Las Vegas is America’s major playground, and the two days we spent there recently proved that. It’s a 24–7 town, unbelievably glamorous and exciting if you ignore the massively upholstered ‘middle’ Americans clad in uniform jeans and Tees who clutter the streets, then sit for hours hunched sadly over dollar slot-machines. What a mug’s game that is. We stayed at the Aladdin (soon to become the Planet Hollywood) in a spacious suite with an amazing view of the extraordinary ‘singing’ fountains of the Bellaggio Hotel, and of the ‘Eiffel Tower’, an exact replica of the original, set in the grounds of a hotel unfortunately named Paris.
Apart from the gambling and the excellent food, LV has the best cabarets and floor shows anywhere in the world. We saw La Cages aux Folles in which Frank Marino, a Joan Rivers lookalike, wore 17 superb gowns, each of which I coveted. He introduced astonishing facsimiles of Michael Jackson, Liza Minnelli, Cher and J-Lo. Some of these imitators are so uncannily like their counterparts as they mime to the songs that you could hardly tell the difference.
I’d always been a huge fan of the cool and confident night-club act of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. This husband-and-wife team have been performing since the Fifties but their appearances are so rare that I hadn’t seen them for several years. When we saw them at the Stardust I expected that perhaps a little of the lustre would have worn off and their voices would be slightly rusty, but how wrong I was! Firstly, they had hardly changed physically at all, particularly Steve, who has the physique and energy of a 40-year-old; their voices were superb and their pitch, phrasing and timing even better than I remembered.
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