The International Hotel-Casino opened in Las Vegas on July 3, 1969. It was big news at the time. First, it was the new largest hotel in Las Vegas, several hundred rooms larger than the Stardust, which had held the record for 12 years; it was also the largest casino, at 30,000 square feet. Second, it was located on 82 acres on Paradise Road next to the Las Vegas Convention Center; conventional wisdom held that so large a hotel-casino off the Strip would have trouble filling hotel rooms. Third, the building was designed as a single unit, as opposed to the tacked-on towers and leap-frogging cubes of the Strip properties. It had a Benihana of Tokyo hibachi restaurant, the first in Nevada. And it cost $60 million, a whopping amount for a resort-casino at the time.
For opening weekend, Barbra Streisand appeared in the 2,000-seat theater. Elvis Presley made his Great Las Vegas Comeback at the International during its opening month; he performed in its showroom exclusively, logging 837 sold-out shows, up until his death in 1977.
The International was built by Kirk Kerkorian. Two years earlier, Kerkorian had bought the Flamingo, which he used as a sort of "hotel school" to train the staff of the International. The sale of the Flamingo to Kerkorian finally eliminated the 20-year behind-the-scenes involvement of the eastern underworld in the house that Bugsy finished.
Shortly after opening the International, Kerkorian bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios in Hollywood. According to Kirk Kerkorian -- An American Success Story by Dial Torgenson, while Kirk was distracted by the MGM deal, his emerging Las Vegas empire was caught short by unforeseen events. The recession of the early 1970s was gaining steam and Vegas hotels went into a slump. In addition, the Securities & Exchange Commission disallowed a public stock offering in the International, which would have paid off the hotel’s debt in full. Torgenson believed that the SEC was retaliating against Kerkorian, who was unable -- or unwilling; it was never made clear which -- to produce old financial records from the Flamingo, which the feds coveted to bolster their skimming case against past owners, particularly Meyer Lansky.
Anyway, with Vegas revenues down and the stock offering dead, in 1970 Kerkorian was forced to sell part of the International to the Hilton Corp. for $21.4 million. One year later, he received another $31 million for the Flamingo and the other half of the International, which was immediately renamed, and remains today, the Las Vegas Hilton.
