But she wouldn’t be back to Las Vegas for six years. And it wouldn’t be at the Riviera, but as the opening headliner at the brand-new International Hotel. Even then, she was still, in a sense, just an opening act. The headliner who followed her was Elvis Presley.
For most of the 1960s, Elvis had little thought of playing Las Vegas. Colonel Parker’s friend Milton Prell once offered $75,000 a week for Elvis to appear for two weeks at the Sahara Hotel, but the Colonel turned him down—as he did almost everything else in those years. Shortly after Elvis’s return from the Army in 1960, in one of the great career miscalculations of all time, Colonel Parker decided that Elvis would do no more live performing, but would instead become a movie star.
It was a bad idea, but not necessarily an absurd one. What’s easy to forget is that in the early years of rock ’n’ roll, no one was quite sure that the new music would be anything more than a passing teenage fad. Many young rock ’n’ roll singers figured they would eventually need to pivot to something else if they wanted to have a long career. Hollywood seemed a logical next step for Elvis. He loved movies and wanted desperately to be a serious actor, like James Dean or Marlon Brando. Elvis made four passably entertaining musical films before the Army—one, King Creole in 1958, possibly better than that. But after his return from Germany (and two unsuccessful attempts at straight dramatic roles, in Flaming Star and Wild in the Country), his movies devolved into a conveyer belt of low-grade formula musicals, which did well at the box office but left him frustrated and bored.
Las Vegas was his refuge. When his movie shoots were finished, he would typically grab a few of the guys and race to the desert town for some R&R. He would stay at the Sahara Hotel for a weekend or a week or even several weeks. He went to Vegas for the Christmas holidays in 1961 and stuck around for an entire month, celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday on January 8 at the Sahara with a cake from Milton Prell. In many ways Elvis was the perfect Las Vegas tourist. He wasn’t a big gambler, but he loved the shows, the all-night activity, the chance to escape. “He loved Las Vegas for one reason above all: time was meaningless here, there was no clock, there were no obligations,” wrote his biographer Peter Guralnick. “It was a place where you could lose yourself, a place where you could indulge your every fantasy—it was, for Elvis, momentary respite from all the self-doubt, from all the questions lying in wait, lurking in the shadows, waiting to assault him.”
When Priscilla Beaulieu, the girlfriend he left behind in Germany, came to visit him in June of 1962, the first thing he did after she arrived in Los Angeles was take her to Las Vegas. They drove all night in his newly customized RV and got to the Sahara at seven in the morning. After a little sleep, Elvis took her shopping and had the hotel hairdresser give her a new beehive do and slather on makeup—“so heavily that you couldn’t tell if my eyes were black, blue, or black and blue,” Priscilla recalled. Then they went to see Red Skelton’s show at the Sands, nearly getting trampled by fans when they didn’t make their exit fast enough. For the next two weeks Elvis showed Priscilla the town, took her to shows, and introduced her to the drugs he was taking to stay up all night and get to sleep in the morning. He wouldn’t consummate the relationship, saying he wanted her to stay a virgin until they married. Elvis was old-fashioned that way.
In July of 1963 Elvis was back in Las Vegas, but this time without Priscilla and, for the first time since his 1956 gig at the New Frontier, for work, not play: two weeks of location shooting for his fifteenth movie, Viva Las Vegas.
The films by this point had fallen into a depressing rut, most of them sappy musical travelogues like Fun in Acapulco and It Happened at the World’s Fair. Viva Las Vegas was very much in the same vein, but it held out a little more promise. It had the biggest budget of any Elvis film to date. The director was George Sidney, a respected veteran of such Hollywood musicals as Anchors Aweigh and Show Boat. And Elvis’s costar was one of the hottest young talents in Hollywood—Ann-Margret, the Swedish-born singer-dancer who had just made a splash with her kittenish performance as the starstruck teen in the musical Bye Bye Birdie, which Sidney had also directed. Sammy Davis Jr. was even signed to play Elvis’s sidekick in the movie, but the Colonel—most likely wary of another star competing for attention with Elvis—nixed him, much to Sidney’s dismay.
After three days of sound recording in Los Angeles, the production moved to Las Vegas on July 15. Elvis and his entourage stayed at the Sahara, with most of the filming done at the Flamingo and Tropicana, as well as at various outdoor locations around the city. Elvis plays a race-car driver who is working in a garage to raise money so he can compete in the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Ann-Margret is a hotel swim instructor who brings her car to be repaired and falls for him. The rest is a pretty typical boy-chases-girl romp, which climaxes with a talent-show competition (they tie for first place, but he gets the top prize on a coin flip) and the big car race (he wins, she watches).
The two costars were soon a romantic item offscreen as well. They flirted with each other between scenes, rode motorcycles together, and shooed away Elvis’s entourage so they could spend long hours alone in his suite. The romance continued when they returned to Los Angeles for several more weeks of shooting on the MGM lot. Elvis’s pals liked Ann-Margret and saw a real connection between the two. “I knew what was going to happen once we got to know each other,” Ann-Margret wrote in her memoir. “Elvis did too. We both felt a current, an electricity that went straight through us. It would become a force we couldn’t control.”
The only problem was the girl back home. Priscilla was now living in Memphis, taking modeling and dance classes while waiting for Elvis to make good on his promise of marriage. When she started seeing gossip-column items about Elvis and Ann-Margret, she called him up and demanded to know what was going on. Elvis denied everything. “She comes around here mostly on weekends with her motorcycle,” he said. “She hangs out and jokes with the guys. That’s it.” But when Priscilla asked if she could come out to LA for a visit, Elvis kept putting her off, telling her there were too many “problems on the set.”
In that, at least, he was not lying. Colonel Parker was not happy during the filming of Viva Las Vegas. The production was going over budget, and director Sidney (who was rumored to have had his own affair with Ann-Margret while shooting Bye Bye Birdie) was giving Ann-Margret too many close-ups and too much screen time, threatening to upstage Elvis. The script originally included three duets for the two stars, but at the Colonel’s insistence one of them was cut, and another was turned into a solo for Elvis. Still, for the first time Elvis had a costar who could hold her own with him on-screen.
Viva Las Vegas is a pretty bad film, tolerable only in comparison with the even cheesier ones that came before and after. (“About as pleasant and unimportant as a banana split,” wrote Howard Thompson in his review for the New York Times.) Elvis and Ann-Margret have a sweet duet, “The Lady Loves Me,” in the old Hollywood-musical mode, and a couple of the big production numbers are staged with more panache than usual in Elvis films—an up-tempo wingding in the school gym, “Come On, Everybody,” and Elvis’s hard-charging cover of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” But the script (by Sally Benson, who also wrote Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt) is ludicrous, the direction lackadaisical, and Elvis’s acting as glazed and stilted as ever. Ann-Margret, with her head-snapping, hip-shaking, go-go-dancing energy, really does outshine him.
Yet Viva Las Vegas has endured as the quintessential Las Vegas film. From its opening aerial shots of the Strip, through its tour of Vegas floor shows (as Elvis scours the hotel chorus lines for the girl he’s just met), the movie serves as a good travel brochure for Vegas in its classic era. But Viva Las Vegas has attained its iconic status mainly because of its title song, written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Its lyrics are some of the clunkiest in the Elvis canon (“There’s a thousand pretty women waitin’ out there / And they’re all livin’ devil-may-care”—three theres in two lines!). But the bongo-driven beat,
catchy melody, and Elvis’s energetic vocal performance seemed to perfectly capture the fun-loving, high-flying spirit of Vegas in its golden age.
Viva Las Vegas finished shooting in September 1963, but MGM didn’t release it until the following May. The movie did reasonably well at the box office, ranking thirteenth among the year’s top grossers. But in the meantime, there was an earthquake.
In February 1964, the Beatles arrived in New York City, for their era-defining US television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. By April, their songs occupied all five of the top five spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In August they returned to the United States for the start of their first American tour. The riotous reception they got surpassed even the frenzy that greeted Elvis back in the mid-1950s.
Las Vegas, strangely enough, was the second stop on their US tour. Stan Irwin—one of the few Vegas impresarios who knew who the heck the Beatles were—booked them for the Sahara Hotel, but when demand for tickets outstripped the showroom’s capacity, the concert was moved to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Irwin offered complimentary tickets to all the hotel owners in town, but didn’t get much of a response until a few days later, when they started calling him back: their high rollers all wanted tickets for their kids.
The Fab Four began the tour in San Francisco and flew to Las Vegas in the early morning hours of August 20. They were whisked from McCarran Airport to the Sahara, where screaming fans surrounded the hotel and the Beatles had to slip in through the freight elevator. They spent the night in an eighteenth-floor suite, furnished with two slot machines to keep them occupied. Eight thousand people jammed the convention center the next day for each of their two shows, at 4:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. The Beatles performed a dozen songs—the same set they did on all their tour stops, with the addition, just for Vegas, of the Broadway ballad “Till There Was You.” After a brief press conference, they spent another night at the hotel and then were off to Seattle.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s front-page headline the next morning read “Las Vegas Survives Beatles—Barely.”
Vegas survived quite nicely, at least for a while. Business was booming. Stars continued to flock to the city’s showrooms. And when there weren’t enough stars to go around, the hotels came up with even splashier alternatives. This was the heyday of the Vegas production show.
The Lido de Paris and Folies Bergere had proven to be durable hits at the Stardust and Tropicana, respectively, since opening there in the late fifties. Then, in 1963, the Dunes introduced a third French-flavored production show, the Casino de Paris. Named for a Paris music hall that dated back to the 1890s, it was the most stylish and contemporary of the French-inspired shows, with choreography by the highly regarded Ron Lewis, chic and colorful costumes by Spanish designer José Luis Viñas, and with a real French star imported from Paris, singer Line Renaud. The Casino de Paris became Vegas’ third big production-show hit and settled in for a long run. Some Vegas watchers even began to speculate that the production shows would eventually take over most of the big showrooms, relegating all but the biggest stars to the lounges.
It never happened. But for hotel entertainment bookers, the production shows offered some big advantages. They were costly to produce, but the same show could run for a year or longer—thus amortizing the costs, before a new edition was brought in to replace it. (The imported sets and costumes, however, all had to be disposed of after three years, to avoid paying duty. Because it was too expensive to ship them back to Paris, most were simply taken out into the desert and burned—much to the chagrin of the directors and designers who created them.) Instead of high-priced stars, the shows offered glamorous showgirls (sometimes uncovered), lavish sets and costumes, and a parade of “specialty acts”—magicians, acrobats, dance teams, jugglers, hypnotists, cyclists, and other performers drawn from the vaudeville and circus traditions. (Among them were Siegfried and Roy, two German illusionists who made a live cheetah appear and disappear in an eye-popping magic act that made its Vegas debut as part of the 1967 edition of the Folies Bergere.)
But most of all, the shows offered spectacle. And the master of Vegas spectacle—the city’s own Florenz Ziegfeld, Busby Berkeley, and Steven Spielberg rolled into one pair of pants—was an innovative, high-strung director-choreographer named Donn Arden.
He was born Arlyle Arden Peterson in St. Louis in 1917 and was dancing for $5 in local movie theaters while still in grade school. After studying with choreographer Robert Alton—later a prominent Broadway choreographer of such shows as Anything Goes and Pal Joey—Arden began staging dance numbers for nightclubs around the Midwest and East. Moe Dalitz, who owned some of the clubs, brought him out to Las Vegas, and by the 1960s Arden was everywhere. He created opening production numbers for the Desert Inn (themed song-and-dance confections that preceded the main show, with titles like “Now We’re in Tripoli” and “A Girl by Any Other Name”); staged new editions of the Lido show every two years; and in 1964 created his first completely original full-length show for the Desert Inn: Hello, America!, a nostalgic, family-friendly (no nudity) look back at turn-of-the-century America.
With each new production, Arden tried to top himself with more dazzling stage effects. His shows had rainstorms, fireworks, ice-skaters, flights of doves, Tyrolean bell ringers, musketeers on horseback. The highlight of his 1962 edition of the Lido de Paris was a giant dam bursting and flooding a small French village—the onrushing water flooding over houses and bridges and straight toward the audience. “It’s not entertainment of the accepted nitery genre,” said a rather shaken Variety critic. “In fact it’s downright frightening.” For the 1964 Lido show, Arden staged a train collision and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. For Hello, America! he re-created the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the sinking of the Titanic, and for a sequel two years later the explosion of the Hindenburg. “Competition among big shows in Las Vegas is so intense that we must come up each year with more unique and costly stage innovations,” Arden said in 1965. “Where will it all end? Well, the boys who spend the money for these super-expensive colossals will decide that.”
They were still spending in 1967, when Arden created perhaps his most acclaimed show, Pzazz ’68, at the Desert Inn. No disasters this time. Just a glitzy celebration of Hollywood’s past, including a tribute to female stars of three different eras (Mae West, Carmen Miranda, and Julie Andrews—flying through the air as Mary Poppins, naturally), and other segments paying homage to Fred Astaire, the Hope-Crosby Road pictures, and Beau Geste–style foreign-legion epics. “From the rousing opening to the resplendent closing, the audience sat electrified and entranced,” raved Las Vegas Sun editor Hank Greenspun, “knowing they were watching one of the greatest shows ever produced in Las Vegas, or anywhere else for that matter.” Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin, a more temperate outside observer, called Pzazz ’68 the best Vegas show he had ever seen.
Arden not only invented the Vegas spectacle; he was largely responsible for creating the look and style of the Vegas showgirl. The dancers in his shows had to be tall (at least five feet eight inches), with “small and firm” breasts (“tight and firm” butts on the men). They also had to know how to move. “There’s a certain way a girl can walk, particularly when you’re going across the stage,” Arden explained. “By simply twisting the foot, it swings the pelvis forward, which is suggestive and sensual. When you’re crossing your feet and you’re going across, if you twist right and swing that torso, you get a revolve going in there that’s just right. . . . It isn’t the way a woman should walk, necessarily, unless she’s a hooker. You’re selling the pelvis; that’s the Arden walk.”
He could be a terror to work for—an exacting, temperamental taskmaster, who could inspire dancers or bring them to tears. He would berate his girls for putting on too much weight, or blowing a step, or simply not having their hair pinned up during rehearsals. It was usually worse in the afternoons, after a couple of martinis. “He would scream and holler, break the girls down in tears.
I’ve never heard anything so abusive in all my life,” said Sonia Kara, a British-born Bluebell Girl, who came to Las Vegas in 1967. “It was scary. He would come in with a hangover so bad and just go for the gullet.”
Some dancers considered Arden a pushover, however, compared to the dark genius of Vegas choreography, Ron Lewis. During rehearsals Arden would shout out insults from the audience; Lewis was known to hound girls on the stage, following them around screaming, even throwing things. He began as an assistant to French choreographer Frederic Apcar on the first Folies Bergere show in 1959. But he came into his own with his stylish and sexy choreography for the long-running lounge show Vive Les Girls at the Dunes, as well as the Casino de Paris shows in the main room. For many years he worked with Liza Minnelli, choreographing her TV specials and her 1977 Broadway show, The Act. But Las Vegas remained his home base, and he was by common consent the gold standard of Vegas choreography in the golden age.
A disciple of jazz-dance pioneer Jack Cole, Lewis brought a vibrant, jazzy style to Vegas dance: heavily accented movements, stylized hip thrusts and head rolls, precise placement of hands, fingers, knees—a style some compared to Bob Fosse’s (though Fosse may have taken some of his moves from Lewis). “Ron was slim, sinewy, and had nitroglycerin in his veins,” said Ron Walker, a swing dancer in Casino de Paris. “Dancers loved him because his work was never contrived, always original, and extremely fun to do.” “When you were a Ron Lewis dancer,” said Sal Angelica, who worked for Lewis in Casino de Paris, “you were the crème de la crème. He was tough as nails. You never knew what he was going to throw at you. But he was the best.”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 11