The figures look so real, Madame's people will tell you, because they are painstakingly created with the cooperation of the real things. Celebrities endure a two-hour session in which they are photographed from every angle, and their bodies, hands and faces are measured more than 150 times with calipers and tape measures. And this is just the beginning of the six-month creation process. From there, Madame's craftspeople take over in a process that is essentially unchanged since Madame Tussaud first created a portrait of writer Voltaire and later honed her craft making death masks for victims of the French revolution such as King Louis XVI and his doomed queen. A fiberglass body is cast from the mold and the head is cast in wax.
Hair is inserted strand by strand into the scalp and each tooth is individually inserted.
And as a sad reminder of the mortality of even our most seemingly vibrant heroes, there's Olympian Florence Griffith Joyner, who sat for her figure shortly before her death last year. Since this is Vegas, the city's famous headliners, of course, get the star treatment. A young Frank Sinatra leads the pack, and he's looking snazzy in '40s style hipster elegance. Sammy Davis Jr. Peter Lawford is, as usual, left out. Elvis being, well, Elvis, he gets not one but two figures.