Las Vegas, the Untold Stories: ...That Made Sin City the Entertainment Capital of the World

By John Romero

Youre about to enter a city that has no equal. It was built by extraordinary people with imaginative minds. Did they drink? Not sure, but why else would they build it in a Nevada desert?

Some say you can go anywhere in the world and discover that people not only know about Las Vegas--theyd give anything to get there. True. As soon as I graduated from college I took an all-night bus to reach a city Id heard of, but never seen. I stayed 30 years.

Damn good years, too. And the mystique of the entertainers and the film stars and the elaborate restaurants and 24-hour-a-day casinos never wore off. I spent 20 of my years at the Sahara, on the Strip, got inside the gambling business in the 60s and loved it. Helped it, too, with my writing and my inventions.

The Mob was still around in those days. They were the first venture capitalists and owned a piece of every casino in town. Did that stop anyone from having a good time? Of course not. Gradually the Mob faded away--which is what happens when an FBI office with 15 agents sets up shop in town. But the gaiety didnt stop for a second, even when corporations realized they were the big guys now.

Our Sahara entertainment director stunned us in 1964 when he made a deal with The Beatles to play two shows. I met the boys after dark at a small Las Vegas airport, rode with them to the Sahara and helped get them to their suite before teen age girls tore their clothes off. So take a chance, have a seat and enjoy that drink in front of you. Its time to start the show.

--John Romero

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Aug 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781458203854

John Romero

John Romero has written for AP, UPI and Sports Illustrated, and for ten years was sports editor of Nevada’s largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He has written more than 400 magazine articles and columns, and his two hardcover books on selling have become twin bibles for the casino industry. He ran 16 marathons including Boston, and lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Las Vegas, The Untold Stories. is his third nonfiction book, soon to be followed by his first novel, The Eisenhower Enigma.

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Copyright © 2012 John Romero

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The Las Vegas News Bureau, an arm of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority, provided all photos of the celebrities who appear in Las Vegas, The Untold Stories.

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0385-4 (e)

Abbott Press rev. date: 08/02/2012

Contents

1 Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy

2 He Immediately Recognized Symptoms of Insanity

3 British Band. Rock and Roll. Very Hot.

4 Old Bosses Knew More than a Computer

5 Clint Gives Great Marquee

6 A Security Cop Who Loved Cheaters

7 A Tale of Two Sahara Beauties

8 Inside the Briefcase Was a Million Bucks

9 The Security Chief Yelled, Incoming

10 Big Al, His Fedora and His Trenchcoat

11 Champagne Tony’s Last Flight

12 A Rumor Swept the Party—Then Pandemonium

13 Did President Johnson Invent the High Five?

14 Soviets Heavyweights Arrive, Bananas Disappear

15 The Casino Promotion That Conquered December

16 An Odd Character With Creepy Eyes

17 Teen Girls Versus Security Guards: Girls Win

18 Stan Irwin on Signing the Beatles: Simple.

19 Rube Goldberg on His Worst Day

20 In Unison, the Girls Pulled off Their Tops

21 The Commission Approves Honky Tonk and a Witch

22 The $100,000 Shower Draws a Crowd in New York

23 Buddy Hackett—Volatile Genius

24 The Night I Bankrolled Del Webb

25 Girls Launched Themselves Like Javelins at the Stage

26 Taps for the Desert Inn

27 From Don Rickles to The Amazing Kreskin

28 A Citizen of Las Vegas

29 He Held Out for the Largest Meeting Room in the USA

30 Flip Wilson Left ’em Laughing

31 The Bomb Turned Midnight into Daylight

32 The Rise and Fall of Chorus Lines

33 Stan, Johnny & Judy

34 18 Holes of Golf in 47 Minutes? True!

35 Paret Took One Too Many Beatings

36 The Show Biz Career of a Lifetime—and the Players

37 He Bet the Country—and Won

38 Lainie Kazan and the Picture That Enraged the PTA

39 A Multi-Million Dollar Idea the Casino Hated

Acknowledgments

About the author of Las Vegas, The Untold Stories

The Eisenhower Enigma

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1

Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy

Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy. If you drove in from California in the early 60s to shoot Craps and raise hell in Las Vegas, it was the last sign you passed as you crept out, cursing all the dumb bets you made.

The sign was almost as famous as the town. It took one last shot at winners and losers and left ’em laughing. Small compared to the huge Strip marques—just a few feet high—but the letters popped out in bright red neon. It stood close to the Strip on a small plot of grass in front of a Union 76 station.

I’d been in Las Vegas a couple of weeks and couldn’t stand it any longer. I drove in and asked the attendant if people really came in to get the aspirin. His face never changed expression. They come in for gasoline, kid.

I blushed. He smiled, then said, But I always offer the aspirin and about half of them take it.

Years later as I traveled the US for the Sahara, people would say, Las Vegas, huh? How about a little Free Aspirin and Tender Sympathy. I haven’t heard that from anyone since the 90s.

As the city spread the sign all but disappeared—muscled out by signs ten times its size. In 1996, according to the Huntington Press, they tore out the Union 76 station, uprooted the sign and dispatched it to wherever legends die. Kind of ignoble, I thought. A much larger but very commercial sign with the same message showed up later. Unfortunately, it had no soul.

But if you grew up with the town the explanation was simple. Las Vegas was outrunning its memories. The 90s are ancient history. The good old days were three or four years ago. Who can remember what happened last month?

And if you were along for the ride in the 60s and 70s, the memories remain. They hang around and rummage in the mind until they find your lips and you can’t resist. Tell an old Las Vegas story and people smile and say, I wish I’d been there.

Well, maybe. The telephones in the 50s had four numbers, and if you wanted to make a call you put the receiver to your ear, fell into a chair and waited. Sometimes it took ten minutes before the operator warbled Number plee-oz, just like they said it in the old movies. I remember a rumor about a guy who died of a heart attack while his wife waited for the operator. I never tracked it down, but like everyone else I was sure as hell it happened.

The only golf club in town greeted players with a hand-lettered sign that read, Municipal Golf Coarse. The big intersections had stop signs, not stoplights. Drive any direction from downtown and you’d hit dirt roads. One high school served the city, and when football season came around everyone in town piled into Butcher Field to cheer the Las Vegas High Wildcats. Railroad tracks cut the city in half and every hard rain filled up the two underpasses and stranded hundreds.

The town became home to thousands of Blackjack and Craps dealers. But it also filled up with interesting and creative risk-takers. I’m talking Russian expatriate chemists, Arabian breeders, chinchilla farmers, writers, artists, Yugoslavian soccer players and German seamstresses. And all of them led two lives—one at work, the other shooting Craps at their favorite local joint.

Las Vegas had more churches per capita than any city on the planet, and a wedding and divorce industry that stayed open seven days a week. The Little Church of the West, a miniature chapel on the grounds of the Last Frontier Hotel-Casino, became a celebrity marriage favorite. I set up a couple of them myself in the early 60s when former NFL star Bob Waterfield asked me to find a place for him to marry Jane Russell, and later when Judy Garland wedded actor Don Heron. I still have the sweater Waterbuckets gave me.

The attitude of the era stayed carefree. I remember thinking how lucky I’d been to discover this little caricature of a town where everyone stayed up all night and I could have more fun in a couple of hours than I’d had in my entire life. Damned if I didn’t grow up with the place.

Almost everyone who came to Las Vegas in the early days came to gamble—to roll around in the dirt with the mob as one writer described it. It was okay to be a little naughty, okay to be a little bit immoral, and okay to sneak off to Vegas in secret and return to brag about it and become a star to your friends and neighbors. Hell, everyone exceeds the speed limit or crosses an intersection against the light once in a while. But here was a town where just showing up made you a risk-taker back home. Las Vegas became the definition of pop culture before the Beatles played a note.

By the mid-50s Las Vegas had swept past Reno to become Nevada’s largest city and gaming center—a magic town where you could shoot craps and pull slot handles and play 21 and brush shoulders with the mob for 24 hours a day—legally.

The old time gamblers and after-hours guys who ran illegal games in the depths of cities from New York to Denver and from Atlanta to Portland started the rush to Las Vegas. They could operate openly in Nevada, and for once, the police were on their side.

ClubBingo.jpg

Here’s the Cub Bingo, forerunner of the Las Vegas Sahara. It took the Sahara owners two years (1952-53) to produce a gem that became one of the famous Strip hotel-casinos.

All this happened before the mob found a home in Nevada. But the mob had money, piles of it. They were the venture capitalists of their time and they soon had a piece of everything. Can you think of any other reason why a town of about 20,000 in the middle of a Nevada desert had an FBI office with 15 agents?

Small but stylish, old Las Vegas was a formal town where you could live in a swanky home and brag about it. The showroom crowds wore their finest. If you had money you showed it. Women wore gowns to dinner and men dressed in suits and ties. The maitre d’hotel who greeted you at the showroom dressed as impeccably as the stars. And you never saw a kid in the casino.

When you checked into the Sahara, a bellman with a baggage cart escorted you to your room. You could stand in the lobby all day and never see a guest carrying his own bags. If you drove in you always took care of the parking valet—unless you wanted your car parked in the sun with the windows rolled up. Or if you drove to a nearby casino to see the show and valet parking was filled, a $10 bill would get you parked a few steps from the front door.

You could buy a shrimp cocktail for 25 cents in downtown Las Vegas, and the shrimp were monsters—not Bay Shrimp the size of the cap on your pen. And listen to these prices from the Sahara Congo Room show menu in the 60s. You want Halibut steak? That’ll be $6 please. How about Roast Tom Turkey with chestnut dressing and giblet gravy. Cheaper still at $5.50. In fact, the high price on the menu was just $7.75 for broiled New York Steak. Appetizers, and choice of soup or salad came with your entree, and desserts from Chocolate Cake to Banana Bavarian Pudding were 40 cents. A bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon cost $2, Chardonnay went for $2.25 and Mumms Cordon Rouge sold for $8.

A big time show and dinner for you and your sweetie for $21 bucks, plus tip? Insane to even think about such a thing these days. Or you could see the same show at midnight for the price of a couple of drinks, and all you needed to get into the main showroom was your name on the reservation list. Tickets? No such things in those days.

Male stars in the main showroom always wore tuxes and black ties on stage and the creases in their pants were knife-edge. You never saw a wrinkle. Footwear started with knee high socks so a star would never show a bare leg on stage. Their patent leather shoes sparkled in the stagelights and once they put on the full suit backstage, they never sat down.

These days, Las Vegas casinos are owned by respectable public corporations. The Wall Street Journal carries stories about them on the financial pages. The top guys get quoted on television. Brokers call you to pitch the stock.

I remember when the casinos held daily money counts, supervised by owners only. And if the same owners made the financial pages the Feds usually wanted to ask them a few questions. The only quotes they gave were their golf scores. And if you owned a point in one of the big casinos you were set for life.

Now the casinos on the Strip are called resorts, the casino manager is a senior vice president and you can’t get near him without an appointment. We used to call them joints, and the casino bosses didn’t have offices. They just hung around the craps pit and smiled a lot.

The old guys had names like Lefty, Big Julie and Jimmy the Greek. They didn’t have fancy titles but you knew who had the juice. Now the top man is called a chief executive officer and he has two names, a middle initial and a brass plaque.

I don’t want to pretend the old days were all sweetness. The owners and stars in some of the places became fierce enemies and once in a while the bosses would peel off their coats and get down. I still remember the night Carl Cohen punched out Sinatra in the Sands coffee shop.

Sahara1973.jpg

Here’s a look at the Sahara Hotel & Casino that began as the Club Bingo and grew into the most profitable store on the Strip through clever casino promotions, big time sales management and a talent buyer so good that Johnny Carson hired him for The Tonight Show.

The casino floor has changed, too. You could look inside one of the old mechanical slot machines and see a garble of springs and wires. The guy who made the first one probably went mad. And when you pulled the handle you heard all these ka-ching sounds like it had cocked itself to fire a missile. You knew you had hold of a dangerous weapon.

Look inside some machines these days and all you see are pathetic little plastic reels just sitting there. You can’t even see what makes them turn unless you put your glasses on. A strong breeze could blow them away. Right underneath them is a big empty hole where all the springs and wires used to be. A computer chip runs everything now. Most machines are called Ticket in, ticket out games. No more coins fall into the loudbox when you hit a winner because the machine cranks out its own canned clatter. Insert your ticket and your wins and losses show up on the face of the machine as you play. Hit the Cash out button—and if you still have money in the machine you get another ticket. You can play it in a different machine or draw your money at the casino cashier’s cage. Progress is wonderful—sometimes.

At the tables, 21 players sometimes get their cards from a dealing shoe that holds up to eight decks. I loved it when every game was single deck and nobody worried about it. Then Ed Thorp wrote Beat the Dealer’’ in 1962 and ruined everything. The old bosses thought his Ten Count System" would kill the house advantage in Blackjack so they tightened the rules. Thorp fired back in 1966 with an easier-to-learn revision, and card counting is with us to this day—as are some of the tighter BJ rules.

The security guards these days are polite. They say, Excuse me, sir, if some guy makes a scene. And when someone trips over a carpet they come running to help him up because the place could get sued for ten million. The old guards had names like Shoulders and Big Max and when you got out of line they’d haul you into the back room and give you a couple of playful shots to the ribs.

Then they’d snap a mug shot, thumbtack it to the security office wall and tell you they never wanted to see you around the Sahara again—emphasis on never.

The wealthiest men in town in the old days held the title of maitre d’ hotel. They didn’t run showrooms; they ran kingdoms. When one of these guys called you by name, you knew you’d arrived. They’d stand at the showroom entrance, blocking the doors, chins in the air, tapping a pencil on a seating chart and holding the fate of civilization in their hands until you laid something on them. They could have stared down the German army.

You dressed in the old days when you went to the casino. Now you see people wearing tank tops and T-shirts that read Save the Planet and some of them try to go barefoot in the coffee shop.

LouisPrimaKeelySmith.jpg

Louis Prima and Keely Smith (in the background) were the hottest musical lounge act in Las Vegas in the 50s and 60s. Because of Prima, the Sahara changed the name of the famous Casbar Lounge to Casbar Theater.

MiltonBerle.jpg

Stars sometimes took over the table games. Here, Milton Berle flips a playing card toward Backjack players at the Sahara. Can you see what’s on top? The Ace of Spades, for gosh sake.

The old showrooms had about 650 seats and the first row of booths behind the tables was called Kings’ Row. In rooms that small, everyone was right on top of the stage. Now the showrooms seat up to 15,000 and you need binoculars. The stars have thinned out, too. They priced themselves out of the market and the casinos brought in productions and Broadway shows.

When I moved to Las Vegas and went to work as a newspaperman in the 50s, the place was an entire comp town. Hell, we made a verb out of complimentary. Nobody in the media could pay a check anywhere. If you were a big casino player once, you were comped forever. If you just knew a casino guy you were comped forever. Now, if the computer says your play is too small, you couldn’t get comped with a gun.

Big changes in advertising and marketing, too. In the old days no one had any faith in a Strategic Marketing Plan. The advertising director bought a few outdoor boards, ran a few restaurant ads, put the casino phone number in the Yellow Pages and slapped the star’s picture in the local papers.

That was about it. Now, if you don’t have a multimillion dollar budget and a big ad agency the stockholders get crazy.

As late as l985, I wrote in my International Gaming & Wagering Business marketing column that I didn’t know a single major casino with a direct marketing manager. Impossible! With more powerful computers and the vast possibilities of the database looming, I knew direct marketing would become the single most effective casino marketing tactic. So that’s all I wrote and spoke about for years. Damned if it didn’t happen, just as I thought it would. Now I can’t name a single casino without an entire direct marketing department.

Until 1978, Nevada was one of a kind. Then Atlantic City opened up New Jersey to casino gaming. Now the games and slots are in Metropolis, Biloxi, Tunica, Vicksburg, Black Hawk, Hinckley and hundreds of other towns only a market maker can keep track of. When Native American gaming surfaced in the 80s, the Las Vegas wise guys said, Those people have no chance. Now, half of them work for the Indians.

I loved the old days in Las Vegas, but I also love the new days. I just like the action, which is why—to this day—I keep writing about it.

2

He Immediately Recognized Symptoms of Insanity

In early January, 1960, about the time my childlike affinity for sports ran dry, the Sahara offered me a job in its publicity department. The offer came from Herb McDonald, the No. 1 promotion guy in Las Vegas. I’d worked with Herb on some of his sports promotions and I knew a couple of things: Herb was the best on the Strip and people loved him. Good enough for me.

But what did I know about the casino business? To tell you the truth, not that much. But I was pretty damn good at one thing—and that was writing. As the sports editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal I’d written features for AP, UP, Sports Illustrated, The American Blade, Runner’s World and two or three more magazines I can’t remember. And much of the Sahara job, Herb told me, involved writing. So I thought about it for maybe five minutes, then phoned my father, who immediately recognized symptoms of insanity.

What? he yelled at me. "You’re the No. 1 sportswriter in Las Vegas, with your own nightly TV sports show. You’ve been there ten years, you know everybody in town and you’re writing for national magazines. Now you’re going to quit?

If I were you, son, I’d consult a doctor. You’re in bad shape."

My father was a smart guy. Started his own real estate business and became a success at it. They named him to the board of directors of a savings and loan company in El Sereno, California. He bought the family a house and paid cash for it. And I said, Thank you, Dad, but I’m quitting.

After that I knew I couldn’t hang around the Review-Journal. Writing sports wasn’t my work anymore. And since the managing