She may only be a sprite of a woman at 5’1”, 108 lbs., but matchmaking marvel Elaine Casale will find you the love of your life faster than cupid can hit you with his red-hot arrow. Forget about going to New York where matchmakers number in the dozens or heading to L.A. for a meeting with the Millionaire Matchmaker, this modern day Yenta is Las Vegas’ best kept secret when it comes to the business of finding love and romance.

With an 88 percent success rate, Elaine takes her business very seriously and is incensed when people question the validity of her service, InterActions. “If you do my service, you are a chooser not a loser. Losers are sitting in bars trying to meet people,” she emphatically declares. “When you join a dating service, it’s like having a lawyer or a doctor.”

If you are not Katie Holmes…
Elaine has a database of 2,500 people and she only accepts candidates that live locally. “I don’t take everybody. If you have a bad attitude, I don’t want you,” she explains. “I have a huge database, and you would be surprised to find out who is in it,” she states with a cat that caught the canary kind of look. But she’s not telling who. Her discretion is impeccable.

And if even she does deem you worthy, it may be with some caveats. “I will tell people they have to go get themselves fixed up, get the right haircut, get the right clothes,” Elaine explains. “I tell people the truth. If you are not Katie Holmes, don’t ask for Tom Cruise,” she knowingly advises. 

She even counsels some of her clients on their personality or lack of and how their dates should go. “I told one guy, ‘Why do you take me out on your dates?’ He was always talking about me and the service, he should have been finding about the gal who was sitting across the table from him.”

She then launches into a story of one client who sought out her services and had the wrong attitude but she took him anyway. She sent him out on some dates and the women’s evaluations kept coming back really low. “I had to call him up and tell it to him straight. He needed to shut his mouth and be nicer to his dates. By the end of the phone call, he was groveling and promising to be good,” she recalls with a laugh. He took her advice to heart, his evaluations improved and she finally found him a match.

The pixieish purveyor of love does caution that some people just aren’t matchable, and others are too impatient. “They want to meet someone but it takes time. Their expectations are too high. They sign up and expect a match the next day. I tell them to be patient,” she acknowledges.

But her success is undeniable with too many committed relationships to even count. “Eighty-eight percent of my people wind up together,” she says. “I do get so excited. So many people come in and if they have the right attitude it really works. There’s always going to be the right person.”

No! Never, Not Me!
Did she ever think she would be in the business of love? Emphatically she immediately declares “No! Never, not me. I was a singer, a mother, an actress.”

The former opera singer had retired from her singing career and figured she would find work in a field she knew a lot about. “All I knew how to do was sing. And I knew a lot about cosmetics from the singing. So I sold Epilady, and then they sold the business so I was looking for another opportunity in the cosmetics field,” she explains.

But fate or love intervened and she started working at dating service Great Expectations in Chicago. She ended up running the company and then in 1995 Richard Geryan, founder of InterActions, hired her away from Great Expectations to start the Las Vegas office of InterActions.

As Elaine became more and more skilled at the art of love, she started matching couples on the sly using her own methods. When Geryan found out what she had been doing, he told her she should buy the business, so she did. That was four years ago.

Broken Pickers
In most cases, Elaine attributes Las Vegas’ transient population as one reason why her clients can’t find love, but more often than not they just don’t have the time. However, there’s also a portion of her clients who have broken pickers.

“They just might not be a good picker. Some girls just have bad pickers and I help them with that,” Elaine explains. 
She goes on to describe one woman who came in to see her and had her finger all wrapped up in a bandage. “I asked what she had done, and she said, ‘Elaine, my picker is broken’,” Elaine recalls with a big laugh.

Elaine then veers off into a story about the acting career she had hoped to pursue that would have been similar to actresses like Kathryn Grayson who was an opera singer who starred in movies like “Kiss Me Kate” and “Showboat” during the ’50s. As she is telling the story, she interrupts herself with a thought about another ’50s screen actress, “I’ll tell you who didn’t have a good picker – Debbie Reynolds – now she didn’t have a good picker.”

Other than those saddled with a broken picker, prime candidates for her services are those who have a good attitude. But she also thinks timing has a lot to do with it, too. “Their heart has to be open to it, and not have any rules,” she advises. “If you know it’s going to work, then it will.”

Surprisingly, Elaine has more men than women in her database. “There’s always more men then women. Men know they have to do it, especially the executives,” she explains. “Men like the service because they cannot stand being rejected. This is easy for them, I do all the work. Whereas, women are used to rejection, they get it all day at work and from their kids.”

The fairer sex is always a little harder to come by, according to Elaine. “I am always looking for women. I do wonderful with all ages but especially women over 50. And you know today a woman of 50 doesn’t look 50, she looks 35.”

It’s a Mitzvah
One key to Elaine’s success is her incredible memory. She knows exactly who everyone she has matched is dating, and has excellent recall of who is buried in her files of 14 years.

I was privy to her steel-trap memory during our interview when a former client called out of the blue. As she chatted away, I overheard her ask him if he was still with the woman (and she knew her name) Elaine had set him up with -- and he was. Another phone call she received while I was sitting there was a client calling to let Elaine know she was happy with her match and not to send anymore people her way.

Throughout our interview she just rattled off the stories of couples she had successfully matched. There was the story of the never-been-married caretaker and widower who met for their first coffee date in the morning and hit if off so well they ended up spending the entire day together and went to see The Lettermen that night. “I remember it vividly, she called me ecstatic, ‘I get roses every day, I don’t want to meet anyone else. Don’t send me anyone else’,” recalls Elaine with a wink. 

There was another woman she matched with a charming maestro who wrote to Elaine and thanked her profusely calling the newly, love struck couple’s meeting a mitzvah. Elaine talked about the “Mr. Big” of her membership, who she has finally successfully matched, as well as the rigid military man she was eventually able to pair up.

And if the stories weren’t proof enough, Elaine’s office is littered with stacks of cards and photos of people who were happily joined in coupledom by her matchmaking skills.

Good Old Fashioned Love
There are no videotapes here, or a computer trying to match you up based on a cyber questionnaire. Success results from old fashioned compatibility tests combined with Elaine’s female intuition.

Elaine enthusiastically insists her method is very simple. “I listen to people, I hear what they are saying,” she explains. “Sometimes I get a great feeling when I am talking with a new member and people start coming into my head that I should match them up with. Those are easy ones.”

First, a potential client must meet Elaine and fill out a 55-question Myers Briggs survey. With questions like: Do you consider yourself hard to please? or Would a spouse who was a ‘homebody’ make you happy?, Elaine gets a pretty good idea of each member’s likes and dislikes.

Next, there’s a background check. Once all that is done, Elaine then gets to the business of finding potential matches. After she finds two members she deems suitable for one another, she sends a letter to each one. They make contact on their own and arrange a date. After their meeting, they each do an evaluation that goes back to Elaine which lets her know how the date went. It also lets her know if she needs to keep setting you up or if you have found “the one”.

That’s something web sites like eHarmony and match.com don’t do. “They don’t offer the personal service I do. It’s a computer doing everything,” she says with a sigh of disregard. “It (cyber love sites) really hasn’t affected my business. Years ago when they first started, it affected me but not anymore, it’s just so phony. It’s not safe for women, they know I do background checks, and those men on those sites could be married, and up to who knows what.”

To utilize Elaine’s matching making skills, it will run you $3,000 for a one-year membership, six months is $1,500, and she offers a senior program that is less. She also offers Strictly Personal, a gay service.

Akin to an accountant during tax season, this is definitely her busy time of year. “January is big because everyone has made resolutions to meet someone in the new year, especially if their Christmas was awful and the person they were seeing screwed it up. Then, of course, there’s February when everyone is looking for love.”

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