So picture this: November 1955, the Strip lit up under that twelve-foot rotating neon slipper the Silver Slipper had bolted to its own roofline, and underneath it, four times a night, seven nights a week, Christine Jorgensen walks out under the lights to do a full nightclub act — singing, patter, the works — while a marquee out front sells her not as a singer or a comedienne but as a novelty item, “the world’s most unique personality,” like she’s a two-headed calf at a county fair instead of a woman doing a job. She’d earned the billing the hard way. Three years earlier she’d been George Jorgensen, a shy former Army clerk from the Bronx who’d traveled to Denmark for a series of surgeries nobody in America had a polite name for yet, and come home to find herself the biggest news story in the country — front page of the New York Daily News, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” a level of fame that had nothing to do with anything she’d actually chosen to perform. By the time Las Vegas got around to booking her, she’d already turned that unwanted fame into an actual act, and the Silver Slipper, unlike the hotel just up the road, had decided that was good business.
That hotel up the road was the Sahara, and it’s worth sitting with what happened there first, because it’s the whole joke underneath this story. Jorgensen played the Sahara in 1953, and the engagement got pulled — other performers on the bill objected to sharing a stage and a dressing room with her, and the hotel caved rather than fight it out. She didn’t let it go quietly. She sued the Sahara over the cancellation, and the hotel, whatever it actually believed about her, understood a full house when it saw one: it brought her back for a sold-out two-week run. So the same Vegas hotel that wouldn’t let her work in 1953 was selling every seat to watch her by the time the dispute settled. That’s not a change of heart. That’s a box office.
The Silver Slipper skipped the controversy and went straight for the box office. When she opened there in November 1955, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran an item on December 2 that read, plainly: “Christine Jorgensen, who was once a GI in the United States Army, is well on her way to achieving a new attendance record at the Silver Slipper where she appears four times nightly, seven days a week.” Four shows a night is a brutal schedule for anybody, let alone someone whose every appearance came wrapped in gawking and headlines she’d never asked for — and she kept doing it, seven nights running, because the crowds kept showing up. Within a few years she’d built the number that became her actual signature, “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” pulled from Flower Drum Song and closed out with a costume reveal that turned the whole novelty framing back on the room watching her — she was in on the joke before anyone else in the building was. Whether that exact number was already part of her Silver Slipper set in 1955 or came together over the following seasons, it’s the song history remembers her by, and it’s almost certainly the “Gee Ain’t It Good to Be a Woman”-type closer that’s stuck in the memory of anyone who caught her act.
The Silver Slipper itself had its own strange history well before Jorgensen ever walked into it. It opened in 1950 next door to the Last Frontier, developed by businessman R.E. “Griff” Griffith with architect Martin Stern Jr. drawing up the building, and it very nearly opened under a different name — “Golden Slipper” — until the Golden Nugget down the street made clear it didn’t appreciate the overlap, and the place got rebranded Silver before the paint dried. What survived every rebrand and every ownership change was the sign: a twelve-foot rotating high-heel slipper, wired with more than nine hundred bulbs, built by the Young Electric Sign Company and designed by Jack Larsen Sr., turning above the casino all night, every night, visible from blocks away. It became one of the most recognized silhouettes on the entire Strip — famous enough to land a cameo in the 1957 monster movie The Amazing Colossal Man, spinning away in the background like it belonged there.
The casino underneath the sign wasn’t always run clean. In April 1964 the Silver Slipper became the first casino in Nevada history to get shut down specifically for cheating its own customers — flat dice, rigged tables, the whole operation running crooked under majority owner Robert O. Shulze. The state pulled the license, new ownership under Shelby and Claudine Williams took over, and the casino reopened having become, however briefly, a genuine first in Nevada gaming-regulation history — for exactly the wrong reason.
Then, in 1968, Howard Hughes bought it, and this is where the story that everybody actually remembers about the Silver Slipper turns out to be wrong. The popular version goes like this: Hughes was holed up in the Desert Inn penthouse, and the Silver Slipper’s rotating neon sign glared straight into his window every night, so annoyed and sleep-deprived that he simply bought the whole casino to shut the sign off. It’s a great story. It’s also not true. Hughes’s own corporate records director, Paul Winn, put it flatly on the record: “He bought the Silver Slipper because it was available, no other reason.” The real chain of events started two years earlier, in 1966, when Hughes checked into the Desert Inn’s penthouse and simply never left — refused to vacate even as the hotel’s owners, who wanted the suite back for paying high rollers over New Year’s, threatened to evict their own biggest customer. Hughes’s solution was to buy the Desert Inn outright in March 1967 for $13.2 million, and once he’d started, he didn’t stop: the Sands, the Frontier, the Castaways, the Landmark, and finally, on April 30, 1968, the Silver Slipper, for $5.4 million — a real estate spree with nothing to do with a glowing shoe keeping a billionaire awake.
The casino’s last real act of reinvention came in 1977, when it became home to Kenny Kerr’s drag revue “Boy-lesque” — female impersonators built up as Streisand, as Cher, running under that same rotating slipper until the Silver Slipper closed for good in 1988. Whether anybody booking that show in 1977 remembered that this exact casino had built its own attendance record on a trans performer twenty-two years earlier isn’t recorded anywhere. But the echo is there whether they meant it or not — the marquee promising “the world’s most unique personality” in 1955, and a stage full of female impersonators under the same spinning sign two decades later. The casino got demolished not long after closing. The sign didn’t. It was saved, restored, and has stood on public display at the Neon Museum since 2009 — the one piece of the Silver Slipper that outlasted every owner, every scandal, and every story told about why it was really there.
Jorgensen herself kept the joke running long after she’d left the Strip behind. By 1958, playing New York’s Latin Quarter, she’d worked up the costume reveal that closed “I Enjoy Being a Girl” for good: a quick change into a full Wonder Woman outfit, cape and all, the same novelty billing turned into her own punchline every single night. She ran that bit for over two decades before anyone objected — it wasn’t until 1981 that Warner Communications, which by then owned the character, sent word that she needed to stop. So Jorgensen didn’t retire the gag. She just renamed it, inventing her own version she called “Superwoman,” with a plain letter S stitched onto the cape. DC Comics, as it happened, had trademarked that exact name back in 1947 and never said a word about her using it — which means the woman Las Vegas once billed as a novelty act ended up quietly out-lawyering two different comic book companies, decades apart, without either of them managing to actually stop her from finishing her own show.