Best viewed at screen resolution of 1024 x 768

Nightclub revues had been a mainstay in Parisian culture since the late 19th century. After World War I, they began influencing other cities with their sophisticated and cosmopolitan displays. The nightclub spectaculars eventually reached the United States via New York. It wasn't long before they became a welcome and permanent addition to Las Vegas entertainment. No other icon epitomizes Las Vegas like the showgirl. It was in Paris, however, that the showgirl and her nightclub first evolved.

All Las Vegas Strip hotel showrooms had their own "lines" of dancers, who performed around the headliners. Donn Arden recalled later, "In those days I was running a girl factory. I was doing shows in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Montreal. At the Desert Inn we didn't do big production numbers. What we did was an opening, a center production, and a finale, and we had a couple of acts in between. We were basically book covers for the shows." The shows became so popular that competition soon developed. The most prominent figures in this competition, however, were Harold Minsky and Donn Arden.

A main show at the Desert Inn was Minsky's Follies. Minsky came from a family tradition of burlesque, and more than anyone pushed the limits of nudity in American revues. Minsky's shows developed around the striptease, another French idiom, but after his troubles with anti-vice squads in New York he tamed his shows and draped them with all the accouterment of the extravaganza revue, which had become the tradition of the Paris shows. The name Minsky has been synonymous with showbiz for as long as we can remember.

Jack Entratter was Las Vegas' resident showman and producer par excellence, who established his Sands Hotel - a Place in the Sun - as one of the hottest entertainment spots in the country. And he had a sharp eye for women. As show producer, Entratter established a chorus line, the Copa Girls, which he personally selected.

Jack Entratter was famed for the amount of money he spent on entertainment at the Sands. The salaries, the productions, set the scale on the strip. Not surprising, given his background, he also served as executive director for entertainment, advertising and publicity of his "Miracle in the Desert," the altogether spectacular Dunes. According to Gottesman's pre-opening publicity, "In entertainment the Dunes strikes out in a bold new direction. The Dunes is bringing Broadway to Las Vegas in a lavish, high, wide and handsome manner that signals a complete departure from night club tradition."

The competition between the hotels on the east side of the Strip and those on the west over the issue of nudity signaled changes in the marketing of entertainment in Las Vegas.The opening of the Lido de Paris at the new Stardust in 1958 ushered in the big show as a staple of Las Vegas hotel entertainment. It was a Parisian Music Hall show, staged by an American nightclub producer, Donn Arden, and brought to Las Vegas because it was "French." And topless. It was an instant sensation and ran for over twenty-years.

In Las Vegas, as in Paris, the showgirl became a popular image, the town's glamour girls gracing the covers of entertainment magazines, advertisements and billboards, a centerpiece of the hotels' and the city's promotion and public relations. Instead of Toulouse-Lautrec, Las Vegas had the hotel publicists and the Las Vegas News Bureau who promoted Las Vegas as a tourist spot by depicting its own beautiful women, in costume, or in bathing suits seated poolside. They have been interviewed, photographed, their real lives, careers, and ambitions chronicled. In short, they have become a genre of local literature and culture which needn't be added to here.

Is it camp? Kitsch? Or simply an aspect of Las Vegas' billboard sex industry? A unique mix of corniness with eroticism? According to New York Times Magazine, as Las Vegas turns into a theme park, showgirls now compete with water slides and volcanoes as tourist attractions, although they remain a reliable "niche of old fashion smut," the risqué show that attracted Parisians (and American tourists) to Parisian clubs, and now attracts middle class couples from Dayton to Las Vegas -- thrilling and provocative, or at least hearkening back to a time when they were.