Las Vegas (What?) Las
Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!
HERNIA, HERNIA,
HERNIA, HERNIA, HERNIA, HERNIA, HERNIA, hernia, hernia, hernia,
hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia; hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia,
hernia, hernia, HERNia, HERNia, HERNia; hernia, hernia, hernia,
hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, eight is the point, the point is
eight; hernia, hernia, HERNia; hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, all
right, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hard eight, hernia, hernia,
hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia,
hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia
“What is all this hernia hernia stuff?”
This was Raymond talking to the
wavy-haired fellow with the stick, the dealer, at the craps table
about 3:45 Sunday morning. The stickman had no idea what this big
wiseacre was talking about, but he resented the tone. He gave
Raymond that patient arch of the eyebrows known as a Red Hook
brush-off, which is supposed to convey some such thought as, I am a
very tough but cool guy, as you can tell by the way I carry my
eyeballs low in the pouches, and if this wasn’t such a high-class
joint we would take wiseacres like you out back and beat you into
jellied madrilene.
At this point, however, Raymond was
immune to subtle looks.
The stickman tried to get the game
going again, but every time he would start up his singsong, by
easing the words out through the nose, which seems to be the style
among craps dealers in Las Vegas—“All right, a new shooter … eight
is the point, the point is eight” and so on—Raymond would start
droning along with him in exactly the same tone of voice, “Hernia,
hernia, hernia; hernia, HERNia, HERNia, hernia; hernia, hernia,
hernia.”
Everybody at the craps table was
staring in consternation to think that anybody would try to needle
a tough, hip, elite soldat like a Las Vegas
craps dealer. The gold-lame odalisques of Los Angeles were staring.
The Western sports, fifty-eight-year-old men who wear Texas string
ties, were staring. The old babes at the slot machines, holding
Dixie Cups full of nickles, were staring at the craps tables, but
cranking away the whole time.
Raymond, who is thirty-four years old
and works as an engineer in Phoenix, is big but not terrifying. He
has the sort of thatchwork hair that grows so low all along the
forehead there is no logical place to part it, but he tries anyway.
He has a huge, prognathous jaw, but it is as smooth, soft and round
as a melon, so that Raymond’s total effect is that of an Episcopal
divinity student.
The guards were wonderful. They were
dressed in cowboy uniforms like Bruce Cabot in Sundown and they wore sheriffs stars.
“Mister, is there something we can do
for you?”
“The expression is ‘Sir,’” said
Raymond. “You said ‘Mister.’ The expression is ‘Sir.’ How’s your
old Cosa Nostra?”
Amazingly, the casino guards were
easing Raymond out peaceably, without putting a hand on him. I had
never seen the fellow before, but possibly because I had been
following his progress for the last five minutes, he turned to me
and said, “Hey, do you have a car? This wild stuff is starting
again.”
The gist of it was that he had left his
car somewhere and he wanted to ride up the Strip to the Stardust,
one of the big hotel-casinos. I am describing this big goof Raymond
not because he is a typical Las Vegas tourist, although he has some
typical symptoms, but because he is a good example of the marvelous
impact Las Vegas has on the senses. Raymond’s senses were at a high
pitch of excitation, the only trouble being that he was going off
his nut. He had been up since Thursday afternoon, and it was now
about 3:45 A.M. Sunday. He had an envelope full of pep
pills—amphetamine—in his left coat pocket and an envelope full of
Equanils—meprobamate—in his right pocket, or were the Equanils in
the left and the pep pills in the right? He could tell by looking,
but he wasn’t going to look anymore. He didn’t care to see how many
were left.
He had been rolling up and down the
incredible electric-sign gauntlet of Las Vegas’ Strip, U.S. Route
91, where the neon and the par lamps—bubbling, spiraling,
rocketing, and exploding in sunbursts ten stories high out in the
middle of the desert—celebrate one-story casinos. He had been
gambling and drinking and eating now and again at the buffet tables
the casinos keep heaped with food day and night, but mostly hopping
himself up with good old amphetamine, cooling himself down with
meprobamate, then hooking down more alcohol, until now, after sixty
hours, he was slipping into the symptoms of toxic
schizophrenia.
He was also enjoying what the prophets
of hallucinogen call “consciousness expansion.” The man was
psychedelic. He was beginning to isolate the components of Las
Vegas’ unique bombardment of the senses. He was quite right about
this hernia hernia stuff. Every casino in
Las Vegas is, among the other things, a room full of craps tables
with dealers who keep up a running singsong that sounds as though
they are saying “hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia” and so on.
There they are day and night, easing a running commentary through
their nostrils. What they have to say contains next to no useful
instruction. Its underlying message is, We are the initiates,
riding the crest of chance. That the accumulated sound comes out
“hernia” is merely an unfortunate phonetic coincidence. Actually,
it is part of something rare and rather grand: a combination of
baroque stimuli that brings to mind the bronze gongs, no larger
than a blue plate, that Louis XIV, his ruff collars larded with the
lint of the foul Old City of Byzantium, personally hunted out in
the bazaars of Asia Minor to provide exotic acoustics for his new
palace outside Paris.
The sounds of the craps dealer will be
in, let’s say, the middle register. In the lower register will be
the sound of the old babes at the slot machines. Men play the slots
too, of course, but one of the indelible images of Las Vegas is
that of the old babes at the row upon row of slot machines. There
they are at six o‘clock Sunday morning no less than at three
o’clock Tuesday afternoon. Some of them pack their old hummocky
shanks into Capri pants, but many of them just put on the old print
dress, the same one day after day, and the old hob-heeled shoes,
looking like they might be going out to buy eggs in Tupelo,
Mississippi. They have a Dixie Cup full of nickels or dimes in the
left hand and an Iron Boy work glove on the right hand to keep the
calluses from getting sore. Every time they pull the handle, the
machine makes a sound much like the sound a cash register makes
before the bell rings, then the slot pictures start clattering up
from left to right, the oranges, lemons, plums, cherries, bells,
bars, buckaroos—the figure of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. The
whole sound keeps churning up over and over again in eccentric
series all over the place, like one of those random-sound radio
symphonies by John Cage. You can hear it at any hour of the day or
night all over Las Vegas. You can walk down Fremont Street at dawn
and hear it without even walking in a door, that and the spins of
the wheels of fortune, a boring and not very popular sort of
simplified roulette, as the tabs flap to a stop. As an overtone, or
at times simply as a loud sound, comes the babble of the casino
crowds, with an occasional shriek from the craps tables, or,
anywhere from 4 P.M. to 6 A.M., the sound of brass instruments or
electrified string instruments from the cocktail-lounge
shows.
The crowd and band sounds are not very
extraordinary, of course. But Las Vegas’ Muzak is. Muzak pervades
Las Vegas from the time you walk into the airport upon landing to
the last time you leave the casinos. It is piped out to the
swimming pool. It is in the drugstores. It is as if there were a
communal fear that someone, somewhere in Las Vegas, was going to be
left with a totally vacant minute on his hands.
Las Vegas has succeeded in wiring an
entire city with this electronic stimulation, day and night, out in
the middle of the desert. In the automobile I rented, the radio
could not be turned off, no matter which dial you went after. I
drove for days in a happy burble of Action Checkpoint News, “Monkey
No. 9,” “Donna, Donna, the Prima Donna,” and picking-and-singing
jingles for the Frontier Bank and the Fremont Hotel.
One can see the magnitude of the
achievement. Las Vegas takes what in other American towns is but a
quixotic inflammation of the senses for some poor salary mule in
the brief interval between the flagstone rambler and the automatic
elevator downtown and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it
into an institution.
For example, Las Vegas is the only town
in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like
New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs.
One can look at Las Vegas from a mile away on Route 91 and see no
buildings, no trees, only signs. But such signs! They tower. They
revolve, they oscillate, they soar in shapes before which the
existing vocabulary of art history is helpless. I can only attempt
to supply names—Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon
Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonald’s Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino
Elliptical, Miami Beach Kidney. Las Vegas’ sign makers work so far
out beyond the frontiers of conventional studio art that they have
no names themselves for the forms they create. Vaughan Cannon, one
of those tall, blond Westerners, the builders of places like Las
Vegas and Los Angeles, whose eyes seem to have been bleached by the
sun, is in the back shop of the Young Electric Sign Company out on
East Charleston Boulevard with Herman Boernge, one of his
designers, looking at the model they have prepared for, the Lucky
Strike Casino sign, and Cannon points to where the sign’s two great
curving faces meet to form a narrow vertical face and
says:
“Well, here we are again—what do we
call that?”
“I don’t know,” says Boernge. “It’s
sort of a nose effect. Call it a nose.
Okay, a nose, but it rises sixteen
stories high above a two-story building. In Las Vegas no farseeing
entrepreneur buys a sign to fit a building he owns. He rebuilds the
building to support the biggest sign he can get up the money for
and, if necessary, changes the name. The Lucky Strike Casino today
is the Lucky Casino, which fits better when recorded in sixteen
stories of flaming peach and incandescent yellow in the middle of
the Mojave Desert. In the Young Electric Sign Co. era signs have
become the architecture of Las Vegas, and the most whimsical,
Yale-seminar-frenzied devices of the two late geniuses of Baroque
Modern, Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen, seem rather stuffy
business, like a jest at a faculty meeting, compared to it. Men
like Boernge, Kermit Wayne, Ben Mitchem and Jack Larsen, formerly
an artist for Walt Disney, are the designer-sculptor geniuses of
Las Vegas, but their motifs have been carried faithfully throughout
the town by lesser men, for gasoline stations, motels, funeral
parlors, churches, public buildings, flophouses and sauna
baths.
Then there is a stimulus that is both
visual and sexual—the Las Vegas buttocks décolletage. This is a
form of sexually provocative dress seen more and more in the United
States, but avoided like Broadway message—embroidered (“Kiss Me,
I’m Cold”) underwear in the fashion pages, so that the euphemisms
have not been established and I have no choice but clinical terms.
To achieve buttocks décolletage a woman wears bikini-style shorts
that cut across the round fatty masses of the buttocks rather than
cupping them from below, so that the outer-lower edges of these
fatty masses, or “cheeks,” are exposed. I am in the cocktail lounge
of the Hacienda Hotel, talking to managing director Dick Taylor
about the great success his place has had in attracting family and
tour groups, and all around me the waitresses are bobbing on their
high heels, bare legs and décolletage-bare backsides, set off by
pelvis-length lingerie of an uncertain denomination. I stare, but I
am new here. At the White Cross Rexall drugstore on the Strip a
pregnant brunette walks in off the street wearing black shorts with
buttocks décolletage aft and illusion-of-cloth nylon lingerie
hanging fore, and not even the old mom’s-pie pensioners up near the
door are staring. They just crank away at the slot machines. On the
streets of Las Vegas, not only the show girls, of which the town
has about two hundred fifty, bona fide, in residence, but girls of
every sort, including, especially, Las Vegas’ little high-school
buds, who adorn what locals seeking roots in the sand call “our
city of churches and schools,” have taken up the chic of wearing
buttocks décolletage step-ins under flesh-tight slacks, with the
outline of the undergarment showing through fashionably. Others go
them one better. They achieve the effect of having been dipped
once, briefly, in Helenca stretch nylon. More and more they look
like those wonderful old girls out of Flash Gordon who were wrapped
just once over in Baghdad pantaloons of clear polyethylene with
only Flash Gordon between them and the insane red-eyed assaults of
the minions of Ming. It is as if all the hip young suburban gals of
America named Lana, Deborah and Sandra, who gather wherever the arc
lights shine and the studs steady their coiffures in the
plate-glass reflection, have convened in Las Vegas with their
bouffant hair above and anatomically stretch-pant-swathed little
bottoms below, here on the new American frontier. But
exactly!
NONE OF IT WOULD HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE, HOWEVER,
WITHOUT one of those historic combinations of nature and art that
create an epoch. In this case, the Mojave Desert plus the father of
Las Vegas, the late Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
Bugsy was an inspired man. Back in 1944
the city fathers of Las Vegas, their Protestant rectitude alloyed
only by the giddy prospect of gambling revenues, were considering
the sort of ordinance that would have preserved the town with a
kind of Colonial Williamsburg dinkiness in the motif of the Wild
West. All new buildings would have to have at least the façade of
the sort of place where piano players used to wear garters on their
sleeves in Virginia City around 1880. In Las Vegas in 1944, it
should be noted, there was nothing more stimulating in the entire
town than a Fremont Street bar where the composer of “Deep in the
Heart of Texas” held forth and the regulars downed fifteen-cent
beer.
Bugsy pulled into Las Vegas in 1945
with several million dollars that, after his assassination, was
traced back in the general direction of gangster-financiers. Siegel
put up a hotel-casino such as Las Vegas had never seen and called
it the Flamingo—all Miami Modern, and the hell with piano players
with garters and whatever that was all about. Everybody drove out
Route 91 just to gape. Such shapes! Boomerang Modern supports,
Palette Curvilinear bars, Hot Shoppe Cantilever roofs and a
scalloped swimming pool. Such colors! All the new electrochemical
pastels of the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid
pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green,
viridine, aquamarine, phenosafranine, incandescent orange,
scarlet-fever purple, cyanic blue, tessellated bronze,
hospital-fruit-basket orange. And such signs! Two cylinders rose at
either end of the Flamingo—eight stories high and covered from top
to bottom with neon rings in the shape of bubbles that fizzed all
eight stories up into the desert sky all night long like an
illuminated whisky-soda tumbler filled to the brim with pink
champagne.
The business history of the Flamingo,
on the other hand, was not such a smashing success. For one thing,
the gambling operation was losing money at a rate that rather
gloriously refuted all the recorded odds of the gaming science.
Siegel’s backers apparently suspected that he was playing both ends
against the middle in collusion with professional gamblers who hung
out at the Flamingo as though they had liens on it. What with one
thing and another, someone decided by the night of June 20, 1947,
that Benny Siegel, lord of the Flamingo, had had it. He was shot to
death in Los Angeles.
Yet Siegel’s aesthetic, psychological
and cultural insights, like Cézanne’s, Freud’s and Max Weber’s,
could not die. The Siegel vision and the Siegel aesthetic were
already sweeping Las Vegas like gold fever. And there were builders
of the West equal to the opportunity. All over Las Vegas the
incredible electric pastels were repeated. Overnight the Baroque
Modern forms made Las Vegas one of the few architecturally unified
cities of the world—the style was Late American Rich—and without
the bother and bad humor of a City Council ordinance. No enterprise
was too small, too pedestrian or too solemn for The Look. The
Supersonic Carwash, the Mercury Jet-away, Gas Vegas Village and
Terrible Herbst gasoline stations, the Par-a-Dice Motel, the Palm
Mortuary, the Orbit Inn, the Desert Moon, the Blue Onion
Drive-In—on it went, like Wildwood, New Jersey, entering
Heaven.
The atmosphere of the six-mile-long
Strip of hotel-casinos grips even those segments of the population
who rarely go near it. Barely twenty-five hundred feet off the
Strip, over by the Convention Center, stands Landmark Towers, a
shaft thirty stories high, full of apartments, supporting a huge
circular structure shaped like a space observation platform, which
was to have contained the restaurant and casino. Somewhere along
the way Landmark Towers went bankrupt, probably at that point in
the last of the many crises when the construction workers
still insisted on spending half the day flat
on their bellies with their heads, tongues and eyeballs hanging
over the edge of the tower, looking down into the swimming pool of
the Playboy Apartments below, which has a “nudes only” section for
show girls whose work calls for a tan all over.
Elsewhere, Las Vegas’ beautiful little
high-school buds in their buttocks-décolletage stretch pants are
back on the foam-rubber upholstery of luxury broughams peeling off
the entire chick ensemble long enough to establish the highest
venereal-disease rate among high-school students anywhere north of
the yaws-rotting shanty jungles of the Eighth Parallel. The Negroes
who have done much of the construction work in Las Vegas’
sixteen-year boom are off in their ghetto on the west side of town,
and some of them are smoking marijuana, eating peyote buttons and
taking horse (heroin), which they get from Tijuana, I mean it’s
simple, baby, right through the mails, and old Raymond, the Phoenix
engineer, does not have the high life to himself.
I AM ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF THE CLARK COUNTY
COURT house talking to Sheriff Captain Ray Gubser, another of these
strong, pale-eyed Western-builder types, who is obligingly
explaining to me law enforcement on the Strip, where the problem is
not so much the drunks, crooks or roughhousers, but these nuts on
pills who don’t want to ever go to bed, and they have
hallucinations and try to bring down the casinos like Samson. The
county has two padded cells for them. They cool down after three or
four days and they turn out to be somebody’s earnest breadwinner
back in Denver or Minneapolis, loaded with the right credentials
and pouring soul and apologiae all over the county cops before
finally pulling out of never-never land for good by plane. Captain
Gubser is telling me about life and eccentric times in Las Vegas,
but I am distracted. The captain’s office has windows out on the
corridor. Coming down the corridor is a covey of girls, skipping
and screaming, giggling along, their heads exploding in
platinum-and-neon-yellow bouffants or beehives or raspberry-silk
scarves, their eyes appliquéd in black like mail-order decals,
their breasts aimed up under their jerseys at the angle of
anti-aircraft automatic weapons, and, as they swing around the
corner toward the elevator, their glutei maximi are bobbing up and
down with their pumps in the inevitable buttocks décolletage
pressed out against black, beige and incarnadine stretch pants.
This is part of the latest shipment of show girls to Las Vegas,
seventy in all, for the “Lido de Paris” revue at the Stardust, to
be entitled Bravo!, replacing the old show,
entitled Voilà. The girls are in the county
courthouse getting their working papers, and fifteen days from now
these little glutei maximi and ack-ack breasts with stars pasted on
the tips will be swinging out over the slack jaws and cocked-up
noses of patrons sitting at stageside at the Stardust. I am still
listening to Gubser, but somehow it is a courthouse where mere
words are beaten back like old atonal Arturo Toscanini trying to
sing along with the NBC Symphony. There he would be, flapping his
little toy arms like Tony Galento shadowboxing with fate, bawling
away in the face of union musicians who drowned him without a
bubble. I sat in on three trials in the courthouse, and it was
wonderful, because the courtrooms are all blond-wood modern and
look like sets for TV panel discussions on marriage and the
teen-ager. What the judge has to say is no less formal and no more
fatuous than what judges say everywhere, but inside of forty
seconds it is all meaningless because the atmosphere is precisely
like a news broadcast over Las Vegas’ finest radio station, KORK.
The newscast, as it is called, begins with a series of electronic
wheeps out on that far edge of sound where only quadrupeds can
hear. A voice then announces that this is Action Checkpoint News.
“The news—all the news—flows first through Action Checkpoint!—then
reaches You! at the speed of Sound!” More electronic wheeps, beeps
and lulus, and then an item: “Cuban Premier Fidel Castro nearly
drowned yesterday.” Urp! Wheep! Lulu! No news a KORK announcer has
ever brought to Las Vegas at the speed of sound, or could possibly
bring, short of word of the annihilation of Los Angeles, could
conceivably compete within the brain with the giddiness of this
electronic jollification.
The wheeps, beeps, freeps, electronic
lulus, Boomerang Modern and Flash Gordon sunbursts soar on through
the night over the billowing hernia-hernia sounds and the old babes
at the slots—until it is 7:30 A.M. and I am watching five men at a
green-topped card table playing poker. They are sliding their
Beebrand cards into their hands and squinting at the pips with a
set to the lips like Conrad Veidt in a tunic collar studying a code
message from S.S. headquarters. Big Sid Wyman, the old Big-Time
gambler from St. Louis, is there, with his eyes looking like two
poached eggs engraved with a road map of West Virginia after all
night at the poker table. Sixty-year-old Chicago Tommy Hargan is
there with his topknot of white hair pulled back over his little
pink skull and a mountain of chips in front of his old caved-in
sternum. Sixty-two-year-old Dallas Maxie Welch is there, fat and
phlegmatic as an Indian Ocean potentate. Two Los Angeles biggies
are there exhaling smoke from candela-green cigars into the gloom.
It looks like the perfect vignette of every Big-Time back room,
“athletic club,” snooker house and floating poker game in the
history of the guys-and-dolls lumpen-bourgeoisie. But what is all
this? Off to the side, at a rostrum, sits a flawless little
creature with bouffant hair and Stridex-pure skin who looks like
she is polished each morning with a rotary buffer. Before her on
the rostrum is a globe of coffee on a hot coil. Her sole job is to
keep the poker players warmed up with coffee. Meantime, numberless
uniformed lackeys are cocked and aimed about the edges to bring the
five Big Timers whatever else they might desire, cigarettes,
drinks, napkins, eyeglass-cleaning tissues, plug-in telephones. All
around the poker table, at a respectful distance of ten feet, is a
fence with the most delicate golden pickets. Upon it, even at this
narcoleptic hour, lean men and women in their best clothes watching
the combat of the titans. The scene is the charmed circle of the
casino of the Dunes Hotel. As everyone there knows, or believes,
these fabulous men are playing for table stakes of fifteen or
twenty thousand dollars. One hundred dollars rides on a chip.
Mandibles gape at the progress of the battle. And now Sid Wyman,
who is also a vice-president of the Dunes, is at a small escritoire
just inside the golden fence signing a stack of vouchers for such
sums as $4500, all printed in the heavy Mondrianesque digits of a
Burroughs business check-making machine. It is as if America’s
guys-and-dolls gamblers have somehow been tapped upon the
shoulders, knighted, initiated into a new aristocracy.
Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy
Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo—without any of the
inevitable upper-class baggage of the Riviera casinos. At Monte
Carlo there is still the plush mustiness of the 19th-century noble
lions—of Baron Bleichroden, a big winner at roulette who always
said, “My dear friends, it is so easy on Black.” Of Lord Jersey,
who won seventeen maximum bets in a row—on black, as a matter of
fact—nodded to the croupier, and said, “Much obliged, old sport,
old sport,” took his winnings to England, retired to the country
and never gambled again in his life. Or of the old Duc de Dinc who
said he could win only in the high-toned Club Privé, and who won
very heavily one night, saw two Englishmen gaping at his good
fortune, threw them every mille-franc note he had in his hands and
said, “Here. Englishmen without money are altogether odious.”
Thousands of Europeans from the lower orders now have the money to
go to the Riviera, but they remain under the century-old status
pall of the aristocracy. At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong
Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau
Richness, Cultural Aridity—concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the
grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect
Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino;
and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las
Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbott and Costello,
and there, in a way, you have it all.
I AM IN THE OFFICE OF MAJOR A. RIDDLE—MAJOR IS
HIS name—the president of the Dunes Hotel. He combs his hair
straight back and wears a heavy gold band on his little finger with
a diamond sunk into it. As everywhere else in Las Vegas, someone
has turned on the air conditioning to the point where it will be
remembered, all right, as Las Vegas—style air conditioning. Riddle
has an appointment to see a doctor at 4:30 about a crimp in his
neck. His secretary, Maude McBride, has her head down and is
rubbing the back of her neck. Lee Fisher, the P.R. man, and I are
turning ours from time to time to keep the pivots from freezing up.
Riddle is telling me about “the French war” and moving his neck
gingerly. The Stardust bought and imported a version of the Lido de
Paris spectacular, and the sight of all those sequined giblets
pooning around on flamingo legs inflamed the tourists. The
Tropicana fought back with the Folies Bergère, the New Frontier
installed “Paree Ooh La La,” the Hacienda reached for the puppets
“Les Poupées de Paris,” and the Silver Slipper called in Lili St.
Cyr, the stripper, which was going French after a fashion. So the
Dunes has bought up the third and last of the great Paris girlie
shows, the Casino de Paris. Lee Fisher says, “And we’re going to do
things they can’t top. In this town you’ve
got to move ahead in quantum jumps.”
Quantum? But exactly! The beauty of the
Dunes’ Casino de Paris show is that it will be beyond art, beyond
dance, beyond spectacle, even beyond the titillations of the
winking crotch. The Casino de Paris will be a behemoth piece of
American calculus, like Project Mercury.
“This show alone will cost us two and a
half million a year to operate and one and a half million to
produce,” Major A. Riddle is saying. “The costumes alone will be
fantastic. There’ll be more than five hundred costumes and—well,
they’ll be fantastic.
“And this machine—by the time we get
through expanding the stage, this machine will cost us
$250,000.”
“Machine?”
“Yes. Sean Kenny is doing the staging.
The whole set moves electronically right in front of your eyes. He
used to work with this fellow Lloyd Wright.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright?”
“Yes. Kenny did the staging for
Blitz. Did you see it? Fantastic. Well, it’s
all done electronically. They built this machine for us in Glasgow,
Scotland, and it’s being shipped here right now. It moves all over
the place and creates smoke and special effects. We’ll have
everything. You can stage a bombardment with it. You’ll think the
whole theatre is blowing up.
“You’ll have to program it. They had to
use the same mechanism that’s in the Skybolt Missile to build it.
It’s called a ‘Celson’ or something like that. That’s how
complicated this thing is. They have to have the same thing as the
Skybolt Missile.”
As Riddle speaks, one gets a wonderful
picture of sex riding the crest of the future. Whole tableaux of
bare-bottomed Cosmonaughties will be hurtling around the Casino de
Paris Room of the Dunes Hotel at fantastic speed in elliptical
orbits, a flash of the sequined giblets here, a blur of the
black-rimmed decal eyes there, a wink of the crotch here and there,
until, with one vast Project Climax for our times, Sean Kenny, who
used to work with this fellow Frank Lloyd Wright, presses the red
button and the whole yahooing harem, shrieking ooh-la-la amid the
din, exits in a mushroom cloud.
THE ALLURE IS MOST IRRESISTIBLE NOT TO THE
YOUNG BUT the old. No one in Las Vegas will admit it—it is not the
modern, glamorous notion—but Las Vegas is a resort for old people.
In those last years, before the tissue deteriorates and the wires
of the cerebral cortex hang in the skull like a clump of dried
seaweed, they are seeking liberation.
At eight o’clock Sunday morning it is
another almost boringly sunny day in the desert, and Clara and
Abby, both about sixty, and their husbands, Earl, sixty-three, and
Ernest, sixty-four, come squinting out of the Mint Casino onto
Fremont Street.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,”
Abby says. “Those last three drinks, I couldn’t even feel them. It
was just like drinking fizz. You know what I mean?”
“Hey,” says Ernest, “how about that
place back ’ere? We ain’t been back ’ere. Come on.”
The others are standing there on the
corner, squinting and looking doubtful. Abby and Clara have both
entered old babe-hood. They have that fleshy, humped-over shape
across the back of the shoulders. Their torsos are hunched up into
fat little loaves supported by bony, atrophied leg stems sticking
up into their hummocky hips. Their hair has been fried and dyed
into improbable designs.
“You know what I mean? After a while it
just gives me gas,” says Abby. “I don’t even feel it.”
“Did you see me over there?” says Earl.
“I was just going along, nice and easy, not too much, just riding
along real nice. You know? And then, boy, I don’t know what
happened to me. First thing I know I’m laying down fifty dollars …
.”
Abby lets out a great belch. Clara
giggles.
“Gives me gas,” Abby says
mechanically.
“Hey, how about that place back ’ere?”
says Ernest.
“ … Just nice and easy as you please …
.”
“ … get me all fizzed up …
.”
“Aw, come on … .”
And there at eight o‘clock Sunday
morning stand four old parties from Albuquerque, New Mexico, up all
night, squinting at the sun, belching from a surfeit of tall drinks
at eight o’clock Sunday morning, and—marvelous!—there is no one
around to snigger at what an old babe with decaying haunches looks
like in Capri pants with her heels jacked up on decorated
wedgies.
“Where do we come from?” Clara said to me, speaking for the first
time since I approached them on Fremont Street. “He wants to know
where we come from. I think it’s past your bedtime,
sweets.”
“Climb the stairs and go to bed,” said
Abby.
Laughter all around.
“Climb the stairs” was Abby’s finest
line. At present there are almost no stairs to climb in Las Vegas.
Avalon homes are soon to go up, advertising “Two-Story Homes!” as
though this were an incredibly lavish and exotic concept. As I
talked to Clara, Abby, Earl and Ernest, it came out that “climb the
stairs” was a phrase they brought along to Albuquerque with them
from Marshalltown, Iowa, those many years ago, along with a lot of
other baggage, such as the entire cupboard of Protestant taboos
against drinking, lusting, gambling, staying out late, getting up
late, loafing, idling, lollygagging around the streets and wearing
Capri pants—all designed to deny a person short-term pleasures so
he will center his energies on bigger, long-term
goals.
“We was in ’ere”—the Mint—“a couple of
hours ago, and that old boy was playing the guitar, you know, ‘Walk
right in, set right down,’ and I kept hearing an old song I haven’t
heard for twenty years. It has this little boy and his folks keep
telling him it’s late and he has to go to bed. He keeps saying,
‘Don’t make me go to bed and I’ll be good.’ Am I good, Earl? Am I good?”
The liberated cortex in all its glory
is none other than the old babes at the slot machines. Some of them
are tourists whose husbands said, Here is fifty
bucks, go play the slot machines, while they themselves went
off to more complex pleasures. But most of these old babes are part
of the permanent landscape of Las Vegas. In they go to the Golden
Nugget or the Mint, with their Social Security check or their
pension check from the Ohio telephone company, cash it at the
casino cashier’s, pull out the Dixie Cup and the Iron Boy work
glove, disappear down a row of slots and get on with it. I remember
particularly talking to another Abby—a widow, sixty-two years old,
built short and up from the bottom like a fire hydrant. After
living alone for twelve years in Canton, Ohio, she had moved out to
Las Vegas to live with her daughter and her husband, who worked for
the Army.
“They were wonderful about it,” she
said. “Perfect hypocrites. She kept saying, you know, ‘Mother, we’d
be delighted to have you, only we don’t think you’ll like it. It’s practically a frontier town,’ she says.
‘It’s so garish,’ she says. So I said, I told her, ‘Well, if you’d
rather I didn’t come …’ ‘Oh, no!’ she says. I wish I could have
heard what her husband was saying. He calls me ‘Mother.’
‘Mother,’ he says. Well, once I was here,
they figured, well, I might make a good
baby-sitter and dishwasher and duster and mopper. The children are
nasty little things. So one day I was in town for something or
other and I just played a slot machine. It’s fun—I can’t describe
it to you. I suppose I lose. I lose a little. And they have fits about it. ‘For God’s sake, Grandmother,’
and so forth. They always say ‘Grandmother’
when I am supposed to ‘act my age’ or crawl through a crack in the
floor. Well, I’ll tell you, the slot machines are a whole lot better than sitting in that little house all
day. They kind of get you; I can’t explain it.”
The childlike megalomania of gambling
is, of course, from the same cloth as the megalomania of the town.
And, as the children of the liberated cortex, the old guys and
babes are running up and down the Strip around the clock like
everybody else. It is not by chance that much of the entertainment
in Las Vegas, especially the second-stringers who perform in the
cocktail lounges, will recall for an aging man what was glamorous
twenty-five years ago when he had neither the money nor the freedom
of spirit to indulge himself in it. In the big theatre—dining room
at the Desert Inn, The Painted Desert Room, Eddie Fisher’s act is
on and he is saying cozily to a florid guy at a table right next to
the stage, “Manny, you know you shouldn’a sat this close—you know
you’re in for it now, Manny, baby,” while Manny beams with fright.
But in the cocktail lounge, where the idea is chiefly just to keep
the razzle-dazzle going, there is Hugh Farr, one of the stars of
another era in the West, composer of two of the five Western songs
the Library of Congress has taped for posterity, “Cool Water” and
“Tumbling Tumbleweed,” when he played the violin for the Sons of
the Pioneers. And now around the eyes he looks like an aging
Chinese savant, but he is wearing a white tuxedo and powder-blue
leather boots and playing his sad old Western violin with an
electric cord plugged in it for a group called The Country
Gentlemen. And there is Ben Blue, looking like a waxwork exhibit of
vaudeville, doffing his straw skimmer to reveal the sculptural
qualities of his skull. And down at the Flamingo cocktail
lounge—Ella Fitzgerald is in the main room—there is Harry James,
looking old and pudgy in one of those toy Italian-style show-biz
suits. And the Ink Spots are at the New Frontier and Louis Prima is
at the Sahara, and the old parties are seeing it all, roaring
through the dawn into the next day, until the sun seems like a par
lamp fading in and out. The casinos, the bars, the liquor stores
are open every minute of every day, like a sempiternal wading pool
for the childhood ego. “ … Don’t make me go to bed …”
FINALLY THE CASUALTIES START PILING UP. I AM
IN THE MANAGER’S office of a hotel on the Strip. A man and his
wife, each about sixty, are in there, raging. Someone got into
their room and stole seventy dollars from her purse, and they want
the hotel to make it up to them. The man pops up and down from a
chair and ricochets back and forth across the room, flailing his
great pig’s-knuckle elbows about.
“What kind of security you call that?
Walk right in the god-dern room and just help themselves. And where
do you think I found your security man? Back around the corner
reading a god-dern detective magazine!”
He had scored a point there, but he was
wearing a striped polo shirt with a hip Hollywood solid-color
collar, and she had on Capri pants, and hooked across their wrinkly
old faces they both had rimless, wraparound French sunglasses of
the sort young-punk heroes in nouvelle vague
movies wear, and it was impossible to give any earnest
contemplation to a word they said. They seemed to have the great
shiny popeyes of a praying mantis.
“Listen, Mister,” she is saying, “I
don’t care about the seventy bucks. I’d lose seventy bucks at your
craps table and I wouldn’t think nothing of it. I’d play seventy
bucks just like that, and it wouldn’t mean nothing. I wouldn’t
regret it. But when they can just walk in—and you don’t give a
damn—for Christ’s sake!”
They are both zeroing in on the manager
with their great insect corneas. The manager is a cool number in a
white-on-white shirt and silver tie.
“This happened three days ago. Why
didn’t you tell us about it then?”
“Well, I was gonna be a nice guy about
it. Seventy dollars,” he said, as if it would be difficult for the
brain to grasp a sum much smaller. “But then I found your man back
there reading a god-dern detective magazine. True
Detectives it was. Had a picture on the front of some
floozie with one leg up on a chair and her garter showing. Looked
like a god-derned athlete’s-foot ad. Boy, I went into a slow burn.
But when I am burned up, I am burned up! You
get me, Mister? There he was, reading the god-derned True
Detectives.”
“Any decent hotel would have
insurance,” she says.
The manager says, “I don’t know a hotel
in the world that offers insurance against theft.”
“Hold on, Mister,” he says, “are you
calling my wife a liar? You just get smart, and I’m gonna pop you
one! I’ll pop you one right now if you call my wife a
liar.”
At this point the manager lowers his
head to one side and looks up at the old guy from under his
eyebrows with a version of the Red Hook brush-off, and the old guy
begins to cool off.
But others are beyond cooling off.
Hornette Reilly, a buttery-hipped whore from New York City, is
lying in bed with a bald-headed guy from some place who has skin
like oatmeal. He is asleep or passed out or something. Hornette is
relating all this to the doctor over the Princess telephone by the
bed.
“Look,” she says, “I’m breaking up. I
can’t tell you how much I’ve drunk. About a bottle of brandy since
four o’clock, I’m not kidding. I’m in bed with a guy. Right this
minute. I’m talking on the telephone to you and this slob is lying
here like an animal. He’s all fat and his skin looks like
oatmeal—what’s happening to me? I’m going to take some more pills.
I’m not kidding, I’m breaking up. I’m going to kill myself. You’ve
got to put me in Rose de Lima. I’m breaking up, and I don’t even
know what’s happening to me.”
“So naturally you want to go to Rose de
Lima.”
“Well, yeah.”
“You can come by the office, but I’m
not sending you to Rose de Lima.”
“Doctor, I’m not kidding.”
“I don’t doubt that you’re sick, old
girl, but I’m not sending you to Rose de Lima to sober
up.”
The girls do not want to go to the
County Hospital. They want to go to Rose de Lima, where the
psychiatric cases receive milieu therapy. The patients dress in
street clothes, socialize and play games with the staff, eat well
and relax in the sun, all paid for by the State. One of the folk
heroines of the Las Vegas floozies, apparently, is the call girl
who last year was spending Monday through Friday at Rose de Lima
and “turning out,” as they call it, Saturdays and Sundays on the
Strip, to the tune of $200 to $300 a weekend. She looks upon
herself not as a whore, or even a call girl, but as a lady of
assignation. When some guy comes to the Strip and unveils the
little art-nouveau curves in his psyche and calls for two girls to
perform arts upon one another, this one consents to be the passive
member of the team only. A Rose de Lima girl, she draws the
line.
At the County Hospital the psychiatric
ward is latched, bolted, wired up and jammed with patients who are
edging along the walls in the inner hall, the only place they have
to take a walk other than the courtyard.
A big brunette with the remnants of a
beehive hairdo and decal eyes and an obvious pregnancy is the
liveliest of the lot. She is making eyes at everyone who walks in.
She also nods gaily toward vacant places along the
wall.
“Mrs.————is refusing medication,” a
nurse tells one of the psychiatrists. “She won’t even open her
mouth.”
Presently the woman, in a white
hospital tunic, is led up the hall. She looks about fifty, but she
has extraordinary lines on her face.
“Welcome home,” says
Dr.————.
“This is not my home,” she
says.
“Well, as I told you before, it has to
be for the time being.”
“Listen, you didn’t analyze
me.”
“Oh, yes. Two psychiatrists examined
you—all over again.”
“You mean that time in
jail.”
“Exactly.”
“You can’t tell anything from that. I
was excited. I had been out on the Strip, and then all that
stupid—”
Three-fourths of the 640 patients who
clustered into the ward last year were casualties of the Strip or
the Strip milieu of Las Vegas, the psychiatrist tells me. He is a
bright and energetic man in a shawl-collared black silk suit with
brass buttons.
“I’m not even her doctor,” he says. “I
don’t know her case. There’s nothing I can do for
her.”
Here, securely out of sight in this
little warren, are all those who have taken the loop-the-loop and
could not stand the centripety. Some, like Raymond, who has been
rocketing for days on pills and liquor, who has gone without sleep
to the point of anoxia, might pull out of the toxic reaction in two
or three days, or eight or ten. Others have conflicts to add to the
chemical wackiness. A man who has thrown all his cash to the flabby
homunculus who sits at every craps table stuffing the take down an
almost hidden chute so it won’t pile up in front of the customers’
eyes; a man who has sold the family car for next to nothing at a
car lot advertising “Cash for your car—right
now” and then thrown that to the homunculus, too, but also
still has the family waiting guiltlessly, guilelessly back home;
well, he has troubles.
“ … After I came here and began doing
personal studies,” the doctor is saying, “I recognized extreme
aggressiveness continually. It’s not merely what Las Vegas can do
to a person, it’s the type of person it attracts. Gambling is a
very aggressive pastime, and Las Vegas attracts aggressive people.
They have an amazing capacity to louse up a normal
situation.”
The girl, probably a looker in more
favorable moments, is pressed face into the wall, cutting glances
at the doctor. The nurse tells her something and she puts her face
in her hands, convulsing but not making a sound. She retreats to
her room, and then the sounds come shrieking out. The doctor rushes
back. Other patients are sticking their heads out of their rooms
along the hall.
“The young girl?” a quiet guy says to a
nurse. “The young girl,” he says to somebody in the
room.
But the big brunette just keeps rolling
her decal eyes.
Out in the courtyard—all bare sand—the
light is a kind of light-bulb twilight. An old babe is rocking
herself back and forth on a straight chair and putting one hand out
in front from time to time and pulling it in toward her
bosom.
It seems clear enough to me. “A slot
machine?” I say to the nurse, but she says there is no
telling.
“ … and yet the same aggressive types
are necessary to build a frontier town, and Las Vegas is a frontier
town, certainly by any psychological standard,” Dr.—————is saying.
“They’ll undertake anything and they’ll accomplish it. The building
here has been incredible. They don’t seem to care what they’re up
against, so they do it.”
I go out to the parking lot in back of
the County Hospital and it doesn’t take a second; as soon as I turn
on the motor I’m swinging again with Action Checkpoint News,
“Monkey No. 9,” “Donna, Donna, the Prima Donna,” and friendly
picking and swinging for the Fremont Hotel and Frontier Federal. Me
and my big white car are sailing down the Strip and the Boomerang
Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral,
McDonald’s Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptical and Miami
Beach Kidney sunbursts are exploding in the Young Electric Sign
Company’s Grand Gallery for all the sun kings. At the airport there
was that bad interval between the rental-car stall and the terminal
entrance, but once through the automatic door the Muzak came
bubbling up with “Song of India.” On the upper level around the
ramps the slots were cranking away. They are placed like “traps,” a
word Las Vegas picked up from golf. And an old guy is walking up
the ramp, just off the plane from Denver, with a huge plastic bag
of clothes slung over the left shoulder and a two-suiter suitcase
in his right hand. He has to put the suitcase down on the floor and
jostle the plastic bag all up around his neck to keep it from
falling, but he manages to dig into his pocket for a couple of
coins and get going on the slot machines. All seems right, but
walking out to my plane I sense that something is missing. Then I
recall sitting in the cocktail lounge of the Dunes at 3 P.M. with
Jack Heskett, district manager of the Federal Sign and Signal
Corporation, and Marty Steinman, the sales manager, and Ted Blaney,
a designer. They are telling me about the sign they are building
for the Dunes to put up at the airport. It will be five thousand
square feet of free-standing sign, done in flaming-lake red on
burning-desert gold. The d—the D—alone in the word Dunes, written
in Cyrillic modern, will be practically two stories high. An inset
plexiglas display, the largest revolving, trivision plexiglas sign
in the world, will turn and show first the Dunes, with its
twenty-two-story addition, then the seahorse swimming pool, then
the new golf course. The scimitar curves of the sign will soar to a
huge roaring diamond at the very top. “You’ll be able to see it
from an airplane fifteen miles away,” says Jack Heskett. “Fifty
miles,” says Lee Fisher. And it will be sixty-five feet up in the
air—because the thing was, somebody was out at the airport and they
noticed there was only one display to be topped. That was that
shaft about sixty feet high with the lit-up globe and the beacon
lights, which is to say, the control tower. Hell, you can only see
that forty miles away. But exactly!