Las Vegas has become such a roaring sensory attraction that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always festooned with big-league sports franchises, megaresorts, and an endless parade of superstar residencies – not to mention the Sphere.
As usual, I’m reminded of the many changes that have taken place in a single lifetime whenever one of the legends of Vegas past takes a final bow and strolls off into that good night, as comedian Shecky Greene did recently at age 97.
The appropriately sweet and sentimental obituaries were written about Greene, who packed lounges and showrooms in Las Vegas and far beyond from the 1950s through the 1980s with an improvisational style mixed with a tried-and-true nightclub act full of material that made you laugh even if you’d heard it a dozen times before. He was a one-man evening at the Improv.
Shecky Greene refused to stay in his lane in more ways than one. He grew up in Chicago playing in mob-run nightclubs and lesser joints and came into his own working in New Orleans. He served in the Navy in World War II. At a time when comedians were mostly slapstick vaudevillians or cleverly scripted, Greene found his way into the spotlight and excelled before live audiences, gathering admirers from the pantheon of comedians of his generation.
He made a lot of friends and had his share of critics. Frank Sinatra was both. Sinatra loved Greene’s energy and hired him as an opening act, then lost his sense of humor when Greene made the notoriously thin-skinned singer the butt of some hilarious jokes. Sinatra grew so irate at one point that some of his henchmen took it upon themselves to rough up the disrespectful Greene.
Shecky responded as only he could. “Frank Sinatra saved my life once,” he told audiences the rest of his career. “A bunch of guys were beating on me and Frank said, ‘OK, that’s enough.’”
If you don’t think that’s funny, you should probably stop reading here.
By 1952, Greene was breaking into Las Vegas in the lounges, eventually making his way into the showrooms. He enjoyed the spoils that accompanied Las Vegas stardom and suffered not only from the pitfalls of alcohol and drug addiction, but also from depression and stage fright, and still managed to keep us smiling.
Greene was part of a generation of entertainers who became synonymous with the Las Vegas scene and style. He wasn’t a member of the Rat Pack, but was certainly at home in that crowd.
And even when he made headlines for the wrong reasons – like the time in 1968 when he had a few drinks and drove his Oldsmobile into the fountains at Caesars Palace – Greene managed to play it for big laughs. He supposedly turned on his windshield wipers and told the officers at the scene, “No spray wax, please!”
Just a suggestion, but I wouldn’t try that today. The man born Fred Sheldon Greenfield, who could sing and act a little, speak in a string of accents and do impersonations, and managed to make millions laugh in a single lifetime, owns that material.
In 2009, Greene told prolific Strip-nightlife columnist John Katsilometes, “I never had an act. I make it up as I go along.”
Don’t we all?
He said something else in that interview that says a lot about the nature of life and the evolution of Las Vegas. “I’m a legend, but nobody knows me in Vegas anymore.”
Historians looking through the wrong end of the telescope regularly lecture us that Las Vegas has transformed a lot of entertainers into household names, but the truth is, it’s the other way around.
Not all of them drove their car into the Caesars Palace fountains, but then again, Shecky Greene was always willing to go the extra mile for a laugh.
