Las Vegas has fallen far from the golden days of Sinatra and Elvis
Vegas scene has gone bust
Las Vegas? Once hot as your newest lover. What happened to that and it and him disappeared with our copper pennies.
Vegas formerly jammed old-timers as high as that elephant’s eye. Now? Snoring. Boring. Better you should hit Rockaway. Or big now are those Greek islands.
Vegas still sees the occasional grandma wearing a hairnet and working the $1 slots. Still the stripper or occasional wham! Slam! VIP biggie night. But like today’s drugstores and supermarkets, not the same.
Like Ronald Reagan out West, my husband Joey Adams was president of East Coast union AGVA — American Guild of Variety Artists. Small earners like Elvis, Sinatra. Comedian Joey was the favorite MC when superhot Zsa Zsa Gabor worked Vegas. Oy, do I know Vegas. I lived there. Repeat six-week bookings.
Today its biggest attractions are prostitution, gambling and marijuana. Today there’s Macau and Monte Carlo, Atlantic City, Reno, Aruba, even uptown NYC.
But before its remnants opened in junky towns, Vegas was its headlight.
And there was Zsa Zsa. She was Doing It with the maitre d’, walked onstage nightly holding his lone rose. I once walked in on them during a nice rainy afternoon. They kept going. Didn’t mind me. Just told me to leave.
On her final performance during this one particular booking she was roseless and she told me: “I don’t mind sleeping with him because he is very good — but now he wants to be seen with me in public. A waiter! What is he, crazy?”
I wrote the book “Jolie.” Mama Jolie Gabor had a Madison Avenue jewelry shop. It sold well. “Jolie,” my book on her, did not. Upset mama told me: “You cannot print we are Jewish. My daughter Eva is marrying again. Her low-cut wedding gown needs a necklace to fill in. What fits in perfectly is a big gold cross. So in the book you make us Catholics.”
When Vegas was hot with its sables, limos, stars, names like Liberace, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Elton John, before them it was created and re-created by other names like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Al Capone. It was black ties, big furs, jewels, Rolls-Royces, VIP names. Remember Wayne Newton? Now not. Celine Dion earned something like $300 million for her time there. Now not.
Today, with warm weather approaching, the VIP names, plus the non-names, schlepping in from Atlanta, Long Island and Newark are more the everydays. It’s beach clubs. Furs turned into T-shirts. Mild-expensive clubs in the Hamptons where hot shots share a beer and whoever else, the Bahamas, Aruba, or small islands like where Meghan went to grab her small Prince Harry.
Cabo San Lucas is semi-cheapie and there’s the Maldives, Hawaii, the Caribbean, your own backyard. The days when Vegas was ruled with The Boys and the gilded glamour came and then — fuhgeddaboudit — gone. The times VIPs would plunk down onto a front table run by guys with names like “Bugsy” and a waiter would slam down a bottle of red wine with the Gotti phrase “Courtesy of JG” are gone.
So are its big spenders. They’re in Coney Island. Have a nice weekend.