Wayne Newton - Personal Story an Interview

the greatest equalizer in the world is that i know i can never fulfill that lady's fantasy about me wayne newton performed 200 times a year he finally weaned himself down to 50 times you may find that hard to believe but it's been said that las vegas without wayne newton would be like disneyland without mickey mouse wayne newton is the subject of tonight's personal story he's something of a vegas institution he has legions of fans but he's also something of a curiosity for years he's been the target of jokes about his weight his high voice and his goody-goody image nowadays he has a black belt in karate a temper to match and a show that has them coming back again and again they come from terre haute and tucson baltimore and bangor altoona and albuquerque they come to spend a few years sentimental hours awash in romance and fantasy they are pilgrims and over the years 12 million of them have traveled wayne newton highway for an audience with the midnight idol of las vegas when ladies scream and throw panties our room keys are give me notes the greatest equalizer in the world is that i know i can never fulfill that lady's fantasy about me wayne newton holds court here 20 weeks a year seven nights a week two shows a night and always always to sell out crowds he reportedly makes a million dollars a month every month he appears i have never performed for money the money has come along thank god but part of what makes me happy is uh is going to work and not how much i'm going to get for working is vegas enough for you in terms of career yeah i remember one of the things i used to get a great deal of flack about in reviews when i would go out on the road is uh invariably they would say uh newton does well in vegas but will he do well in des moines well that's absurd i mean there's no greater competitiveness in the world than this town wayne has been doing what he loves performing since he was six he made his first record the 1964 novelty hit donkey shane when he was 21. he described himself then as a pudgy kid with a soprano voice with your first hit donkey shane you said you went to sleep thinking that you had a big hit on your hands and you woke up with the world thinking you were a german girl it was more than just thinking the first time i heard it played on on the radio was an la station and the announcer said we've got a brand new record it's done by a person by the name of wayne newton and he said i know that this is actually margaret whiting recording under a different name so that's the first time i heard it on the air and what did you say because it hurt my feelings after donkey shane the big time eluded wayne until a certain howard hughes took a special interest in him hughes it seems kept a careful watch over the axe at the casinos he owned and he appreciated wayne's wholesome patriotic family-oriented show word got around town that the invisible godfather had taken wayne under his wing and newton's luck changed quick as a roll of the dice he was a headliner i would have given up two or three years of my life to just hang around him but meanwhile wayne became the butt of all those wayne newton jokes and donnie carson's monologues years ago when johnny carson made fun of you you got very angry you still mad at him i don't uh and i don't mean this to sound any any way other than the way i'm gonna say it he's not important enough in my life for me to be angry with him still i wasn't fighting what he said i was fighting his right to say it he didn't know me well enough to say those things and have them be humor but his biggest fight so far has been with nbc news in 1980 nbc linked newton with some unsavory organized crime types and newton's sued for libel it was a classic vegas title bout the battle dragged on round after round for nearly 10 years but wayne went the distance this year he agreed to a court settlement of almost 6 million dollars nbc is appealing but newton feels vindicated by what his attorney calls the largest libel award in history it was uh one of the most demanding times of my life would it have been better just to let it drop and not to have gone through 10 years of that if they had hit me at a place that i could have i would have but they hit me in the two areas that are not for sale and that's my dignity and my honor on the home front he's engaged to marry actress marla heasley but it's the spectacular stage show that will keep the pilgrims coming back what does your audience take home they see that i'm vulnerable they see that i hurt and if i hurt i cry and if you cut me i believe and that i mean [Music] wayne brings to joe butcher is a charm and an ease to the character i'm trying to seduce him um he's trying to seduce me so it's sort of a game of cat and mouse and he can do it in a number of ways he can do it with his sense of humor he can do it with his uh charm he can do it with songs when people say to me do you bet i don't i say only on myself uh and i've never been to one of the tables in my life [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] dutch treatment i'm one of those people that i'm terribly optimistic um you know the kind of guy that took his last dollar and bought a wallet with it you know uh i don't like bad news nobody likes bad news i also try not to cross bridges before i get to them and i feel that when it's time to be sad that's soon enough because it's real so i try not to make a lot of sadness for others as well as myself okay and again rebuilt stone for stalin drawn its original river i have had three things in my life but great faith in the man upstairs a great faith in the public and the ability to just kind of pull back my energies when i feel i'm getting close to the burnout and go sit down somewhere and let the chips fall where they may in this edition of cover story with entertainer wayne newton we went to las vegas and joined wayne at his casa de shenandoah just outside town where he shared with us the journey that brought him here from his roanoke virginia birthplace and what it's like being a full-time single father for his daughter aaron succeeding elvis presley at the las vegas hilton as the premier attraction year after year didn't come easy wayne newton started out professionally on the grand ole opry radio show when he was six years old but wayne's asthma forced his parents to move the family to arizona when he was 10. there he continued to sing and by 1963 wayne newton had his first hit record donkey shane now 25 years later wayne has made more than 80 albums and entertained more than 12 million people all over the world wayne's acting careers included appearances in such hit tv shows as vegas and won him critical acclaim for his role in north and south book 2. in mexico city wayne just completed a co-starring role in the latest james bond film license to kill and now we're going to find out what's really important for this second son of two native american indians who was chosen one of the ten outstanding young men in america by the national junior chamber of commerce for wayne newton the boy who dared to live the american dream nobody thinks of wayne newton with country music when in fact that's how i started uh in virginia i mean there was nothing i ever heard but country music and that's what i started with and what i sang nobody in my family on either side uh had ever been in show business uh my mother's family um around the house played guitars and fiddles and that kind of thing but as far as just plain deciding to to be a singer that came about one night when i was four years old my parents took me to see a grand ole opera roadshow that had come to roanoke virginia i decided that night that that's what i wanted to do i kept begging my parents to give me music lessons and i think my dad was making like 48 dollars a week and six of that went for the music lessons and the rental of the instruments and uh so we both started at the same time because my brother's older he got the the rhythm guitar which is really what i wanted to play and uh because i was younger i had to take the steel guitar of course which i've never regretted [Music] in [Music] had a 6 am radio show and had seen me sing at a used to have things in virginia called community sings uh where the sundays they would be out in the park and all the young aspiring singers and performers would go there and not and so this group had seen me and asked me to come on their radio show and i became a regular and so i just i had a local radio show when i was six before going to school local television show when i was 12 for four years in phoenix arizona so i've literally been working my whole life [Music] an agent uh saw me in phoenix and uh called my parents to ask if we'd be interested in auditioning in las vegas drove to las vegas auditioned at the fremont got the job out of the first year i think we spent 46 weeks at the fremont and my voice changed the first time when i was about 16 and a half when i was at the fremont and all voice teachers will tell you when your voice starts to change the first thing you should do is not sing because the obvious changes that are going on uh physiologically well i couldn't not sing because we're doing six shows a night a duet six shows a night uh six nights a week and that went on for five years we have been together believe it or not going on 20 long miserable years i've seen him come a long way i guess but he always had that innate ability to entertain and uh that's something you can't uh give to a person uh he was always able to do that he could do it with almost any kind of music that he wanted to and i um i found it a very fascinating life with him i always felt that i could truly be whatever i wanted to be but the level of success that i achieved at it was excuse me not the criteria in other words i never said by the time i'm this age i'm going to accomplish this and i'm going to have this i would never be a slave to this [Music] [Applause] [Music] mr benny jack benny was in australia on a tour and he came and see my show and he invited me to see his show the theater in sydney and we went backstage and he said to me uh would you consider working with me i should consider it where would you like me and when and the first place we worked was harris in lake tahoe and i said to him when he told me that was going to be the first engagement i said mr mr benny i think you should know because i don't i don't like these kind of surprises for myself and i wouldn't want you to have them i said they don't want me at harris not in the main room i said i played the lounge there for years and uh and they refused to to book me in there and he said if they don't want you they don't want me we went into harris and so i played i believe three engagements with mr benny and harris and then my first engagement headlining was the flamingo as a result of of that show we opened i believe it was on the 18th of november in 1964 and the place was packed but with all locals all those people that had seen me for those years at the fremont came out we broke all existing records for the flamingo in attendance to that particular [Applause] engagement [Music] and i'll never have that recipe when you talk to me about las vegas there's no place like this in the world nor are there any people in the world quite like these people that live here it's been an incredible town to me from that aspect um the locals have supported me tremendously i find them more likeable all the time you know and um i uh naturally working with them all these years kind of speaks for itself he's just a wonderful guy and he's made it very interesting for me and for anyone that's up on that stage with them every southern boy i think always has wanted a plantation so because of my health i couldn't live in the south uh because of broncolasma and so we moved from the south when i was 10 years old to arizona and yet i still had this dream of owning a plantation so when i built this i i felt that a a plantation wouldn't look right in the middle of the desert either so i just tacked on the spanish name casa de and still called it the shenandoah so i think that this is my my answer to uh my desert plantation i can come home at night and walk around the ranch and mess with the flamingos or fool with the penguins and they don't have to do anything for me i mean they don't have to do tricks and they don't as you can see almost everything runs wild we must have over 100 peacocks i've been blessed and these are the things that that truly pleased me and one walk around the ranch's equipment having a week off i've had two pensions in life one was music the other was horses and i didn't honestly know which came first when i was younger i can tell you which afford is the other i have had such a love of horses my entire life and i had always wanted the prettiest black horse in the world the good lord has blessed me tremendously i have owned truly some of the most magnificent horses that ever took a breath of here we have is one of the top five herds in the world we have imported horses from all over the world and we have exported horses all over the world i i plan the entire breeding program i name every fall i do the following myself we have had over 600 foals born here at the shenandoah and i've never lost one at birth there's it's it's been a great equalizer for me whenever i started to feel like i was a little too important for my own good uh invariably i would come home and have a baby sick or a mare that i had to stay in the stall with for you know 36 hours but that's not uncommon sure i have people now that that can and do that but i still do it and it just makes me realize that that uh i'm not much and i i really mean that i'm i love cars i'm and and they're art to me but each car has a particular significance to me also the the roles that i drive was bill harris personal car uh the stutz bearcat was made for elvis who was a very dear friend one of the clinics belonged to a very different died much too so marvin gaye and that was left to me the 59 rolls was my first rolls royce and my and still my favorite there's a duesenberg out there that i would be uh certainly remiss if i didn't mention that would belong to howard hughes [Music] daddy don't you my daughter's 12 now erin uh she is she's my reason for waking up in the morning and there isn't anything i wouldn't do for and she's i have been through things with her that forget being a single father just being a father but then being a single father is really doing [Music] something [Music] i generally get home around three or four in the morning i'm up at seven i take my daughter to school and make any phone calls that i have to make and deal with any emergencies of the day pick my daughter up again at 2 30 from school then we try to spend an hour an hour and a half together whether it be riding a horse or watching television it doesn't matter and at five o'clock i shower and shave have dinner at 5 30. finish that at 6 30 and change and go to work and i'm there by seven and on stage at eight did this whole thing going down tomorrow and all the cars were gone and and the horses were gone i'd probably find myself a little bird out there with a broken wing and i'd be nursing it and then take in a stray cat and a dog that doesn't have a home and i'd go on i this i built then i could build it again [Music] they were you

Channel: The Wayne Newton Show

Views: 3,793

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Keywords: Wayne Newton

Id: 5DLWqww6f84

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020