A carful of youthful tourists cruises by, and a pretty girl leans out the window and takes a picture. ““How you doin’,’’ Jimmy says affably. A limousine with two snazzy blondes poking through the sunroof glides past. ““Elvis!’’ they scream. Jimmy gives them a movie-star wave. Apparently his sacrifice is worth the trouble: chicks still dig Elvis. Jimmy turns up the volume on his tape deck, and the triumphant sounds of Elvis’s 1972 live album, ““As Recorded at Madison Square Garden,’’ spill out of the car. He sings along in a strong, mellifluous voice. The crash of cymbals, the glittering neon, the crush of traffic and the desert heat all bleed together in a gorgeous, Technicolor blur.
Forget everything you know about young, beautiful Elvis and hordes of screaming teenage girls. Never in his career did he receive the kind of unconditional love he got - and still gets - in Las Vegas. Between 1969 and 1976, Elvis performed 837 consecutive sold-out shows at the Las Vegas Hilton (originally the International). He played two shows a night, seven nights a week, three or four weeks at a time. ““He still holds the house record,’’ says Bruce Banke, the Hilton’s publicity director back then. ““He had 2,200 people at one performance. This is a room that seats 1,500. Of course, those were the days before fire regulations.’’ When Elvis arrived, business all over town shot up. ““Elvis would come play the Hilton in December, and five hotels would fill up,’’ says Joe Guercio, musical director on Elvis’s ’70s tours. ““That’s how good he was for this town.''
Actually, when Elvis first played here in 1956, he wasn’t ready. He was booked at the New Frontier on a bill that included comedian Shecky Greene. Back then Vegas was a very different town. It was a land of high rollers, fancy cars, nightclubs and sleek sophistication. Presley, with his raw voice, hip swivels and lip curls, didn’t fit in. ““The kid wore, like, a satin baseball jacket,’’ Greene recalls. ““There was no presentation. They introduced him, and he stood in front of the curtain. I said, “Who the hell is this guy?’ I never heard of “Hound Dog’ or “Blue Suede Shoes’.’’ Greene wasn’t too impressed with Presley’s performance, but he liked him personally. ““He was very humble and polite. As a matter of fact, too much so. It was like, is this kid putting me on or what?''
Even the ladies weren’t too impressed. When Elvis asked out Joanie Richardson, a sun-belt blonde who’d been voted Miss Sahara and Miss Nevada, she turned him down. The publicity director at the Sahara begged her to reconsider, and she finally agreed. They went for a drive in his Cadillac. ““After he warmed me up a little bit, he scooted over and he kissed me,’’ Richardson remembers. ““He was not a very good kisser. Not my type. Like he learned it, you know?''
But by the mid-’60s, Elvis was becoming more of a fixture on the Las Vegas scene. In 1964 he filmed ““Viva Las Vegas’’ with Ann-Margret, an endearingly amped-up romance with lots of hyperactively wiggling body parts and a brawny, steamy soundtrack. Elvis performs the title song in a single shot: the camera follows him around a stage set as he conga-lines with showgirls, shimmying so hard he actually dislodges a lick of glued-down helmet-hair. By the end of the song, his chest glistens lightly through his open satin shirt. It was a harbinger of sweat to come.
His esthetic and Vegas’s were inching closer together. The change wasn’t as drastic as it seems. Elvis had always revered Dean Martin, and his first TV stop out of the army in 1960 was ““The Frank Sinatra Timex Special,’’ where he and the Chairman of the Board traded swingin’ verses on ““Love Me Tender’’ and ““Witchcraft.’’ He must have enjoyed the social temperature of early-’60s Vegas: the stars, the gangsters, the abandon. Around 1963 - still a few years before his marriage to Priscilla in 1967 - he asked out singer Phyllis McGuire, who had been romantically linked with mob king Sam Giancana. They went for a drive in his Rolls-Royce. ““He was a great kisser,’’ says McGuire. ““He was sort of shy. One thing that wasn’t shy, he said, “I’m going to show you something that will impress you.’ I think he knew about my history with Sam. And he pulls out this beautiful gun. Of course I wasn’t frightened because I knew - well, I assumed - it wasn’t loaded.''
In 1969 Elvis returned to live performing after nearly a decade of films. It would have been impossible, and pointless, for him to re-create the rebel hick sound of his youth. So he did what virtually no other performer has ever managed to do: he blended honest-to-God rock and roll, arena-scale pop, mellow country and deep gospel. Joe Guercio, his orchestrator, understood the sensibility. ““The early stuff - you know, “let’s go to the hop’ - it was never my bag,’’ he says. ““I was a schooled musician. I was into orchestras, string sections.’’ As if he wanted to create a new, post-Sinatra set of standards, Elvis combined pop hits of the day (““Unchained Melody’’), country songs by hip composers (Tony Joe White’s ““Polk Salad Annie’’) and inspired new singles of his own (““Suspicious Minds,’’ ““Burning Love’’). Eventually he worked his way up to Sinatra’s ““My Way.’’ ““He’d always say to me, “I love that song’,’’ says Paul Anka, who co-wrote it. ““And I’d go, “It’s not your kind of song. You got that two-chord rock and roll. What do you want to sing that song for?’ He’d say, “One day, Paul, I’m going to sing that song’.''
With an emphasis on love songs, lonely songs and anthems of reconciliation, Elvis’s Vegas shows had a clear target audience: women. As the ’70s wore on, newspaper critics and outraged purists (mostly men) increasingly blasted him for his weight gain and physical deterioration; fans (mostly women) stayed loyal, and his shows continued to sell out. Certainly Elvis in 1975, his once angelic proportions gone awry and his onstage concentration fractured due to drug abuse, was not as easy to love as the unblemished innocent of the ’50s. Women didn’t care. A poignant ritual evolved. Witness it in the 1970 documentary ““Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.’’ After a self-deprecating introductory monologue, he starts to sing ““Love Me Tender,’’ dispensing kisses to a couple of women in the front row. Then he works his way across the stage, kissing more and more women until he’s barely hitting half his lines. ““Hello, dear,’’ he says to one, as he leans down and smiles. By the end of the song, camera lights have flooded the room, a feverish din has arisen and women are clustered five deep along the lip of the stage. Elvis basks in the affection. ““I’ll be up in the balcony later,’’ he says. ““I usually make the rounds.''
This ineluctable bond between Elvis and his female fans was something a lot of men just didn’t get. Watching this scene unfold night after night, Paul Guerrero, a captain in the show room, had a strange thought: hygiene. ““I think I would think twice before I would kiss people on the mouth that I don’t know,’’ he says. Now the theater manager at the Hilton, Guerrero has worked in Vegas for 38 years. During Elvis’s reign he witnessed brawls over props Elvis threw into the audience; he watched women rush toward the stage during ““Love Me Tender,’’ leaving bewildered and affronted husbands behind. And he realized he was watching sophisticated, old Vegas disappear. ““I was raised to do everything proper to woo somebody,’’ he says. ““Open doors, throw our coats down so girls’ shoes don’t get wet, all these courtesies. We saw stuff that you would not believe. Keys, room numbers - “Please, if you could get me down front.’ It was hard to hang on to that respect for women. You saw them at their worst.''
If audiences’ dedication for Elvis knew no bounds, then Elvis, even in the throes of deterioration, always tried to give back. Tony Brown, his piano player from 1976 to 1977 and now the president of MCA Nashville, recalls a late-period show: ““Some woman got his attention and he said, “What do you want, what do you want?’ She said, “I want that ring.’ It was a big diamond ring. And he gave it to her. Guess what? The bodyguards went out there and got it back.’’ The whole situation took on an operatic grandiosity, further heightened when Guercio added ““Also Sprach Zarathustra’’ to the show’s opening. ““My wife and I were in the movies, watching the rerelease of “2001’,’’ says Guercio. ““This Strauss thing started. And she said, “Don’t you get the feeling Elvis is about to walk out?’ ''
TO THE FOLKS WHO WORKED IN and around the Hilton, Elvis’s death in 1977 was devastating. ““In those days we had the old teletypes,’’ says Banke. ““When there was a major story coming across, you’d hear bells going dong, dong, dong. This was like a four-bell story. I says, “I hope to hell World War III just broke out’.’’ Vegas would never be the same. Elvis was the first attraction in Vegas to be bigger than gambling. In his own way, he helped usher in the Vegas of today: the theme-parked, family-fun vacationland where gambling is almost beside the point. ““Las Vegas owes him a lot,’’ says Guercio. ““He was a wake-up call for this town. It wasn’t a show, it was a happening. I’m talking about a vibe in people’s hearts.''
Today that love burns on. People show up at the Graceland Wedding Chapel for a quickie Vegas ceremony with an Elvis impersonator hunka-hunka-loving along. The real keeper of the spirit may be Jimmy LeBoeuf. At 10 on Saturday night, he steers his giant Lincoln into the tiny parking lot of Go’s West, a seedy dive off the strip, literally in the shadow of the mighty Hilton. He sets up a rack of specially recorded tapes of Elvis backing tracks. He gets his props together: homemade scarves, teddy bears. And for four nonstop hours, he sings his heart out. ““There are a lot of clones around,’’ whispers Wanda, one of his regulars. ““But Jimmy, he’s got the feeling.’’ During ““Love Me Tender,’’ Jimmy drapes a yellow scarf around his neck and ambles into the audience. When he gets to the line ““For my darling, I love you,’’ he mops his brow, wraps the scarf around a girl’s neck and gently dispenses a kiss. Some girls don’t get it. They think, Gross, I just got a sweaty kiss and a stinky scarf. But some girls do. It’s not that they believe Elvis is reincarnate before them. It’s that when they close their eyes, they can feel the shadow of his love.
