Bill Miller, 98; Vegas Hotels Entertainment Director, Club Owner

Bill Miller, an innovative Las Vegas hotel entertainment director who booked Marlene Dietrich and Mae West into the Sahara Hotel’s main showroom in the 1950s and turned the concept of the staid lounge act on its head when he booked the supercharged Louis Prima and Keely Smith into the Sahara’s Casbar Lounge, has died. He was 98.

Miller, onetime owner of Bill Miller’s Riviera, a top postwar nightclub overlooking the Hudson River in Fort Lee, N.J., died of natural causes Monday at his home in Palm Springs.

A show business agent who had once been half of a vaudeville dancing duo, Miller bought the Riviera in 1945.

As an agent, he had booked many of his clients into the swank nightclub’s large showroom, and he had no trouble convincing one, the popular crooner Tony Martin, to be his first headliner: He offered Martin $10,000 a week, twice what he was getting at the Copacabana in New York.

“He was the biggest smash you ever saw,” Miller told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1999. Other headliners followed, including Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra.

“Bill Miller’s Riviera was the place,” Joey Bishop recalled Friday. “It was up there with the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana.”

Bishop was working at the Latin Quarter in 1952 when Sinatra asked if he would be his opening act for an engagement at Miller’s club across the river, thus beginning Bishop’s longtime relationship with Sinatra.

“You don’t get to associate with the owners of clubs, but Bill was more than just the owner of a nightclub; he was fun,” Bishop said. “You could do humor about him from the stage and he’d laugh as much as the audience did. He was just a wonderful guy.”

Born in 1904 in Pinsk, Russia, Miller arrived in America with his parents when he was a year old. (Miller said he never knew his real last name, suspecting it fell victim to an immigration official’s mix-up on Ellis Island.)

The family settled in Brooklyn before moving to New Jersey, where Miller’s father, an accomplished building tradesman, made a good living.

Hooked on vaudeville shows, Miller dropped out of high school to pursue a career in show business.

Learning to dance by watching the dancers on stage and then practicing the steps at home, he linked up with another young dancer and formed the duo of Miller and Peterson. They went on to play the legendary Palace Theater, and Miller eventually assembled his own successful musical comedy revue.

But in 1929, after more than a decade, he had had enough of the stage and became an agent.

After Bill Miller’s Riviera closed in 1953 to make way for the Palisades Parkway, Miller bought a 10% interest in the Sahara Hotel and was named entertainment director in 1953. With many top acts being booked into the rival Sands Hotel, Miller told the Review-Journal, “I had to start from scratch.”

The first act he booked was Ray Bolger, a dancer best known for his role as the Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“The trouble with Ray Bolger was that nobody knew how to use him in a nightclub act,” Miller said. “He was a dancer. How many numbers can you do?”

So Miller created an act for Bolger, in which he served as master of ceremonies of a variety show. Bolger, who did a dance before introducing each act, was a hit.

Miller went on to book Donald O’Connor, Marlene Dietrich and, in 1954, Mae West. Then 61 and off the screen for 11 years, West had been touring with a not-so-successful stage revue.

To give the onetime Hollywood sex symbol some Vegas pizazz, Miller hired a group of male bodybuilders to appear with her on stage. Clad only in bathing suits, the musclemen strutted and flexed as West fluttered her false eyelashes and cracked wise.

“I wrote her a song for the very finish,” Miller said. “It went, ‘I’ve got something for the girls: boys, boys, boys.’ ”

West’s buffed “boys” remained a staple of her stage act.

In 1954, Miller offered one of his former clients, trumpet player and singer Louis Prima, and his partner and wife, Keely Smith, a seven-year deal to perform with their backup band, Sam Butera and the Witnesses, in the Sahara’s Casbar Lounge.

When Prima expressed misgivings about working in the lounge, Miller told Prima, “You’re going to make more money than you ever did.”

And, Miller recalled, “there was no one, ever, in the history of show business, that did the business this man did. From midnight until 6 in the morning, you could not get into that club. That really was one of the biggest things that happened in Vegas.... All the lounge acts started with Louis Prima.”

Miller left the Sahara in 1955 and bought an interest in the new Dunes Hotel, where he worked as entertainment director. Working with a tight budget, he booked “Smart Affairs,” a show that started the trend of Lido de Paris, the Follies Bergere and other big production shows.

Miller, who later worked as entertainment director of the Flamingo and International hotels, retired to Palm Springs in the mid-1970s.

He is survived by his fourth wife, Denise; two daughters, Judith Miller of New York and Susan Miller of Desert Hot Springs; a stepson, Jerry Johnson of Pasadena; a sister; and two grandchildren.