Manufacture of souvenir items specifically for the Sahara’s going-out-of-business sale was never mentioned in news coverage of the event and, given manager Navegante Group’s straitened circumstances, was highly unlikely. Navegante had closed two of the Sahara’s hotel towers and was advertising rooms on Twitter for as low as $1 a night, in a special promotional gimmick.
Besides, it’s not as though there weren’t enough souvenirs to go around and the sale was all about cleaning house, not bringing in more stuff: When it closed, the Sahara had approximately 600,000 items of inventory to sell, much of it mundane, including glassware ($1) and mirrored closet doors. "Even if it’s nailed down, we’ll sell it. This place has thousands and thousands of items," National Content Liquidators President Donald Hayes told the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Howard Stutz at the time. We asked Hayes about your tumbler and he said, "We only sell what’s there," not ancillary merchandise. So your Sahara cup is the real deal. (The big-ticket item was the money-sorting machine from the count room, retailing for $22,500.)
Incidentally, the only things initially not for sale when the Sahara closed were fixtures and merchandise from the NASCAR Café. At the time (2011), Sahara owner Sam Nazarian hoped to reopen it elsewhere in Las Vegas. But there was then an evident change of heart or abandonment of the idea just as the main sale was drawing to a close and the contents, including clothing, photographs, Cyber Speedway simulators, signage, and fixtures and fittings including the bar, plus Dale Earnhardt's No. 3 car and Carzilla, the largest Pontiac Grand Prix stock car in the world, were also offered up to the highest bidder.
At the time of its closing, the Sahara was in a poor state of preservation, so we hesitate to think what evils might have befallen the Beatles’ suite, which was part of the Sahara’s "Vintage Suite Collection." By 2007, when this footage was shot, it had fallen into something of a Vegas time warp, boasting neither anything special in historical cachet nor up-to-date with suites elsewhere on the Strip. "Preservation" is a very relative term when dealing with what SLS could have made of the rooms, which it certainly didn’t leave ’as is.’ All rooms and suites in the property were gutted and redone, with some reconfigured and combined to slightly reduce the SLS’ room inventory.
In August 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, the Fab Four played two concerts at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which held 8,408 spectators at the time and had a top ticket price of $5.50. The band indulged in escapades that, nowadays, would give gaming regulators fits. The foursome didn’t dare venture onto the casino floor, so slot machines were brought up to their suite where they (minus a disapproving John Lennon) played the one-armed bandits. Also, a pair of 14-year-old girls "trying their hardest to look like Suzanne Pleshette and Connie Stevens," talked their way past security and into a Beatles cocktail party, claiming to be 19. "Now don’t you think such ingenuity should be rewarded," Paul McCartney allegedly asked, when informed of the ruse.
The twosome snuck into the Beatles’ suite, where they ambushed the rockers and peppered them with questions long into the night, which the sleep-deprived Fab Four bore with a remarkable amount of patience. By this time, the girls’ mother had gone into Defcon Four mode and asked two Sahara-patrolling cops about her daughters’ whereabouts. The three made a beeline for the Beatles’ suite, where the two would-be groupies were found. Asked one of the cops, "What are you two trying to do? Get these boys booked in jail?"
If anything compromising had happened, however, it has been kept out of the history books. The teenyboppers were escorted from the premises and the Beatles got some long-delayed shuteye. Looking back on the incident, George Harrison wrote, "There was all kinds of trouble in the States … There were girls trying to get into our rooms so they could sue us for totally made-up things. There was always this very peculiar suing consciousness. I’d never heard about suing people until we went to America."
For fans of Beatles trivia, the Fab Four were paid $30,000 for their two Convention Center concerts, each of which is estimated to have played to capacity, and they deviated from their set list at one show, adding "Till There Was You." As for physical souvenirs of their Vegas stay, an eBay search turned up only an October 1964 copy of the Las Vegas Saharan with the Beatles on the cover, selling for $150.
If you’d like to supplement your regular collection of Sahara memorabilia, however, eBay sports items as mundane as a wooden coat hanger ($10) or as distinctive as a Fifties "Where the Stars Play" cigarette lighter ($50), which we hope is some consolation for our disappointing news about the Beatles Suite.
