Love and War in Las Vegas

Technically this is Las Vegas, but it ain't Vegas, baby. No high rollers or white tigers here. No Penn. No Teller. The Celine Dion gift shop might as well be in another city.

No, these are the drab asphalt flats of eastern downtown, miles from the upscale casinos of the Strip resorts. From here the swank Vegas of TV shows and movies exists mostly as a nighttime glow. The neon in this neighborhood advertises beer or vacancies, and if someone offers to valet your car, drive away immediately. Sluggish traffic loafs through a neighborhood of rundown shops and exhausted old motels.

In one of those motels a self-proclaimed professional hit man and his associate show up at a $30-a-night suite. The hit man is named Rip; the other is Milt. Rip heads to the bathroom to give it the once-over. Milt moves swiftly to look under the bed, checking it out, making sure it's safe. In their line of work a man has to take precautions.

They're there to meet Barb Ludwig, a stocky woman in her 50s dressed in unfashionable black pants and a maroon top. She stands by the doorway, shaking with fear. Hit men are not part of her usual social circle.

"People disappear," Rip tells Ludwig when they're all in the room. A tall, thin black guy, Rip wears a T-shirt depicting an M&M slashed in half. Because Ludwig has a reporter with her, Rip decides to hide behind the bedroom door. Apparently he's allergic to cameras. "Things happen permanently to people," he insists. "It's gonna get worse."

Rip claims to have been hired by a rival family to make trouble for Ludwig and her daughter Cheryl Luell. It seems Rip has had an attack of conscience and wants to come clean, cut a deal. But right now Luell is at work and Ludwig is in a tizzy. Whack her kid? This guy?

"I mean, if they call you up tonight," Ludwig says, her Wisconsin accent rising in pitch and volume, "and say, 'Here, I've got $5,000 and I want you to go and hurt Cheryl, or hurt her husband...'?" She's in full, fluttery squawk now.

"Okay," Rip replies, his voice even, steady. "If you want me to turn over, then I need to be able to contact you."

"And what is that going to cost us?"

"Listen, if someone's paying $5,000 to have somebody hurt, you understand for me to turn over and have my client arrested, I'm not going to charge you just $5,000. But the life you save may be your own. You figure out what your life is worth."

That challenge is posed in some form every day in Las Vegas but not often so nakedly. "Where I come from there's no such thing as limits," the hit man says urgently, upping the hard sell. He comes out from behind the door. "A hundred thousand dollars will get anybody to disappear."

Ludwig shudders from her dyed-red hair to her painted toenails. This could get ugly.

Or Forever Hold your Piece

The city that gave us Bugsy Siegel, Casino and a cemetery's worth of shallow desert graves has another sordid tale to tell--a lurid melodrama of violent confrontations, beatings, out-of-town muscle and several guest appearances by the ghost of Elvis. It's a conflict with millions of dollars at stake, a threat to one of the town's big three tourist industries. No, not gambling. Not sex, either.

Welcome to the Las Vegas wedding chapel wars.

Marriage is money in Sin City, worth more than $600 million a year. Business is booming, thanks in no small part to a recent wave of high-profile Us Weekly--ready nuptials. The town has close to 100 licensed chapels, from swank setups in the Strip casinos to wedding mills where you can be in, out and legally bound before anyone catches the bouquet. Downtown is packed with small chapels that have calculatedly romantic names--A Las Vegas Garden of Love, Stained Glass Chapel, the Little White Wedding Chapel, Wee Kirk 0' the Heather--and marquees flaunting the celebrities who've gotten married there. Within these walls no fantasy is deemed too elaborate, too off-color or too embarrassing.

But all is not well in the wedding capital of the United States. Hostilities among these money-hungry family businesses, long simmering, finally boiled over last year. Things have gotten nasty--a full-on conflagration threatening toburn the whole quickie-wedding industry to its foundation. It's enough to make a bride cry. Or make Britney Spears think twice about where she gets married again.

The story of the chapel wars is about bad blood coursing through a cottage industry dependent on the glamorous lure of reckless behavior. Each year the exciting pull of a Las Vegas wedding brings in more than 125,000 couples from the world over, some looking for kitsch, some for class, all for expediency. The beauty of it for chapel owners? Every single one of these potential clients, from Britney to Jane Doe, funnels through a single doorway: the Clark County Marriage License Bureau in downtown Las Vegas. Outside that portal--a nondescript door near the metal detectors in the aging concrete county courthouse--the war begins. But first, a romantic interlude.

Kiss and Tarantella

Ken Mleczko and Nanette Szumski are crazy lovebirds from Palm Harbor, Florida who have pulled themselves from the gambling tables long enough to see just how weird and kicky matrimony can get. Fresh from the court-house steps, certificatein hand, they find themselves at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.

"Dear friends, I am the Godfather, and I'm alive and well and here today to exchange the wedding vows of Ken and Nanette."

Outside the Viva Las Vegas chapel, the city goes about its Friday-afternoon bustle. The Thai restaurant up the street is getting ready for the dinner crowd and, later, the Thai karaoke crowd. The girls are shaking it at the strip club down the street, while the art galleries around the corner are getting their Brie together for a big event. At the nearby Econo Lodge someone is probably asking for the same room in which 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta stayed; over at the Oasis Motel someone is likely asking for the room in which actor David Strickland of Suddenly Susan hanged himself.

Inside the chapel Ken has set down his toy machine gun. He's standing expectantly beside the faux Italian cafe table--complete with Chianti bottle--that will serve as his matrimonial altar. He's wearing a pin-striped suit and an anxious grin. Chalk up any appearance of jittersnot to cold feet but to the prospectof cold luck--he has been cleaning up at the tables and is eager toget back. The minister, a gaunt man dressed in black, is sitting at the table like a capo; an assistant, dressed as a waiter, stands beside him.

"Do you, Ken and Nanette, promise to let your love be strong so it overcomes all of life's obstacles? 'Cause if you don't, I may have to break somethin'."

Ken, 47, and Nanette, 45, have looked over the chapel's menu of wedding options and decided against the Intergalactic ceremony (officiated by"Mr. Schpock"). They've said no to the Western (line dancing, a Clint Eastwood imitator) and the Egyptian (a sarcophagus, Cleopatra's throne, male slaves). The tombstones and coffins of the Goth wedding? Uh, no. The Elvis--Blue Hawaii? Almost. But in the end Ken and Nanette opted for the Gangster package. Very Vegas. Ken hints mysteriously, "It fits in with my past a little." (He's in the auto business now.)

Time to get moving: The party ahead of them has filed out, trailing showgirls and an Elvis imitator, and the party behind them has already begun to gather. In Vegas happily ever after is a volume business.

The room, a high-ceilinged chapel with pews, potted palms and plenty of room for props, swells with "Here Comes the Bride." Out strolls Nanette, looking like a flapper in a beaded black sheath provided by the chapel. The minister conducts the ceremony in a throaty Godfather rasp, complete with exaggerated Italian accent and comic by-play with the waiter.

It sounds like high-spirited fun, and it is. It will be a great story for years. But there's something indelibly sad about it, too. The happiest day of this couple's life has a temporary, express-lane feel. And aside from chapel personnel, the only onlooker is the reporter from Playboy. No family. No friends. All this playacting has been for themselves. It's a show without an audience, something not seen in this town since Robert Goulet's last gig.

At least no one got hassled or screamed at or told their marriage wasn't valid--all frequent occurrences in the wedding chapel wars. As the Godfather might say, they dodged a bullet.

"Do you agree to cook each udda a tasty plate of pasta, to always makesure the trunk of the Cadillac is empty and to always take care of each udda's violin cases?"

He does, she does, kiss, kiss, pose for some pictures, and 15 minutes later, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. and Mrs. Ken Mleczko! The chapel limo whisks them back toward their casino before Ken's luck cools. Behind them the smooth crew at Viva Las Vegas has already removed the cafe tables.

Weapons of Matrimonial Destruction

Back at the courthouse where Ken and Nanette started, happy couples-to-be emerge one at a time from a single doorway--revenue on the hoof. As they exit, a scrum of handbillers, expendable foot soldiers for battling chapels, sets upon them. These tend to be down-and-outers of somevariety--homeless men, tweakers and boozers paid a small fee per couple to lure business to whatever chapel is employing them that day. There's an older man, a big guy with a gray beard and dangling gold earrings. A tiny Filipino woman. An Asian minister who looks very, very tired. They bark out their chapel's special attributes:

"Free limo ride...."

"Only half a block away...."

"I can walk you down there right now...."

"Forty dollars for a simple wedding...."

"We have Jewish people, people from Pakistan who come here...."

"Free parking...."

Free parking may not figure prominently in a little girl's dreams of the perfect wedding, but when you're one of a hundred chapels, you flack your every attribute. One chapel owner estimates that as many as half the people coming to Vegas to get married haven't picked a chapel. This makes a handbill the equivalent of a hand grenade.

First Strike

It all started when Cheryl Luell opened the Garden of Love chapel in January 2003. The 33-year-old had moved to Vegas from Wisconsin seven years earlier and immediately found work at various wedding chapels and hotels. Even in a crowded market she saw a niche. Along with her husband, Craig, and her spunky mom, Barb, she bought a place on West Sahara Avenue. To her the whole business was ripe for aggressive marketing innovations. The weapon of choice for her opening salvo? Limousines. The Garden of Love is two miles from the licensing office, while many of Luell's competitors are within easy walking distance. Luell sent limos to the courthouse to offer couples free rides to her place. According to Nevada law, limos must be engaged with a destination in mind; you can't use them to solicit business. Luell's flagrant use of limos idling in front of the courthouse outraged other chapel owners. Making matters worse, Luell undercut her rivals' prices. Within three months the Garden of Love's business exploded to 500 or more ceremonies a month, well beyond that of the competition.

Perhaps her boldest move was to ratchet up the hand-billing action during peak hours by stationing five or more marriage barkers in front of the courthouse. Chapels have employed handbillers for years but not with the numbers or ferocity that Luell brought to the party. (The city's handbilling ordinance allows workers to hand out literature, but they're not supposed to speak to potential customers or lead them anywhere--another law flouted.)

Tension on the courthouse steps mounted every day. Luell made enemies and none more formidable than Sherrie Klute, the owner of Stained Glass Chapel, established two years ago on East Ogden Street. Klute decided shewasn't going to lose ground to a newcomer. Her first step: In April of last year Klute hired 14 new handbillers to counter Luell's nine. She claims her goal was to have everyone recognize the folly of escalation and move toward détente. It didn't work. "You know what she did?" Klute ask sincredulously. "She hired them away from me!"

The genteel world Klute had long inhabited began to unravel. She was appalled during one visit to the courthouse: "I was talking to someone, and a handbiller butted in and said, 'You don't want to go to that trashy place. They've got dead flies all over.' They will say anything!" Shouting episodes, and sometimes shoving matches, between handbillers were breaking out almost daily.

The next major skirmish occurred when Klute's husband, the Reverend Stephen Smith--the minister at Stained Glass--went to the courthouse steps himself and offered to marry couples for the price of a heartfelt donation. Undercutting the undercutter! It led to an ugly confrontation. Because of the trauma and fear of further entangling himself, Smith declines to be quoted directly, but he manages to describe an intense scene indeed: Luell, whom he'd never met before, raced over and screamed in his face while half a dozen of her handbilling bruisers surrounded him. He returned to Stained Glass deeply shaken.

Shortly afterward, Klute says, a Stained Glass handbiller, a 64-year-old former homeless alcoholic, wasseverely beaten. Smith, after several days during which his car was vandalized, was also attacked. Assailant unknown, but there's no doubt in Smith's mind who bears responsibility: Luell.

Cliff Evarts claims to have been a victim too. He runs the misleadingly named Las Vegas Wedding Bureau. (Despite the official-sounding name, it's just another chapel.) "I was talking to a couple on the sidewalk, and one of Luell's handbillersphysically got between me and the couple. So did Luell, and she said, 'Don't believe a thing he says.' And then she said, 'I'm going to giveyou a wedding for free just becausehe's such a liar!"

Evarts's problems weren't limited to the courthouse steps. In July, he claims, one of Luell's handbillers entered Evarts's chapel to harass his customers, and Evarts filed trespassing charges against him. Evarts went to local courts two more times, pushing them to issue a protective order against Luell. He failed both times.

Things got stranger. After a tussle with Klute on the courtroom steps in July, Luell emerged with long, gouge-like scratches on her arm. She said Klute had attacked her. Klute insisted that Luell had scratched herself. As hostilities escalated during the summer, Klute hired armed guards to accompany her to the courthouse. She made her handbillers carry cell phones with 911 on speed dial.

Someone flattened all four tireson one of Klute's cars.

The Las Vegas city government, wary of the PR nightmare of having indigents slugging it out in front of lovesick tourists, formed a task force to investigate the troubles. Asked to comment on the intensifying conflict, a police spokesman was moved to say, "This whole thing is bizarre, and trying to get to the bottom of it is difficult."

Desert Storm

Luell doesn't look like a goon. The owner of A Las Vegas Garden of Love is effusive in her jeans and unstyled hair; she exudes a bubbly Midwestern earnestness that invites immediate trust. She picks at her pasta and salad in a mid-city Italian joint, determined to set the record straight. "They think I'm the new kid on the block," she says when asked about the other owners' accusations. "But I've worked for five years in this business."

Luell can dish the accusations too. She recalls a day on the courthouse steps when she was ushering a couple to one of her now infamous limos. She says a handbiller from another chapel scurried up. "Don't go in there," Luell says the man barked at the soon-to-be newlyweds. "They sell crack, and they're gonna rip you off!" The couple stuck with her, though, and she threw in a free wedding video and photos to compensate for the trauma.

For her part Luell wears this conflict on her skin--she has eczema, which flares up in a pimply rash when she's stressed. She's been stressed and rashy a lot in the year since she opened Garden of Love. As you talk to her, it's hard to reconcile the reasonable woman before you--good-natured, presenting herself (continued on page 148) Las Vegas (continued from page 120) as the victim of a coolly coordinated smear campaign--with the hellion described in more than a dozen affidavits presented in court. In one, a former employee says he witnessed her offering a man $50 to beat up a rival.

Lies, Luell says, driven by envy, fueled by greed. She's doing more bookings than other chapels, and they're striking back. The dirty tricks attributed to her? Con jobs, shell games, frame-ups. Klute and others perpetrate even dirtier tricks, Luell says, and she gets the blame.

Klute and her team find the charge laughable. "What she's done is change the marketing dynamic," says John Curtas, a lawyer who represents Klute and several other chapel owners, sitting back in his office far from the downtown slugging grounds. "It's always been a friendly little business, and now it's become a cutthroat price war. We can criticize her tactics, and some of them have been brutal and may be criminal. But on the other hand, they recognize that there's a way to get business here, and instead of doing it the old, nice, mutually respectful way, they think, Let's get in there and elbow our way in front of everybody else and we'll get a bigger slice of the pie."

Whereas Luell is talky and gesticulative, Sherrie Klute is a model of quiet composure as she eases into Curtas's small office on a chillyVegas afternoon. Her pink makeup matches her pink dress, under a helmet of immobile blonde hair, possibly a wig. Everything about Klute is deliberate. Her eyes don't dart. She keeps her voice carefully modulated; no moment of outrage wills it toward a hysterical register. She has brought her husband, the bearded and haggard Stephen Smith, who today looks just a few bad breaks away from being one of the street people the chapels employ.

"I was dropping off a family at the courthouse," says Klute, "and Luell walked up and said, 'You know, you're not really married.' She is a street person, and I can't get down to that level."

And the city task force? "This went to the task force, to the police, to the district attorney, and nothing's been done," Klute harrumphs. "They're never going to do a thing because this is such a huge money industry.

"Her instructions to her employees are, explicitly, 'Do not let Stained Glass Chapel get any weddings,'" Klute says with a deep sigh. "They go out there in bands and harangue people. We call them 'the crew' out there. I think she personally hates me."

To Charolette Richards, reigningqueen of the Las Vegas wedding biz and owner of the Little White Wedding Chapel, where Britney Spears flirted with expiration-date matrimony, the wars are an industry embarrassment. A small, matronly woman with a habit of calling on Jesus, she blames Luell for the whole shebang. "I'm asking God to change her life because of what she has done to the wedding industry," says Richards. "She has put a dark cloud over it."

Richards says she has given free weddings to crying brides simply to ease the emotional pain they suffered in front of the courthouse. She has vowed to form a kind of God squad to clean up the industry's mess.

The Heavy Artillery

One sweltering afternoon in late summer 2003, Luell hurries past the faux Roman benches and fake climbing ivy of her chapel and into her office. Fast-food boxes clutter the room, and her sister-in-law is working the phones. When Luell hitsthe play button on her answering machine, she's in for a surprise.

"You're a liar, you're a cheat, you beat people up, you rip people off, cut their tires and everything, all lies," a slurred male voice says, audible above the burbling of the chapel's waterfall. "You had your game, okay? This is nationwide now. I'm gonna get hold of Jeb Bush.I went to school with him, okay? We're gonna do what we have to do nation-wide, because this is the capital of the world for being married, okay?"

Things were getting serious. Soon she gets another call: A man known as Milt, who says he used to workfor Klute, wants to talk about whatis really going on--how Luell is being framed. It's the promise of vindication she has been waiting for, and she is so eager for someone to believe her that she breaks down in tears.

The Man with the List

Two days later Milt shows up. As two weddings are taking place in the chapel's marrying rooms, Milt sits in the banquet hall among half a dozen tables set with white linen and real plates and silverware, a small, nervous man marooned amid the trappings of elegance. He tells Luell he is scared. Two nights ago a guy broke into the hotel room where Milt was living and beat him. A bruise on his cheek and scratches on his nose and ear seem to back him up. A teary Luell, emotions dialed to10, hugs Milt and thanks him for coming forward.

He shuffles constantly. He says the beating terrified him and he wants to leave town. He says he knowsthe guy who is being paid to perpetrate acts of vandalism that get blamed on Luell. "The guy with the list," Milt calls him.

"Do you know what's on the list?" Luell asks.

"You guys are actually going to burn down one of the carriages [owned by a rival chapel]. You're going to throw paint on the chapel."

She listens to Milt ruminate nervously for two hours. He's well-spoken, an intelligent man who has fallen on bad times. After a while he calls to check on his mom, who also lives in Vegas. Screams echo from the cell phone as his mother informs him his hotel room has just been broken into again.

Till Death Do us Part

The next day Milt calls. The guy with the list--who turns out to be Rip, the self-described hit man--is willing to meet. Rip has just been baptized, Milt explains, and wants to fess up. It seems the hit man has a soul. Or does he? Even Milt, who claims to be the hit man's confidant, tells Luell he is skeptical about Rip's motivation: "Is he telling me the truth, or am I just getting set up because I left Stained Glass?" Then again, Milt doesn't have much left to lose.

Luell agrees to put the men up in a motel for three nights. She clears it with the city task force, ensuring that no one will accuse her of bribing them if this meeting is as fruitful as she hopes. She had planned to go and meet the guy with the list--this mystery man, this purported killer--but hey, business is going gangbusters. So she decides to send her mom instead.She sends Barb.

Milt and Rip act wary in the $30motel room. The second-floor suite is separated from the rest of the hotel--perfect for some kind of unspecified funny business. Rip positions himself behind the bedroom door, away from any lurking cameras, while Barb Ludwig stands in the middle of the living room.

"I'm being paid to do certain things to this particular person and blame them on y'all," he says. Without Rip saying so, everyone assumes" this particular person" must be Klute.

"Why did she pick you?" Ludwig asks.

"Because that's what I normally do. In other words, I get paid to do things."

"What have you done for her?"

"I've scratched a couple of cars. I did interior damage to the church."

"To her church?"

"Yeah, and it's been blamed on y'all already."

Rip has a stoic, matter-of-fact delivery: The hit man says he has netted about $3,000 so far and has paid his associates to beat up a minister. Milt sits on a couch, staring out the window. His bruises standout in the light slipping in from outside, but his discomfort seems more than physical. He stands, runs his hands nervously through his hair and asks urgent questions about bodily harm.

From behind the door Rip's voice remains calm, but his ulterior motives are becoming clear.

"The only thing I would do at this point--if it came to where I was paid enough to turn the other way or turn to the other side--is to be wired or have them set up to where they could be videotaped passing money or what have you. Then it'd have to be worth it to me, and I'd have to be able to walk out of there."

Has the situation gone too far?

"It's getting ready to go too far."

"See, then you're telling me that you're here because you have a conscience," Ludwig says.

"No. Understand something. If I have to leave Nevada, I can't do it with nothing in my pocket. If I have to disappear and go somewhere else, I couldn't do it for free." Ludwig is worn down, drained by the threats and the reality of it all. She's out of questions. Rip walks slowly back into the room and stands in the brown kitchenette, glowing under the fluorescent lights. He gives his word that he won't hurt Luell. He seems sincere--for a killer.

"Hopefully we won't ever see each other again," Ludwig says, heading for the door. She doesn't bother to look back, but if she had, she would have seen Milt and Rip exchange sudden conspiratorial smiles. Milt's jitters are gone, and he looks very much in control.

Urban theorists will tell you that what makes Vegas the strangest city in America is that, instead of tangible industrial or agricultural products, it sells experience, spectacle, illusion--copies invested with more drama than the real thing. Maybe Rip and Milt are who they claim to be. Maybe they're a couple of guys trying to scam easy money by throwing a scare at an embattled businesswoman. Maybe the whole thing is a play within a play that Luell has arranged to bulwark her own story. Or maybe it's just anothermanifestation of the free-range weirdness that makes Vegas so alluring to the 40 million visitors it sees each year.

Armed Garden

Back at Luell's chapel, Ludwig alternates between tears and nervous, hysterical laughter as she explains the motel conversation to her daughter: "I've always told you I'm never afraid of what's going to happen, and I'm scared. I really am." Luell's mouth drops open, but nothing comes out. From the chapel, prerecorded organ music pours forth, sealing the moment's gothic feel. Theyagree not to tell Luell's father--who drives a limo for the chapel--what happened. "It would kill him," Ludwig says.

Ten minutes later Luell's dad walks through the door. They spill their guts.

He stares off, but his stoic pose doesn't hide the angst of a worried father. He sits quietly while the women buzz about, rehashing the episode--asking if they should close the chapel, wondering what to do and where to turn.

Meanwhile the phone rings continually, and Luell alternates between taking care of business ("Hello, A Las Vegas Garden of Love!") and crying over the possibility of mayhem ("She'd really hire someone to kill me?").

In the background a bride straightens her tiara in the mirror. One of the chapel's ministers whispers that no one's going to hurt Luell because he's a ninja. And her 14-year-old cousin grabs a sheathed knife and says he won't let anyone hurt his family.

It's all industrial-strength bullshit to Klute. "I don't believe it really happened," she said early this year, her features a mask of exasperation and disdain.

Happily Ever After?

That peak of absurdity marked the end of the wedding chapel wars--sort of. As the president might say, the major fighting has ended. But that doesn't necessarily mean peace is at hand.

Ludwig and Luell never paid Rip a dime, and he eventually disappeared without killing anyone. Milt is gone too, and word on his fate is almost as vague as word on Rip's--it's said that Milt was arrestedand extradited to the Pacific Northwest, where he was wanted under another name for charges no one can quite confirm. Two other handbillers were also extradited, to the East Coast for outstanding warrants. The city task force, after months of appearing to do nothing, made it official: It was doing nothing.

Vegas by its very nature has provided events to distract the warring factions: Britney Spears and her prank wedding; Michael Jackson, who led a drooling media pack on a bizarre chase around Las Vegas immediately after the latest charges were leveled against him.

But the handbillers are still downtown, still pouncing, and the hot emotions haven't dissipated. Casualties continue to mount: Luell's three dogs became mysteriously ill not long ago, and one died--poisoned, she insists, another victim of the chapel wars. A few weeks later one of Klute's handbillers, an older man, got jumped and beaten badly enough that he needed crutches and a knee brace; no amount of urging will get him back to the courthouse steps. It appears a homeless guy with a quick fist and a mean streak can still find a place in the wedding business.

Back in the high, ferocious moments of this controversy, Garden of Love minister Chip Bendel tried to put the cutthroat goings-on in perspective. "It's all about the dollar. That's what it all comes down to," he spat. "Personally I wish they'd outlaw all chapels, but it'll never happen."

Probably not, but there are signs that business is returning to normal: Luell recently acquired a capuchin monkey and is teaching it to walk up the aisle.

"People disappear," says the hit man. "Things happen permanently to people. You figure out what your life is worth."

Celebrity Weddings Gone Bad

Wedded bliss: July 19, 1966--August 19, 1968

Location: The Sands presidential suite

The 50-year-old Chairman of the Board did it his way when he married the 21-year-old actress (and when he later served her with divorce papers on the set of Rosemary's Baby). A witness, photographer Mike Gordon, said Ol' Blue Eyes didn't even kiss the bride. "I was the first person he spoke to after saying 'I do.' He said, 'I'm going to have a Jack Daniel's and water. How about you?"'

Wedded bliss: December 12, 1991--December 1, 1994

Location: Little Church of the West

Owner Greg Smith remembers someone calling at around seven P.M. and asking if the chapel would like to do a celebrity wedding. "We've got a Disney executive who wants to getmarried," said the caller. At 11:30P.M. a scruffy Gere and a makeup-less Crawford showed up instead. Afterward the new couple headed to Denny's for their first meal as husbandand wife.

Wedded bliss: February 15, 2000--April 6, 2000

Location: Onstage at the Las Vegas Hilton

Who wants to marry a millionaire? Conger did, until she realized that it meant being wed to Rockwell. Still, Conger, a former nurse, got a $35,000 ring, a free cruise, an Isuzu Trooper and a Playboy pictorial for exchanging vows in front of 23 million people. Rockwell got this badly written haiku published: "Love on television/ Not as strange as concept seems/ But Darya present."

Wedded bliss: May 5, 2000--May 29, 2003

Location: Little Church of the West

With only a 20-year age difference between them and a mutual love of tattoos, what could go wrong? They ponied up $189 for the ceremony and another $29 for Jolie's ring. Both wore jeans, and no blood was exchanged--at least not in public. For an interesting sentimental touch, they asked for the Righteous Brothers hit "Unchained Melody" as their background music.

Wedded bliss: January 3, 2004--January 4, 2004

Location: Little White Wedding Chapel

The one-day marriage between the princess of pop and some schlub from her hometown captured imaginations around the world. After whooping it up at the Palms' hip Ghostbar, Spears and Alexander had a quick wedding at 5:30 A.M. Following an emergency summit with Spears's handlersand her mom, the marriage was annulled the next day. The Star is still writing about it.

"I'm asking God to change herlife. She had put a dark cloud overthe wedding industry."