Today’s Las Vegas Boulevard not a Siegel kind of Strip
Millicent Siegel Rosen is in her eighties now. Her childhood godmother was the sex symbol Jean Harlow ("she showed up, gave us baths, that kind of stuff, it used to happen quite often"). More famously, her father Benjamin Siegel conceived the Las Vegas Strip.
Her father was assassinated when Millicent was a teenager, and books and movies have chronicled his bootlegging-and-guns era amid construction of the Flamingo hotel.
Rosen declined Hollywood requests to consult on films, as "they thought I should do it because of who was making it, so my lawyer told them where to go, he was very polite."
On Tuesday, downtown's El Cortez hotel will celebrate the opening of a restaurant named Siegel 1941 featuring artifacts and private home movies of the Siegels.
Rosen tells me, in her youth, she and her father would eat in a long-gone Italian restaurant ("I don't remember the name"), while he planned to tailor Las Vegas after Palm Springs.
"I remember coming out here as a kid when it was a real, rinky dinky, ugly, ugly downtown area. It was just a miner's town," she said.
Siegel's vision, and the Rat Pack, convinced tourists to cocktail in night furs and jewelry.
Today's Las Vegas Boulevard isn't a Siegel kind of Strip.
"It's nothing what my father envisioned," she said. "Now it's all just big businesses and high rises."
If she were given the opportunity to speak to hotel executives about what Vegas should look like, Benjamin Siegel's daughter wouldn't take it.
"They wouldn't even listen. Come on," she said, laughing a little. "Their bottom line is money. The big Ferris wheel and all that other junk is what they're putting in here. They want it to be a *playground*," she said, delivering Buddy Hackett-worthy italics to the punchline "playground."
Big corporate people aren't her people.
"It's like Donald Trump wants to be president. It's getting funnier by degrees," she cracked.
"People must be stupid if they're going to vote for him. All he has is a big mouth. He makes a lot of money, but who's to say he would make a good president. He could probably get us into war faster than anybody else."
She doesn't have any favorite politicians.
Rosen moved back here from California six or seven years ago, because her son-in-law was ill, ("I'm lucky he's still here,") after he and Rosen's daughter opened a lighting business.
Workers in her house stole from her ("they got jewelry"), and "stupid people" have tried to con her ("I called the FBI, somebody was writing to me, they stopped that.")
Rosen hates the heat and spends leisure hours doing "normal things in Vegas," movies, dinners with friends, shows.
Her all-time favorite Vegas performers have been Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, and "Jersey Boys."
Is there any important message she wants to give the world to improve Las Vegas?
"No. It's corporations, and there's nothing you can say to them. Whatever they want to do, they're able to do — legitimately."
But she's a fan of the Epstein family running El Cortez (which her father briefly co-owned).
"They've been very good to me, and they're doing the right thing by my father, otherwise they wouldn't have ever got anything from me," she said. "I applaud the two girls that run it, (Alex and Katie Epstein). They are lovely, lovely women."
Contact Doug Elfman at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman. Find him on Twitter: @VegasAnonymous.
