Bill Fuller. Colourful Irish builder and promoter.
At the height of his career, Bill Fuller owned 26 ballrooms and ran a construction company that employed 3,000 people. Even at the age of 89, he still went out the back to relieve his frustrations on a punching bag hanging in the gardens of his opulent Las Vegas home.
Bill Fuller was born in the townland of Finogue, about five miles from Tralee, Co Kerry, on May 6, 1917. He emigrated to London as a teenager to work on building sites.
He developed his own construction business and took over a rundown Irish ballroom on Camden High Street when he was 20. A notorious rough house, the Buffalo had been forcibly closed down, but Fuller, a keen amateur boxer and wrestler, persuaded the local police chief to let him reopen it, promising that if he ever needed to call the constabulary he would personally close the hall down for good. Fuller manned the door himself and transformed the Buffalo into one of the most popular Irish ballrooms in Britain.
In the 1950s, he built a chain of ballrooms across England and Ireland, while amassing some of his fortune from demolition. There was even a saying about him at that time: “What Hitler didn’t knock down, Bill Fuller did.”
In 1956 he opened Manhattan’s City Center ballroom, which soon became the leading Irish dance hall in New York, and he later opened ballrooms in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Regularly commuting an average of 6,000 miles a week between his many properties, Fuller found himself increasingly drawn to Las Vegas. In 1966, he managed to get one of his acts, the Royal Showband, a big break in the city. “I remember Bill telling me about the day someone offered to introduce him to Elvis Presley,” recalls his friend, Frank Murray, who would later manage the Electric Ballroom and the Pogues. “He turned around and said: ‘Fuck Elvis, I want to meet the Colonel’.” Vegas became home for the rest of his life.
He also owned The Crystal (later McGonagles) and Town & Country in Dublin, Teach Furbo in Galway and the Atlantic in Tramore.
Fuller, built an empire of entertainment venues and hotels across the world – including the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town and San Francisco’s Fillmore West. Aside from his venues, Fuller ran a management and promotions company whose list of clients included Joe Loss, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash. He brought The Dubliners and the Pecker Dunne among others to play his American venues.
During the 1970s, Fuller sold off many of his ballrooms while converting others into rock venues. The Buffalo was renamed the Electric Ballroom in July 1978. The opening show featured various Sex Pistols and Thin Lizzy, and its stage has seen Iggy Pop, the Clash, Joy Division, U2, the Smiths and Oasis. Fuller was full of surprises: he turned his attention to prospecting for gold and silver in western Nevada and after a lifetime avoiding publicity, he was suddenly thrust into the media spotlight at the age of 82, when he he bankrolled the Las Vegas stripper Sandy Murphy and spent $2m on lawyers who got her acquitted of drugging and killing casino mogul Ted Binion in 1998.
Fuller was married three times – his first marriage was to a Kerry woman he met in London, and they had three children. He married the singer Carmel Quinn and was predeceased by their son, Mike. After that marriage ended, he married a dancer in Las Vegas. He was survived by four daughters, Mary, Jane, Terry and Kate, and two sons, Stephen and Sean.
He died in a Santa Monica hospital in California after a heart attack on July 28, 2008.