So picture this: May 14, 1941, the Roundup Room at the El Rancho Vegas — the very first resort casino ever built on the Strip, so new it had only been open six weeks — and an eighteen-year-old girl in tights and a small cape is standing under the lights making billiard balls disappear between her fingers while a room full of grown men trying to figure out how she’s doing it. Two shows that night, back to back. Between the magic she dances the rumba to a band playing “You Couldn’t Be Cuter,” because in 1941 Las Vegas a fifteen-minute card act wasn’t quite enough to fill a booking on its own. She closes both shows the same way: a playing card vanishes from a handkerchief and turns up, whole and untouched, inside a quartered orange somebody in the audience picked out themselves. The next morning the Review-Journal runs the write-up, calls her “a petite magician who performs her rites in tights and a small cape,” says she “completely mystified the audience with her legerdemain,” and singles out the orange trick as the best thing in the show. Nobody in that room that night, including her, has any idea they just watched the first magic act in the history of the Las Vegas Strip.
The building around her was barely older than her act was. A California hotelier named Thomas Hull had bought the land two years earlier off Highway 91, well outside the Las Vegas city limits on purpose, so neither the city’s taxes nor its zoning could touch him — the same logic every casino builder on that stretch of road would copy for the next fifty years. He hired architect Wayne McAllister, who’d originally sketched something closer to a scaled-down version of a Tijuana resort before the budget cut it down to size, and what went up instead was a Western fantasy: a Spanish-tile exterior wrapped around a cowboy-and-frontier interior, sixty-five cottage-style rooms scattered around the property instead of stacked into a tower, horseback riding on offer for guests who wanted it, and a pool positioned right along the highway so every carload of Angelenos driving up from Los Angeles could see exactly what they were missing. The whole thing was topped off with a fifty-foot revolving neon windmill out front, blades and all, lit up with a sign underneath telling drivers to “Stop at the Sign of the Windmill” — the first great piece of roadside advertising in what would become the most famous stretch of neon in the world. Opening night, April 3, 1941, pulled in Hollywood names like Rex Bell and Clara Bow alongside the bankers and businessmen Hull actually needed to impress. Six weeks later, a teenage magician nobody had heard of yet got a booking in the showroom, and the windmill kept spinning outside while she worked.
The El Rancho didn’t stay simple for long, and it didn’t last forever either. Hull sold out in 1943, and the place changed hands and changed hands again over the next decade — Joseph Drown, then Wilbur Clark, then a Katleman family that would run it for the next twenty years. Somewhere in there, in 1946, the hotel’s own entertainment director, Herb McDonald, tried something new to keep gamblers on the property longer: an all-you-can-eat spread he threw together almost as an afterthought, the thing that became the Las Vegas buffet, the single most copied idea in the history of casino hospitality. Then, on June 17, 1960, a fire nobody was ever able to explain tore through the main building — the casino, the restaurants, the showroom where Gloria had performed, all of it — doing something like five million dollars in damage and burning up over $400,000 in cash that was sitting in the building at the time. The cottages, oddly, survived untouched, scattered around a main building that wasn’t there anymore. The resort limped along afterward as a motel with no casino attached to it, got sold to Howard Hughes in 1970 after a two-year court fight, and the last of the cottages came down before the decade was out — some of them trucked off and reassembled at other properties, most of them just gone. The windmill Gloria Dea worked underneath for one night in 1941 didn’t outlive the hotel it was built for by very long at all.
Her name was Gloria Metzner, and she didn’t just wander into this. Her father, Leo Metzner — a World War I veteran, a paint salesman by day, and an amateur magician who performed as “The Great Leo” — started teaching her tricks when she was four years old. By seven she was being billed as the youngest working magician in the world. By twelve she was a featured act at the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians’ annual convention, written up afterward as “a charming twelve year old girl” who “acquitted herself in a very delightful manner” — the kind of line that reads today like nobody quite knew what to do with a child who was already better at this than most of the adults in the room. The card-and-orange trick that closed her El Rancho set wasn’t something she picked up on her own. Her father taught her that one too.
She didn’t stick around to become the thing she’d started. After that one night in the Roundup Room, Gloria more or less walked away from magic for good — kept dancing at the El Rancho, then went to work as a Flamingo showgirl once that hotel opened a few years later, then packed it in for Hollywood entirely, taking the stage name Gloria Dea. She landed under contract at Columbia Pictures and turned up in Delightfully Dangerous in 1944 and Mexicana in 1945 — ordinary enough studio-system work, the kind of thing a hundred other contract players were doing that same year. Then her career took a hard left into the genuinely strange. In 1952’s King of the Congo, she played Princess Pha, leader of an all-female tribe called the Rock People, who rescue a downed U.S. Air Force captain after he crash-lands in the jungle disguised as an enemy pilot chasing stolen microfilm — a serial built, somehow, on top of an actual comic-book character named Thun’da, mashing together Cold War espionage and Tarzan-style jungle adventure into something that made sense to absolutely nobody even at the time, complete with a rival all-male tribe called the Cave Men and a plot that turns, at one point, on the correct ringing of a temple gong. It was marketed like a knockoff Tarzan picture. It wasn’t really even that.
And then there’s 1957, and Plan 9 from Outer Space, and this is the one people actually remember, if they remember any of it. Gloria Dea’s part in it is small — one of the mourners in a graveside scene — but the film itself has become one of the strangest footnotes in American cinema history. Ed Wood shot the whole thing in what actor Lyle Talbot later described as a wooden shack down an alley off Santa Monica Boulevard that wasn’t even soundproofed, on a budget so thin it shows in nearly every frame — boom microphones dipping into shot, actors visibly reading their lines off cue cards in their laps, cardboard headstones wobbling when actors brush past them. In 1980, film critics Harry and Michael Medved crowned it, flatly, the worst movie ever made. It’s since become something closer to beloved — a midnight-movie staple, a punchline with genuine affection behind it, “so bad it’s good” turned into its own permanent genre — and somewhere in one of its graveyard scenes, barely visible, is the same woman who was once the first person to ever perform a magic trick on the Las Vegas Strip. After that, Gloria sold insurance. Then she sold cars. She married four times. In 1980 she moved back to Las Vegas for good and just lived there, a few miles from the Strip she’d technically started, without anyone in the magic world having the faintest idea who she was.
Here’s the part that makes it actually sting: somebody did get credit for being Las Vegas’s first magician. It just wasn’t her. John Calvert built an act called “Magicarama” — assistants fired out of cannons, volunteers seemingly beheaded with a buzz saw, the full carnival-spectacle version of stage magic — and he played that exact same El Rancho stage in 1942, a full year after Gloria Dea had already stood on it. Calvert kept performing for the next eight decades, building the kind of career that gets you remembered by name long after the specifics get fuzzy, and somewhere in the retelling, being first and being famous got quietly swapped for each other. He’s not the only one, either — magician and comedian Carl Ballantine gets handed the same title sometimes too, a full fifteen years after Gloria Dea’s actual night in the Roundup Room. Nobody set out to erase her, as far as anyone can tell. It’s just that a nineteen-year-old girl who did two shows and then went off to dance and act and sell insurance was easy to lose track of, next to men who kept showing up onstage decade after decade making sure their own names stayed attached to the trick.
For forty-five years, that’s exactly what happened. Gloria Dea lived in Las Vegas — the city she’d helped invent an entire category of entertainment for — essentially forgotten, by her own account happy just to be there, telling people later, “Vegas makes me happy. I don’t care to live anywhere else,” without much reason to think anyone in the business she’d once been part of would ever come looking for her. Nobody did, for a long time. Then in July 2021, a working magician named AnnaRose Einarsen stumbled onto some of Gloria’s old performance memorabilia and started asking questions, and word worked its way back to a ninety-eight-year-old woman living quietly a few miles off the Strip who turned out to still remember every detail of a night eighty years gone. Vegas gave her a key to the city. Magicians who’d built their entire careers on rooms she never got credit for opening started calling her a pioneer. David Copperfield, asked about the people who made modern Vegas magic possible, put it about as plainly as it can be put: “If it wasn’t for the people who went out there and really made magic important, I wouldn’t be here.” He wasn’t talking about John Calvert when he said it.
Gloria Dea died on March 18, 2023, at a hundred years old — two years after anyone in her own field had bothered to find her, and eighty-two years after a Review-Journal writer sat in the Roundup Room and typed up a review of a magic act without knowing he was documenting the start of something. Ask her, near the end, what that first night had actually felt like, and she didn’t reach for anything grander than the truth of it: “It felt good. Anytime someone likes something that you do, you feel good don’t you?” Eighty years is a long time to wait for the rest of the room to feel the same way back.