically unsustainable. Miller was only partly wrong. Elvis didn’t kill Vegas, but he did change it. His triumph in Las Vegas helped hasten the demise of the old nightclub shows and sounded the starting gun for a very different era of Las Vegas entertainment.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Las Vegas. The transition from the old mob factions that had dominated the casino business to a new era of corporate owners was gaining steam. On Thanksgiving eve in 1970, Howard Hughes left town, as suddenly and surreptitiously as he had arrived four years earlier: spirited out of the Desert Inn on a stretcher, driven to Nellis Air Force Base, and flown to the Bahamas, never to return. In 1971 Kirk Kerkorian sold his International Hotel to the Hilton organization—the first national hotel chain to get a foothold on the Las Vegas Strip—and moved on to an even bigger project. Having just acquired a controlling interest in Hollywood’s MGM film studio, he set out to build a namesake hotel in Vegas: the MGM Grand. Constructed in a quick eighteen months and opening in December 1973, the $106 million concrete-and-glass behemoth had no particular architectural distinction except for its size: with 2,084 rooms (and a building volume as large as that of the Empire State Building), it was not only the biggest hotel in Las Vegas, but the biggest in the world at the time.
The MGM Grand would, however, be the last major resort to open on the Strip for more than a decade—and would be ravaged by a disastrous fire in November 1980 that killed eighty-five people. (The hotel had not bothered to install a fire sprinkler system in the casino or the restaurant, where the fire started.) Several of the older Strip hotels built new high-rise additions during the 1970s; downtown got a major facelift; and the city’s national profile grew, as TV hosts like Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas brought their popular daytime talk shows to Las Vegas and Jerry Lewis in 1973 made Vegas the permanent home for his annual Labor Day telethon for muscular dystrophy. Yet Las Vegas, increasingly, seemed to be living off the glory of a fading show-business era.
Many of the stars from the golden age were still around, but they were well past their prime. Frank Sinatra announced his retirement from show business in June 1971, only to return two years later—still a big draw in Las Vegas, but no longer the cultural force he once was. Dean Martin’s lazy-hazy drunk act, overexposed for nine seasons on his NBC variety show, was past its sell-by date. Sammy Davis Jr., with his hip Nehru jackets, flashy jewelry, and cool-cat lingo, was verging on self-parody. Their old patron at the Sands, Jack Entratter, was gone too: dead of a cerebral hemorrhage following a bike accident in March 1971. (His former wife Corinne Entratter Sidney always had suspicions about the death, since it followed a trip Entratter made to New York, when the hotel’s mob bosses summoned him to explain some alleged financial improprieties.)
Nor did Elvis’s comeback in Las Vegas do much to attract a new generation of rock stars, most of whom still shunned the city as a haven for nightclub has-beens. A few younger, middle-of-the-road pop singers, like Olivia Newton-John and Engelbert Humperdinck, became Vegas headliners during these years. Following Elvis’s success, Vegas became more receptive to other vintage rockers (like Jerry Lee Lewis, who followed Elvis into the International Hotel’s showroom in 1970) as well as to country music: once confined mainly to downtown, country stars like Johnny Cash, Barbara Mandrell, and Willie Nelson now became top attractions on the Strip.
Yet Elvis’s white jumpsuits and bombastic stage shows came to symbolize the gaudiness, fakery, and middlebrow bad taste that people identified with Las Vegas. The city in the seventies was “an uncool polyester dump” (Time), a “blight to spirit and soul” (New York Times), an object of parody—like Bill Murray’s unctuous lounge-singer character on Saturday Night Live, crooning the theme to Star Wars (and Elvis’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra). “Gradually between 1968 and 1975, Vegas found itself pushed across the generational line that divides cool from laughable,” wrote Mike Weatherford in Cult Vegas, “Without a new generation of headliner-types to draw from, Vegas became an elephant’s graveyard of has-beens or dependable B-teamers.”
Arena concerts and tours were the preferred (and more lucrative) route for the major rock stars of the era. Vegas was regarded as a sellout; the hip agents steered their clients away. Mac Davis, who was trying to make the jump from songwriting to performing in the early seventies, recalled his first meeting with music-industry power broker David Geffen. “Why in hell are you playing Las Vegas?” Geffen said. “That’s the worst thing you can do!” Even among the more traditional Vegas stars, the city was no longer considered the essential stop that it had been a decade earlier. “There are a lot of performers who don’t want to work here,” Petula Clark told reporter Mark Tan in 1976. “Ten years ago everybody would kill to get here, and now it’s ‘Who needs it?’ Concerts have really cut into the prestige of Vegas. People feel they can go out in concert and make more money and work less.”
The glamour and cachet of the early sixties were long gone; the high rollers and Rat Pack–era hipsters replaced by a new crowd of budget-conscious, Middle American tourists. (The “flood victims,” as some of the old-timers referred to them.) Texas columnist Molly Ivins, on her first trip to Las Vegas in 1979, was both amused and appalled: “Genuine Pa Kettles, wearing overalls and straw farmer’s hats, stand pouring quarters into slot-machines bookended by characters sent from Central Casting to give Californians a bad name. Shirts open to the navel, razor-cuts, indelible tans, and little gold coke spoons around their necks. They in turn are bookended by blue-rinse perm grandmas in print dresses wearing cat-eye glasses with sequins on the top.”
But that, by and large, was Elvis’s audience. And it was Elvis’s show, in all its glorious excess, that seemed to presage Vegas’ new era.
He gave the Vegas show a makeover and pointed it in a new direction. He turned the Vegas show into an event and set the high bar that the next generation of headliners tried to top. After Elvis, everything got bigger: higher salaries, gaudier productions, more musicians onstage, splashier publicity campaigns. For rock and pop singers who had finished their run in the Top 40 but still had creative (and commercial) ambitions, Elvis showed that Las Vegas could be a viable career option: a little nostalgia for the old fans, then a move into fresh territory, a chance to show off new artistic maturity and range—accompanied by the sort of Vegas hoopla that certified the presence of an authentic superstar.
Cher, already a Vegas veteran from her years with Sonny Bono, came back to Caesars Palace as a solo in 1979, with an opulent show in which she modeled twelve different Bob Mackie outfits (from cowgirl chic to Folies-Bergère feathers), rode a mechanical bull, and sang a medley of rock ’n’ roll hits starting with Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock.” Two years later Dolly Parton got a record $350,000 a week for her massively hyped Vegas debut at the Riviera Hotel, making her entrance across a drawbridge from a fairy-tale castle, and supplementing her country hits with “House of the Rising Sun” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Wayne Newton, who considered himself Elvis’s heir in Vegas, pumped up his own show with a bigger orchestra, more backup singers, and a tribute segment to Elvis. One night at the Hilton Hotel, in the middle of singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” Wayne claimed he saw Elvis’s ghost watching him from the balcony. (In 1976 Las Vegas got its first arena-sized venue for rock shows, when the Aladdin Hotel opened its seventy-five-hundred-seat, $10 million Theater for the Performing Arts, with Neil Diamond as the opening attraction.)
The broad-based, Middle American audience that Elvis attracted, moreover, was precisely the target audience for Vegas’ own reinvention a decade or so later. The modern era began in 1989 with the opening of Steve Wynn’s Mirage Hotel. Situated next door to Caesars Palace, the Mirage was the first resort in Vegas to offer not just a theme, but a veritable theme park. Inside the hotel Wynn created a giant rain forest, enclosed in a glass dome, featuring real palm trees and orchids and twenty thousand square feet of fake plants. Behind the registration desk was a twenty-thousand-gallon aquarium filled with sharks and rays. Outside the hotel, visitors gaped at a fake mountain range, with grottoes, waterfalls, and—the spectacular pièce de résistance—a fifty-foot-high volcano that erupted with fiery fake lava every fifteen minutes. “It’s what God would’ve done if he’d had the money,” said Wynn.
The Mirage was an instant success, and a spate of other theme park–like hotels quickly followed: the Excalibur, designed to look like a medieval Arthurian castle; the Egyptian-pyramid-shaped Luxor; the kid-friendly Treasure Island, where a sea battle between pirate ships was staged every ninety minutes. And more: hotels re-creating the canals of Venice, the streets of Paris, the skyline of New York City. It was dubbed the Disneyfication of Las Vegas—but there were designer shops and gourmet restaurants for the grown-ups too. Wynn’s Bellagio, opened in 1998, featured a re-creation of Italy’s Lake Como, with a giant musical fountain display every fifty minutes, plus a $300 million collection of art by Cézanne, van Gogh, and other modern masters. Las Vegas was now a full-service vacation spot, both mass-market and upscale, amusement park and designer shopping mall, something for the whole family. With gambling, too—only now it was called gaming.
The entertainment changed as well. As headliners in the Mirage’s main showroom, Wynn installed the glam illusionists Siegfried and Roy. The two had met in the 1960s aboard a German cruise line, where Siegfried Fischbacher was working as a steward and doing magic shows for the passengers, and Roy Horn, another ship employee, convinced him to incorporate a pet cheetah (which Roy had smuggled on board) into the show. The two developed a unique magic act that they were soon performing in nightclubs across Europe. Eventually they moved to Las Vegas, where they appeared in the Lido de Paris and other production shows, before headlining their own show, Beyond Belief, for seven years at the Frontier Hotel. For the Mirage, they enlisted directors John Napier and John Caird—the Royal Shakespeare Company team responsible for Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables—to fashion a $28 million, effects-laden extravaganza, featuring a menagerie of white tigers, elephants, and other jungle animals, that set a new standard for Vegas spectacle.
Then came Cirque du Soleil, the new age Canadian circus troupe, founded in 1984 by a couple of street performers in Montreal, which opened its first Vegas show, Mystére, on Christmas Day 1993, in a specially designed, fifteen-hundred-seat theater at the Treasure Island resort. The Cirque shows, with their mix of aerial acrobatics, circus stunts, clowns, puppetry, music, and special effects, were an entirely new kind of spectacle for Las Vegas: hugely expensive to stage, but capable of running forever. A half dozen more Cirque shows would soon be fixtures on the Strip—the water-themed O, the erotic Zumanity, tributes to the Beatles and Michael Jackson—reinventing the city’s family-friendly entertainment for the new millennium.
The new Vegas was an astonishing success. Twenty-eight million people visited Las Vegas in 1994, more than double the number just ten years earlier. The critics who once scorned Vegas as the bad-taste capital of America suddenly saw the town in a new light. The over-the-top stage spectacles and theme-park hotels were now viewed as an authentic, and somehow lovable, expression of all-American kitsch. “How can a large-spirited American not love Las Vegas, or at least smile at the notion of it?” wrote Kurt Andersen in a 1994 Time cover story, which celebrated all the ways in which the Vegas esthetic had transformed American culture, from postmodern architecture to Michael Jackson concerts. Even Wayne Newton was now corny enough to be hip.
The Cirque du Soleil spectacles, along with other production shows, magic acts, and performance troupes like Blue Man Group, all but pushed out the traditional Vegas headliners. But in the early 2000s came the stirrings of a revival. Colonel Tom Parker himself—who settled in Las Vegas after Elvis’s death and became a consultant to the Hilton—heard a young Canadian singer named Céline Dion perform Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” on a 1994 Disney TV special and urged her manager-husband, René Angélil, to bring her to Las Vegas. He demurred, saying she wasn’t ready. But nine years later, in 2003, Caesars Palace signed Dion to a blockbuster three-year contract—five shows a week, forty weeks a year, in the hotel’s new $95 million, four-thousand-seat Colosseum theater.
Dion’s high-tech show (created by former Cirque du Soleil director Franco Dragone) featured more than fifty dancers, a huge LED screen displaying vistas ranging from ancient Rome to New York’s Times Square, shooting stars, meteor showers, and a tree blooming onstage—along with Céline’s rafter-raising soprano, belting out everything from “I’ve Got the World on a String” to her signature hit, “My Heart Will Go On.” Her show was a huge success, and the inspiration for a new wave of Vegas “residencies,” from Elton John to Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, and Lady Gaga—all pop stars with big followings, at least one foot in the rock world, and a flair for spectacle. Just like Elvis. Said Dion in a 2007 Vegas tribute, “Elvis was Las Vegas. If it wasn’t for him, so many performers like myself would probably never have had the chance to do what we do in this town.”
Their shows were more extravagantly staged than anything Elvis Presley could have imagined. But they all owed a debt to Elvis’s comeback show in 1969. He taught Las Vegas to think big.
On August 16, 1977, the day Elvis Presley died, the Hilton Hotel lowered its flag to half-staff. Barron Hilton, in a perfunctory statement, called Elvis “more than just a great talent, he was a good friend to all of us at the Las Vegas Hilton.” Elvis’s doctor, Elias Ghanem, expressed shock at his death; he had given Elvis a physical exam only recently, he told reporters, and “why, he was in perfect health.” That night, shortly after midnight, a weeks-long drought in Las Vegas ended when an inch and a half of rain poured down in just three hours. Could even the heavens be weeping?
The first formal tribute to Elvis in Las Vegas came a year later, in September 1978, when Colonel Parker and Elvis’s father, Vernon, coproduced the Always Elvis Festival at the Hilton Hotel. It featured an audiovisual tribute to Elvis’s career, a display of his costumes and other personal effects, and the unveiling of a bronze statue of Elvis, given a place of honor outside the hotel’s rechristened Elvis Presley Showroom. Las Vegas had found its most enduring icon, and the Elvis industry was underway.
Elvis impersonators had been around since before the King’s death. Elvis himself reportedly went to see singer Brendan Bowyer, who did an impersonation of him as part of the Royal Showband’s act in the Stardust Hotel’s lounge. The spangled jumpsuits, curled-lip sneer, and jet-black, aging-greaser hairdo made Elvis easy to imitate, or at least approximate, and soon Elvis impersonators were as ubiquitous in Las Vegas as quarter slot machines. They starred in tribute shows, entertained in hotel lounges, competed in Elvis Tribute Artist contests, appeared at conventions, rode in parades, and played in celebrity golf tournaments. The winner of the 2016 Las Vegas Marathon was a man in an Elvis costume.
At least three museums or exhibitions of Elvis memorabilia have opened and closed in Las Vegas in the years since his death. (The Elvis estate in Memphis owns most of Elvis’s costumes and personal effects, but there’s still plenty of freelance memorabilia to go around.) Visitors to the Westgate Hotel—the former Hilton—can tour the thirtieth-floor suite where Elvis once stayed, since redecorated and divided into luxury suites for paying customers. A troupe of skydiving Elvis impersonators, dubbed the Flying Elvises, were the comedic highlight of the 1992 movie (and later Broadway musical) Honeymoon in Vegas. Fans of the King congregate every July for the annual Las Vegas Elvis Festival, one of several such fan gatherings around the country that keep his legacy alive among the faithful. The street leading from the Strip to the Westgate Hotel has been renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard.
One Elvis impersonator, Jesse Garron (real name Jesse Grice, before he adopted the name of Elvis’s twin brother, misspelled), was given a key to the city by former mayor Oscar Goodman; now Jesse calls himself the Official Elvis of Vegas, appears as Elvis in various shows and events, and gives tours of the Strip in his 1955 pink Cadillac. Donny Edwards, who played the King for years at the now-defunct Elvis-A-Rama Museum, has toured with former Elvis backup musicians D. J. Fontana and the Sweet Inspirations and stars in an Elvis tribute show at the South Point Hotel and Casino. Vegas has a “Big Elvis”—aka Pete Vallee, a four-hundred-pounder who sits in a chair while delivering Elvis songs on weekday afternoons in Harrah’s piano bar. And there’s “Little Elvis,” a pint-size Greek immigrant named Dimos Greko, who dons a red-and-black jumpsuit and hires himself out for weddings and parties.
Quickie weddings have been a major Vegas attraction since the city’s earliest days. But it took the Gretna Green Wedding Chapel (opened in 1947 and supposedly visited by Elvis in 1967, just before his wedding to Priscilla) to come up with the bright idea, just after Elvis died, of changing its name to the Graceland Wedding Chapel and making Elvis part of the ceremony. Now it conducts more than four thousand Elvis weddings or renewals of vows a year and is one of several chapels lined up along Las Vegas Boulevard, between the Strip hotels and downtown, that will furnish an Elvis impersonator to walk the bride down the aisle, serenade the happy couple with Elvis songs, and maybe even conduct the ceremony.
Ron Decar spent twenty years singing on the Strip in such shows as the Folies Bergere and Moulin Rouge before donning a studded black jumpsuit, sunglasses, and jet-black wig as the resident Elvis (and owner) of the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel. “Elvis changed the whole idea of what you could do with a Vegas show,” said Decar. “People expect to see him here.” For each couple, he’ll sing two or three Elvis songs (usually “Love Me Tender” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—and he pays royalties), administer the vows (he’s licensed as a minister), and close out the ceremony in the proper campy spirit: “Do you promise to adopt each other’s hound dog? Not to wear your blue suede shoes in the rain? To always be each other’s teddy bear? And to give each other a hunka-hunka burnin’ love?” Then he escorts the couple down the aisle, out the door, and into the bright Vegas sunlight, where their names, at least for a few minutes, are emblazoned in neon lights on Las Vegas Boulevard.
The couples at the Viva Las Vegas chapel were streaming in like patients in a busy doctor’s waiting room on the hot August afternoon I visited. Benito and Miriam Villanueva, a young couple from Madrid, Spain, were inspired to tie the knot there by a Spanish TV reality-show couple, Alaska and Mario, whose Vegas wedding was televised on their popular show a few years ago. David and Denise Law, a middle-aged couple from Minnesota, stopped in to renew their vows on their twenty-fifth anniversary. Steven and Karen Coling came all the way from Brisbane, Australia, so that Elvis could help them celebrate thirty-four years of marriage. “Just a bit of fun,” Steven explained—but also a tribute to his mother, who died a few months earlier. “My mum was the world’s number one Elvis fan. Her one and only trip outside of Australia was to Graceland.”
There have been signs in recent years that Vegas’ long infatuation with Elvis may have peaked. A Cirque du Soleil tribute show, Viva Elvis, produced in collaboration with the Elvis estate, opened at the Aria Hotel in 2008, but closed after two years of lackluster ticket sales. An Elvis exhibit and tribute show at the Westgate Hotel opened to much fanfare in 2015 (also in conjunction with the Presley estate), but shut down abruptly after just a few months, when the third-party producer pulled out because of disappointing business, prompting a lawsuit.
Yet Elvis remains an unavoidable presence in Las Vegas, everywhere from souvenir shops to the nostalgic tribute shows that populate the smaller venues on the Strip, helping visitors fill the downtime in between the slot machines and Cirque du Soleil.
I went to see one of the Elvis tribute shows, All Shook Up, and brought along Pat Gill, one of my favorite sources for this book. Pat grew up in South Africa, began performing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris at age fifteen, and came to Vegas in 1967, a striking five-foot-eight-inch blonde, for a role in the Casino de Paris. She was lead dancer in the topless lounge show Vive Les Girls in 1969, when Elvis Presley came to see the show, went backstage to meet her, and invited her to his opening night at the International Hotel. Pat, an Elvis fan ever since she saw him in G.I. Blues as a teenager, sat at one of the VIP tables and went backstage after the show for some photos with Elvis. The two generated some gossip and continued to see each other for years afterward, whenever Elvis came to town. Pat always insisted they were “just friends,” but she was smitten. “I adored him,” said Pat. “He was charming, kind, generous—a true Southern gentleman.”
Pat was almost surely the only person in the audience of eighty or so in the tiny V Theater on that Tuesday evening who actually knew Elvis Presley. The show itself was passably entertaining. Star Travis Allen, re-creating an Elvis Vegas concert, didn’t so much do an impression of Elvis as simply wear his clothes (gold jacket in the first half, white jumpsuit in the second) and sing his songs. “Elvis never did moves like that,” Pat said, turning to me early in the show. She was right: Allen’s swivel-kneed, moonwalking gyrations were more Michael Jackson than Elvis Presley. When he sang “Return to Sender,” both Pat and I noted that Elvis never performed that song in concert. Allen closed, predictably enough, with “Viva Las Vegas,” and here we disagreed. There’s no record that Elvis ever performed the song in Las Vegas. But Pat claims she saw him do it.
Pat spent twenty years as a Vegas dancer, working with some of the top choreographers in town. When her performing days were over, she remained in Vegas and worked as a photographer and blackjack dealer, before retiring. At seventy-two, she’s had her health issues. She survived a bout with cancer many years ago (Liza Minnelli and Joan Rivers helped pay for her therapy), and when I saw her, she was still moving slowly after knee-replacement surgery. She never married and lives alone in a two-bedroom condo a few blocks off the Strip. She goes to church three times a week. Most of her friends have left Vegas or died. She gets depressed, but stopped taking her antidepressants because she couldn’t handle the side effects. She complains that Las Vegas is a bad place to grow old.
But like many of the people I interviewed for this book, she embodies the vibrant, hard-headed, irrepressible spirit of Las Vegas. She is smart, talkative, unsentimental, not so much nostalgic for the old days as simply appreciative of the privilege she had to be part of one of the great eras of American entertainment. “I was blessed,” she says. She was friends with Sammy Davis Jr., who helped her get a green card so that she could remain in the country after her work visa expired. She played a Bond girl in Diamonds Are Forever, starring Sean Connery, which was shot in Las Vegas. (Her one line was cut, but she still gets residuals.) Cary Grant once threw her a twenty-first birthday party. And she fell for Elvis Presley.