This sidebar on headliners who were unusual even by Las Vegas standards
was excluded from the book for length and editorial considerations, and is
presented here as an Internet "extra."
At this point, you might ask: In a town where Liberace was accepted as
perfectly normal, was anything considered weird?
It's a good question. Though Vegas is a place where surrealism and warped
perspectives are part of the archictecture, it was still shaped with a bent
of '50s conservatism. Even Liberace tiptoed onto the Strip during his
relatively macho days, only gradually getting deeper into the sequins and
ostrich feathers as the town became more "out there" itself.
This sampling of oddities marks either those rare times when Las Vegas
actually raised a collective eybrow, or acts that seemed routine then but
bizarre today in light of what we know now:
Christine Jorgensen, the world's first publicized transsexual, was billed
as "The World's Most Talked-About Personality!" in ads for her post-op
Sahara engagement in November of 1953. "The entire show is in the finest
taste and played to many family groups," a press release claimed. Red
Skelton quipped, "I love her -- but hate him!"
Ronald Reagan brought an act -- the contents of which have been recorded
with even less care than Iran-Contra evidence -- to the Ramona Room of the
Last Frontier in February 1954. A press release of the day anticipated what
we would be asking today: "Each time a movie star is booked to appear ...
tongues begin to waggle at both ends debating what 'This one' will do in a
night club.
"Advance information would indicate that Ronald Reagan... has no
intentions of walking onstage unprepared." With that issue settled, it went
on to make note, "Although Reagan declines to discuss it, he has long been
one of Hollywood's most vigorous public minded citizens. He has played more
than 500 benefits for good causes, fought Communism from the day he
detected it and served three years as president of the Screen Actors Guild."
If movie Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller was going to have an act, what did you
expect him to do: Grunt and groan his way through "Guitarzan" onstage? No,
the Olympic swimmer did what he did best, in the Desert Inn's swimming
pool. Billed as "Las Vegas' first outdoor musical extravaganza!" Noel
Sherman's "Agua Fair" apparently led the audience from the showroom, where
conventional acts performed onstage, to the pool, where Weismuller and "20
winners of beauty and swimming medals" did the aquaboogie.
Before they went on to long, lucrative and artistically fulfilling
careers producing such TV fare as "The Donny and Marie Show"(Brady Bunch?),
Sid and Marty Krofft were puppeteers.
The brothers put themselves on the map with "Les Poupees de Paris," a
complete French revue starring a marionette cast that included topless
showgirl puppets. After becoming a hit attraction at the Seattle World's
Fair, the puppet show pulled up at the Hacienda Hotel in the summer of 1963.
The $150,000 revue included 128 little puppet costumes, and celebrity
parodies of Liberace the real one recorded his own lines on the taped
soundtrack), Maurice Chevalier, Mae West and Loretta Young. The special
stage mimicked the usual modest showroom fare: A swimming pool, an ice
rink, a waterfall.
Audiences were invited to look around backstage after each show, but in
their autobiography, the Krofft Brothers later confessed to some withheld
trickery: At one point, a marionette comes to life and walked out into the
audience: They used a midget.
Perhaps no story illustrates the riches-to-rags fatalism of show business
as much as one Herbert Khaury -- better known to the world as Tiny Tim. The
beak-nosed, ukelele-strumming crooner was easily the most bizarre showroom
headliner ever to play Caesars Palace.
In the summer of 1968, at the height of his unlikely fame via
television's "Laugh-In," Caesars offered Tiny Tim $50,000 to croon "Tiptoe
Thru the Tulips With Me" for a one-week engagement. The late magician Harry
Blackstone was brought in to add some substance to what was essentially a
novelty act. "Everything in the first part of the show was done in black
and white," Blackstone recalled, "until it came to the point where this
Aladdin's lamp came down onstage. I lit it, and out started coming smoke.
"The smoke turns pink and everything on the stage turns color to
pink, and out of this cloud of pink smoke comes Tiny Tim ... It was too
bizarre for words. It was really surrealistic."
So too was Tiny Tim, who saw fame and fortune come and go in a
two-year period.
"I saw myself as a long-term deal," Tim recalled in 1990, when he
played a lounge gig in the dumpy Contintental Hotel. "If I had the right
manager, I would have been as standard as anyone." Instead, Tiny Tim's
career reached its zenith on Dec. 18, 1969, when he married his 17-year-old
sweetheart, "Miss Vicki" Budinger, before a nationally televised audience
on "The Tonight Show." By 1972, his money, his record deal and his Miss
Vicki were all gone. He died Dec. 1, 1996, after making a minor comeback
as a frequent Howard Stern guest. He was 64.
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