Shecky Greene was hardly the only entertainer who had to battle the temptations of Las Vegas. Many stars couldn’t resist gambling away the money they earned from their well-paying jobs. “A lot of entertainers were playing Vegas for nothing,” said the impressionist Rich Little. “I remember arriving at the Sands for the first time, and Don Adams showed me around. He was gambling, and in the course of an hour he lost twenty thousand dollars. And I found out that he and a lot of the performers were so in debt to the hotel that they were working essentially for free.” Jack Benny once joked, “I make approximately the same salary as the other entertainers who work in Vegas. The only difference is that I’m going to take mine home.”
Along with the gambling, there were the women: well-endowed showgirls, ambitious cocktail waitresses, high-priced hookers. What happened in Vegas didn’t necessarily stay in Vegas, and few marriages seemed to survive long in this freewheeling Sin City. “There was one rule: No wives or girlfriends in the hotel or casino. You never saw a wife on the Strip,” said Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson’s lawyer, who accompanied the Tonight show star on his Vegas revels. “Nowhere was Johnny more pampered, more doted on, more satisfied, and freer to explore and indulge the far boundaries of his Johnnyness than when he was in Las Vegas. It was his Shangri-la.”
To an outsider like Mia Farrow, the Hollywood flower child who started dating Frank Sinatra in 1965, the male-dominated, Mad Men–era culture was an alien land. “The women, who didn’t seem to mind being referred to as ‘broads,’ sat up straight with their legs crossed and little expectant smiles on their carefully made-up faces,” she wrote in her memoir. “They sipped white wine, smoked, and eyed the men, and laughed at every joke. A long time would pass before any of the women dared to speak, then under the males’ conversation they talked about their cats, or where they bought their clothes; but more than half an ear was always with the men, just in case. As hours passed, the women, neglected in their chairs, drooped; no longer listening, no longer laughing.”
In the background, always, was the mob. The presence of organized crime in Las Vegas was an open secret for years, but it grabbed the nation’s attention most forcefully in 1963 with the publication of The Green Felt Jungle, a bestselling exposé written by two Vegas investigative reporters, Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris. Most entertainers were well aware of the mob figures behind the scenes—and sometimes on the scene—but were careful to keep their distance. “The one thing you learned,” said Bob Newhart, “you never asked them what line of work they were in previously. You didn’t want to know the answer to it.”
Yet “the boys,” as the locals called them, were largely accepted, even admired, in the entertainment community. They treated you with respect, stuck by their word, and kept a tight rein on the city. “I loved being around those guys,” said Paul Anka, who mixed with mob figures but insisted he never took any favors from them. “If they respected you, they protected you. With the mob in control, Vegas was the safest place to be. Even walking around in the middle of the night you didn’t have to worry about being mugged.”
“They would bring their girlfriends on Friday night, their wives on Saturday, and on Sunday they’d bring their mothers or their family,” recalled singer Lainie Kazan, who saw them often in her audiences at the Flamingo. “They invited me to weddings, home for pasta. And I went. I was intrigued. I found them to be very interesting characters.” Nelson Sardelli, a lounge singer from Brazil who specialized in Italian love songs, got friendly with many of them, went to their homes for dinner, and once turned down a local thug’s offer to put a hit on a manager he was having a feud with. “Because I sing ‘Come Back to Sorrento,’ the Italian guys come, they cry,” Sardelli said. “There was always respect. I never asked them for anything.”
Some stars had the juice to stand up to them, or at least claimed to. Shecky Greene liked to tell the story of his meeting with the formidable mob lawyer Sidney Korshak (described by the Justice Department as “one of the five most powerful members of the underworld”), who flew out from Chicago to mediate a dispute between Greene and Riviera boss Ross Miller. Korshak took the two to lunch and ordered Miller to shake hands with Greene and make up. When Miller refused, according to Greene, Korshak threatened to fire him. Shecky was more valuable to the hotel.
Vic Damone’s relationship with “the boys” was closer than most. When he was just starting out in nightclubs in New York, he was engaged to marry the daughter of a mob boss from Buffalo. After Damone broke off the engagement (because she refused to cook for his mother), the jilted father of the bride lured him to a fourteenth-floor suite at the Edison Hotel and tried to push him out of a window. As Damone tells the story in his autobiography, he was dangling from the window when his agent burst into the room and pulled him to safety. The feud was finally settled, according to Damone, at a mob meeting chaired by Frank Costello—who gave Damone the thumbs-up and told the mobster to lay off.
“I became very friendly with the mob guys after they saved my life,” said Damone. “I liked hanging out with them; they were nice guys, you know? Once they shook your hand, boy, that was like a contract.” Peter Lawford once set up a lunch between Damone and Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, who was investigating organized crime. When Kennedy quizzed him about the hotel incident, Damone claimed he didn’t remember it or know the gangster involved. Kennedy stormed out of the meeting in anger.
Vic Damone was a stand-up guy.
Vegas was a boomtown not just for big-name entertainers, but also for the rank-and-file performers who filled the chorus lines, lounge shows, dance troupes, and hotel orchestras. As a jobs program, Vegas was the entertainment industry’s answer to Hoover Dam.
The city, for one thing, was a glorious last stand for big-band music in America. The famous orchestras of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Stan Kenton, and others had begun breaking up after the end of World War II, and most were gone by the 1960s. But Vegas provided a welcome landing spot for many of their best players. Each of the major hotels had a house orchestra, with a regular conductor (Antonio Morelli at the Sands and Jack Cathcart at the Riviera were among the longest serving) and sixteen or more full-time musicians. In the most active years there were even two “relief bands,” which rotated among the hotels, filling in for the regular bands on their night off. More work could be found in the small jazz groups that often entertained in the lounges. For musicians, it was a godsend.
“The work was steady, the pay great,” said Frank Leone, a piano player who moved to Vegas from Philadelphia in 1967 and never left. “It prompted a lot of great players to give up their traveling ways and settle in Vegas.” Carl Fontana, the highly regarded trombonist for Woody Herman and Lionel Hampton, moved to Vegas in 1958 and played there for the rest of his career. Buddy Childers, the former lead trumpeter for Stan Kenton’s orchestra, was a full-time Vegas player for much of the 1960s. Bill Chase, the former Woody Herman trumpeter who later led an acclaimed jazz-rock fusion group, performed in Vegas lounges during the late sixties and was the musical arranger for one edition of Vive Les Girls.
“All the top guys were here, the best in the world,” said Pete Barbutti, who first came to Vegas in 1960 with a jazz-and-comedy group called the Millionaires. There was so much work that some musicians did double shifts—playing the main room at 8:00 p.m. and midnight, moving over to the lounge for the 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. shows. (Trumpet players who did double duty sometimes blew out their lips.) “Scale in those days was $650 a week, so they could make $1,300 a week,” said Barbutti. “You couldn’t make that in New York or at the Philharmonic.”
By the late sixties Las Vegas had at least fourteen hundred working musicians. For seasoned players who were tired of the traveling grind, Vegas was a place to settle down, raise a family, have a career. “It was musical heaven,” said Mark Massagli, a bass player who came to Vegas in 1957 and later became head of the Las Vegas chapter of the Musicians Union. There may have been more studio work in Los Angeles or Nashville. �
��But for someone who wanted to take the horn out every night, this was it.”
It was striking—but maybe not surprising, in a town where the Rat Pack were macho role models—that nearly all the musicians, as well as the directors, choreographers, and producers, were men. Vegas was a guy’s town. But for female performers, at least those with the right attributes, Vegas also offered a mother lode of opportunities.
The women who filled the chorus lines and production shows in Las Vegas fell into two categories. There were the showgirls—tall, statuesque beauties, typically five feet eight inches or more, whose job was mainly to parade around and look pretty. (Some appeared topless—and usually got paid extra for it.) Then there were the dancers, who could be shorter (often called ponies) and who had enough training to do the steps that a Ron Lewis or Jerry Jackson might throw at them. They came from all kinds of backgrounds, with all kinds of skill sets: sophisticated young women from Britain and South Africa, brought over from Paris by Madame Bluebell; wannabe Broadway dancers who moved to Vegas to find steadier work; starry-eyed teenagers from the Midwest headed for Hollywood who stopped off in Vegas and never left; fading burlesque queens who could still parade their assets, as long as the assets held up.
The talented ones could have long careers. Maria Pogee, a pixieish, five-foot-four-inch dancer from Argentina (where her uncle served as a minister in Juan Perón’s government), first came to Vegas in the spring of 1960, at age eighteen, with an Argentinian troupe called the Lobato Dancers. After an appearance on Dinah Shore’s TV show, they arrived in Las Vegas by train for an engagement at El Rancho Vegas—on the very day the hotel burned down. Stranded without work, they were given temporary lodging in the hotel bungalows, while a local Catholic church and the stage workers’ union brought them food to tide them over, before they landed another gig in Lake Tahoe.
Two weeks later they were back in Las Vegas, opening for Dean Martin at the Sands Hotel. Pogee was rarely out of work after that. She performed in lounge shows with the Maldonado Dancers; starred in a revue called Bonjour Paris for director Barry Ashton (who changed her stage name from Maria Victoria to Marie Pohji, because it sounded more French); and danced with stars like Juliet Prowse, Shirley MacLaine, and Sammy Davis Jr., before moving into choreography. “For a dancer,” she said, “Las Vegas was the place.”
For a showgirl, it could be the place to fall on your face. Dance moves might not be required, but balance, poise, and strength were. The feathered headdresses could be six feet high; strapped underneath the chin, they came close to strangling some girls. (Costume designers and choreographers were often at odds: it was hard to do a Ron Lewis head roll with a six-foot headdress.) “You had to learn how to walk,” said Sonia Kara, who joined the Lido in Paris when she was eighteen, started out in Vegas in the chorus line at the Sahara, and later worked in Donn Arden’s Pzazz ’69. “Not just forward but sideways. And you had to know how to hold those feathers. Because back then the headpieces were thirty pounds and the backpack was like fifty. And the stairs—you could be up thirty-some feet, and you could never look down. You had to walk with feet pointing out, in at least three-inch heels. I’ve gone flying.” The saying in Vegas was that you weren’t a true showgirl until you fell down the stairs.
But the work was glamorous and well paying. Claire Fitzpatrick Plummer had some dance training back in New York and even one Broadway credit—in the chorus for a revival of Pal Joey—when she came out to Vegas with her two roommates in 1958. Her first job was as a Texas Copa Girl at the Sands. (She hailed from Long Island, but was told to call out “Corpus Christi” when the girls went down the line identifying their hometowns.) “Vegas was a great place to work,” she said. “When I came here I made $150 a week. I was only getting $125 on Broadway.” She went on to dance in the chorus line behind stars like Ginger Rogers and Mickey Rooney; flew in from the ceiling for Donn Arden’s Hello, America!; and turned down a Barry Ashton show because she didn’t want to work topless.
Kathy McKee did. She came to Las Vegas from Detroit in 1965, at age fifteen, and got work in a Watusi show at the downtown Mint Hotel. Her first paycheck was $240—more than her father was making after twenty years at the Ford Motor plant. She moved on to Minsky’s burlesque show, where most of the girls were “typical mob types, bleached blond, silicone breasted, hard-nosed—they hated me.” Then she landed a spot in Ron Lewis’s classier topless show at the Dunes, Vive Les Girls. But she had to overcome a handicap that few other dancers in Vegas faced. Her father was black, and she got jobs only by passing for white.
“I don’t think I would have had any career if I’d said I was mixed,” said McKee. “There were no girls of color, no Latinos. There were no blacks in any show. Not even the pit bosses or waitresses in the casinos. The only black people you saw were in the bathroom or cleaning the rooms.” Indeed, the first black person she ever saw gambling in a casino was Sammy Davis Jr.’s father. They struck up a conversation, and he took her to meet Sammy—who later hired her as a dancer in his stage show. (She toured with him for years and also became his on-the-road girlfriend.)
A showgirl’s job didn’t necessarily end when the show was over. At most of the hotels they were also expected to hang around in the casino afterward, serving as decoration to lure gamblers to the tables. “You had no choice—it was called mixing,” said Lisa Medford, who came to Vegas in 1957, where she made her first appearance topless as part of a Harry Belafonte show. “People would come up to you and ask for autographs and want to buy you a drink. Famous people would want you to stand at the table with them because you’re a showgirl.” Sometimes the casino bosses would stake them with gambling money. “They’d give us a hundred dollars, real silver dollars, and we’d play,” said Claire Plummer. “We’d always end up pocketing some of it. Guys would come over, win a couple of hands, and throw me a hundred. We made a lot of money that way. I was sending money home to my family all the time.”
Any additional mixing was optional. “It didn’t have to go any further if the girls didn’t want to,” said Plummer. But for some, undoubtedly, it did.
For Elvis, the women were the main attraction. Vegas gave him a chance to relax, to party all night, and to see favorite lounge entertainers like Della Reese, the Four Aces, and Fats Domino. (Elvis was dismayed when he went to say hello to Fats in between sets in the Flamingo lounge, and the old rocker, down on his luck, tried to sell him his diamond cuff links.) But mostly Elvis loved Vegas for its banquet of beauties.
“Each show opened with fourteen to twenty magnificent showgirls. We were determined to meet every one,” said Joe Esposito, Elvis’s former Army buddy and frequent companion in Vegas. “In those days, the dancers were required to stay in the hotel lounges between shows to mingle with guests and ensure that gamblers didn’t defect to other casinos. We used that to our advantage. ‘See those five girls over there,’ we’d say to the maître d’. ‘Ask them if they’d like to join us for a drink after the show.’ ”
Esposito was struck by one dancer wearing a poodle costume in Dean Martin’s show, made a point of meeting her afterward, and wound up marrying her. Elvis preferred to keep his options open. He picked up showgirls, had girlfriends meet him in Vegas, and dated the occasional star. When he was in Vegas for two weeks in January of 1964, he saw a lot of singer Phyllis McGuire, despite warnings from his pals that she was mobster Sam Giancana’s girlfriend. (When Elvis visited her in her suite at the Desert Inn, he noticed a gun sticking out of her purse. She told him Giancana had given it to her for protection. “Yeah,” Elvis said, “well, tell him I carry two of ’em.”)
But Las Vegas couldn’t relieve Elvis’s growing frustration over his stalled career. After Viva Las Vegas—which, despite its success at the box office, Colonel Parker thought cost too much—the movies got even dumber and more demeaning. Yet the Colonel kept signing new studio contracts, keeping Elvis on a schedule of three movies a year, with accompanying soundtrack albums that were no longer producing hit singles. Shu
ttling back and forth between his Graceland home in Memphis and two leased California residences, in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, Elvis looked to Vegas for distraction and escape. But he needed more.
In the spring of 1964 Elvis got a new hairdresser, Larry Geller, a twenty-four-year-old stylist at Jay Sebring’s fashionable LA salon. While he was cutting Elvis’s hair, Geller began talking about his spiritual studies, and Elvis responded with interest. Geller brought him books to read—including The Impersonal Life, a guide to self-realization written in 1917, and Autobiography of a Yogi—and soon they were inseparable, talking long into the night about God, the self, and the meaning of life.
Geller found Elvis to be intelligent, curious, and absolutely sincere in his spiritual seeking. Elvis’s Memphis pals mostly found Geller to be a pain in the ass. Elvis, their formerly fun-loving companion, was suddenly serious, buried in books, and spending all his time with his new guru, whom they dubbed the Swami. “We were having fun and now all of a sudden Elvis is outside looking at the stars all night or reading these books,” said Joe Esposito. “We used to sit and watch football games. All that stuff was gone.”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 13