“I loved the theater, and in those days it was all live shows, no movies or anything. He took a few, but he usually spent the half-buck to see a vaudeville show. His father obligingly provided him with 50 cents a week to take violin lessons. “But I never remember ever being hungry at home.”īy the end of his second year in high school, Miller had already decided on a show business career, and he dropped out of school to pursue it. “We went through the Depression,” he says. David Miller was an accomplished building tradesman and was soon making a good living. The family settled first in Brooklyn, then moved to Jersey City. “And that’s as far as we know about it,” says Miller. Somehow, the immigration official heard “Miller” and that became the family’s American name. He suspects it was lost at Ellis Island, when an official asked David his name, and he instead told him his occupation. Miller doesn’t know his original family name. “I was 1 year old when they brought me over.” William Miller was born in 1904 in Pinsk, Russia, the son of David and Lena, Jews who wanted to get to America. “People came to see her, but she didn’t really have an act,” he shrugs. He admits to booking only one real flop - Zsa Zsa Gabor. Not only were Mae West and her muscular minions a crowd-pleaser in Las Vegas, they subsequently played to sellout crowds in New York and Atlantic City. “It went, ‘I’ve got something for the girls: boys, boys, boys.` ” “I wrote her a song for the very finish,” laughs Miller. West leered, inspected lats, delts and pects and fluttered her eyelashes in excitement. Clad only in bathing trunks, they posed, flexed and strutted. Miller hired a group of spectacularly buffed-out male bodybuilders. Her last major screen appearance was 11 years behind her, she was 61 years old, and was traveling with a marginally successful stage revue. Miller, a relatively robust 94, allowed that time was on his side when he booked West at the Sahara in 1954. “For instance, do you think you could ever get Mae West to play in a nightclub? I did.”Īdds his former colleague, Bill Layne, “He was an innovator he brought in stars nobody else could get to play Las Vegas, and by doing that, he permanently raised the standard for Las Vegas entertainment.” “I brought in people nobody believed could do a nightclub act,” says Bill Miller, the man who virtually invented the Las Vegas lounge show. “Why don’t you come up and see me some time? Make it Tuesday, that’s amateur night.” But she was a screen star, not a nightclub performer. She would slither up to a front row customer, give him the up-and-down scan, and issue her trademark invitation.

And, of course, to hear her famed witticisms.

They came to see flashy costumes wrapped tightly around her generous hourglass figure. Seductive 1930s screen actress Mae West still looked pretty good by the mid-1950s, enough so that she still was able to pack the guys in just by showing up.

Nobody's Looking by J.R. Miller