May 24, 2002
By Jerry Fink
At age 70, Steve Rossi continues to maintain a high profile on the Las Vegas entertainment scene. He's appearing at the Lady Luck, featured in Robbie Howard's "Stars of the Strip," co-starring with Howard and Michael Holly.
The longtime Las Vegan often shows up at Greek Isles, where he performs with sometimes-comedy partner Sandy Hackett. Rossi is also a frequent guest at area parties, business openings and shows.
Rossi, a native of Harlem, N.Y., was given the nickname "The Legend" by shock jock Howard Stern.
Rossi recently spoke to the Sun about his legendary career, the highlight of which was his longtime partnership with another entertainment legend, Marty Allen. The team was together on three occasions for almost 30 years:
Las Vegas Sun: Why did you and Marty Allen break up one of the most successful comedy teams in history?
Steve Rossi: You know how it is -- it's the same thing as any two
people in life. You agree to disagree.
Sun: How did you get together with Marty?
SR: I was a production singer at the Sands. I met Nat "King" Cole, and he recommended I do a team. There were no comedy teams at that time -- Martin and Lewis had broken up, Abbott and Costello had broken up. Nat said there were tons of stand-up guys, but there were no teams. He knew Marty was funny, and he knew I could play straight. He suggested we get together.
Sun: Before you and Marty joined forces, what had you done?
SR: Actually, my first partner was Mae West, back in 1953. I was attending Loyola University, working on a degree in communication arts and theater, and I also was playing the lead in "The Student Prince" for the Civic Light Opera Company in Los Angeles. I was about 20 at the time, the youngest lead singer ever in the history of the Civic Light Opera.
Sun: How long were you with her?
SR: For 14 months. For a long time we were at Ciro's Supper Club on the Sunset Strip, where all the biggest stars worked. We went on right after (Frank) Sinatra and just before Sammy Davis Jr.
Sun: Steve Rossi isn't your legal name?
SR: No. It's Joseph Charles Tafarella. She didn't put my name on the marquee at Ciros because there was no room for it. Then we went to the Sahara. The night before we opened she called me up and said, "I want to see you downstairs at the marquee." My entire name was across the whole marquee. He name was only seven letters. She says, "What name do you notice up there?" I said, "To tell you the truth, I notice my name more than yours." "Why is that?" she said. I said, "Because I have 22 letters, and you only have seven." She said, "From now on, your name is Steve Rossi."
Sun: How did the Mae West era come to an end?
SR: At Loyola I was enrolled in an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps program, so after I graduated I had to go into the service for two years.
Sun: What did you do after you and Marty broke up?
SR: We actually broke up three times. The first time (around 1970), I teamed up with Joey Ross from the television series "Car 54, Where Are You?" Joey had some drinking problems, so that partnership didn't last too long. Then I teamed up with Bernie Allen -- and became Allen and Rossi, with a different Allen. Bernie was very funny. He did a lot of funny characters. I was a totally different act. Bernie did more ad libbing.
Sun: You were still the straight man for all the comics?
SR: Yes, but then when I got with Slappy, a lot of times he didn't show up. He had some drug problems. When he wouldn't show, I would have to do both parts. I was forced to learn how to do stand-up. I couldn't just go out there and sing. Slappy actually helped me.
Sun: You say you and Marty broke up three times. What were the other two?
SR: The first time was 1970. We were apart more than seven years, then we got booked into the Playboy Club in Atlantic City around '77 or '78 and we just packed the place. Then we packed rooms in casinos at Lake Tahoe. We were at the Maxim here in Las Vegas for two years.
Sun: The second split came in '87? What happened?
SR: It was just a difference of opinion about the direction the act was going.
Sun: Then you got back together a third time?
SR: Yes. We performed at Bob Stupak's Vegas World (on the site of Stratosphere) for about four years in the early '90s.
Sun: Why didn't you keep the act going?
SR: We just knew we weren't going to make a huge comeback, so we went our separate ways.
SR: What have you been doing since the last parting?
SR: After Vegas World, Marty and I headlined at the Sands -- we were the last headliners there before it was imploded. What was upsetting was we were onstage when they blew it up.
I'm also involved as a celebrity spokesman for a lot of companies, the most recent is for a security window company.
Sun: How did you get involved with Howard Stern?
SR: Howard was working for a radio station in Washington, D.C., when he came to see me in '85 at the Shoreham Hotel. I was doing a (solo act) in the Blue Room. He and Robin Quivers came to see me and he asked me to be a guest on his show. I was booked for a week, but he had so many phone calls they kept me over for four weeks -- I really jammed the room up with guest celebrities.
Then, when he moved the show to NBC in New York, I got the celebrities for that show. All together, over the years, I've been on the Howard Stern show 125 to 135 times -- maybe more.
Sun: How did your situation with Stern end?
SR: When I was with him, his top pay was $300,000. I got 10 percent for managing him, so I was making $30,000 a year, plus dates on my own. Then, when I got back with Marty (in '90), we were making $35,000 a weekend, so I wasn't making enough with Howard. As luck would have it, he really made it big, in the millions. My 10 percent would have meant a lot of money.
Sun: Are you still friends?
SR: Oh, sure. He's a great guy. I did a taping last week, part of a retrospective that he'll air sometime in July. He just talked to me about how I'm doing.
Sun: And how are you doing?
SR: Great. I'm always busy, and I love it. I love to write. I love to see shows, especially comedians. I love to sing.
Sun: So you've adapted to being a stand-up comedian instead of a straight man?
SR: When I was first breaking in, you couldn't believe the sweat. You find out the audience is great if they like you, but horrible if they don't.
New York, Vegas shows remembered
When Harrison and Rossi had performed at CBS studios earlier, 10,000 screaming teenagers gathered at the 52nd Street entrance. But at La Camelia -- owned by young mobster John Gotti -- Harrison, wearing a cap for a disguise and detached from the other Beatles, was not recognized or disturbed.
"George was a very nice guy who initially did not know how to deal with his fame," said Rossi, who headlined with partner Marty Allen on the program in which the Beatles made their American debut and stole the show.
"George was in the dressing room next to mine for the Sullivan show, and I told him, 'You guys are going to be a sensation.' He said he never had expected such a response because their first record, 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand,' was not yet that big in America."
After the Beatles made their sensational debut, Allen walked on stage and said: "Hello dere -- I'm Ringo's mother." Rossi sang "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and both got big laughs. "If we had tried to do our regular routine after the Beatles had performed, it would not have worked," Rossi said.
Allen and Rossi, who performed on all three Sullivan shows on which the Beatles appeared, were performing at the Sands when the Beatles came to Las Vegas in August 1964 for the Fab Four's only concert at the Convention Center.
"There was an absolute frenzy surrounding their arrival at McCarran Airport and at the Sahara Hotel," said Myram Borders, who covered the event for United Press International. "There was such squealing at the Convention Center, you could hardly hear the music.
"They stirred up the community like no one had before, and at the time they were bigger than any other major entertainer who had come here, including Elvis Presley."
Don Payne, head of the Las Vegas News Bureau at the time, said: "I am sad about George's passing because it makes us realize they are not kids anymore. John Lennon has been dead 20 years and Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are around 60. George was 58. We are seeing the aging of icons."
Brian O'Shea, who as a singer in the early 1960s had records produced by George Martin -- the Beatles' producer -- remembered his friend Harrision as every bit the "quiet one" by which he was known.
"George, I feel, was relieved when the Beatles broke up because he never enjoyed the pressure that was on the group," said O'Shea, a Las Vegas resident of 20 years who now works locally as a trombonist.
"If it was up to George, he would have locked himself away in a room and wrote songs all day. He was really a hermit at heart."
Harrison's death also reminded Rossi that time marches on.
"I experienced something similar watching the Mills Brothers die one by one, and now, at age 69, I'm seeing the same thing happen with the Beatles," Rossi a local resident since 1950, said.
"They all still seem so young, but now half of them are gone. What
we can take to heart is that George's music and the music of all of the
Beatles will live on forever."
May. 04, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Rossi's introduction came in the late 1980s.
The former straight man in the legendary comedy duo Allen & Rossi was producing two shows -- "Showgirls U.S.A." and "The Wacky World of Burlesque" -- at the Holiday International, now Main Street Station.
Rossi and Marty Allen had gone different directions after a long partnership that included dozens of appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show."
Rossi was filling in as emcee of his afternoon show "Showgirls U.S.A." one day because his female emcee called in sick.
While bantering with the audience at the $9.95 show (including two drinks), Rossi chatted up a handsome young man.
"He said his name was Danny Gans, and it was his first day in Las Vegas," recalled Rossi, who is in New York City rehearsing for a Broadway show.
"He said his baseball career didn't work out, and he had been doing impressions for about three years. Said he had been doing corporate dates. I said, 'Let me hear some of your impressions.'"
Gans reeled off some of his favorites and "just tore the place apart," said Rossi, who turns 76 on May 25, the day his musical comedy, "Don't Leave It All to Your Children," opens.
Impressed with the response, Rossi said he offered Gans a contract that day, starting the next day.
Gans jumped at the opportunity and was a headliner on the show for about five months, Rossi said.
A few years later, when Gans returned to Las Vegas as the opening act for Joan Rivers at the Desert Inn, Rossi went backstage after the show to chat with his discovery.
"He told me he didn't think he wanted to be an opening act. Twenty minutes a night just wasn't enough."
A couple of more years passed, and Rossi learned Gans had got his wish: He was opening in the showroom at the Stratosphere. A three-month deal turned into nine months for Gans, who became an overnight sensation.
After three years at the Rio, he was lured to The Mirage by Steve Wynn, who signed Gans to an eight-year deal in 2000.
Jacobs, at the time an entertainment reporter for KTNV-TV, Channel 13, met Gans during an interview the week he opened at the Stratosphere in May 1996.
"(Gans' manager) Chip Lightman insisted I see the show before I interview Danny." She sort of balked but agreed to watch the show. "He came out on stage in that dinky little theater and took my breath away."
During the interview, they discovered they lived a few streets apart at Spanish Trail. They hit it off and had been close friends since. "He was always giving me pointers."
A week before Gans died last Friday, they were having a telephone conversation about his new music video "What a Wonderful World" being produced by Hollywood director Brett Ratner. Jacobs said she wanted to interview him about it, that it would be "a fun story."
Gans then stunned her with a comment that came out of left field.
"He said, 'When I die and you do my obituary piece, it will be the most brilliant work of your career.'"
She shushed him. She didn't want to hear it.
Last Thursday, Jacobs was in tears, in the intensive care unit at St. Rose Dominican Hospital, Siena campus. She had just gotten the news: Her father, Ralph Berger, was on life support and suffering multiple organ failure.
Gans sent numerous text messages saying he was praying for her father. He had been texting like never before in recent months, she said. "I had this sense that he was on a mission of some sort. He seemed more motivated than usual. He had these brand new projects."
When her telephone rang at 4 a.m. Friday, and she heard Lightman's voice, she expected to hear bad news about her father.
Instead, Lightman delivered the news that Gans had "passed away in his sleep."
Devastated, Jacobs took a statement from Lightman and headed for KVBC to break the news.
"It was about 6:30, 7. My cell phone rang, and it was my mother (Brenda). She said, 'Oh my God, they just took your dad off life support.'"
When she went back to the hospital after filing her reports, her father had come back from the brink.
"He was sitting up and talking.
"I feel like Danny gave me my father back."
Norm Clarke www.normclarke.com.
How the hero sandwich got its name March 21, 2009 Philadelphia has the
hoagie. New England calls it a grinder. And New Yorkers order a hero—basically
the same stuffed-to-the-gills Italian-deli meat, cheese, and vegetable
sandwich as the other two. So where did the moniker come from? Supposedly
in the 1930s, a New York Herald Tribune food writer commented that only a
hero could finish off such a massive concoction. And the name stuck. You
don’t see as many signs for heroes anymore, now that the city has
been infiltrated by so many Subways and other chain sandwich shops. But
one place the name survives is at Manganaro’s Heroboy on Ninth Avenue
in the 40s. The photo above was taken there in the 1960s. That’s
comedy duo Marty Allen and Steve Rossi holding the ends of a six-footer
for a photo op.
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