RGG Scholarship

Standing in Picasso on Saturday night, I beheld the picture of Dorian Gray in the form of Robert Goulet.

Just watching the entertainment legend work the Bellagio gourmet room made me feel tired. The fact Goulet was celebrating his 70th birthday with all the zest of a 12-year-old made me a little depressed. Somehow, he'd remained the personification of youth. I began to wonder about his secret.

Next to Goulet, I felt about as together as one of those jumbled faces hanging in frames from the walls of Picasso.

I jogged my memory to recall any time in my life when I had possessed as much energy. At a loss, I asked my wife if she remembered if I'd ever had as much zip. She just patted my hand, told me to try not to fall asleep at the table.

Come on, Goulet, you can't fool me. You admit you're 70 in a town where entertainers lie about their age more often than the Gabor sisters and Latino relief pitchers combined. There has to be a catch, some soul-selling pact such as that character in the Oscar Wilde novel.

Shouldn't you have a cane or shortness of breath or something? The least you could do to make me feel better was fake a dizzy spell.

Could Goulet be overstating his date of birth?

I've started doing that. I tell people I'm 55.

They sometimes say, "You look great for 55."

Which would be really swell if I weren't 43.

Goulet could pass for 55, but that would mean he was 12 in 1960 when he starred as Lancelot in "Camelot" on Broadway opposite Richard Burton and Julie Andrews.

To hear Goulet tell it, his singing career started at 11 after he was mugged by nuns. (I recall nuns hitting me to get me to stop singing.) The sisters persuaded Goulet to perform at a Saturday night church function, and he came away not only with their blessings but with a moment that changed his life. His father had listened from the balcony, and with tears in his eyes he told his son how proud he was. The kid from Lawrence, Mass., who grew up in Canada, had found his calling.

Robert Goulet has pleased millions since that night in thousands of live performances and on 75 recordings, 100 TV shows, 25 plays, and 15 movies. Along the way, he's won a Grammy, a Tony, and an Emmy.

The Strip has become such a tough place for singers who don't also cut people in half, strip to a G-string, and turn themselves into human pretzels that it's easy to forget there was a time when the Boulevard's marquees were lined with the greatest crooners in entertainment history. Goulet was once so popular and prolific a performer that his name wound up on marquees at the Desert Inn and Frontier -- simultaneously. That was back when Vegas veterans were sometimes called to drop in when a Strip contemporary took sick. (Call me the next time Celine fills in for Danny Gans.)

That not only takes an uncommon talent, but it takes an exceedingly rare energy and a love for the craft.

As Saturday night's swing-shift celebration rolled on, Goulet and his firecracker of a wife, Vera, only became more animated and energized. In a world where vanity is almost all, they thrived on the company of others. Some present, such as Tony Curtis, Clint Holmes and Rich Little, were entertainment icons. Others were neighbors and newsies and friends they'd collected along the way.

Most shared my problem with Goulet: How do you keep up with the guy?

I mentioned this dilemma to his friend, Jack Wishna, who along with wife, Donna, have founded a perpetual music scholarship at UNLV in the singer's name.

"This 45-year-old's secret is, if we know we are going to be with entertainers who don't get going till midnight or 1 a.m., Donna and I take a nap in the afternoon before an event," Jack says. "Honestly, that is the only way we can even attempt to keep up."

By the time the moveable feast reconvened at Sonny King's show at the Bootlegger Bistro on Sunday morning, I needed an AARP card and an early bird special, but I discovered Goulet's secret.

He didn't sell his soul all those years ago when he started singing.

He found it.

He's no Dorian Gray, but Robert Goulet finds Camelot whenever they strike up the band.