Donn Arden
Donn Arden didn’t invent topless showgirls parading sensually wearing heavy feathered headdresses, glittering costumes and omnipresent smiles.
He was not the first in showbiz to employ quirky novelty acts, handsome lead singers and winsome chorus dancers, then surround them with massive stage sets and mind-boggling special effects.
But the late producer was certainly the first to fuse these elements into such creative, over-the-top presentations that would become known worldwide as Las Vegas showroom spectaculars. His flair for blending beauty and good old song-and-dance, with amazing re-stagings of disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, earned Arden the titles of king of the modern production show and the “Master of Disaster.”
And his impact is still felt today, nearly five years after his death and almost 50 years since Arden’s showgirls and boys performed with headlining ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (with dummy Charlie McCarthy) and singer Vivian Blaine at the April 24, 1950, opening of Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn. Some Donn Arden show has been running ever since.
Bally’s “Jubilee,” a bare-flesh laden spectacle that’s sunk the Titanic more than 15,000 times since it opened in 1981, is the last living testament to Arden’s genius. It will no doubt be the last show of its kind in this increasingly high-tech era.
Arden shook up the entertainment world, not to mention American morals, when he imported an “English edition” of “Lido de Paris” to the Stardust Hotel in 1958.
The concept of showgirls dates back to the 1869 Paris premiere of “Folies Bergere” — an adaptation has been in residence at the Tropicana Hotel since 1959, making it the longest-running Las Vegas production show — and American producer Flo Ziegfeld brought “covered” showgirls to Broadway in the 1920s in his self-named Folies.
But bared breasts had barely been seen in America, with “Minsky’s Folies” at the Dunes Hotel the first to display such natural wonders on a Vegas stage.
Arden changed all of that when the first topless showgirl paced across the Stardust stage displaying her breasts as well as the sensual “showgirl walk” that Arden patented and demanded of his females. “There’s a certain way a girl can walk, particularly when you’re going across the stage,” Arden said in an interview published in 1989 in Jefferson Graham’s “Vegas Live And In Person.”
“By simply twisting the foot, it swings the pelvis forward, which is suggestive and sensual. If you twist right and swing that torso, you get a revolve going in there that’s just right.
“It isn’t the way a woman should walk, necessarily, unless she’s a hooker. You’re selling the pelvis; that’s the Arden Walk.”
Las Vegas producer Breck Wall fondly recalls seeing the groundbreaking nudes in “Lido de Paris.”
“It was just magical,” said the longtime producer. “I was just a boy from Texas, and I’m sure my jaw must have dropped from the shock of just seeing these beautiful young women exposed like never before. But there was nothing tasteless about it. It was really quite beautiful.”
Arden was notorious for requiring the right kind of bodies in his spectaculars such as “Hello America,” “Hello, Hollywood, Hello!” and “Hallelujah Hollywood.”
“We specify no girls under 5-foot-8,” Arden said. “I can’t tell you how many girls 5-foot-4 show up. But we have to audition them (under equal rights laws) even when there’s no chance of us hiring them. They’re wasting their time, but they just enjoy having fun at our expense. So you finally have to say, `I hope you grow up one of these days,’ or `Eat more potatoes.’ ”
Arden demanded “small and firm” breasts for his women, “tight and firm” butts on his male dancers.
Fluff LeCoque, longtime company manager of “Jubilee!” and a former covered dancer for Arden, said the producer wanted to stimulate audiences without degrading the women on display. She said, “The nudity still carries a shock value, even today, and you can’t say it’s not for sexual attraction. But it’s not meant to be pornographic like a strip club. What he wanted to do was beautify them, like it was a painting that had come to life.”
That meant looking, dancing or sounding just right. Arden could be brutal to would-be cast members during open auditions. “He would rant and rave all the time,” recalls producer Wall, “but he really knew what he was doing. He had an eye for talent and everybody else was just wasting his time.”
“I think I can be very nice, and I think I can be very mean,” Arden said. “But you know within the first eight bars whether they can sing or not. Sometimes you can tell in two. And the same thing applies to dancers.
“There’s no such thing as a natural dancer. The dancers I hire absolutely must have proper ballet training. They must have jazz training. You have no time, even in 10- to 12-hour rehearsals, to teach a girl who has never had training to dance.”
A dancer himself, Arden was earning money by the age of 9, dancing for dollars in his hometown of St. Louis, Mo., where he was born Arlyle Arden Peterson in 1917. “I’d pick up $5 on weekends doing shows at movie theaters while I was in grammar school.”
The son of a railway executive and a housewife, Arden found a teacher in Robert Alton who would move on to directing Broadway shows, Gene Kelly’s first break in “Pal Joey” among them, and choreographing Hollywood musicals such as “Showboat” and “Easter Parade.”
Arden, meanwhile, tap danced his way through his teens and, by the age of 20, was running small dance troupes that performed in clubs in many cities. He changed his name for showbiz effect, later adding the second “n” in Donn on counsel of a numerologist who said a nine-letter name would assure his success.
In 1950, “the boys” who ran the clubs in Cleveland told Arden about the new property they had invested in: the Desert Inn in Las Vegas where owner Wilbur Clark brought in former racketeers Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman and Sam Tucker when his construction funds ran low.
“I felt obliged to go,” Arden would say years later. “They were ‘the boys’ and they paid well.” The mobsters had plenty of cash to spare, allowing Arden the luxury of buying the best costumes he could come up with.
“It had to be real ermine,” he remembered. “I wouldn’t dare to go to Lerner’s and buy shows. Oh no, they had to be custom made and all that sort of thing, which I loved.”
Mob carte blanche allowed Arden to design all manner of moving, gargantuan set pieces.
“He dared to do things that had never been tried on a stage before,” remembered LeCoque. “Some of the things he came up with didn’t seem possible.” Such as having a DC-9 rev its engines as it seemingly prepared for takeoff, right through the audience. Collapsing Delilah’s temple in a heap of columns. Sinking the Titanic in “Jubilee!,” or flooding the stage with thousands of gallons of water from a bursting dam.
Amazons. Waterfalls. Spaceships. Celestial goddesses. Can-can girls. Argentine gauchos. Magicians. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers clones. Smoke and fire. Spangles. Stand-up comics. Crooners.
The show itself was the star and completely nonreliant on financially risky headliners. Productions costs, while hefty, were mostly fixed. As were profits.
Bosses wanted to give Arden a lump sum for his efforts but he always declined. “With my drinking and gambling, I never believed in that,” he once said. “I’d rather have the security of a weekly paycheck.”
Arden’s steady cash flow enabled him to buy homes in Palm Springs and Mission Viejo, Calif., both easy bases for jaunts to Las Vegas for periodic check-ups on his creations.
“My business, it seems like it’s going out of fashion,” he once said, unaware of $100 million-plus productions (new theater included) to come, such as Cirque du Soleil’s “O” at Bellagio. “I’m known to be an expensive guy, and it just costs money to put these shows on. You spend money, you make money. Of course, I could put them out there in a bikini and stick a feather in their head and one bracelet on the arm and little earrings, but that isn’t the glamorous show that I do. The things that make my show look right are expensive.”
His pushed the limits in his recreations of famous disasters, such as the burning of the Hindenburg — with “stuntmen falling from the fly loft in flames.”
But if anyone complained about turning human misery into a glitzy Vegas crowd-pleaser, Arden could have cited his own experience in a disaster — the Nov. 21, 1980, fire that raced through the MGM Grand Hotel (now Bally’s), killing 84 people and injuring another 700 in the worst disaster in Las Vegas history.
Arden was nearly ready to unveil “Jubilee!,” his follow-up to the recently closed “Hallelujah Hollywood,” when the fire started. “Around 7 a.m. all hell broke loose,” he recalled. “I looked out in the hall and all I saw was smoke.”
He rounded up friends and attempted to escape down a stairwell, only to be turned back by a crowd coming up the other way. The entire group dashed back to Arden’s suite where he began directing them like a cast, slapping some of those turning hysterical and taking control of the group’s survival effort.
Rescue ladders only reached to the ninth floor, but a well-positioned ramp on one side of the burning building allowed some of the party to be lowered to safety. Arden and the remaining group eventually were led to safety by a firefighter, covering their mouths with towels soaked in vodka because they were out of club soda.
“If it taught me anything, it’s to live for today,” he told a reporter in 1984. “If you live for tomorrow, before you know it, you’re dead.”
The fire also claimed all of Arden’s scenery and costumes for “Jubilee!” It took nine months of retooling before it finally made its debut.
Although surrounded by beautiful women his entire life, Arden never married, saying he’d been engaged maybe six times early in his dance career and now couldn’t be bothered.
Only two Arden alumni ever went on to achieve large-scale fame.
One was Valerie Perrine, “a secretary from Scottsdale with a lisp,” who went on to star in Hollywood films (“Lenny,” “Slaughterhouse Five”) after a stint as a parade nude and leading body in “Lido de Paris.”
Actress Goldie Hawn, remembered by Arden as “a skinny fruitcake,” was fired from Arden’s chorus line at the Desert Inn after three weeks of covered dancing. That forced her to Hollywood and a career that has lasted since the mid-1960s and TV’s “Laugh-In.”
Over the years there were fewer shows offering topless showgirls. Some such, as Jeff Kutash’s “Splash,” featured bare breasts, contemporary taped music and leaner staging for an investment of about $1 million. Ardens’ $10 million jobs began to seem like financial burdens.
“You can safely say there will never be another one like him,” said producer Wall. “He was a genius at what he did and his style will never be duplicated. Donn Arden shows always had a certain air of fantasy and escapism about them, and he opened the doors for the mega-shows that came in the 1990s.”
Arden’s health began to fail in the early 1990s and he became a less-frequent visitor to Las Vegas. Years of chain-smoking and the showbiz life began to take a toll on his body.
When he died Nov. 2, 1994, at his Los Angeles home, the lights on the Strip were dimmed in memory of the 78-year-old producer.
Part III: A City In Full
