Dreaming of Old Vegas: Noel Coward, live in ’55

By Joe Brown

Thursday, May 14, 2009 | 2 a.m.

I recently came across the live 1955 recording of “Noel Coward at Las Vegas,” and the photo on the CD cover sent me into a daydream about what a Vegas performance once was and could be.

There he is, the Englishman out in the midday sun, immaculately, incongruously attired in a dinner jacket and black tie, a carnation in his buttonhole, teacup in hand, casting a sundial shadow, an oasis of sophisticated cool in the 118-degree swelter of the blank, blanched Nevada desert.

Las Vegas was still relatively young and fresh in 1955, not yet besmirched as the place where out-of-date entertainers go to die. Coward, after decades as society’s favorite playwright, actor and songwriter, was suffering a rough postwar patch of stage flops and embarrassing overdrafts.

And so, lured by “a rather excessive salary” of $15,000 a week, Coward brought his elegantly sung-spoken innuendo to the Desert Inn for a four-week run, two shows nightly, in the white-hot summer of ’55.

This charming man was an exotic specimen in the middle-class playground of Las Vegas.

And Coward found Vegas exotic, too, calling it a “fabulous, extraordinary madhouse,” run by polite, dapper gangsters.

“Their morals are bizarre in the extreme,” he wrote in his diary. “They are generous, mother-worshippers, sentimental and capable of much kindness. They are also ruthless, cruel, violent and devoid of scruples ... curious products of a most curious adolescent country.”

The opening night crowd included Frank Sinatra — who chartered a train from Los Angeles, bringing along Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, David Niven and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

The subsequent headline in Variety read, “Las Vegas, Flipping, Shouts for More as Noel Coward Wows ’em in Cabaret Turn.” And his desert apparition, Coward said in his diary, was “one of the most sensational successes of my career.” His Vegas stint gave his career a revivifying jolt.

You can hear the ice cubes clinking in the cocktails on the album, which, as the cover proclaims, was “Recorded in actual performance at Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn.” “We must have music to drive our fears away,” Coward sings in his graceful, nimble staccato. And also, “Dance, dance, dance little lady ...”

Perhaps it was that lyric from Coward’s live recording that got me thinking of another Brit who recently performed “live” in Las Vegas.

This, I’m fairly certain, will be the first time Britney Spears has ever appeared in the same sentence with Noel Coward.

Here’s the question that came up after hearing Coward dazzle a Vegas showroom a half-century ago: What should we reasonably expect from a live performance? What is the minimum you can demand from a pop singer, say?

When Spears brought her “Circus” juggernaut to town last month, several writers made a point of saying it really doesn’t matter whether Spears actually sings onstage or not.

I think it does matter.

And it’s not just a question of value for the dollar, the $155 for a halfway decent seat at the MGM Grand.

By some accounts, Spears lip-synced listlessly through her paces. A puppet show. A show pony. A hologram.

It’s not just Spears, although she’s the most crass example of the degraded quality of glamour and celebrity and performance. A new generation of audiences is being led to believe that this kind of fakery is just fine.

More than 50 years later, what Vegas calls entertainment has gotten bigger in scale and brighter technologically.

But it has become diminished, too.

There’s no going back, I know. But hearing Coward charm the lucky few at the long-gone Desert Inn reminds me to cherish those rare Vegas moments when a performer really connects. Till then, I can dream that an oasis might appear in this desert again.