Donn Arden’s Art: Beauty, Disasters Wrapped in Extravagance

Donn Arden’s ultimate triumph, the capper of a 60-year career in show business, is still on the drawing board--and, he admits wistfully, will probably stay there.

When Arden was hired by MGM to do the biggest, most expensive club show in history for the opening of the Las Vegas MGM Grand, he spent several months reviewing MGM’s entire film library for ideas. The most spectacular idea he could conceive came from MGM’s most spectacular movie, “Gone With the Wind.”

“I was going to burn Atlanta on the stage,” he said almost reverently in his plush Mission Viejo home last week. “I had approval from MGM and the money to stage it. All I needed was permission from the Margaret Mitchell estate. And they wouldn’t give it to me.”

In creating and producing the extravaganzas that carry his name in Las Vegas and Paris--and before that in nightclubs in virtually every major city in the world--Arden hasn’t given up often, or easily. Among other things, he’s sunk the Titanic (twice), burned San Francisco, crashed the Hindenburg and brought down Samson’s temple. “I’m famous,” he says matter-of-factly, “for beautiful girls and major disasters.”

But besides the burning of Atlanta, there’s one major disaster he’ll never touch on stage: the tragic fire at the MGM hotel in Las Vegas.

Arden was there, sleeping in a suite on the 10th floor when the fire broke out early in the morning of Nov. 20, 1980. He had been creating and rehearsing the current MGM (now Bally’s) show, “Jubilee” for 18 months and was only two weeks away from opening. At midnight, he had driven to the airport to pick up his producing associate, Margaret Kelly (known professionally as Madame Bluebell) who had just flown in from Paris. They talked until 3:30, and Arden was in a deep sleep when a hammering on his door awakened him about 7 a.m. “Someone was shouting, ‘There’s a fire!’ over and over. Bluebell was in the next suite with a connecting door, and it took me a long time of beating on it to wake her. She put a mink coat over her nightgown, and I put a bathrobe over my shorts and we went out into the hall.”

They found pandemonium, people milling about in the smoke, stumbling toward the elevators. Then they met a surge of people coming back, saying there was no escape in that direction. By that time, loudspeakers outside were telling guests to stay in their rooms and plug up cracks with wet towels.

“Most of these people had run into the hall without keys and their doors had locked behind them,” recalls Arden. “But I had my key, so I herded about 30 or 40 people into my suite.”

He recalls oddments of detail of the next chaotic hour with the eye of a showman. The enormously fat lady who sat in a chair and suggested they just stay calm and call room service. The man he caught rifling the drawers in his bedroom and pocketing his jewelry. Breaking out Scotch and gin from his bar to soak the towels they all wore over their faces when the water taps no longer worked. A man crashing a chair through Arden’s bedroom window when he couldn’t get the sliding glass door open. Whenever panic started to appear, Arden assigned people to tasks, just as he did every night on stage. “A few times,” he says, “I had to slap hysterical women, but for the most part, people were remarkably calm. That was partly because for a while, at least, we didn’t know how bad it was.”

When they saw the flames licking out from the building below them, they stood on the balcony and watched the ladders snake upward. “They were only supposed to go nine stories,” Arden says, “but somehow they got up to us.” The man who had been stealing Arden’s jewelry went down first and Arden never saw him again. “After that, the people with the most guts went first. You think awhile before you climb down 10 floors on a ladder.”

Finally, there were only four people left: Arden, Bluebell, the fat lady (“who couldn’t possibly have gone down that ladder”) and a young man. That’s when a fireman burst into the room and led them to a stairway fire exit “They had strung light bulbs every 20 feet,” says Arden, “and we plunged into this black hole with towels wrapped around our faces and felt our way down the cord, from light to light, for 10 floors. When I got to the bottom, I was numb, and I remember standing on the street and watching the smoke pour out of my theater and wondering if there was anything left.”

There wasn’t much. Although the theater structure was intact, all of the sets and costumes burned, and the interior had to be gutted and restored. After making it through “the worst Christmas holiday in my life,” Arden took his staff to Paris to put together a new Lido show, expecting it to be at least a year before the MGM theater was back in business. Instead, he was called in late April to start the whole “Jubilee” process over again. That was almost seven years ago, and the show is still selling out nightly.

A lifelong bachelor, Arden married his craft in his early teens when he started tap dancing for quarters in the speak-easies around St. Louis, where he was born in 1917. His father died when Donn (the extra “n” was added early in his career to jazz up his name) was very small, and his dancing helped support his mother. It also helped pay for lessons from Robert Alton, who later left St. Louis to become one of Hollywood’s best known choreographers--and whom Arden still regards as both a mentor and an inspiration.

In the early ‘30s, Arden won a local Charleston contest, along with a St. Louis girl named Ginger Rogers. It launched a vaudeville career for both of them. After several years of solo (“the Fred Astaire-type”) dancing, Arden’s agent told him he needed a female partner--so he got four: two sets of twins. Known as “Donn Arden and the Artists Models,” the act was so successful that it was held over repeatedly.

“That’s when I first got into staging and choreographing,” Arden says. “We had to change costumes and routines when we were held over. Staying in one place felt so good that I figured, why not add 10 more girls and be a house line? So we did that, and sometimes we’d stay three for four years at a time at the same vaudeville house.”

Arden’s style evolved over those years. He put together house lines for a whole string of theaters (“I once had 12 shows running at the same time in the U.S.”), dancing less and choreographing and staging more. He moved to New York and “cornered the girl market--before modeling came in. I wanted ‘em tall and leggy. I wouldn’t hire anyone under 5-foot-9 for a dance line. If a girl was beautiful, she knew I’d dress her better than anyone else. I’d spend $50 on shoes for my girls in those Depression days.”

After taking out several years to produce shows for American armed forces during World War II, Arden took his special brand of genius to major nightclubs across the country, working with virtually every big name in show business, from Sophie Tucker to Frank Sinatra. (“I worked with Dean Martin before he got his nose fixed and Danny Thomas when he was called Amos Jacobs.”)

During this period, he experienced one of his few failures. “I tried and tried to choreograph a Broadway musical, but they thought I was too young--and besides, it took too much time to romance the backers. I always wanted a Tony, but you have to do what you’re equipped to do--and my forte was the spectacular.”

A group of French businessmen restoring the Lido in Paris recognized that fact and brought Arden to France in 1948 to put together his first total stage production. Its success brought him to Las Vegas two years later, where he broke all sorts of ground at the Desert Inn by enticing such headliners as Danny Kaye, Jack Benny, Betty Grable, Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton to make their first appearances there. Then, in 1958, he was hired by the Stardust Hotel to bring the Lido de Paris show to Las Vegas--and his course was set for many years.

“Before I got there, Vegas had burlesque but no high-class girl shows. I used tall girls because you can’t put headdresses on little girls, and besides, they are lost on those huge stages. I’m into glitter. I’m very expensive. I can’t work with rags. But I don’t believe in complete nudity, either. I like to leave a little to the imagination.”

In between the girls, Arden used specialty acts, many of them recruited from circuses in Europe. Probably the most famous is Siegfried and Roy, who worked for Arden at the Stardust for almost a decade before signing one of the richest contracts in show business history with a new hotel now being built in Las Vegas. The Arden-type production worked so well that it sparked some basic changes in the Las Vegas entertainment scene.

Arden got rid of dinner shows (“my show deserves more respect than that”), and grievously wounded the headliner syndrome by demonstrating the longtime drawing power of the ensemble girl show. (“I used to do style shows behind headliners. Then I took over the show. I’ve taken a lot of showrooms away from the headliners.”)

To some extent, Arden is a victim of his own success. He was hired to first do “Hallelujah Hollywood” then “Jubilee” at the former MGM Grand in Las Vegas and performed the same service in Reno with a show called, “Hello, Hollywood, Hello.” He was set to refurbish all of his Nevada shows when the hotels changed hands and the new owners decided they didn’t want to tamper with a good thing. As a result, the Paris Lido show is in its fifth year, Stardust its 11th, Reno its 11th and Bally’s in Las Vegas in its seventh.

And Arden divides his time between his Palm Springs and Mission Viejo homes, living splendidly from his fees off these long-running shows. “It’s a great gravy train,” he says simply.

Arden is a slight, sartorial man, with a cherubic ruddy face and an elastic spring in his step that belies his 71 years and speaks eloquently of his dancing background. He still keeps in touch with all his shows, checking them out in person every three months and meeting regularly at his home with his company managers, Fluff La Coque and Jillian Hrushowi.

Like many of Arden’s associates, they’ve been with him for several decades. This is especially true of his dancers, many of whom have made a career of working with Arden because, as one of them told me, “he has always treated us with care and respect.”

“When they no longer want to dance,” Arden says, “some of them marry well, some go off to universities. They aren’t Playgirls or hookers. I always had great respect for them, but I never interfered with their lives as long as they gave me top performance on stage.”

They come to visit him now, sometimes with husbands and children. And they talk about the evening Arden had two knights jousting on stage and the wrong horse fell down and panicked the other and both horses went charging out into the audience, running over table tops. Or the night Arden was doing a tropical number and had colored the fake rain with a chemical that blew out over the audience and ruined a lot of expensive furs. Or opening night of “Jubilee,” when the staircase elevator broke down in the finale and the dancers were trapped below stage in a maze of wires and cables.

Arden was sitting in the audience to watch the show that night. The curtain was dropped on the confusion, and Arden ran through the audience, squeezed under the curtain, told the cast to hold their places, told the audience to stay seated because he wanted them to see the finale of his show, then set out to pick up the pieces. Twenty minutes later, the curtain went up and the finale played the way Donn Arden had designed it.

Arden still has an eye for a beautiful, tall girls, “but I don’t have any place to put them.” He’s afraid that inflated prices have made it almost impossible to mount a real Arden show again. But he’s ready.