Las Vegas Loves Who?

LAS VEGAS —  Five nights a week, just after 8 p.m., Danny Gans begins the same sprint. He takes the stage in the Danny Gans Theatre at the Mirage hotel and casino and transforms himself from a nobody, the guy you haven’t heard of, into the $10-million-a-year Vegas headliner that he knows himself to be.

He becomes an unambiguously loved, new-millennium Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr.--the “Entertainer of the Year,” as Gans is billed on the Strip.

He is “Entertainer of the Year” as immutable fact, as if it doesn’t matter what year we’re in.

Much about Gans’ daily life feeds into this mantra, this constant psyche job. In addition to the workouts and the dieting, Gans has certain rituals for the protection of his voice. He carries bottled water like an extra appendage and consults the best throat men in the desert. He even considered having his family learn sign language so that he could remain a husband and father without having to use his vocal cords.

What is he? Gans is an impressionist with a seven-piece band, but if he was only that, he wouldn’t be selling out his 1,265-seat theater, at times weeks in advance, at $80 to $100 a ticket. People come because of the tremendous word-of-mouth Gans has generated, and because his advertising on the Strip is inescapable--the face and the name on every passing cab roof like a CNN news crawl.

But they also come because Gans has a peculiar talent: He is good at sounding like other people, or at least appearing to sound like other people. Lots and lots of them.

On the Strip, tribute shows abound. What is different about Gans is his packaging: He is not just Frank and Sammy and Dean, but Frank and Sammy and Dean and, say, Hootie & the Blowfish. And Macy Gray. And Johnny Mathis. And Creed (if it’s a Creed kind of night). And Forrest Gump. He is whomever you need him to be, giving and giving, and usually no longer than 30 seconds or a minute.

In the course of his show, Gans does 50 or 60 voices, mostly of singers. It is impersonation not as satire but as a breathtaking achievement--entertainers of the last 50 years put in a blender and presented as a mass-culture smoothie.

Sure, Sinatra was Sinatra. But Gans is Sinatra doing “Hakuna Matata” from “The Lion King.”

Gans just doesn’t see himself as an impressionist. It fails to evoke what he does, he feels. He will tell you that he is taking the audience on an emotional journey. When he does a dramatic reading of Al Pacino’s climactic speech in “Scent of a Woman,” the audience, properly stirred, cheers. When he does Clinton, post-Monica, singing the Gloria Gaynor hit “I Will Survive,” they laugh. When he does Henry Fonda from “On Golden Pond,” they cry.

Some people think the show is pure schmaltz--fascinating, in a kind of horrifying way. But Gans will tell you that his show isn’t all that different in spirit from “The Producers.”

Whatever it is, Gans has been doing it in Vegas permanently since 1996, when he opened as the resident headliner at the Stratosphere. In the years since, he has upgraded--first to the Rio and then to the Mirage--and has become a so-called “destination act,” a key cog in the billions generated by the estimated 35 million people who visit the Strip each year.

At the Mirage, drawing customers from other properties used to be Siegfried & Roy’s domain, but since Gans showed up more than two years ago, the coiffed tiger tamers-illusionists have been forced into the somewhat galling position of sharing the marquee.

Gans performs between 75 and 90 minutes (he is off Mondays and Fridays). His band is a finely tuned machine, churning out the same bright notes in the same precise increments night after night after night. Shows start at 8 and Gans rarely takes the stage later than, say, 8:04. A digital clock at the foot of the stage, ticking off the seconds and visible only to Gans, tells him when he’s pushing 90. As much as luring them in, Vegas entertainment is also about getting people back out there--to dine or shop or gamble.

Gans is part of this continuum, part of Vegas’ growth as a mega-entertainment theme park. As the city tries to lose its kitsch entertainment image, shows have gotten classier and more elaborate. But they have also grown more commercial. In today’s Vegas, in the biggest showrooms, you aren’t shown to a table by a maitre d’, and you don’t have dinner and drinks. You buy your tickets online, and when you see Blue Man Group at Luxor, or Cirque du Soleil’s “O” at Bellagio, you sit in a theater that could be anywhere and afterward you are supposed to buy a T-shirt or cap or video, which highlights what you’ve just seen.

The rampant commercialism makes sense and is only lamentable if you have a frame of reference--the “old” Vegas of Louis Prima and Shecky Greene. Today, when authenticity is replaced by a hyperactive, pseudo-authenticity, Gans is ideal. He is more than just Vegas-ideal, he is America ideal--as painless and convenient as a debit card swipe.

And yet, despite his Vegas acclaim, or perhaps because of it, Gans remains outside the context of most media. He is big business, incorporated as DG Entertainment. But he has never made it onto “The Tonight Show” or David Letterman, and is probably less well-known than a winner on “Survivor.”

As if to make up for this, Gans surrounds himself with totems of his fame-by-proxy. Autographed sports memorabilia (a basketball from Dick Vitale, a framed photo of Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz) is displayed in his dressing room, which has the look and feel of a Marina del Rey pied-a-terre. The photo gallery outside the dressing room stretches down hallways: Gans with Mel Brooks and wife Anne Bancroft. Gans with Sylvester Stallone. Gans with Kevin Costner. In each photo, Gans’ smiling image symbolizes both his status and, once again, that nagging question: Who is this guy and how did he get here?

He is, it turns out, several different things, all of which are very American. He is the boy who fantasizes about becoming a professional baseball player but never makes it, and who then marshals his will and reinvents himself--as a devout Christian and, later, as an entertainer in the grand sense of Sammy or Frank or Dean.

Such is the Vegas epoch in which Gans exists: The legends are dead, but the imitators are alive, soothing us with their instant nostalgia.

“This is the Warhol argument,” said Penn Jillette, who is one-half of the gleefully perverse magic act Penn & Teller. The duo recently began a long-term run at the Rio.

“It’s as though Andy Warhol did not bring you the famous Campbell’s soup painting,” Jillette said of Gans, “but instead took an ordinary Campbell’s soup can, redid the label to look like Campbell’s soup, and sold it right back to the same people as the same soup.”

When Gans signed with the Mirage, he became royalty at Shadow Creek Golf Course, his clubhouse locker in the same neighborhood as those of comedian Billy Crystal and the Australian billionaire Kerry Packer.

Shadow Creek was built in 1990 by casino mogul Steve Wynn as a golf haven for his high-roller customers. Today, green fees are still $500 and you are still shuttled by limousine 15 minutes off the Strip, into the beige nowhere. There, behind gates, exists a non sequitur in the desert--an imported world of pine trees, bucolic creeks, whispering willows and geese.

On a recent Monday morning at about 10, Gans teed off at the par-four first hole, and drove his ball straight and true and more than 250 yards. He was with two playing buddies--Andrew Abshier, a concierge at the Venetian, and David Graham, pastor at the Christian City Church. They kibitzed while Gans locked himself in battle with the course. He had left himself about 140 yards to the green on the first hole and was going to use his pitching wedge, but his caddie--young, earnest--gently suggested a nine-iron. Gans took the advice and promptly sailed his second shot over the green, bogeying the hole.

This, then, is Danny Gans at 45: good-looking and rich, someone who plays a lot of golf and can count on at least five standing ovations in his life each week. Gans prefers other archetypes: Little League dad, hard-working entertainer, Christian family man. Gans, who grew up in Torrance, lives with his wife, Julie, and their three children (Amy, 14; Andrew, 12; and Emily, 7) in Henderson, Nev., 12 miles from the Strip, in a pricey, mountainside development called Roma Hills.

His three-story home is done like a French countryside manor, with a faux log cabin on top of the house. The cabin is called the Lodge Room and is one of several places in Gans’ life that he goes to be alone. Down from the main home is a carriage house for a huge private gym and classic car collection--the Viper, the ’55 Chevy Bel Air, etc.

Gans had arrived at Shadow Creek in a custom-rebuilt black Ford pickup, with a “golf coffin” in the cab for his clubs and a trunk door whose underside featured Gans’ logo, “The Man of Many Voices,” over a drawing of red socks and spats.

The nickname is a show-biz trick, for what entertainer wants to be known as “The Man of Five Voices”? The speed with which Gans moves from one voice to another tends to obfuscate their accuracy. He opens with a taste of Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown,” and from there he’s off and running, a human jukebox: Joe Cocker into Blood, Sweat & Tears into the Temptations into James Brown into Ray Charles into Tom Jones into Garth Brooks into Michael McDonald into Janet Jackson into Al Jarreau into Anita Baker into Aaron Neville into Macy Gray into Prince into Hootie into Michael Bolton into Stevie Wonder. Then comes a comedy interlude, impressions of George Burns and Jimmy Stewart. “I try to start the show with total opposites,” Gans said. “Left and right, left and right.”

Pleasing the audience is what it’s all about, and pleased they are. At the Mirage, you can’t get to the pool or to Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden without passing the Danny Gans Theatre, where a television monitor runs clips of his show in a constant loop. To watch people as they walk past is to get a clue to his success: All day, small crowds gather by the TV, mesmerized by Gans’ magical powers. From there it’s only a short walk to the box office, and the sad but titillating news that tickets for tonight’s show are sold out.

You could reduce the audience to cultural stereotype--middle America, with walking-around money--but you would be wrong, says Steve Wynn: “Those are stereotypes that always fail on closer inspection.”

As the former chairman of Mirage Resorts Inc., Wynn’s casino empire once included Bellagio, the Mirage, the Golden Nugget and others; in May 2000, the company was bought by MGM Grand Inc., and Wynn is now trying to get back in the game with La Reve, a resort that would be built on the former Desert Inn site.

In Wynn’s expansive view of Vegas entertainment, there are no demographics or taste classes. There are only people of all shades, showing up on a “carnival midway” to be dazzled. It was Wynn who turned his world-class art collection into a tourist attraction at Bellagio, and it was Wynn who signed Gans to an eight-year contract at the Mirage, converting ballroom space to accommodate a new theater and lobby.

By then, Gans had gone from the Stratosphere to the off-Strip property the Rio, where he’d proven his might as a destination act.

In the deal between Gans and the Mirage, Gans gets 90% of the ticket revenue from his shows. (Estimates of his income range between $10 million and $15 million.) The deal is a not-uncommon arrangement known as “four-walling,” wherein the entertainer incurs all production and marketing costs and the hotel gets the foot traffic--the 1,265 Danny Gans fans who will, the hotel hopes, stay afterward to dine or shop or gamble.

Wynn says that it cost $12 million to build Gans the space he needed. More delicately, there was the matter of how to accommodate the ego needs of both Gans and Siegfried & Roy, who have been at the Mirage for more than 10 years. In the end, the hotel’s marquee grew by 50 feet, and Siegfried & Roy retained top billing. Gans, who appears underneath them on “the big board,” has billboards on less-prominent parts of the property.

“The last thing I wanted to do was let Ziggy or Roy feel like they were being” mistreated, Wynn said. “I kept saying to Ziggy, ‘How wonderful would it be to have entertainment [on the nights] you’re off?’ Danny’s a big star that’s completely different from you. Wouldn’t that be nice to have him in the same building?’ ”

Although Gans performs a grueling 46 weeks a year, his critics say the entertainer helps ensure that demand stays high by performing only five shows a week, half the amount of some top acts on the Strip. (“If this kid tried to do more, he’d punk out,” Wynn said of Gans.)

Regardless, part of the Danny Gans Experience is coming to Las Vegas and not being able to get a ticket to see Danny Gans. Comps--the free tickets given to high rollers--are another impediment to the average consumer. One night, I sat next to a guy who identified himself as a bookie from Puerto Rico. This was the sixth time he’d seen Gans, he said, and while he seemed a bit weary of the casino’s largess, he also applauded every time Gans hit the first few notes of an entertainer he loved.

“The attention span of our audience is in general shorter, because they’re so excited to be here,” said Pat Caddick, who was Gans’ keyboardist and collaborator from 1993 to 2000.

Caddick, a respected arranger who now works with other Strip entertainers, including Clint Holmes at Harrah’s, remains in awe of Gans’ ability to hear voices at perfect pitch and spit them back.

They had met, Caddick says, when Gans was opening for Lola Falana and forged a bond during seven years--through work and religion and family. Shortly before opening at the Mirage, Gans and his manager, Chip Lightman, asked each band member to sign new contracts that included detailed provisions regarding confidentiality agreements and the forfeiture of any creative rights to the show’s content.

Caddick took the contract to a lawyer and eventually sued when the show went on without him. Oddly, given that Gans’ show depends on the use of other people’s material, the legal battle hinged in part on Caddick’s claims of copyright infringement--that he had, for instance, written segues between songs--but more generally Caddick’s dispute with Gans sounds like the result of a bad divorce, with Caddick claiming Gans had promised financial security in exchange for his loyalty.

Asked about Caddick one evening, Gans, who was in his dressing room before a show, stiffened. “He was a musician in the show,” he said. “I didn’t fire him. He didn’t accept my [contract] offer.” Soon Lightman appeared, and Gans said he had been asked to comment on the lawsuit. “It’s so insignificant,” Lightman said. “Literally, it’s just a ridiculous lawsuit.”

A week later, an arbitrator, acting according to an existing contract between Gans and Caddick, ruled against Caddick’s claims of copyright infringement. But the judge did award Caddick $25,000 in back pay, for services rendered. (The status of the federal lawsuit is unresolved.) Gans and Lightman, meanwhile, immediately sent out a press release to the Vegas media declaring total victory.

Danny Gans’ father, Sid Gans, tries to come to his son’s show every Wednesday and Saturday. Sometimes, Sid Gans turns 85 and is introduced. Other times, he has recently turned 85 and is introduced. Often, Sid Gans gets up and does an “impromptu” version of “Singin’ in the Rain.” He gets a standing ovation.

On the phone, Sid Gans said: “I could blow my nose and get a standing ovation.”

He lives in Las Vegas, in a home bought by his son. His wife, Alta, Gans’ mother, is in a nursing home. Sid Gans goes to see her every day, and his wife talks to him “with her eyes.” They met, Sid Gans said, when he was performing and spotted a gorgeous woman sitting near the stage. He told the audience: “I’m going to marry that woman.”

Sid Gans said he got his start in show business in the Catskills, in the 1940s, performing first as a drummer and then as a comedian. “I had a wonderful sister who stole material for me,” he said. He was in show business from age 18 to 35, at which point he took a job selling televisions. It took him to Southern California, and the family settled in Torrance.

From an early age, Sid Gans said, Danny wanted to play third base for the Dodgers. Today, he seems to bleed for his son’s lost baseball career, which took him from Torrance High School to Mount San Antonio Junior College to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and then, briefly, to the minor leagues in Canada.

Sid Gans can tell you the name of the player who stepped on his son’s Achille’s heel, ending his baseball career.

It was in the hospital after that incident that Danny Gans says he met a man in the next bed who had cancer in his legs. According to the story, Gans told the man about his career-ending injury, and the man told Gans that God had put him in the hospital with cancerous legs for a reason, to tell Gans that “God has another plan for you.”

“But you’ve gotta put him first in your life, which you didn’t do in baseball,” the man told Gans. “Baseball was your god. If you put him first, he will make you successful and happy and fulfilled, outside of baseball.”

Since then, Gans has rededicated himself to the Lord. He calls himself a devout Christian, and forms a prayer circle with his band before each performance.

Sid Gans is Jewish. He says he’s happy that his son found spiritual guidance, but he isn’t interested. “They’re pushin’ me with the church business,” Sid Gans said of his family. “Every two months I’d go to the church with them and I’d sit there aggravated.”

But he loves his son. He named him Danny, “because you can’t be mad with a person when you say ‘Danny.’ ”

There is an anecdote that Danny Gans likes to repeat: When he was starting out in show business, Sid Gans took him to Vegas to see Sammy Davis Jr.

“He says, ‘Do you get it?’ ” Gans said his father asked him afterward. “I said, ‘Yeah. You think I should be a variety entertainer.’ He says, ‘Bingo.’ I says, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘Because he’s going to be dead soon, Frank’s no longer doing it, Dean’s no longer doing it, who’s left? You name me one person that has a live show that makes you laugh and cry, there’s music in it, it appeals to all ages.’ ”

It was a Friday afternoon, an off day, and Gans was eating one of his protein-rich “garbage” salads in California Pizza Kitchen at the Mirage. He was sporting a bloodshot eye--the result, he said, of pushing too hard on stage the night before and bursting a blood vessel.

Without his makeup and the stage lights, Gans looked less burnished, less pumped up (on stage, he wears a form-fitting, sweat-resistant dark shirt to accentuate his biceps and pectorals). His voice sounded thrashed, like someone who’d been rooting too loudly for the Lakers the night before.

If Sinatra and Elvis treated the Strip as a playground, Gans makes a point of noting that he does not. “I finish my show, I write my notes, I take my shower, eat my egg whites, I go out the back door to my car, and I go home,” he said.At home, Gans said, he will sometimes leave out a note for his kids saying, “Daddy’s not talking today,” just so they know. Both Gans and his wife said the sign language project ultimately proved unfeasible with three children. But it seemed clear, as Julie Gans discussed her entertainer husband, that she had grown accustomed to living with someone who regards small talk as a threat to his livelihood.

Julie Gans is a fit, attractive woman who offers a visitor some of her homemade granola. She is the daughter of former Republican California state Sen. Newton Russell. She grew up in La Canada Flintridge and Sacramento, and met Gans at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “I get so defensive when people refer to it as Sin City,” she said of life in Las Vegas.

Over lunch, Gans outlined his anti-Vegas Vegas day: Wake up, have a protein bar, a cup of coffee, read the paper. Go to his gym for an hour and a half. Have a protein shake. Hang out at home until 4 p.m. Eat a protein-rich, low-fat salad for dinner. Head to the Mirage. Do a brief rehearsal. Put on his makeup at 7. “If I’m hungry, I have another protein bar.” Do the show. After the show, if he’s dieting, he’ll eat egg whites. If not, he’ll have a chicken breast, broiled, no salt, a little white rice and nonfat milk. If he feels like cheating, he’ll grind up a filet or have a glass of red wine.

For the last five years, Gans has been named best all-around performer in a lightly regarded, advertiser-driven annual readers’ poll by the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal. He has also been hailed by such publications as Casino Journal and Gaming Today, which is evidently where the term “Entertainer of the Year,” comes from.

No one really questions the efficacy of the title. On the Strip, everyone plays the same hype game (a recent column by the Review-Journal’s Mike Weatherford noted that there are several marquees on the Strip touting “Magicians of the Year,” while Siegfried & Roy are “Magicians of the Century”).

Amid such hyperbole, there is little context for criticism. When Gans moved from the Rio to the Mirage, Weatherford, the paper’s entertainment critic, did an updated review of his show. Weatherford gave Gans a good write-up and graded him with an A-minus. Gans, more than a year later, still hasn’t gotten over the grade, which he attributes to the fact that Weatherford came on a night when he did Elvis and Michael Jackson, impressions he thought the critic had already seen.

“The No. 1 show in town should be an A plus-plus-plus, you should like everything about it,” Gans said. “If he was going to give me a lesser grade like that, knowing the success I’ve had, he should have come to me privately and said, ‘You know what? If I review your show, I saw it at the Stratosphere. The only thing I don’t like is when you do Michael and Elvis.’ Don’t do it the night I come.’ ”

Giving the audience 110%, in Gans’ view, is chiefly his job, but not only his. He has talked, for instance, to his ushers.

“I’ve had a couple of pep talks with even them, saying we can’t take this for granted any time,” Gans said. “Yes, I just won ‘Entertainer of the Year’ again and ‘Comedian of the Year’ and all this kind of stuff, but you can’t take it for granted. You have to make sure that everybody that walks into that showroom--and now I’m like directly talking to the usherettes and ushers--they’re in for the greatest moment of their life.”

In his show, after Hannibal Lecter and Barry Manilow, after Inspector Clouseau and Kermit the Frog, Gans, finally, does Gans himself. He relates the Danny Gans Story: A boy grows up dreaming of playing professional baseball, reaches the cusp of that dream and then suffers a career-ending injury. He finds God and goes into show business. He gets to Broadway. Sometimes, this leads him into “The Music of the Night” from “Phantom of the Opera.” Other times he’ll sing a song from “A Brand New Dream,” his CD.

“I was 36 hours away from the major leagues,” Gans said, discussing his baseball career in his dressing room one evening.

He was referring to his brief time with the Victoria Mussels, an independent British Columbia team that played in the Class A Northwest League and is no longer in existence.

Later, pressed a bit for specifics, Gans said that the 36 hours referred to something his coach had told him--that he was about to be signed by the San Diego Padres Class A team in Walla Walla, Wash., and would likely be called up to the majors right away. A Padres official was skeptical, noting that it took San Diego batting champion Tony Gwynn nearly two years to make the same jump.

Gans had gone to Canada after two seasons at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where, playing right field and first base, he hit .321 with seven home runs one year and .262 with no home runs the next.

“In those days, he was a great Elvis impersonator,” said Tom Hinkle, a retired pro scout who recruited Gans for Cal Poly from Mount San Antonio College. “Him becoming a successful performer does not surprise people who saw him as a young man,” Hinkle said. “He had the work ethic in baseball to be a major leaguer, he just didn’t have the complete talent.”

Gans applied that work ethic when his baseball dream went sour and he became an entertainer. He tried comedy clubs but says he never liked hanging out late at night. More relevantly, Gans came along in an era--the 1980s--that shaped monologuists like Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling.

So Gans went a different route. He got a job as an emcee-comedian in a tribute show in Palm Desert called “Salute to the Superstars,” and work of this ilk gave Gans his entree into corporate entertainment.

It remains a lucrative, if largely unknown, pocket of show business--a way for the biggest names in entertainment to earn $100,000 for an evening’s work at a corporate chicken dinner and for show business’ middle class to pay the bills.

Gans was good-looking but he wasn’t a celebrity, and he knew he had to sell himself. It involved learning the names and interests of corporate middle managers at Heinz or Allstate Insurance, and being available throughout the year with a show grounded in impressions that would offer something for everyone. It involved putting together a great press kit, not to mention a video that reassured potential clients that you were funny and clean and unlikely to offend a client.

It involved becoming, finally, a kind of vaudeville schlepper in an era of Marriotts and Hyatts, and it proved to be the perfect warmup for the customer-is-always-right approach in Vegas.

Chip Lightman says he first saw Gans in 1990, at a corporate event in Universal City. Theirs was a marriage of mutual interest--Lightman, an experienced booker of corporate dates, with clients including Mary Wilson of the Supremes and Tina Turner, and Gans, performing earnestly in a tuxedo and looking to expand. Soon, the corporate dates increased, with Gans traveling from his home in La Canada Flintridge. Decent money blossomed into a multimillion-dollar business--with Gans, at $25,000 a show, doing more than 100 corporate events a year.

But if Gans could play an atrium or open for Bill Cosby, his act hadn’t been tested as an attraction in itself. So Gans made a foray into legit theater--taking his show first to the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood and then, in 1995, to Broadway, where he was sponsored by the Broadway-producing Nederlander Organization, in association with American Airlines.

The show went into previews at the Neil Simon Theatre on Oct. 27, opened Nov. 8 and closed Nov. 12, after just six performances. “Mr. Gans tries to make up in tirelessness what he lacks in talent, spontaneity and decisive point of view,” the New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote.

Lightman and Gans prefer to fashion this episode as a limited Broadway run that drew mostly raves--with blurbs from such publications as the Wall Street Transcript, a financial news service. “If we would’ve stayed there, he would’ve been a sensation on Broadway,” Lightman said.

Gans goes further: Around the time he was contemplating a longer stay on the Great White Way, one of his daughters drew a picture of the family. In it, Dad was seen waving from an airplane. Should he take a chance on Broadway stardom or put family first? Gans and his wife prayed on it, and there was really only one choice to make.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks sent the Strip into economic shock. A city that relies not just on tourism, but on the ceaseless influx of people via the airport and the roadways was suddenly confronted by no flow, and stranded visitors who were only interested in leaving. More than 10,000 people were laid off within two weeks of the attacks, many of them in the hotel industry. Empty cabs went back and forth on Las Vegas Boulevard.

Nine months later, you can still see the blood leave people’s faces when you bring up 9/11 on the Strip. This includes the four men who were sitting in the clubhouse at the exclusive Shadow Creek Golf Course on a Monday in June, having lunch after shooting nine holes of golf.

Andrew Abshier, the concierge at the Venetian, said the desperation to get out of town was so rampant that he had calls from people wanting directions to the nearest Lexus dealership. Lightman insisted the terrorist attacks only derailed Vegas’ economy for a few months, although many will tell you otherwise.

“He’s honored the Lord, and when everyone else wasn’t going to the shows, his was packed,” Pastor Graham declared of Gans. “That’s an answer to your prayers.”

Some entertainers on the Strip performed the night of Sept. 11, and the casinos, of course, stayed open.

Danny Gans began performing the Saturday after the attacks--emboldened, he said, by the return of Broadway.

He closed his first night back with “God Bless the U.S.A.”

“Oh my gosh,” said the “Entertainer of the Year,” “there wasn’t a dry eye.”

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Paul Brownfield is a Times staff writer.