The billionaire financed a junket for members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association two months before the awards at the Riviera. Riklis is largely credited with creating a golden path for Zadora to win her Golden Globes award for New Star of the Year for her 1982 role in “Butterfly,” which he had co-produced. The show became the inspiration for the Netflix scripted series, “GLOW.” He also bankrolled “G.L.O.W.: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,” a syndicated TV show starring female pro wrestlers. He brought the groundbreaking production shows “Splash,” “Crazy Girls” and “Evening at La Cage” to the Strip. Riklis turned the Riv into one of the most successful - and for a time, the largest - hotels on the Strip. The man known as “Rik” by his closest friends was famous as Zadora’s first husband (the two were married from 1977-‘93) and as the owner of the Riv in during its heyday in the 1980s through the early ’90s. The billionaire who was a fixture on the Strip while owner of the Riviera died Friday at a Tel Aviv hospital. “He’d say, ‘Do you know who I am? And they would go, ‘Noooo!’ And he’d say, ‘Do you know who Pia Zadora is? I’m Mr. “He would go lecture at Yale or Duke, speaking as a successful businessman - he was a brilliant businessman, who knew how to make money - and he had a great sense of humor,” Zadora said while seated in a darkened booth Friday night after a performance of her “Pia’s Place” show at Piero’s Italian Restaurant. Somehow, the marriage of starlet Pia Zadora and billionaire businessman Meshulam Riklis was favorable to both parties. Meshulam Riklis, Pia Zadora and their baby Kady are seen at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York in 1984.
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