Curtain down. Dim the lights. After 67 years, the Tropicana Las Vegas closed its doors last week, taking with it a slice of the city’s history. The hotel will be demolished in October to make way for a baseball stadium for the A’s, relocating from Oakland. The new building will hit many of the same pleasure points as the old – crowds, lights, packed seats, plenty of booze, and, given American professional sports leagues’ recent relentless embrace of on-demand betting, gambling opportunities galore. Still, the loss of an iconic presence on the Strip conjures nostalgia for a lost era – Rat Pack! Elvis! And of course, those pasties-and-headdress-sporting, sequin-bedecked, skin-baring ambassadors of Sin City. Who else? The showgirls.
Once Vegas’s primary entertainment draw, the classic showgirl extravaganza has lost a step or two in the marketing stakes. Now, marquee-name pop diva residencies and every imaginable flavor of Cirque du Soleil rule. Yet the showgirl endures, as a character and a genre; she has captivated the imaginations of storytellers from Colette to Paul Verhoeven. Whether crisscrossing Europe by train, steeling herself against life’s grand disappointments, or pushing Gina Gershon down a flight of stairs, she remains compelling. And why not? She’s the perfect balance of glitter and grit. Plus, she’s got legs for days.
Belle Époque Paris may have been light on the neon and bottomless mimosa brunches, but the music-hall dominated culture had plenty of Vegas energy. Renée Néré, the woman at the heart of Colette’s 1910 novel The Vagabond, needs employment after a crushing divorce. When a literary career doesn’t pan out, Renée finds work as a showgirl, “behind a mask of purplish rouge…eyes ringed with a halo of blue greasepaint.” (Would that all struggling writers had sufficient skill and gumption for a side hustle of dancing and some light mime.) It’s not the spotlight that lures Renée, but a more practical concern: money. She sees her work as “bartering my gestures, my dances, the sound of my voice for hard cash.”
Renée dismisses her motivation as “a characteristically feminine fondness for money.” Sing it, sister. Yet there’s something else, too. Sometimes, when one’s life falls apart, one must smear on the stage makeup, kick up the heels and start anew. As grueling as the gig can be night after night, it’s become Renée’s life of choice – the music-hall community she’s built for herself suits her far better than the tut-tutting society folk she left in the custody of her ex-husband.
After years of romantic solitude, Renée develops a relationship with Maxime Dufferein-Chautel, or rather, he develops an immense fascination with her, which she warily endures. The courtship hits a roadblock when the opportunity arises for Renée’s troupe to hit the road. She promises Max that she will be all his upon her return from a six-week train tour of Europe, but she seems to know this is a feint. He’s a good man, but she’s not ready to settle her wandering spirit. When the tour extends to South America, she lets him down as gently as possible in a letter, while articulating the whole truth in inner monologue: “I reject you and I choose…all that is not you.” There are dances to dance, money to make and new wonders to see as “a vagabond, and free.” And if Renée experiences hardships along the way, that’s life. She is a Colette heroine, after all. “A woman,” she notes, “can never die of grief. She is such a solid creature, so hard to kill!”
Put that up in neon lights and hang it outside of the Stardust, where Harmony, the put-upon lead of Larry McMurtry’s 1983 novel The Desert Rose, plies her trade. A Vegas lifer, Harmony started onstage at the Tropicana at the tender age of 17. From the get-go, the city delivered on its promise of high glitz with a side of danger. Harmony reminisces about one Tropicana show during which a bored audience member started to play Russian Roulette. It ended badly.
Once Miss Vegas Showgirl, Harmony has fallen on some tough times. She spends her days in a run-down duplex eight miles off the Strip, tending to her sixteen-year-old daughter, Pepper, and a small gaggle of peacocks. She spends her nights topless onstage, being hoisted aloft on a disc, holding court above the dancing ladies below. (Despite her local acclaim, Harmony’s range is limited, and depends solely on her beauty. She’s not talented enough to dance.) The latest in a string of bad boyfriends totals her car and runs off with the insurance check. And her daughter is, to be charitable, a real bitch. “Couldn’t you just buy a plain white blouse some time…Every single blouse you’ve got is so tacky,” she admonishes the single mother who works six nights a week to pay for her dance lessons.
Those tacky blouses serve a purpose that Pepper, for all her adolescent worldliness, is too young to understand. “After the costumes, it was sort of hard to know you were there if you didn’t wear clothes with a little color in them,” Harmony muses. Those costumes are an ordeal; in McMurtry’s prose, the dressing process pulses with the urgency of a NASCAR pit stop. The huge feather outfits “had to be lowered by a little hoist,” and the headdresses are so heavy, maintaining anything other than perfect posture risks permanent neck damage. Still, Harmony loves her job. Despite a string of money troubles, crummy bosses and worse paramours, she clings to a positive world view with a white-knuckle grip. Or tries to. When life gets too difficult (as it does every morning when she goes to bed), she turns to a less hot-cha-cha accessory – a set of total blackout sleep goggles, on which she is totally reliant.
Harmony takes pride in her accomplishments – her fame on the Strip, her figure (she hasn’t “gained an ounce” in her 20-year career), and her daughter. Pepper repays Mom’s pride with disdain, nasty rejoinders and secrecy. A talented dancer and preternatural beauty, she sneers that Harmony is pathetic. Pepper has a lust for adventure and experience, which leads her to a cash-paid stint modeling vintage lingerie for an ultra-wealthy, much older man. The tasteful photos earn her $5,000 (which she squirrels away from her financially hard-up mother) and a marriage proposal (which she accepts).
Finally, the bottom falls out for Harmony. Bonventre, the Stardust’s dastardly producer, offers her daughter a starring role in the show. Since Pepper can dance, no floating disc for her. Harmony spends much of the novel wrangling with the notion of sharing a stage with her daughter. It’s an internal struggle from which she could have saved herself. Bonventre fires her immediately upon obtaining her required signature on Pepper’s minor work release form. Turns out, a mother-daughter topless revue is too weird, even for Vegas. Plus, with her 39th birthday looming, Harmony is all washed up. (It’s a brutal read.)
Over and over, Harmony chastises herself for not being a stronger person; rather than stand up for herself, she too often accepts what life hands her. Still, it’s hard not to be moved by her survivalist optimism. Yes, she flirts with self-delusion, but what other protection does she have? Not even the most crushing defeats can kill Harmony’s inner romantic. At the novel’s bittersweet conclusion, she offers this assessment of Vegas to her daughter: “I was never talented like you are, I was just pretty. Nobody would have known what to do with me anywhere else, but here I got to be a feathered beauty.” It’s a wistful show of resilience from a gal who considers herself something of a doormat.
If Harmony’s sweet-natured Tulsa girl with big dreams that go unfulfilled is one end of the showgirl archetype, then Showgirls’ Nomi Malone is the other. Rough around the edges and carrying a dark secret, Nomi – played by Elizabeth Berkley in a wondrously wanton leap from Saved by the Bell – rages, wrassles and shimmies her way through Sin City.
Okay, fine. Paul Verhoeven’s once-reviled 1995 erotic drama isn’t based on a book, but it did spawn one: Adam Nayman’s well-titled 2014 It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls. To wit, the film has enjoyed a cultural rehabilitation over the past several years. Panned upon its release, and a box office flop, it won seven Razzies before finding new life as a camp classic worthy of consideration like Nayman’s, and other celebrations, including a screening at the Academy Museum’s theater last month. While crass and vulgar enough to earn every frame of its NC-17 rating, the movie’s perverse delights are plentiful. If you can’t take pleasure in Gina Gershon’s Cristal Connors extolling the joys of eating Doggy Chow in a come-hither rasp, or Berkley, covered in gold body paint, leaping victorious out of a pyrotechnic volcano after violently clawing her way to the top of the Vegas ladder, you might be beyond help.
When Nomi arrives in Vegas, it delights and daunts in equal measure. Sure, there’s the bright lights, big city element and new friends to be made. But there’s also a stint in a seedy strip club, and Cristal, the manipulative, villainous star standing between Nomi and a bigtime casino career. Cristal is worldly (if tackily so) and canny, while Nomi is neither. Upon donning a fancy dress, she fishes for compliments by cooing, “It’s a Ver-SAYCE.” She’s a complicated gal, part wide-eyed, boob-baring ingenue, part aggressive street punk. When hitching her first ride into town, she holds the truck driver up at knife point. When a guy gets fresh in a nightclub, she starts a brawl. And when Cristal goes one step too far in their psycho-sexual pas de deux, Nomi pushes her down a flight of stairs. It’s All About Eve with full frontal.
So, what would these various showgirls make of each other? Would they recognize a kinship deeper than merely feeling at home while sparsely dressed under the spotlight? Certainly, it’s a long road from the Belle Epoque to Verhoeven schlock. And Harmony possesses neither Renée’s steely determination nor Nomi’s unhinged brashness. But under the pasties, the feathers and the stage makeup, each is a determined, self-made woman. Perhaps what they’ve made isn’t perfect – for Harmony, it’s downright dispiriting. But they’ve made it, nonetheless. That’s why the showgirl captivates: She’s a costumed, high-kicking beauty who masks her mettle under near-naked razzle-dazzle.
And so, farewell to the Tropicana Las Vegas. It’s always a bit sad to see a landmark bulldozed to make way for something new. Tastes change. Major League Baseball comes calling, daughter upstages mother in the limelight, and it’s time to go. Nothing lasts forever. As Cristal Connors so poetically puts it, “There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you.”
Love this. Need to check out that McMurtry novel.