Elvis Presley Sat Front Row at Dean Martin’s Last Show — Their Talk After the Show Changed His Life

Elvis Presley Sat Front Row at Dean Martin’s Last Show — Their Talk After the Show Changed His Life

Las Vegas, Nevada. December 13th, 1976. 11:52 p.m. [music] The show had already ended. The house lights were up, which in the Copa Room of the Riviera Hotel meant the specific transition from intimate to institutional. The moment when the room stopped being what it had been for 90 minutes and became what it was between shows, a collection of chairs and tables and white linen and the accumulated residue of cigarette smoke and spilled wine and the particular compressed warmth of 600 people who had spent the evening packed

close together in the service of something. The audience had gone or most of the audience had gone. The floor staff were moving through the tables with the practiced efficiency of people for whom the aftermath of a show was the actual show, the real work. Collecting, resetting, preparing for the next occasion that would require the room to be what it had been.

 At table four, center front row, a man was still sitting. He had not left when the house lights came up. He had not left when the people around him gathered their things and filed toward the exits with the warm, slightly overstimulated energy of an audience that had received something and was still processing it.

 He had sat while they moved around him and he was sitting still now in the full flat light of the room’s working mode with both hands on the white tablecloth and a glass in front of him that had not been touched in 40 minutes. The floor manager, a man named Vincent Ottery, who had been working Copa Rooms in Las Vegas since 1959, noticed him on his third pass through the room.

He recognized the face. He had recognized it at the beginning of the evening when the man had come in through the side entrance with no one else, which was an unusual entrance for someone who generally arrived with 12 people and a security detail that required its own logistics. Vincent did not approach the table.

 He had worked in enough rooms to know the difference between a man who wanted assistance and a man who needed to sit somewhere for a while, and this man was the second kind. He made a note on his clipboard. He continued working. The man at table four sat with his hands on the white tablecloth in the full working light of the Copper Room and looked at the stage.

The stage was empty. Before I tell you why Elvis Presley sat alone in the front row of Dean Martin’s final Las Vegas residency for 40 minutes after the house lights came up and what happened when Dean Martin found him there, if you have ever sat in the empty room after something ended because leaving would have made the ending real, subscribe to this channel right now.

 This is what we do here and hit that like button for what remains when the show stops and the lights come up and the thing you came for is already gone. Now, back to the Riviera. December 13th, 1976, the stage is empty. The room is working and Elvis Presley is still sitting at table four. Dean Martin had not announced that this was the last time.

He had not announced it to the press, which was the conventional announcement, the one that produced the specific retrospective coverage that famous careers accrued at their endings. He had not announced it to his management, who would have had opinions about the timing and the framing and the promotional opportunities that an announced final Vegas residency would have generated.

 He had not announced it in any explicit sense to anyone, but he had told Phil Barker. Phil had been Dean’s road manager for 14 years, which was long enough to have developed the specific expertise in Dean Martin that long employment in close proximity produces, the ability to read the things that were not said, to hear the decisions that were made before they were spoken, to understand that certain kinds of news from Dean arrived not as announcements, but as weather, environmental facts that preceded any formal acknowledgement.

Dean had said it on the flight from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on December 1st, the first night of what was being billed as an extended holiday residency. He had been looking out the plane window at the desert below, the specific dark expanse of Nevada at night, broken by the specific constellation of Las Vegas’ lights.

 And he had said, without turning from the window, “Last run, Phil.” Phil had not asked him to repeat it or clarify it. He had written something in the small notebook he carried. They had not spoken about it again for the entire 2 weeks. The residency had been, by every external measure, excellent. Dean was 59 years old. The voice had changed.

 It always changed, the instrument changing with the instrument’s owner, taking on the particular character that years put into things without diminishing what made it what it was. He was not the Dean Martin of 1953 or 1964. He was the Dean Martin of 1976, which was its own thing, carrying its own specific weight and depth and authority. The rooms had been full.

 This was not a surprise. Dean Martin at the Riviera in December of 1976 was still the kind of proposition that filled rooms. The decade had changed around him in ways that could have been clarifying or disorienting depending on the night, but what the rooms registered, what the people who came registered, was continuity, the specific warm gravity of someone who had been doing this long enough that the doing of it had become its own argument.

 He had performed 11 shows. The 12th was December 13th, the last one. He had not told the audience. >> [snorts] >> He had not told anyone except Phil. He had performed the 12th show with the same ease that he had performed the previous 11 and the 11 before those and the hundreds before those back through 20 years of the same specific act of inhabiting a room and making it feel like it had been waiting for him.

 The 12th show ended at 11:22. He had taken his bows. He had shaken the hands of the people in the front tables who reached up as they always reached up. He had said good night. He had off the stage. He was in his dressing room. The bow tie loosened. The jacket not yet off. A drink he was not drinking on the table when Phil came to the door.

 “There’s someone in the room.” Phil said. Dean had heard this sentence in various forms across 14 years and had developed from hearing it a reliable index of its urgency. The sentence had a register when it referred to press and a different register when it referred to management and a different register again for the specific situations it was impossible to prepare for.

 This was the third kind. “Who?” Dean said. Phil told him. Dean set down the drink he had not been drinking. He said nothing for approximately eight seconds which Phil counted without meaning to count them the way you count things that have a weight that resists the ordinary passage of time. “Alone?” Dean said. “Alone.” Phil said.

 Dean looked at the mirror, not at himself particularly, at the mirror, at the room behind him, at the dressing room that looked like every dressing room he had occupied in 20 years of Las Vegas residencies. The same kind of chair, the same kind of lights, the same kind of mirror that showed you whatever version of yourself you had brought through the door that night. He stood.

 Elvis was not performing in Las Vegas that week. He had completed his own fall engagement at the Las Vegas Hilton in early November and he was between commitments in the specific way that his schedule between commitments always worked, which was to say that the machinery of his life continued even in the absence of shows, the people, the movement, the specific organized chaos of being Elvis Presley in 1976.

 He had driven from the Hilton to the Riviera alone. This was not in the ordinary architecture of his life a thing he did. Driving alone in Las Vegas was a logistical problem that his management solved for him as a matter of course. It was also, at a deeper level, a thing he did not do because solitude in movement was not a state he had frequent access to because the space around him was almost never empty of people who had organized themselves in relation to him.

 He had called his car himself. He had not told anyone where he was going. He had been inside the Copa Room before the show started, which meant he had sat through the entire 90 minutes at table. He had not been recognized or had been recognized and not disturbed, which amounted to the same thing in terms of what the evening had been for him, which was a private thing.

 When the show ended, he had not left. He had sat with both hands on the white tablecloth and the house lights coming up and the room becoming what rooms become when the show ends, and he had looked at the stage. He was still looking at the stage when Dean came through the door at the back of the room.

 Dean walked through the empty Copa Room he walked through rooms, with the ease that was the performance of ease, the ease built across 40 years from something that had originally cost more than it appeared to cost, the ease that was not the absence of feeling but the organization of feeling into something that took up less visible space.

 He had come through the staff entrance at the back, which brought him in behind the audience section, which meant he had a moment before Elvis could have seen him, a moment in which he could have assessed the room from that position, taken inventory as he took inventory of all rooms, the continuous peripheral reading that performing had made involuntary.

 He registered the empty chairs, the floor staff, Vincent Ottery near the bar, who nodded once and whose eyes directed briefly toward the front, and the man at table four. Dean had not seen Elvis in 7 months. They had crossed paths at a function in April, a brief overlap of orbits that had produced 30 minutes of conversation about nothing in particular, which was the kind of conversation that worked as a container for things neither man needed to say directly.

 They had been close for years, not the closeness of the Rat Pack, the organized and performed closeness of men in a public formation, but the looser, more private closeness of two men who had found, across a decade of parallel careers and intersecting lives, that they understood certain things about each other that most of the people around them did not.

 Dean walked toward the front. He pulled out the chair across from Elvis and sat. Elvis looked at him. In the full working light of the Copper Room, without the softening of stage light or candlelight, his face was what his face was in December of 1976, which was different from what it had been.

 The weight he had been carrying for the past few years was visible in the way that certain kinds of weight become visible when a person is very tired, not in their posture, not in any single thing, but in the specific quality of the space behind their eyes. “Good show,” Elvis said. Dean did not say anything immediately. He poured from the water glass on the table.

 It had not been cleared yet, and drank. “You came alone,” Dean said. “Yes,” Elvis said. “Why?” Elvis looked at the stage. He did not answer right away. The floor staff were at the far end of the room, well out of earshot, moving with the professional inattention of people who understood that the front of the room was private for now.

 I wanted to hear you, Elvis said, without He stopped. Just hear you. Dean waited. I didn’t know you were finishing, Elvis said, not until I got here. Phil told me when I came in. He paused. You’re finishing. Yes, Dean said. Elvis looked at the stage again. He had a particular way of looking at empty stages that people who worked with him recognized, not the performer looking at where he would stand, but the person looking at the structure of the thing, the frame that held what happened inside it.

 I haven’t had a good night in a while, Elvis said. He said it with the specific flatness of a man making an observation about himself from a slight distance, a scientist reporting data rather than a person confessing. Tonight was a good night. Because of the show? Dean said. Partly, Elvis said. Dean looked at his hands on the tablecloth.

 Partly because nobody knew I was here, Elvis added. They sat at table four in the Copa Room for 40 minutes after the house lights came up. They were not talking for most of it. Conversation happened in pieces, the way conversation happens between people who have known each other long enough to not need conversation as the primary form of contact.

 They talked about the show, about specific moments in it, two men discussing craft the way craftsmen discuss craft, with precision and without sentiment. They talked about nothing. They sat without talking. At some point, Dean had not consciously decided to say this, but the moment arrived the way moments arrive when the environment makes them available.

 He said, When did it stop being enough? Elvis looked at him. The performing, Dean said. When did it stop being enough? It was not phrased as a question, exactly. It had the quality of something he was asking himself as much as asking Elvis. And the asking of it was itself the answer to part of its own question.

 Elvis was quiet for a long time. Vincent Atterbury had stopped moving through the room. The Copa Room had reached its late-night stillness. The equipment off, the work done, the space resting in the specific neutral state between one thing and the next. “I’m not sure it’s stopped.” Elvis said. “I’m not sure that’s what happened.” He paused.

 “I think I just started needing more from it than it could give.” Dean looked at him. “That’s not the same thing.” Elvis said. “No.” Dean said. “It’s not.” The stage was empty. The chrome microphone stand was in its position at center, where it always was between shows, not put away, not displayed, simply placed where it would be needed if it were needed.

 The ambient light of the Copa Room at rest caught the chrome and produced the specific valueless gleam of an object that existed entirely in relation to its function. Dean said, “It gave me everything.” He said it once, quietly, without inflection. Not a eulogy, not a performance, the flat statement of a man completing an accounting.

 “It gave me everything I had.” Elvis did not say anything. “The problem,” Dean said, “is that I can’t tell the difference anymore between what I gave it and what it gave me.” “It all went into the same thing.” He was quiet. “That’s probably how it’s supposed to work.” He said. “But it means you can’t take inventory.

 At the end, you can’t look at what’s left and know which parts are yours.” Elvis put both hands flat on the white tablecloth, the specific gesture of a man pressing down on something he wants to stay in place. “I’m 41.” He said. “I know.” Dean said. The number sat between them in the empty Copa Room, with its full working light and its empty stage and its chrome microphone stand at center that would be needed again by someone on another night. 41 years old.

 Dean had been 41 in 1958, which felt like several lifetimes ago, which felt like last Tuesday, which felt like both things simultaneously in the way that time works when you have spent long enough doing one thing that the accumulation of the time itself becomes its own specific weight. He did not say anything to the number. There was nothing to say to it that the number did not already know.

 Elvis left at 12:47. He went through the same side entrance he had come in. Dean walked him to the door, not all the way, just to the edge of the staff corridor. The point at which one person’s interior space ended and the other’s began. At the door, Elvis turned. He did not shake Dean’s hand. He put his hand on Dean’s shoulder briefly.

Not the public gesture, not the performed affection of men in the entertainment industry who have learned to deploy physical warmth as social currency, something simpler and more direct. The hand of one person on the shoulder of another person for a moment without words. Then he went through the door.

 Dean stood in the staff corridor for a moment. He could hear the sound of the Copa Room behind him. Vincent and Terry finishing the last of the reset, the particular ambient sounds of a room that was becoming ready to be something again. He could hear the corridor ahead of him, the hotel beyond it, the strip beyond that, the desert beyond that.

 He went back to his dressing room. He sat in the chair in front of the mirror for a while. The bow tie was still loosened from before. The jacket was still on. He had not gotten around to any of the things he usually did in the dressing room in the aftermath of a show, the small rituals of the return to private self that performers developed across years and that varied from person to person in their specific contents, but shared a common function.

 He sat in the chair and looked at the mirror. He was 59 years old. He had been singing in rooms since he was 17. 42 years of rooms, 42 years of the specific transaction between a performer and an audience of the particular commerce of presence and attention of the thing that happened in a room when someone who knew how to do this thing stood in front of people who wanted to receive it and the exchange happened and both sides went home carrying something. 42 years.

 He did not stay long in the chair. This was consistent with how he handled most things, the brief unspectacular acknowledgement of the weight of a thing and then the continuation of whatever came next. He loosened the bow tie the rest of the way. He hung the jacket. He picked up the drink he had not been drinking.

 He sat with it for a while in the empty dressing room after the last Copa Room performance he would ever give in the hotel that had been his Las Vegas home for 11 years in the city that had shaped the particular version of himself that the world had accepted as the real one. He thought about what Elvis had said about not being able to tell the difference.

 He thought about what he himself had said about inventory. He thought about the 42 years. He did not arrive at any conclusions. The particular structure of the thoughts was not the kind that arrived at conclusions. It was the kind that arrived at the next morning and the morning after that and the slow accumulation of days after the last night in Las Vegas in which the accounting continued without ever quite balancing. He put the drink down.

 He stood. He turned off the mirror lights. He went out through the staff corridor, the same corridor through which Elvis had left 45 minutes earlier and he walked to the car that was waiting and he got in, and Phil Barker was in the front seat with the small notebook in his lap that contained 14 years of logistics and the notation from December 1st and the three words that had been written there and that had been correct.

Phil said nothing. Dean looked out the car window at Las Vegas moving past outside the glass. Neither of them spoke on the drive back to the hotel. There was nothing to say that the drive did not say on its own. Elvis Presley died eight months later. August 16th, 1977. He was 42 years old. He was not performing when he died.

 He was between things in the way that he had been between things that night in the Copa Room, in the way that everything he was doing in the months before the end was between things. Dean Martin was told the news by phone. He was at his home in Beverly Hills. The person who called him was Phil Barker. He did not respond immediately. He said, “Thank you, Phil.

” He hung up. He sat with it for a while. What he sat with included the December night at the Riviera, which was not the last time he had seen Elvis, but was the time he remembered most clearly in the subsequent years, in the way that certain encounters acquire retroactive weight when the available inventory of encounters closes.

 The empty Copa Room, the full working light, the white tablecloth, the hand on his shoulder at the staff corridor door. 41 years old, he had not known on that December night that the 41 years would not become 42. Nobody had known. Elvis had not known. Whatever it was that Elvis had brought to the Riviera alone without his people, without anyone knowing where he was going, whatever he had needed to hear in the specific way that required coming alone, Dean Martin had not known that the hearing of it was going to be one of the last nights of its kind. You cannot

know these things. That is perhaps the specific weight of a life lived in rooms. You give the room what you have, you receive what the room returns, and you walk out through the staff corridor not knowing which nights will acquire their full meaning later. You simply do the next show, and then when there are no more shows, you sit in the chair and look at the mirror and carry the accounting forward in the way that accountings carry forward when the numbers are not the kind that balance.

The chrome microphone stand at center stage in the Copa Room waiting to be needed by someone on another night.