LOST VEGAS: Ronald Reagan Had a Las Vegas Lounge Act

Yes, a hereafter US chairperson in one case sang and danced on the Las Vegas Strip. And you want to know something stranger? Ronald President Reagan was, past to the highest degree accounts, all redress at it.

From Feb. 15 to 26, 1954, Reagan, who had just now turned 43, topped the note in the Ramona Room at the Last Frontier. At 600 seats, this was the largest salesroom inwards Las Vegas. As the show’s emcee, Ronald Reagan told self-deprecating jokes with aw-shucks tempt spell introducing quartet acts: a barbershop foursome called the Continentals; the Dendroica fusca Twins featuring Evelyn Mary Augusta Arnold Ward (a Great White Way showgirl who happened to be the female parent of future tense soda pop star David Cassidy); a dancing gymnastic troupe called the Honey Brothers; and the put up chorus line line, nicknamed the Adorabelles.

Reagan did to a greater extent than bring out the Continentals. He interacted with the foursome in zany sketches that appeared throughout the show. The running retch was non dissimilar Lucille Ball’s with Desi Arnaz on I Love Lucy: President Reagan tried desperately to follow included inwards their represent act. And, though he hammed it upward for laughs, he hoofed it upwards and sang songs such as “Sweet Adeline” with them serviceably.

Serious Comedy Business

Reagan took the gig quite seriously. A month earlier, he rented a Hollywood soundstage and rehearsed with the Continentals for a week, upward to quatern hours a day, until his parts were nailed. After that, they workshopped the human activity with a week of performances at the Statler Hotel inward downtown L.A.

The knockout work paid off. The Vegas shows sold out, Variety powder store wrote that Ronald Wilson Reagan had a “winning personality,” and Reagan was offered a bring back engagement.

But regular before President Reagan proved himself, the Last Frontier was happy to hold a bona-fide picture show principal working for them. Most steered decipherable of playing Vegas at the time, fearing the effectuate of the has-been halo on their image. But Reagan had just served as supporting histrion to a chimpanzee inward the 1951 movie Bedtime For Bonzo. There was no lour set for his vocation to go. He commanded so minuscule respect, a paper advertisement for the mesh misspelled his in conclusion identify “Regan.”

Anyway, he had minuscule choice.

The studios had stopped-up(a) offering Ronald Wilson Reagan his customary $75K-per-picture fee at the same time he had a brand unexampled wife (the former Nancy Davis), an infant girl (Patti), and mortgages on his Pacific Ocean Palisades nursing home and a 350-acre ranch in the Malibu Hills. He also owed child-support payments of $500 a month to his first wife, Jane Wyman, as good as a whopping $18K inward rear taxes to the IRS.

So when his agent, President Arthur Park, proposed a Vegas nightclub act, President Reagan listened. As past times chairman of the Screen Actors Guild, he had already emceed dozens of Hollywood brotherly love benefits, where he highly-developed a talent for introducing entertainment acts with humourous patter. And the money was right: $11K for II weeks work.

Originally, Park intended to rule book Ronald Wilson Reagan into the El Rancho Vegas. But that gambling casino hotel’s owner, Beldon Katleman, insisted that the exhibit feed o'er the Christmas holiday. That was pretty a great deal a deal-breaker for Reagan, but what really torpedoed the thought was the headlining act. Lili St. Cyr was one of America’s premiere strippers, and Ronald Wilson Reagan was having none of that.

So Why Didn’t Ronald Reagan the Lounge Lizard Play Vegas Again?

While driving nursing home from Vegas to LA, Ronald and Nancy had a heart-to-heart and decided to play shoot down the Last Frontier’s offer up for a payoff engagement. Reagan would instead occupy ace lowest Hail Mary liberty chit at Hollywood stardom. Though that stargaze continued to bilk him, his next two films, Prisoner of War and Cattle Queen of Montana, did well, which led to an eight-year black market hosting CBS-TV’s General Electric Theater. That present made President Reagan wealthy again and generated hundreds of paid offers for him to speak as GE’s spokesperson. These engagements earned him the moniker “The Great Communicator” and led flat to the political vocation we all know.

Decades later, Nancy Reagan radius to PBS-TV around her late husband’s Vegas lounge career.

“He rolled with it, but it hurt, of course, when (his) life history dehydrated upwardly — of course it hurt,” she said. “But … he’d acquire rearwards to the late belief that everything happens for a reason. And that whatever happened to him there, (there) was a reason out for it.”

“Lost Vegas” is an occasional Casino.org series featuring remembrances of Las Vegas’ lesser-known history.

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