UPDATE: Circus Circus’ Elephants NEVER FLEW After All

Posted on: December 31, 2024, 02:20h. 

Last updated on: January 1, 2025, 07:29h.

Corey Levitan Read More

Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.

UPDATE: Crow — it’s not just for breakfast anymore. We need to clear this myth up ASAP, and that’s because we started it!

Sometimes, journalists check our facts with legitimate sources who don’t have them straight. Regrettably, this is one of those times.

After publishing the story below, we were contacted by Mike Hartzell, ringmaster and director of entertainment at Circus Circus for 28 years. He informed us that the intel we ran with from Heidi Straus, daughter of Circus Circus founder Jay Sarno, was bad.

“The Flying Elephant didn’t fly,” Hartzell said. “I worked there from the opening and, yes, it was advertised and, yes, a platform for the elephant to stand on was created. But doing a test, the poor baby was going nuts after being lifted off of the stage and it was feared the animal’s restlessness would damage the apparatus that telescoped above the animal’s platform.

“For safety reasons, it was called off.”

Once we verified Hartzell’s credentials, we confronted Straus with his claim. She admitted that she wasn’t old enough to witness the flying elephant and only heard about it later.

So this was a myth after all — albeit one with an asterisk, since an elephant did achieve partial liftoff — and we will recategorize it as one, once we clean up the mess made by our head exploding all over our wall.

Most of the time, we were right. This is how we put to rest such widely held Vegas beliefs as the bodies buried inside Hoover Dam, the casino that Howard Hughes bought just to dim its sign so he could sleep, and, of course, the extra oxygen that casinos pump onto their floors to keep gamblers awake. (Well, we tried putting them to rest, anyway. Many people still believe them.)

However, some such stories end up, quite insanely, being true…

The Flying Pink Elephants of Circus Circus

“According to some accounts, a short-lived publicity stunt involved baby elephants that were transported around the casino via an overhead tram, giving the illusion that they were flying,” the Wikipedia entry for Circus Circus states about the casino’s earliest days in 1968.

Of Wikipedia’s three citations for that claim, only one asserted that the stunt was a thing that actually happened. (The other two doubted it.) On Feb. 7, 1999, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran this story about Circus Circus founder Jay Sarno, a modern-day P.T. Barnum, in which reporter Kevin J. Evans casually tossed off the following sentence 25 paragraphs in…

“A live pink elephant ‘flew’ around the casino on sort of an overhead tram.”

That was all he wrote. No elaboration. No kidding.

We’ve become pretty good at spotting myths, and this sounded like the surest candidate ever to fly into our crosshairs on sort of an aerial tram.

First of all, even baby elephants seem very heavy to us. So why would any casino owner want to dangle one 80 feet over people they were trying to convert into return customers? Even if Babar didn’t crush any of them to death, being beaned in the head with his plummeting poop doesn’t sound like a fun night out, either.

More importantly, not a single photo is known to exist of this alleged publicity stunt. And there is no such thing as a publicity stunt where photos are not taken — at least not since the dawn of photography. No photos makes this a fraternity prank, not a publicity stunt.

We weren’t the first to try busting this story as a myth. One of Wikipedia’s other two citations was a column by our late friend Robin Leach, the former host of TV’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” who spent his final decades as a Las Vegas entertainment reporter.

“Were there flying elephants at Circus Circus back in the day?” Leach headlined this 2011 Las Vegas Sun column. (By the way, if you didn’t read that in a half-screaming British accent, please do yourself a favor and read it again like that. We’ll wait…)

Leach had heard Las Vegas author Jack Sheehan tell the story once and, like us, called bullshit on it.

So he checked with Elaine Wynn, who clearly remembered the early days of Circus Circus but no airborne pachyderms, pink or otherwise.

Leach then asked his friend at the Las Vegas News Bureau to scour the archives for proof. Darrin Bush found plenty of snapshots of Tanya, the very Earthbound 4,000 lb. Asian elephant who pulled slot handles, shot dice with her trunk, and “called” Keno to the delight of crowds. (Her slot trick was even featured in the 1971 James Bond flick, “Diamonds are Forever.”)

But there were no photos of flying baby elephants, not a one.

“Jack must have heard it as a golf story,” Bush told Leach, who ended his column by asking his readers if any knew the truth.

Leach never followed up, so we assume he didn’t crack the case and moved onto less important matters.

In honor of our old friend, we picked up the ball 13 years later. We managed to track down the email addresses of all four of Sarno’s children and queried each one about the flying pink elephants.

Unfortunately, none replied, but that didn’t diminish our resolve. We uncovered a 1971 program describing all the acts at Circus Circus. It was the blurb for “The Cage Girls” that caught our attention. It mentioned four go-go dancers who shimmied “while dangling from an aerial tram.”

Hmm. So that establishes the mechanism by which the alleged pink baby elephants allegedly flew. Were we getting closer to the truth, or just piecing together the origin for yet another myth?

Then we found a pre-opening interview with Sarno in which he promised “two little pink elephants you can ride … or pet” at the grand opening on Oct. 18, 1968.

And we learned that month-old baby elephants only weigh about 300-450 lbs. That’s less than the combined weight of The Cage Girls and the clown they shimmied beneath in the photo at left.

Hmm. So the elements were now seemingly in place. Still, without photographic proof of one of the most irresistibly photogenic events ever to have supposedly occurred on this planet, we were solidly on the fence, just like Leach was.

“It sounds too good to be true,” he wrote in 2011, “but in the good ol’ days of Vegas, anything was possible.”

Couldn’t someone have confused The Cage Girls with Sarno’s pink baby elephants while trying to remember what flew above them after they spent too much time at the cocktail bar?

Pink elephants are literally what people see when they hallucinate.

That’s when the magic occurred that we live for. Heidi Straus, the youngest of Sarno’s children, emailed back.

“It’s real, Corey!” she wrote. “Not sure if the flying elephant was pink, yet quite sure it required a diaper while flying.”

We didn’t even think to ask her about the plummeting poop in our outgoing email. She just volunteered that.

Even with a diaper involved, though, gamblers in the pit below didn’t quite consider it potential good luck to get to cushion the fall of a flying elephant with their internal organs.

“They weren’t all that keen on what was going on overhead and the attraction ended as quickly as it began,” is how Straus phrased it.

As for how no one could have figured that out before any elephants were hoisted, Straus offered a quote that proves who her father was…

“How would we know unless we tried it?”

Robin, old friend, consider this case finally cracked.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org. Click here to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org.