The International Hotel, later to be renamed the Las Vegas Hilton, was like a second childhood home to Lisa Marie Presley. The first, of course, being Graceland in Memphis, Tenn.
As Graceland was turned into an international tourist destination celebrating Elvis, Lisa Marie all but forgot about the hotel where her father performed 636 consecutive sold-out shows during her childhood.
“I didn’t even know the building was still here, to be honest with you,” Lisa Marie said Thursday afternoon shortly after she joined her mother, Priscilla, Westgate Las Vegas owner David Siegel and Graceland Holdings Managing Partner Joel Weinshanker in cutting the ribbon to “Graceland Presents Elvis: The Exhibition, The Show, The Experience.” “I didn’t know what had happened to it since he played here when it was the Hilton. But it feels right. … It feels like we’re resurrecting everything.”
Lisa Marie was age 8 when Elvis played his final show at the Las Vegas Hilton in December 1976. Some of her earliest memories were from his days headlining at the hotel, spending time scrambling from the showroom to the 30th-floor suite Elvis used as his home during his days in Las Vegas.
“I spent so much time here just running around. That’s what I remember, always being able to run upstairs in the suite when he did his shows,” Lisa Marie recalled. “He did two shows a night, including a midnight show, and I would be upstairs trying to do stuff like wailing outside on the (balcony) by myself, which I probably shouldn’t have been doing (laughs). There was a slot machine in the suite, and I remember playing that a lot.
“This was like a second home, really.”
When asked when it was that she realized her father was not an ordinary parent, Lisa Marie took a moment and said, “I don’t know when that was, but I knew he was really special, oh, yeah. He was really special as a person anyway, but I knew he was different by the way people responded to him.”
The Graceland outpost also is an offshoot of a similar attraction in London, “Elvis at the 02” at 02 Arena, which runs through December. The head archivist at Graceland, Angie Marchese, has led the team that has assembled both attractions. Lisa Marie applauds those efforts.
“The spirit you feel is what Angie brought here,” she said. “The 02 show has been incredibly successful, and it was sort of a trial run for what we wanted to bring to Las Vegas.”
Priscilla and Lisa Marie returned to the showroom in which Elvis headlined, now named Elvis Presley Theater at Westgate, and watched “Elvis: The Experience,” the stage show resurrecting the King’s concert presentation in his days at the International and Hilton.
Martin Fontaine’s show is produced as a full concert experience replete with his gold-trimmed jumpsuit and 24 musicians, all donning groovy stage attire of the early 1970s. Home movies, photos and documentary footage boosts that experience, and the Presleys occupied a replica of the booth reserved for Priscilla in those days when the King was just that.
“We’re getting some life injected back into this hotel,” Lisa Marie said. “His presence is here, and it’s great to be back.”
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