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ent001210-016

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ent001210-016
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    University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Libraries

    THE NEW ZIEGFELD The Story of Jack Entratter Pageant Magazine 1953 Some months ago when Tallulah Bankhead agreed to do the first night club act of her career at the. Sands Hotel in Las Vegas for an incredible $20,000 a week, the Broadway prophets shuddered and dourly predicted, as the critics recalled later, that the producer would "fall flat on his face with the off-beat booking." Tallulah herself doubted the innovation so much that she had a violent attack of the shingles on opening night, kept a doctor in the wings, and hoarsely croaked to the audiences "Dahlings - I never thought I'd be shilling for a gambler?╟╓s joint." Tallulah was a smash, nevertheless, broke the house record and was subsequently offered $100,000 to do a similar show for two weeks in Texas. Variety critic Joe Schoenfeld phrased it neatly; "Bankhead was banknite for the Sands Hotel." The Houdini who pulled off this entertainment "unpossibility" is not one of the Broadway or Hollywood immortals, but a six-foot-four, 240-pound ex-New York bouncer named Jack Entratter, who at 39 is a mere novitiate in show business. But in the garish neon .gambling world of Las. Vegas, Nevada, where hypnotized citizens left more than $122,000,000 last year and where, as one comic put it, the bus boys carry monogrammed Kleenex, Jack is the man with the biggest beanstalk. -more-