The Las Vegas Hilton is no more. Oh, the building is still there but they lost their right to use the Hilton name and now the same place is the Las Vegas Hotel and Casino — or LVH for short. Few will probably notice and if you tell a cabbie there to take you to the Las Vegas Hilton, that's where he'll drop you off.
An interesting bit of history. It was the biggest hotel in the world when it opened its doors in 1969 as The International. Barbra Streisand was its first headliner and that naturally raised the problem, "How do you follow Barbra?" Easy: You bring in Elvis. In 1971, the Hilton Corporation bought the International and just before they renamed it, it was used for many of the scenes in the James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever. In that movie, there was a Howard Hughes-like entrepreneur named Willard Whyte who operated a hotel called The Whyte House. For the exterior shots of The Whyte House, they used a view of the International and did a matte painting to add several stories (and a big sign that said THE WHYTE HOUSE) to the top of the International. But of course that was only on film. They didn't actually build onto the building.
One of the first times I was in Vegas, I had dinner with a gentleman of advanced years who had been a casino host and showroom manager at the Sands throughout the sixties. He had loads of great tales about Frank, Dino, Sammy and all the guys. The subject of the Vegas Hilton came up and he said, "You know about the secret floors there, right?" I said I didn't. He explained to me that while most people thought the Hilton had 30 floors, it was actually more like 34 or maybe even 36. Most elevators, he said, didn't go up to the secret floors but if you had a special key they only gave to the highest of rollers, you could get access. What went on up there? "You don't want to know," he replied. It was like a super-casino with drugs and hookers and gambling tables where it was not unusual for someone to wager a cool million on one spin of the wheel."
The way he described it, it sounded a little…let's say "hard to believe." I asked him how he found out about these super-secret floors. He said, "They gave away the secret in that James Bond film. The way they photographed the hotel, you could see the extra stories." It took a few seconds for me to realize he was not putting me on.
That's when I asked him, "So how is it that if I go over and look at the Vegas Hilton, I won't see these extra stories?"
He hunched over the table like he was letting me in on the biggest secret on the planet. Then he said, "Listen…you go down to the Frontier and see two guys in the showroom there named Siegfried and Roy. You'll see them make an entire elephant disappear into thin air. But they don't really make the elephant disappear. It's a trick. And I don't know how they do that but if people can make it look like an elephant has disappeared, they can sure as hell make a 36-story hotel look like it only has thirty stories."