In Sagaponack, the house Richard Zoglin shared with his late wife Charla Krupp sits nestled on wooded grounds: immaculate, swimming pool, antique adorned, just the way she, a style editor for Glamour and In Style Magazine, left it. By contrast, the subject of Zoglin’s new book, Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show, which tells “The King’s” story in transforming Las Vegas entertainment, is as much about the place itself in all its tawdry madness: a culmination of Zoglin’s work in his last two books, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the ‘70’s Changed America, and Hope: Entertainer of the Century, taken together, his books form a trilogy in the history of American entertainment, well researched and themselves well, highly entertaining.
Most interviewers, he said in a recent phone chat, wanted to keep the talk on
Elvis, who landed there in 1956 as a young singer. Elvis liked Vegas, for both good and bad, said Zoglin, because he could stay up all night, not a wholesome recipe, even while he kept a good boy image. If you believe
Ann-Margret, his
Viva Las Vegas co-star, in her autobiography,
Ann-Margret: My Story, when they dated, he never touched her. But digging deeper, Zoglin finds he had his showgirls, along with the diet of drugs that did him in in 1977. You may be surprised to learn that the “Las Vegas show” was inspired by Paris’ Folies Bergere, featuring bare-breasted showgirls, even while Vegas promoters wanted to keep the acts clean.
Today, says Zoglin, people smoke everywhere there, in casino interiors meant to eliminate time, merging day and night. Some of the riches of this book are the narratives he creates of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the Rat Pack, the mob (Elvis kept his distance), the promoters who brought comedy acts like Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Shecky Green, and Buddy Hackett and the transition to rock ‘n’ roll, when Elvis revived Vegas, making it cool again. There’s his meeting with the Beatles. Other tales include the coming of Vegas staples Tom Jones and Wayne Newton. Now of course, Vegas is on another trajectory, “a theme park, it’s a dozen Disneylands put together.”
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