Las Vegas: America’s Favorite Dirty Secret

Glitter Gulch, the heart of the Strip, in 1948.

(UNLV)

“Las Vegas,” writes the documentary filmmaker Stephen Ives in the introduction to Las Vegas: An Unconventional History (Bulfinch, $40), “is the necessary dark side of our nature. It is our favorite dirty little secret.” Dirty, perhaps, but definitely not little. Las Vegas is the capital of so many things outlandish, absurd, and incredible-it is, for instance, the self-proclaimed “World’s Wedding Capital,” with more than 120,000 ceremonies performed every year-that virtually nothing that is said about it can be merely hyperbolic.

The book, co-authored with Michelle Ferrari, is a companion to Ives’s own three-hour documentary of the same name that airs November 14 and 15 as part of PBS’s American Experience documentary series. There isn’t a dull moment in the production, with cowboys, gangsters, billionaires, showgirls, and Elvises bouncing through nearly every frame of the biography of what one of Ives’s talking heads refers to as “the city of the eternal now.” At times Ives’s Las Vegas looks like a Ken Burns documentary on amphetamines.

Originally a railroad town, founded in 1905, Las Vegas began to boom after World War II. As Lee Strasberg’s Hyman Roth (a character modeled on Meyer Lansky) so astutely noted in The Godfather, Part II, it was a convenient stopover for GIs on their way to the West Coast; it was also a handy destination for gambling and prostitution for local miners and workers on the Hoover Dam. Because of antiquated laws that allowed gambling, the place was a scandal waiting to happen. Big business and organized crime discovered Las Vegas at almost the same time, and their happy marriage caused it to mutate into a city unlike anything ever seen on this or any other continent. As Ives puts it, “Las Vegas may be the only city in the world where the buildings are not presumed to be permanent.”

With the help of, among others, the radio talk-show host Marc Cooper, the art critic Dave Hickey, and the organized-crime writer Nicholas Pileggi, Ives gives us what the subtitle suggests (the book’s and the movie’s names are the same): an unconventional history of an improbable town, cutting back and forth through time while crisscrossing through the races and classes of the men and women, some of them looking and sounding remarkably like normal Americans, who have made the city hum for the last century.

Ives combines the instincts of a journalist with the eye of a genuine filmmaker. Some of his subjects depict Las Vegas through their own experiences. An out-of-work ex-con bemoans the gambling addiction that wrecked his life and drove him to rob a bank (new to armed robbery, he asked a teller to “please excuse me”). He still can’t drag himself out of Las Vegas. “Ain’t got ’em [slot machines] in McDonald’s or Burger King yet,” he observes while driving around town, “but it’ll happen.” Each personal vignette is interspersed with a slice of local history. Film footage of Vegas’s early 1950s neon-lit architecture-when the strip area was called “Glitz Gulch”-is juxtaposed with scenes of the early-twenty-first-century theme park it has become. By the end, the viewer has absorbed more than half a century of dazzling visuals, everything from Bugsy Siegel to Bugs Bunny.

Siegel is far from the only underworld luminary in the city’s pantheon. Proper homage is paid to the one-time Cleveland mob figure Mo Dalitz, of whom it is said, “In Cleveland he was a bootlegger, in Las Vegas he was an elder statesman.” Dalitz was one of the first to see that Vegas needed to diversify its entertainment base in order to grow, and also one of the first to understand the importance of jet transportation in extending the tourist base beyond the wealthy to the vast and rapidly growing American middle class. But despite his best efforts, and despite the public’s fascination with the quintessential Vegas cool of the Frank Sinatra-Dean Martin-Sammy Davis, Jr., Rat Pack, the investigations by Attorney General Robert Kennedy into the role of organized crime in Las Vegas nearly wrecked the city’s economy. In the late 1960s, it was left to Howard Hughes-“the fairy godfather of Las Vegas,” or more precisely, the Wizard of Oz, since he was pulling strings behind the scenes without being seen-to complete the town’s transformation to semi-respectable, with the construction of huge hotels to lure the family crowds.

You don’t have to share Ives’s fascination with Las Vegas to be fascinated by the city’s history. One moment Vegas appears as a cutaway to socio-political changes in America. For instance there’s the story of the town’s Westside, home to nearly 15,000 blacks, most of them workers in the Strip’s hotels and restaurants. The TV talk show host Patricia Cunningham calls the West Side “one of the most segregated areas in America.” The history of integration and the fight for civil rights in Sin City seems depressingly similar to what was happening in the towns across the country whose troubles Americans were going to Las Vegas to forget. And at nearly the same time as Las Vegas blacks were fighting for equality, tourists were hiring limos and carrying picnic lunches just a few miles out of town to watch mushroom clouds from the nuclear tests being conducted just 70 miles away.

Las Vegas has thus far survived the bomb, government investigations, hotel fires, competition from Atlantic City, and the deaths of Elvis and Frank Sinatra. And, as William Faulkner said about mankind, it has not only endured but prevailed. The city, writes Ives, is “freed from the constraints imposed by too great a reverence for what has gone before.” Thus Las Vegas: An Unconventional History, both the book and the film, is filled with an exhilarating nostalgia for a city without a memory of itself.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.