Elvis and Liberace had another unusual connection. Elvis Aron Presley was famously one of twins; his brother, Jesse Garon, died at birth. This haunted Elvis throughout his life. He often visited Jesse’s grave, and his mother, Gladys, would tell him, “When one twin died, the one that lived got all the strength of both.” Liberace, startlingly, also had a twin who died at birth. And when Walter, the surviving brother, emerged from the womb, he was wrapped in birth membrane, or a caul—regarded in some cultures as a sign of wondrous things to come.
It’s not clear whether the two knew of the matching circumstances of their birth, or ever spoke about it. But for these two self-created, almost mystically inspired performers—two of the great originals of twentieth-century American entertainment—the coincidence is hard to dismiss.
Elvis was entranced by Las Vegas. He loved the hotels, the shows, the round-the-clock activity. “When you grew up in Memphis, they closed in those days pretty early; we were the only people up late at night,” said Jerry Schilling. “You go to Vegas and at three o’clock in the morning it’s like noon. Elvis liked the lights.” He came back to Vegas for a ten-day vacation in October 1957, traveling by train from Memphis with several of his friends and staying at the Sahara Hotel, where Colonel Parker had become friends with owner Milton Prell. Elvis saw shows and had his pick of women, among them a red-haired stripper named Tempest Storm. When a picture of the two of them in her dressing room got out to the press, Colonel Parker blew his top. He didn’t want his boy contributing to the negative image of rock ’n’ roll by “dating a stripper.” “I didn’t date her,” Elvis replied. “I just spent the night with her.”
Elvis’s regular visits to Vegas were forced to stop in March 1958, when he was drafted into the US Army—the start of a two-year tour of duty that brought teenage girls to tears and Elvis’s career to a screeching halt. Las Vegas, in the meantime, was suffering through some growing pains. New hotels continued to open: the Dunes (with its smiling, thirty-foot-high sultan greeting visitors out front) and the Royal Nevada in 1955; the downtown Fremont in 1956; the luxurious Tropicana, at the south end of the Strip, in 1957; and the space-age Stardust in 1958, boasting the city’s gaudiest sign—216 feet long, with 7,100 feet of neon tubing and 11,000 lightbulbs. But as the nation struggled through recessionary times in the late fifties, Las Vegas’ rapid growth hit a speed bump. The Royal Nevada closed down, and several hotels, including the Riviera and Tropicana, ran into financial trouble. The press, which had covered Vegas’ progress so enthusiastically, began to ask whether the boom times were over.
By 1960, Vegas was in a period of consolidation. The city’s initial construction boom was over; though several hotels expanded and a new convention center was completed in 1959, no new hotels would open on the Strip until 1966. Yet Las Vegas had secured its grip on the American imagination, and its place at the very center of the entertainment world. “This desert never-never land, more than ever, is a standing movie set of almost unbelievable make-believe,” wrote Variety’s Abel Green in January 1960. “Complete abandon and dedication to entertainment exists as in no other geographical center of the world. The Riviera, Florida, and assorted spas or fun-and-sun-worshipping spots have their seasons. Las Vegas seemingly has none.”
Even more remarkable, the party was just getting started.
Three
THE COOL GUYS
Jack Entratter, the top man at the Sands Hotel, was having trouble making a left turn. He was coming out of the Sands driveway and trying to head south on the Las Vegas Strip, but the traffic wouldn’t let him. It was the early days of Vegas, when the few hotels lining the Strip were still separated by expanses of desert, and no one wanted to slow down traffic with anything as mundane as a stoplight. But for the impresario of the classiest, starriest hotel in Las Vegas, the man sometimes called the Ziegfeld of the Desert, it seemed unjust.
“You’re the big man on campus,” said his girlfriend, an LA actress and model named Corinne Cole, who was sitting in the passenger seat next to him. “Why don’t you just tell the city hall you need a light there?” Sure enough, the next time she and Entratter were negotiating the same intersection, a traffic light had suddenly appeared.
Jack Entratter had clout. A beefy six-footer with prematurely gray hair and what Corinne called “electric Paul Newman-blue eyes,” he was a commanding figure, a former street kid who wore custom-made suits and traveled in rarefied circles. “I used to call him crudely refined,” said Corinne, who later married and divorced him, twice. The waters parted when Entratter walked into a room; the Sands shook when he got angry. “He had a physical presence that was just extraordinary—as strong a presence as any of the major stars I’ve met over the years,” said Kevin Thomas, former film critic for the Los Angeles Times and a frequent Vegas visitor in those years. “An overwhelming presence. Yet he was soft-spoken and direct. You knew you were in the presence of a very powerful man.”
He was born Nathan Entratter in Brooklyn, the youngest of eight children of Austrian Jewish parents. A bout of osteomyelitis as a child left him with a bad foot and a permanent limp. (The doctors said he would be crippled for life, but little Nate walked home from the hospital.) At eighteen he went to Miami, where he worked as a reservations clerk at the French Casino, then returned to New York and got a job as host at the famed Stork Club. In 1940 he moved to the Copacabana, the tony nightclub on East Sixtieth Street, where he eventually became a co-owner and head of entertainment. Under his guidance, the Copa became the most famous, star-studded nightclub in America.
In 1952 the Copa’s mob-connected owners (chief among them New York crime boss Frank Costello) were preparing to open a new outpost in Las Vegas, the Sands Hotel, and Entratter, then thirty-eight, was the man they sent to run the place. In Las Vegas, Entratter drew on all the relationships he had established at the Copa to assemble a lineup of stars unrivaled by any other hotel on the strip—including Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (together, when they were the top comedy team in America; separately, after they split up), Frank Sinatra, Danny Thomas, Nat King Cole, and Lena Horne. He added a chorus line of statuesque Copa Girls, handpicked by Entratter and billed as the most beautiful showgirls in Vegas. Among the big-name acts he brought to Las Vegas during his first year at the Sands were Edith Piaf, Tallulah Bankhead, and a double bill of opera star Robert Merrill and jazz great Louis Armstrong.
The Sands was the jewel of the Strip, with its sleek, Sunbelt-modern design, fifty-six-foot-high entry sign (the tallest on the Strip), and sprawling grounds where golf carts shuttled between the guest buildings named for famous racetracks. Entertainment was presented in the Copa Room, an intimate venue that seated just under four hundred, at tables arrayed in a semicircle around a shallow thrust stage. Guests entered just off the casino, through two curtains (to block out all the light from the casino), and were greeted by a tuxedoed maître d’, who needed to be tipped if you wanted a good table. Entratter had his own table, just to the right of the entrance, at the very back so he could survey the whole scene.
A gregarious host, he treated his stars like family and fostered great loyalty in return. “Jack Entratter was the Genghis Khan of Las Vegas,” said Jerry Lewis. When Martin and Lewis, one of the first acts Entratter booked at the Sands, were hit up by the IRS for $400,000 in back taxes, “Jack put it on the table, four hundred grand, cash, and said, ‘Now get busy doing your fucking show.’ He was tough. Put him in a business meeting and he’ll eat your lunch and dinner. But he was a great friend.” When Frank Sinatra altered the lyrics to “I Love Paris” for his Sands shows, it became a different kind of love song:
I love Vegas.
Why, oh why, do I love Vegas?
Because Entratter’s here.
“I cater to the overprivileged,” Entratter liked to say. Yet he always kept two pockets full of money, according to Corinne, one for himself and one for any Sands employee who might need help with a debt or a doctor’s bill. He helped found the first synagogue in Las Ve
gas and raised money for local schools and hospitals. But his chief project was building the Sands into the premier entertainment venue in Las Vegas. Al Freeman, the savvy publicist Entratter had brought with him from the Copa in New York, came up with newsreel-ready publicity stunts like putting a floating crap table in the Sands swimming pool. Each Sands anniversary in December was a gala event, with the return of the hotel’s opening-night headliner, Danny Thomas, and a barrage of Freeman-supplied statistics. (On December 15, 1955, its third anniversary, the hotel had been in operation for 95 million seconds; hosted 7.4 million visitors; spent $1.63 million on entertainment; and was preparing a birthday cake made with the “five millionth egg purchased by the hotel since it opened.”)
Entratter’s greatest promotional coup, however, came in January 1960, when not one or two but five major stars—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop—took the stage of the Copa Room for a show that broke all the records and all the rules. It was the ultimate in Vegas glamour and star power, and it launched the city’s most glamorous, star-packed decade. It was dubbed the Summit—a reference to the Cold War summit meeting soon to be held between President Eisenhower and Soviet premier Khrushchev. The two world leaders were even sent invitations to the show. They didn’t come, but it seemed everyone else did. In the era of Sputnik, U-2 flights, and the space race, the Rat Pack launched Vegas into orbit.
Frank Sinatra owed a lot to both Las Vegas and Jack Entratter. The singer, born on December 12, 1915, in a working-class Italian American neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, had burst onto the music scene in the early forties, as the swoon-inducing vocalist for Tommy Dorsey’s big band. Striking out on his own in 1942, he was soon America’s top recording artist (replacing Bing Crosby in Downbeat’s poll as the nation’s most popular singer in 1943); an idol of teenage bobby-soxers, who mobbed his shows with a fervor never before seen in American show business; a star on radio and in such MGM musicals as Anchors Aweigh and On the Town. By the end of the 1940s, however, his career was in a slump: his records no longer selling, his movie career at a dead end, his personal life a mess (he divorced his first wife, Nancy, amid a stormy affair with screen beauty Ava Gardner, whom he married in 1951 and separated from two years later), his public temper tantrums and rumored links to mob figures making him one of the most controversial stars in Hollywood.
Las Vegas helped keep his career afloat. He made his Vegas debut in September 1951 at the Desert Inn (where he discovered a lounge pianist named Bill Miller, who became his longtime accompanist) and appeared there again the following July. But when Jack Entratter came out from New York to run the Sands, Sinatra had a new friend in town. Entratter had been one of Sinatra’s champions at the Copa, giving him much-needed bookings even in the depths of his career doldrums, and the Sands’ boss offered Sinatra the spot as headliner for the hotel’s opening night on December 15, 1952.
Sinatra demurred, saying he didn’t want to work during the holidays. But he made his Sands debut the next year, in October 1953. He drew capacity crowds, but only mixed reviews—a reflection of the bumpy career transition he was going through. “As he meanders down memory lane, Sinatra slams the door on his former worshipers to please an older and less exuberant set of applauders,” noted Variety, which praised the “unmistakeable mark of quality,” but faulted his “tendencies to insert dubious gags or parody lines in great established melodies, ennui, and mechanically phrased offerings of humility.” Hank Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun, raved about him in a front-page column—“Oooooh, Frankie, you almost gave me goosebumps last night”—suggesting that Sinatra was back “almost to the point 10 years ago when the world loved you.” A separate review inside the paper, however, griped about Sinatra’s abrasive behavior onstage, calling him “arrogant, ill-tempered, and downright insulting.”
But Sinatra’s debut at the Sands coincided with one of the great career turnarounds in show-business history. Just two months before, Columbia Pictures had released From Here to Eternity, an adaptation of James Jones’s World War II–era bestseller, with Sinatra in the key supporting role of Private Maggio. The performance would win him an Academy Award the following spring and rejuvenate his movie career. In 1953 Sinatra also signed with a new record label, Capitol, and began a career-transforming collaboration with arranger Nelson Riddle. Their first album together, Songs for Young Lovers, released in January 1954, introduced a new Sinatra—his voice fuller and more expressive, his orchestrations more swinging, his emotional investment in the lyrics of America’s great popular songwriters unmatched by any other singer of his generation. “The new Sinatra was not the gentle boy balladeer of the forties,” wrote critic John Lahr. “Fragility had gone from his voice, to be replaced by a virile adult’s sense of happiness and hurt. . . . Sinatra’s sound had acquired the edge that comes with suffering: something gallant, raffish, and knowing.”
Sinatra became closely linked with Las Vegas. Though he appeared only sporadically at the Sands during the mid-1950s, busy with movies and recording work, he was a great booster for the city, and the Sands became his home away from home. He acquired a 2 percent ownership stake in the hotel (increased to 9 percent in 1961) and was there often, taking up residence in a three-bedroom suite in the Aqueduct building. “I’ve been trying for more than a year to get a foothold in Las Vegas, because I believe it has a great future,” he told reporters. “I want to be a part of that future.” He helped open the Dunes Hotel in 1955, riding into the newly built casino on a camel. He starred as Joe E. Lewis—the veteran Vegas comic who survived a brutal throat-slashing by Al Capone’s thugs while performing in Chicago nightclubs during the 1920s—in the 1957 biopic The Joker Is Wild and attended the film’s gala premiere in Las Vegas in August. (When Lewis himself took the stage at El Rancho Vegas and tried to coax Frank out of the audience to sing, Sinatra grabbed his date, Lauren Bacall, and walked out. His deal with Entratter prohibited him from singing anywhere in Vegas but the Sands.)
Sinatra brought something else to Las Vegas: an aura of New York glamour and sophistication, new to a town still emerging from its raffish frontier days. Lorraine Hunt-Bono, who came to Vegas as a child with her family in 1943, recalled the impact Sinatra had on a teenage girl seeing him for the first time in the early 1950s: “The thing that amazed me was the way he was dressed. Because he wasn’t a cowboy; he didn’t have cowboy boots on, as so many of the guys did here. All of a sudden I see this fantastic black tuxedo. And I looked out as a young girl and I’m just staring at his shoes, black patent leather shoes. And I’m going, ‘Wow, this is so cool.’ Sinatra brought New York, that class, to Vegas. And everybody followed.”
But it was Sinatra’s singing—his impeccable voice, his cool stage presence, his masterly way with lyrics—that made him the model for so many of his contemporaries. “Frank was the king, the one who really taught us all,” said Vic Damone, another Italian American singer from back East, who actually made his Vegas debut before Sinatra, at the Flamingo in 1949. “When I was a kid, I used to listen to him. And what I found was that his interpretation of the lyrics was so good—he lived it when he sang it. He told a great story. I recognized that when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. And I used to copy him.” Even many of the younger rock ’n’ roll singers who came to Vegas in the early sixties, like Paul Anka and Bobby Darin, saw Sinatra as an aspirational role model. “He was the number one guy,” said Anka. “He ruined it for anybody that wanted to get up in front of an orchestra.”
Sinatra’s great musical achievement of the 1950s rests mainly in the albums he recorded for Capitol (mostly with Riddle), in which he presented his definitive, deeply felt interpretations of the Great American Songbook. Only when Sinatra started his own record label, Reprise, in 1961, did he get around to recording any of his live performances. In November 1961 he brought in a crew for the first time to record five nights of shows at the Sands, for an album that was never released (Sinatra shelved it when he got distracted by pl
ans for a 1962 world tour). But as reconstructed for a later box set—Sinatra: Vegas, released in 2006—it offers a vivid sampling of Sinatra’s power as a Vegas performer in his classic period.
Accompanied by the Sands house orchestra conducted by Antonio Morelli (with help from two Sinatra regulars, pianist Bill Miller and guitarist Al Viola), Sinatra is in superb voice, energized by the live crowd, and totally at ease in his home venue. He’s a hurtling locomotive on up-tempo numbers like “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else” (with a great Sy Oliver arrangement), yet he caresses ballads like “Without a Song” and “The Second Time Around” with the kind of sensitivity and tonal nuance that one doesn’t usually associate with Vegas bravado. He slows down Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and turns it into a brooding torch song and delivers a parody version of “River, Stay Away from My Door,” with special lyrics by Sammy Cahn that pay tribute, once again, to Sinatra’s patron at the Sands: “Entratter, stay away from my door!”
Sinatra’s patter in between songs is relatively restrained, especially compared with that on some of his later Vegas albums. Drinking, as usual, is topic A: “Fell off the wagon with a boom-bang last night. I woke up this morning and my hair hurt.” He tinkers with some of the lyrics—doing a mocking Italian accent at the end of “You Make Me Feel So Young,” for example, or embellishing the bridge of “The Lady Is a Tramp” with his ring-a-ding-ding flourishes:
She loves the free, fine, cool, wild, cuckoo wind in her hair,
Life without care . . .
Sinatra could go overboard with this sort of thing in later years, especially when he was performing live. But here it is just enough—a dash of spontaneity for a vocal performance that’s as focused and technically fine as anything in his studio albums.
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 6