Sept. 12: True Cloris, Shining Through
Betty White may be getting all the headlines these days as America’s elder stateswoman of comedy, but has she ever played Vegas? Another randy grandma, Cloris Leachman, hasn’t either, but at 84 she makes her debut on Sept. 18 and 19 at the Suncoast. The Academy Award winner, who has also won more Emmys than any actor ever, spoke to Steve at length in advance of that one-woman show and brace yourself because some of this is almost as sexually explicit as that Tony Curtis chat we gave you a while back. There are many highlights, including Cloris sharing her experiences with Marlon Brando, Jackie Kennedy, Judy Garland, the Reagans and Kathryn Hepburn, although an instant classic is Cloris’ hilarious re-enactment of a call from Joan Collins, who was having an affair with Cloris’ husband George Englund in the 1970s. Leachman also discusses her new Fox sitcom, "Raising Hope."
Links to stuff discussed:
Get tickets to see Cloris Leachman on Sept 18-19 at the Suncoast
Cloris Leachman’s website and book
Cloris’ new TV show on Fox, “Raising Hope”
Get the DVD of “Young Frankenstein”
Sheryl Crow’s cancellation at the Joint
Steve’s column about Ted V. Mikels
The AOLNews.Com piece on the Liberace Museum closure
VegasHappensHere.Com exposes the New York-New York 9/11 Memorial decay
MGM Resorts still spins animal attacks, but this time there’s YouTube of it
Oscar’s brilliant interview on the BBC's HARDTalk
The Las Vegas Sun on the possible Wayne Newton home becoming an attraction
The website for Jabbawockeez and the R-J on how they got the Monte Carlo deal
VegasHappensHere.Com on the July gaming and visitation data
The YouTube clips of Cloris Leachman’s Oscar speech and a classic Young Frankenstein scene
The site for the Kimchi Museum in Seoul
1 comments:
GREAT interview & episode, as usual. As good as you tweeted.
Regarding the Liberace Museum; in one of the lasvegassun.com articles it wasn't stated flat out, but alluded to, that the trustees have been dipping into the endowment a little each year in the hopes that things would turn round and they could keep people employed. When the economy turned south, hurting their investments, tenants left their shopping center and visitation declined, things became critical.
I think this unpaid board of directors have made decisions that all of us would have made. Thank God they made this difficult decision now, when there is still enough to maintain the Liberace artifacts. If the movie, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon is made next year, then things could possibly stabilize.
In my opinion the Riviera has 10-15,000 feet of space to give the Liberace people for a few years. Properly packaged, he can be shown as a performance ancestor of Madonna and Lady Gaga. He laid the foundation for any "over the top" performers of the television era. The only knock I may have about his caretakers is that they have protected his musicianship to the detriment of "pimping" his showmanship.
Last month, I was in the master bedroom of his house just off Tropicana (which was part of some forclosure against the current, unrelated owners), the mural on the ceiling tells me that he would allow his preferred lifestyle to be more positively promoted if he were alive today. My point being that ulike Lawrence Welk and the Lone Ranger, Liberace would be still be relevant today if he were promoted effectively.
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