Quips and Quotations (What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas Edition)

 

We experienced music in the same visceral way. Music ignited a fiery pent-up passion inside Elvis and inside me. It was an odd, embarrassing, funny, inspiring, and wonderful sensation. We looked at each other move and saw virtual mirror images. When Elvis thrust his pelvis, mine slammed forward too. When his shoulder dropped, I was down there with him. When he whirled, I was already on my heel.

--Ann-Margret

Elvis Presley confided in me soon after he did Viva Las Vegas with Ann-Margret that he was considering marrying her. I'm not implying that anything untoward ever occurred between them, but they had marvelous chemistry. But soon after that, I think he might have had it read to him from a review, he heard Ann-Margret described as "a female Elvis," and Elvis reacted negatively. To his mind, it was vaguely homosexual! Whether that's what cooled his feelings for Ann-Margret or not, I don't know.

--Bobby Darin

Leaving Las Vegas

 

The Riviera Hotel and Casino opened in 1955, the ninth resort to do so on the legendary Las Vegas Strip. Mob-owned and Mob-run for decades, it featured top-notch entertainers, and was one of the bigger draws for those tourists who save up their money all year round so they can experience the pleasure of losing it at the tables or slot machines. The Riveria also popped up in movies such as the original Ocean's 11 (the one with the Rat Pack, not George Clooney), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Diamonds Are Forever. Unfortunately, casinos aren't diamonds. Starting in the 1980s, multinational corporations began buying up most of the rest of the gangland holdings on the Strip, and proceeded to knock down the aging neon towers one by one and replace them with even larger indoor gambling theme parks, the nearby construction of which reduced foot traffic to the Riveria. Ownership eventually passed from the underworld to more legitimate groups of investors, and finally in 2015, the state-run Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. Are we talking a unique form of American socialism here? Nothing so provocative, I'm afraid. The Riviera was just bought to be gotten rid of and the whole thing went through a series of "implosions" to make room for some kind of trade center expansion. Before any of that happened, though, there was first a liquidation sale...

...and Las Vegas mainstay Shecky Greene, who had played at that and every other hotel on the Strip, was on hand to salvage what he could.

Here's Shecky at home:

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