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Elvis Presley poses with Alex Shoofey, president and general manager of the International Hotel, now the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas.
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How Elvis turned his career around

Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino

How Elvis turned his career around

The history of the King’s comeback Vegas residency 50 years ago

There’s a building in Las Vegas that Elvis Presley never really left.

It’s where 50 years ago, about a week after Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk, Elvis hoped to relaunch his career with his own giant leap. But the small, first step had him all shook up.

With more than 2,000 people — including A-list celebrities such as Sammy Davis Jr., Cary Grant and Ann-Margret — packed into the showroom of the brand-new International Hotel and his band, backup singers and an orchestra poised on stage, Elvis nervously walked up to lead guitarist James Burton.

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“James,” said the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, “I don’t know if I can walk out there.”

With the hindsight of history, Mr. Burton chuckled when telling that tale.

“Elvis had been gone from live performing for a while, so he was a little nervous about how people would accept him,” he said. “But when that curtain came up and he walked out, it was a standing ovation. So loud. The screaming. The stomping. Just amazing. It was like, man, the King has arrived.”

Setting the stage

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July 31, 1969, kicked off a seven-year run of 636 consecutive sellout performances by Elvis at the hotel, propelled him into legendary status as one of the city’s hottest-ever attractions and jump-started a stale career.

“We like to say that our hotel is the home of legends,” said Gordon Prouty, director of public relations and community affairs at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, the venue’s current name. “Well, nobody was bigger than Elvis. He set the tone.”

Elvis had been setting the tone since blazing a trail in the 1950s as a rock music pioneer with a string of hit records, television appearances and unparalleled live shows. In the 1960s, he became one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors. By late in the decade, however, his movies had become formulaic, his last hit record was a distant memory and he hadn’t performed a live concert since 1961.

Then came a bolt of lightning in December 1968, when an NBC television special featured Elvis performing before a small studio audience. The program garnered top ratings and left Elvis yearning to create more of that live concert energy.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, investor Kirk Kerkorian was yearning for some energy, too. He was building the biggest hotel-casino with the biggest showroom in the desert playground and needed an entertainment anchor for the International. Soon after the NBC show aired, Alex Shoofey, hotel president, and Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, struck a deal to pay Elvis $400,000 for four weeks of concerts, matching the highest fee in Las Vegas at the time.

In May 1969, after the contract had been signed, a secretary in the hotel’s publicity and advertising department joined other staff members, hotel executives and Parker’s team at a planning lunch. Cognizant of the corporate pecking order, Loanne Miller planned to wait until everyone was seated then take the last available chair. To her dismay, that chair sat between Shoofey and Parker.

“I ate very little and managed not to drop any food on my lap,” laughed Ms. Miller, who became Shoofey’s secretary that August, later worked for RCA Records promoting Elvis’ concert tours, and was Parker’s wife from 1990 until he died in 1997.

The late Shoofey, a Las Vegas superstar in his own right, was orphaned at age 2, put himself through college, served in World War II, and ended up in Las Vegas when his car broke down there. By 1969, he was known as an innovator in the hotel-casino business with an eye for details and cost controls.

Return of the King

In picking his band members, Elvis also valued innovation, so he started with Mr. Burton as lead guitarist. Renowned for his distinctive style and studio playing for singers such as Ricky Nelson, Glen Campbell and Dean Martin, Mr. Burton set up auditions and dug in with a singular focus.

“We wanted to bring together the top-notch, heaviest players in the studio world,” said Burton, a member of the Rock & Rock Hall of Fame since 2001. “It was a handpicked, all-star crew and we became the TCB Band [meaning Takin’ Care of Business, an Elvis mantra].”

Rehearsals began in mid-July in Hollywood, then shifted to the hotel a week before opening night. Although the sessions were closed to the public, that didn’t deter one enterprising super-fan from sneaking a peek.

Ian Fraser-Thomson, then 18, flew from San Francisco to Las Vegas the morning of July 31 with plans to attend Elvis’ shows on Aug. 1 and 2. While in a restroom at the International, he heard Elvis singing “Love Me Tender” but it sounded different from the recorded version. He found the showroom, slipped past a security guard and watched the rehearsal from the balcony. Later that night, he snuck back into the hotel, hid in a closet until show time then snagged an empty seat at a front-row table that included two of Elvis’ step-brothers.

Backstage, Elvis paced anxiously.

“He had a lot of nerves and anxiety,” said Terry Blackwood of The Imperials, a backup vocal group. “You’d see it in his hands and fingers, just twitching his fingers a lot.”

Then finally the moment came, and Elvis burst onto the stage in a dark, two-piece, karate-type outfit.

“There was this multitude of flashbulbs and it was like daylight in the building all of a sudden, just electric,” Mr. Blackwood said.

Guitar slung on his shoulder, Elvis reached for the mic — “I could see his hand shaking,” Mr. Fraser-Thomson said — and blasted off with “Blue Suede Shoes”: “Well, it’s one for the money. Two for the show. Three to get ready now go, cat, go …”

And go he did, at warp speed, captivating the crowd with an eclectic blend of his hits from the ’50s, a couple of Beatles tunes and two new songs that would become million-sellers, “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds.” He closed with “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which became his signature finale for the next eight years.

After the show, Parker whisked him to a press conference where the King held court for about 20 minutes, telling reporters he had grown tired of his typical movie roles: “When you do 10 songs in a movie, they can’t all be good songs. … I got tired of singing to turtles.”

Mr. Fraser-Thomson snuck into the press conference, too, where he posed a question to his idol and secured an autograph.

“It was a magical day, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he said.

The next morning, Shoofey met Parker at the hotel coffee shop and they sketched out a long-term contract on a tablecloth.

Shoofey’s daughter, Teri, was 4 years old then, so she doesn’t remember that day, but has her own magical memories of Elvis.

“To me, Elvis was a family friend,” she said. “He would come on our boat at the lake. He’d let some of the hotel executives’ kids build forts in his closet and we would crawl around all the clothes with the sequins and rhinestones. I remember him bringing me a giant teddy bear, about 6 feet tall, for my birthday. And he would have candy bars set up, like other people have alcohol bars, with big jars of candy, every kind you could imagine. As a kid, it was like, ‘Wow!’ He was just a warm and funny person, just a kind soul.”

Presley lives on

I never met Elvis and I never saw him perform in Las Vegas, but the Westgate’s Mr. Prouty and Dominic Parisi, an executive casino host, showed me glimpses of where his Las Vegas magic happened during a recent behind-the-scenes tour.

We began at the Elvis statue in the lobby, a bronze likeness that includes a guitar with actual strings supplied by a fan who insisted on realism. At its base, fans sometimes leave scarves, an homage to those Elvis handed out during concerts.

Then there’s the dressing room where Elvis and his entourage gathered. The room has been split in two, with the other half used by Barry Manilow, the Westgate’s current signature performer; the bar in the corner is the same one Elvis would have leaned on. We rode the same elevator he did from the dressing room to the backstage area. As we walked from the elevator toward the stage, Mr. Prouty pointed to a small square of wooden floor boards, preserved from days gone by.

“Right here,” he said, “is where Elvis would stop before going on stage, touch the wall and say a quick prayer.”

The showroom’s footprint is the same, although dinner tables have been replaced by theater-style seating. Elvis’ penthouse suite, where he lived while performing two month-long engagements annually, was remodeled years ago.

Mr. Parisi — whose late mother, Ann Tatalovich, was born in Pittsburgh — has worked at the property off and on since 1972. At one time, he handled food and beverage service for the suite when performers such as Elvis stayed there. He has enough stories to, well, fill a book, so he wrote “My Vegas Life,” an entertaining read with a chapter about Elvis. Among Mr. Parisi’s favorite memories are when Elvis and friends gathered for impromptu jam sessions and he was invited to stick around.

“It was the best I ever heard his music because he did it for himself, not to entertain,” he said. “There’s never been anybody like him, and I don’t know if there ever will be.”

Elvis died Aug. 16, 1977, 42 years ago at age 42, which means he’s been gone as long as he lived. And yet he lives on, thanks to the memories of his fans, and of those who knew and worked with him.

And thanks also to a particular building in Las Vegas, one that Elvis never really left.

A Cranberry Township resident, Tim Wesley (tmwesley@zoominternet.net) is a freelance writer and corporate communications executive. His book “My Boxes: A Nostalgic Collection of Stories and Stuff” is available on Amazon.com and includes a chapter on Elvis Presley’s Pittsburgh concert on New Year’s Eve 1976, which he attended.

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First Published: August 4, 2019, 11:00 a.m.

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Elvis Presley poses with Alex Shoofey, president and general manager of the International Hotel, now the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, in Las Vegas.  (Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino)
 (Maura Losch/Post-Gazette)
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