Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217)

by Zoglin, Richard

  A few of the younger pop singers did become Vegas regulars during these years, including such hitmakers as Petula Clark (“Downtown”), Trini Lopez (“If I Had a Hammer”), and Roger Miller (“King of the Road”). And for the most part, they were happy to be there. “At that time Vegas was the thing to do,” said Lopez, the Texas-born Latino singer who made his Las Vegas debut in 1965. “It was prestigious. If you were doing Vegas, you were doing well.” The Supremes were a popular act at the Flamingo during the late sixties, adding Cole Porter songs to their familiar repertoire of Motown hits. Playing Vegas was “huge for us,” said Mary Wilson, one of the group’s founding members. But the Supremes had a commercial sheen that made them well suited to nightclubs—and an artist-development team behind them at Motown that groomed them for Vegas. “We were not an R and B act,” said Wilson. “We were doing standards before we were doing Motown. We were known as a classy kind of act, so it was a perfect match.”

  But Vegas was also trying to look hip, in an effort to attract the tie-dyed, peace-and-love generation—what Variety liked to call the “juve market.” The lounges featured trendy dance shows like Watusi Stampede and Mad Mod World, and young music groups with a more contemporary vibe, like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Mod Squad (fronted by future country star Lee Greenwood). “Las Vegas, the bastion of adult-appealing entertainment, is going contemporary,” reported Billboard in 1967, “reaching out for the sounds and sights of the ‘now’ generation.” The older, more traditional lounge acts had to “get out or get groovy,” as Mike Weatherford put it in Cult Vegas. Freddie Bell, the lounge-show rock ’n’ roller from the fifties, came out of retirement to try to catch the new wave, returning to Vegas with a band called Action Faction. “I wore the bells, I wore all the outfits, trying to be what was happening at that time,” Bell recalled. “But for me it didn’t work.”

  One younger performer for whom it did work was Ann-Margret. The sexy musical star had first appeared in Las Vegas in 1960, as George Burns’s hot-wired opening act at the Sahara. (“George Burns has a gold mine in Ann-Margret,” raved Variety.) After a stretch in Hollywood, including her costarring role with Elvis in Viva Las Vegas, she came back to Vegas in July 1967 as a headliner at the Riviera, with a flashy show choreographed by David Winters, who had staged her dances in Viva Las Vegas (and had also choreographed three other Elvis films). Winters had barely even seen a Vegas show before. “I wanted to bring a Broadway mentality to Vegas,” he said. “I wanted to blow everyone away.”

  And he did. Ann-Margret’s show at the Riviera had a mod-sixties-psychedelic opening, with multiple film projections on a giant screen, flashing strobe lights, and pounding electronic music, as the star and eight male dancers raced out on motorcycles and Ann made a full costume change onstage, hidden by the strobes. The fast-paced show also featured a salute to the miniskirt, with Ann in go-go boots inside a gilded cage, and a tribute to old-time Broadway, with Ann tap-dancing like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street. “It’s not often that a different kind of show hits the Strip like the Ann-Margret show,” said Variety. “It’s avant-garde, it’s old-fashioned, and it’s modern . . . with brilliant gimmicks never before seen in a nitery, which are certain to be copied by wise producers.” “Avant-garde” might have been stretching it, but Ann-Margret’s Riviera show was a landmark for Vegas, the first big show to capture the vibe and visual energy of the new “youth culture.”

  Contemporary rock and R&B artists were hardly unknown in Vegas during these years. Gladys Knight and the Pips, Ike and Tina Turner, the Temptations, the Righteous Brothers, Little Anthony and the Imperials—all of them played Vegas lounges during the mid- and late 1960s. Wayne Cochran, the pompadour-haired soul screamer, shook up the Flamingo lounge in August 1968 with “possibly the highest decibel count on the Strip,” Variety reported. The flamboyant early rocker Little Richard did surprisingly strong business at the Aladdin Hotel in the spring of 1968—“the sleeper of the year,” according to Variety. Even the godfather of soul, James Brown, headlined a show at the Flamingo, easing the crowd into his act with Vegas-friendly numbers like “I Wanna Be Around” and “That’s Life.” “The lewd stuff will come later,” he announced. “This is Dr. Jekyll—stand by for Mr. Hyde.”

  Las Vegas also spawned at least one standout R&B group of its own in the 1960s. The Checkmates were a mixed-race group (three blacks and two whites), headed by honey-voiced lead singer Sonny Charles. They came to Vegas in 1964 to work at the Pussycat A-Go-Go and developed a high-energy act strongly influenced by the Treniers, the popular fifties Vegas lounge group, which featured covers of R&B hits, spiced with comedy antics. They would don cowboy hats and ride stick horses, say, or put on boxing trunks and gloves for a spoof of the Sonny Liston–Cassius Clay heavyweight bout. After Sinatra invited them to entertain at his New Year’s Eve party at the Sands, they were booked into the Sands’ lounge. From there they moved to Caesars Palace, recorded with Nancy Wilson, and made several national TV appearances, even before they had a hit record. (They made the charts in 1969 with “Black Pearl,” produced by Phil Spector.)

  The Checkmates were one of the most popular Vegas lounge acts of the sixties, proof that R&B in a relatively undiluted form could work in Vegas if it was showcased with enough razzle-dazzle. “We were such an oddity because we were doing straight-out rhythm and blues,” said Charles. “The Temptations, Four Tops, Gladys Knight, and all those people would come to town, and their Vegas act would be a bunch of show tunes. The Temptations came to see us and they went, ‘They’re doing our songs and packing the place, and we’re doing “42nd Street.” We should be doing our show!’ ” The outsiders taught the Checkmates some lessons too. When Sly Stone was booked into the Pussycat A-Go-Go, he refused to appear after discovering that blacks in the audience were segregated and relegated to a side section. “He’d come from San Francisco, and they didn’t do that there,” said Charles. “After that we looked at it and go, ‘You know, Sly’s right.’ ” They insisted that the club end the practice and got their way.

  The changing musical winds were reflected in the shows of more mainstream Vegas singers as well. Vic Damone sang “MacArthur Park” and “For Once in My Life.” Everyone from Wayne Newton to the Lennon Sisters (“no relation”) was covering Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday.” Yet there were perils for a performer who tried to update his act and image too drastically. The major cautionary tale was Bobby Darin.

  He was born in East Harlem in 1936, a sickly child raised by his maternal grandmother and an older sister—who he discovered in later years was actually his mother. He worked his way into the Brill Building group of pop songwriters and wrote and recorded such early hits as “Splish Splash” and “Queen of the Hop.” But Darin slid into a more sophisticated jazz groove with his swinging 1959 take on Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife.” George Burns brought Darin to Las Vegas in May 1959 as his opening act at the Sahara. “Self-assured, almost cocky in manner, young Bobby Darin cradled a sophisticated house in the palm of his hand,” said Downbeat, “and made his bid as leading contender to the title, Young Sinatra.”

  Darin became a popular headliner at the Flamingo (recording an excellent live album there in 1963, unreleased until after his death) and proved to be one of Vegas’ most versatile and dynamic young performers. He specialized in jazzy, up-tempo versions of old songs like “Beyond the Sea” and “Artificial Flowers” and also dabbled in folk, country, and gospel. He even did impressions. For a while he seemed the front-runner to inherit Sinatra’s mantle as the swinging, swaggering king of Vegas—with an ego to match.

  But he left Las Vegas for three years in 1963 and returned as a more serious, politically committed performer, adding folk and social-protest numbers to his act. He worked on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for president; then, after Kennedy’s assassination (Darin was with him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6, the night he was shot), he retreated to a cabin in Big Sur and rethought his career. When he returned to Vegas in 1969,
he dumped the tuxedo in favor of jeans and a denim jacket, replaced his orchestra with a rhythm quartet, and insisted on being billed as Bob (not Bobby) Darin.

  The makeover did not sit well with the Vegas audience. Darin filled his set with socially conscious message songs, including his own composition, “A Simple Song of Freedom.” When someone in the audience called out for “Artificial Flowers,” Darin shot back, “That was yesterday!” His appearance at the Sahara Hotel in December 1969 was something of a disaster. “Bobby sat on a stool for forty-five minutes and bored everyone to death,” recalled his agent, Don Gregory. “Everyone came out in shock.” Darin’s friend Dick Clark tried to knock some sense into him: “Go back and put on the tuxedo and go to work. Do what the people expect of you.”

  Darin eventually compromised, restoring some of his old hits to the act, and when he appeared at the Landmark Hotel a few months later, his two-week engagement was extended to six weeks. His career had a mild uptick after that—he returned several more times to Vegas and got his own NBC variety show in 1972—until his premature death in 1973, from a congenital heart ailment, at age thirty-seven.

  The cultural upheavals of the sixties were felt especially acutely by the younger generation of stand-up comics influenced by Lenny Bruce, the rebel-satirist who died of a drug overdose in August 1966 (and was one of the few major comedians of the era who never played Vegas). Richard Pryor made his Las Vegas debut that same month, opening for Bobby Darin at the Flamingo, and got a warm welcome: “The young comedian scored consistently with first-nighters,” said Variety, “through the Bill Cosby school of reminiscing and identifiable storytelling.” But Pryor was moving into rougher, more overtly racial material, and when he appeared at the Aladdin Hotel a year later, he was fired after ignoring warnings about his explicit language. Pryor described his last performance there as a kind of drug-fueled epiphany, triggered when he saw Dean Martin staring at him from the audience.

  “I imagined what I looked like and got disgusted,” he wrote in his memoir, Pryor Convictions. “I grasped for clarity as if it were oxygen. The fog rolled in. And in a burst of inspiration I finally spoke to the sold-out crowd: ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ Then I turned and walked off the stage.” Marty Beck, the Las Vegas–based agent for GAC (General Artists Corporation), who represented Pryor and many other performers in Vegas, remembered a somewhat more colorful walk-off: Pryor singing new lyrics to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song—“F-U-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E”—crying “Fuck you!” to Aladdin owner Milton Prell, and storming out. The entertainment booker for the hotel, sitting at a table with Beck, turned to him and said, “You just cost me my job.”

  George Carlin was another young comic who was experimenting with more provocative material and testing the boundaries of Vegas acceptability. At the Frontier Hotel in 1969 he did a routine about his small ass: “When I was in the Air Force, black guys used to look at me in the shower and say, ‘Hey, man, you ain’t got no ass.’ ” Some conventioneers in the audience complained, and the hotel cut his engagement short. Comedians like Buddy Hackett were getting away with much stronger language on the Strip, but the long-haired Carlin seemed a different, more dangerous kettle of fish. A few months later he was back at the Frontier to fill out his contractual obligation and got into more trouble with a routine about the word shit: “Buddy Hackett says ‘shit’ right down the street. Redd Foxx says ‘shit’ on the other side of the street. I don’t say ‘shit.’ I’ll smoke a little of it. . . .” This time he was fired for good.

  Even as the sixties revolution was challenging old taboos and freeing up artists of all kinds, Vegas was still a conservative place. Its mostly middle-aged, Middle American audiences didn’t want to be provoked or lectured to or unsettled in any way. They wanted warm, comfortable, reassuring entertainment; they wanted to feel the love. They wanted Wayne Newton.

  He was the quintessential Vegas entertainer of the post–Rat Pack years: a corny, crowd-pleasing avatar of an earlier show business era. He wasn’t cool and edgy like Sinatra and his Rat Pack cohorts, but old-fashioned, sentimental, eager to please—more like Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor, or that old Vegas schmaltzmeister Liberace. He was Vegas’ greatest homegrown star: a performer who came of age in Las Vegas, who spent virtually his entire career there, and who never approached the same level of success anywhere else.

  Carson Wayne Newton was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on April 3, 1942, one of two sons of half–Native American parents. He began playing the piano at age four, and by six was singing regularly on a local radio show. His chronic allergies forced the family to move to Phoenix when Wayne was ten. While still in high school, he and his older brother, Jerry, appeared on a local TV variety show and caught the attention of a booker for the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas. He brought them up for an audition and hired them for two weeks in the hotel’s lounge. Wayne was only sixteen, not old enough to step into the casino.

  Their two-week gig was extended, and the Newton brothers spent the next five years in the downtown Fremont lounge—Wayne singing, Jerry making jokes and accompanying him on guitar. They made their national TV debut on Jackie Gleason’s CBS variety show, and Bobby Darin signed them to a recording contract, handing Wayne the song that would become his first big hit, “Danke Schoen.” In 1965, after a couple of years touring with Jack Benny, they were big enough to headline their own show in the main room at the Flamingo Hotel.

  They were still a brother act, but Wayne was clearly the star: a pudgy, cherub-faced singer with a velvety, androgynous soprano. He could swing on oldies like “Swanee” or “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey,” or belt out a Broadway showstopper like “What Kind of Fool Am I?”; he ranged easily from country (“Your Cheatin’ Heart”) to contemporary (“Goin’ Out of My Head”) and often closed the show with a roof-raising “When the Saints Go Marching In.” While Wayne did the singing, his brother provided a kind of Greek chorus of acerbic commentary. “I want to do something that we’ve never tried before,” Wayne might announce, and Jerry would quip, “Who are you kidding? We do the same bloody thing every night.” Jerry would taunt him with nicknames like “Fig” Newton, or “Hey, you with the pompadour hairdo and shoulder pads.” The show would always include a segment in which Wayne would show off his musical versatility by playing five or six instruments in a row—guitar, banjo, violin, trumpet—and Jerry would crack, “I’d take off my coat, but I’m afraid he’d play that too.”

  Newton nuzzled up to the audience, teased it, flattered it by promising to entertain until the cows came home: “We got no place to go—I’d just as soon stay here with you, is that all right?” He was hammy and sentimental. For one closing number, he donned clown makeup and had a conversation with himself in a mirror, lamenting all the friends who didn’t come to his birthday party, before closing with “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.” In another maudlin bit, Wayne would sing “Danny Boy” while his brother read a letter written by a slain serviceman to his mother. “When he sings ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,’ women in the audience do everything but fetch him cookies and milk right there in the nightclub,” Time said in a 1970 profile. “Wayne is square and he knows it. . . . American mothers get precious little filial devotion these days, and Wayne represents an age when boys loved their mamma and weren’t afraid to show it.”

  Vegas audiences went wild for him. “The Flamingo is charged with a near revivalist hysteria as Wayne Newton exhorts his flock of glory-be’s into pandemonium and standing ovations,” said Variety in a 1968 review. The Frontier Hotel hired him away from the Flamingo for $52,000 a week, and he became one of Howard Hughes’s favorite stars—the kind of wholesome, all-American entertainer that Hughes thought Vegas needed more of. Walter Kane, Hughes’s veteran entertainment director, became such a close friend and benefactor that Wayne referred to him as Grandfather. Newton never saw Hughes (nobody did), but he felt like a favored son. “Many nights there would come a knock on the door,” Newton wrote in his autobiography, “and a
guy would appear in my dressing room and say to me, ‘Mr. Hughes wants you to know he knows what you’re doing and he’s proud of the kind of entertainment you’re representing. He’s happy that you’re a member of his family.’ ” (Newton, a lifelong Republican, was the one performer James Watt, President Reagan’s interior secretary, picked to entertain at the July 4, 1983, celebration on the Capitol Mall, after he banned rock groups for promoting drug use.)

  Newton was a longtime Las Vegas resident and booster, buying a forty-acre ranch he called Casa de Shenandoah, where he raised Arabian horses. His weight ballooned (up to 275 pounds at one point, before he began working out with Hollywood muscleman Steve Reeves), and so did his shows, which often ran two hours or more, flouting the hotels’ customary time limits. Ron Rosenbaum, who profiled Newton for Esquire in 1982, saw this as the key to his popularity: his ability to create the illusion that every show was a unique personal gift to the audience: “Everyone leaves The Show feeling totally satisfied, thinking how hip, how simpatico, how special the whole evening was, how they’ve been present at one of those rare moments when the rules went by the board; how Wayne drove himself past his own limits, knocking himself out just for them.”

  Not everyone in Las Vegas was in love with Wayne Newton. He seemed to collect enemies. Paul Anka, Totie Fields, and comedian Jan Murray were among the performers he had feuds with. He hated Jack Entratter because the Sands chief supposedly once told his manager, “Get that fag out of here.” When Johnny Carson began making gay jokes about Newton on the Tonight show (the girlish voice always raised eyebrows—though Newton was married twice and had two daughters), Newton stormed into Carson’s NBC office and threatened him if he didn’t stop. Many Vegas musicians found Newton arrogant and difficult to work with and hated doing his extralong shows. “The one show I found I had to drink to get through was Wayne Newton,” recalled one player. “It was like giving a pint of blood.”