WAYNE NEWTON

A lot has come and gone since Wayne Newton first set the entertainment world on fire as a precocious, big-voiced six-year-old. When Elvis Presley was still driving a truck, Wayne almost ten years his junior had already sung before a president, toured with a Grand Ole Opry road show and released his first record. While the Beatles were still scrambling for their early Liverpool gigs, Wayne, who was two years younger than John Lennon, was playing Las Vegas and appearing on the Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball television shows. In a business that is, at best, volatile, and success sometimes short-lived, Wayne has performed live, at last count, to more than 40 million people and on television and record, to many times that number. He has epitomized the talent, glamour and energy that is Las Vegas-the entertainment capital of the world-for so long that he is called “Mr. Las Vegas.” And these days, having established himself both on television and in movies as a fine actor, he’s getting more attention than ever. He does it with the incredible talent and showmanship he was born with and the approach he developed as a child entertainer in Virginia. He simply works harder and digs deeper than anyone out there, sizing up audiences as he goes, tailoring shows to fit their moods, until he’s given them their money’s worth. The songs change and the show gets re-worked, but Wayne’s basic approach is the same as it has been since his beginning, and it’s something that goes to the core of who he is. “I’m still doing the kind of shows I’ve always done.” Wayne says, “and I can tell you one thing; People may leave one of my shows disliking Wayne Newton, but they’ll never walk out saying, ‘He didn’t work hard for us’. At a young age, Wayne was already a veteran of show business. He was just four when he settled on a life course. His parents had taken him to see a Grand Ole Opry road show in Roanoke, Virginia, and he watched, wide-eyed, as Hank Williams and Kitty Wells, among others, performed. When it was over he said to his mother, “That’s what I want to do.” “What?” she asked. “That,” he answered, pointing toward the stage. A natural, he learned piano, guitar and steel guitar by ear, and by the time he was six, he was doing a daily radio show before going to school. On weekends, he and his older brother Jerry appeared with the Opry road shows that came through Virginia and Tennessee, and performed before movies at a local theatre. He was in first grade when they performed at a USO show for President Truman and eight years old when they entered a local contest and won the chance to audition for the nation’s biggest amateur show. “There are two people I know of,” he says with a laugh, “who flunked ‘Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour’ auditions: Elvis Presley and me.” That disappointment was a minor setback in a childhood that included serious health struggles. Wayne’s severe bouts with asthma forced the family to move from Virginia to Phoenix, Arizona, where he recovered and continued his career. The stamina that would see him through this and many other difficult periods he credits to his Powahatan Indian/Irish father, who overcame his own poverty stricken background, and his Cherokee Indian/German mother.