Quotes of the Day

My stomach hurts. it's 7 a.m., and somehow person after person after person has persuaded me to pull an all-nighter so they can show me their little slice of Vegas — their glossy strip club, their late-night pool-cabana scene, their Studio 54, their swank ultralounge. And now, at an after-hours nightclub, the bass pumping, my eyes jolted open every few seconds by the shock of manufactured cleavage, they are offering me a beer. All I wanted was to see a nice Cirque du Soleil show, work my expense account at Le Cirque with my only famous friend, Robert Goulet, and crash at the new hotel at Mandalay Bay, where my standard room has two bathrooms and three flat-screen TVs. But New Vegas won't let me be. It needs to show me what a great time it's having, with its supersized, sanitized, nonintimidating version of the same sins I don't want when I'm at home. I am considering taking the beer so I can finally get sick and get the nurse to send me home.

This New Vegas, this stomach-churning Vegas, was built from a scrap heap of roller coasters. When gambling popped up at every U.S. racetrack and lottery counter and on every piece of ground where a Native American once lived, Las Vegas had an identity crisis. It built theme parks,believing that if its vices had become acceptable, it might as well turn family-friendly. And it stumbled. Because what Vegas hadn't understood is that, compared with even the most worn-out vices, like keno and showgirls, roller coasters bite. So now Vegas has reinvented itself again, returning to vice but sanitizing it by creating the biggest, nicest place to sin ever imagined, a Sodom and Gomorrah without the guilt. The town's logo, "What happens here, stays here," is complete camp. What happens in Vegas, in fact, is bragged about at home for months afterward — and home might be in America, Europe or anywhere else in the world.

All this feels strange, but not nearly as strange as talking to Robert Goulet about it on three hours of sleep. "You beggar, it's not Sin City," he says. "It's Fun City." The lounge singer has a point. It's a Vegas where the average tourist gambles only four hours in a four-day stay. That's fine with the casinos, since today they make more on rooms, food, drinks and shows — what they used to give away to get you to gamble.

Vegas doesn't have to give anything away right now. It's so hot, even the people who own the town are spending money here. Last month, 87-year-old multibillionaire Kirk Kerkorian cut a deal to merge his MGM Mirage with Mandalay Resort Group to form the world's largest gaming company — until two weeks ago, when Harrah's Entertainment agreed to buy Caesars Entertainment in a $9.25 billion deal (including cash, stock and debt) that would create an even bigger company. Sheldon Adelson, 70, the owner of the Venetian, is contemplating an ipo to score cash to make a bigger bet on a new Strip hotel, the Palazzo, and other properties in the U.S. and overseas. In April, Steve Wynn, 62, who brought renewed glamour to Vegas in the '90s with the shimmering-sided Mirage and the Bellagio's Continental swank, will open the $2.6 billion Wynn Las Vegas. It's just a construction site, but Wynn's creation is scaring all his competitors, with its plans for a 15-story mountain and lake, a Ferrari and Maserati dealership, and the Strip's only 18-hole golf course.

In an experiment worthy of a Harvard Business School case study, sex has proved to be far more profitable than wholesome fun. The MGM Grand tore down its amusement park and now has two nightclubs (a third is opening soon) and a replica of Paris' Crazy Horse, La Femme, in which the dancers' costumes consist of a stringless G-string, one of many great new technologies to come from Las Vegas. Zumanity, the newest Cirque du Soleil show at New York-New York Hotel & Casino, is a near-naked gymnastics event in which men make out and the rest of the cast simulates acrobatic sex. And Treasure Island, which now calls itself TI, has traded its kid-friendly pirate show for one in which half-naked sirens say things like "Ahoy? Who you calling a hoy?" Sexification has helped put Vegas on course for a record year in visitors, after having 35.5 million last year. Billy Vassiliadis, the ad man whose firm came up with Vegas' logo and who is known around town as Billy V., insists: "It's not about sex, it's about feeling sexy." Sex, sexy — whatever. It's selling, and not just at home; as Billy V. says, "Demand for the Las Vegas product has become global." Last year, Vegas lured 362,000 visitors from the U.K., up nearly 25% from 2002. Eager to tap foreign markets, the local convention authority has offices in Germany — which sent nearly 100,000 visitors to the city in 2003 — as well as Australia, Japan and South Korea. International air service to Vegas' McCarran Airport has more than doubled in the past year. Last week, Britain's bmi airline announced that, from Oct. 31, it will fly nonstop three times a week to Vegas from Manchester, England.

So it's no surprise that MGM Mirage announced last week that its second-quarter profits nearly doubled from 2003. According to Joseph Greff of Fulcrum Global Partners, room rates in top hotels on the Strip are up 40% from the same period last year, but the increase didn't stop occupancy from zooming to 95%. The city's casinos, hotels, restaurants, shops and clubs took in a record $32.8 billion in 2003. Vegas is the fastest-growing major U.S. city; 7,000 people move to Clark County each month, bulging the population to 1.6 million and overstretching the police, fire fighters, hospitals and schools. The unemployment rate is more than a third below the national average, and there's more construction than in any other American city.

The hotels only get more and more extravagant. One must-have feature is a posh spa, such as the 6,400-sq-m Canyon Ranch SpaClub at the Venetian, which has a two-story rock-climbing wall. Vegas dining has become so high-end, with restaurants run by chefs such as Alain Ducasse, Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, that it employs more master sommeliers than any other U.S. city. Luxury shops — Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Armani, Dior — are so common that they seem practically like Gaps in Vegas. Just down the Strip from the Venetian, home to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, the Bellagio houses a gallery that shows works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

A good chunk of Vegas' growth is driven by people under 30, the ones who can spend money until at least 7 a.m., apparently with no significant stomach problems. Peter Morton, 56, the first to see that youth was an untapped market, built the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in the middle of the sagebrush off the Strip in 1995, and that demo is funding the Richard Meier-designed tower he's building later this year. "Our demographics studies have shown that young people who come to Vegas are better educated, have more disposable income and are less averse to travel than the typical Vegas customer," he says. "Our dealers earn more in tips than any other dealers in Vegas." The Hard Rock has a Sunday daytime pool party called Rehab, and live webcams at the pool for its website. (What happens in Vegas goes right up on the Internet — the way everyone likes it.) Its penthouse boasts the Boom-Boom Room, with a bowling alley, sauna and — like seemingly every party bus, large hotel suite and open flat space in town — a stripper pole. The owners of Palms Casino Resort, which opened at the end of 2001, decided to aim even younger. The Maloof brothers, who also own the Sacramento Kings basketball team, built the Palms off-Strip and gave it no theme, figuring Vegas visitors would find out which hotel fit their demographic. (Wynn will also be unthemed, as will the Palazzo.) "I wanted to make sure I cultivated young Hollywood," says George Maloof, 40, the brother who runs the hotel. "In the '70s, '80s and most of the '90s, Hollywood didn't really come to Las Vegas except for a big fight. Now it's every weekend."

Maloof made the Palms a hipster draw by housing the 2002 edition of MTV's Real World in the hotel, a move the rest of Vegas thought was suicide (having cameras inside a hotel was believed to be like asking the gaming commission to shut you down). But the Real World scheme worked. It made the hotel and its steak house, nightclubs and tattoo parlor the hottest spots for the barely legal. It is Britney Spears' home away from home whenever she's in town to get married. "I have friends of friends who are 17 years old, and they can't wait to go to Vegas," Maloof says. "The trust-fund babies will do anything they can do to go to our clubs."

The young people of New Vegas mostly come from L.A., and they spend most of their time at the clubs, which have sprung up like stripper poles. Every hotel has at least one disco and an ultralounge, the Vegas term for a Eurotrash bar with overpriced drinks. "The clubs are now carrying Vegas," says Cy Waits, vip manager at MGM's Tabú bar. "Young people are more reckless with their money." The clubs are a big draw for women, who outnumber the men. "We give women some empowerment," says Jennifer Worthington, 32, who co-owns Coyote Ugly, BiKiNiS and Tangerine. "Let them dance on a table and feel like a star for a minute."

Along with clubs, music venues have sprouted up in the hotels, replacing the crooners with major pop and hip-hop acts. "For years people thought it was where acts go to retire," says Russell Jones, general manager of House of Blues Las Vegas, where Prince, Snoop Dogg and James Brown have played this year. "Now a lot of [current] acts come through three times a year."

The only part of the action that casinos don't control are the strip clubs, and they're trying to change that. Last year, a few hotel-casino owners quietly started a conversation about getting the gaming commission to allow them to put in strip joints. It didn't go well. So for now, they're compromising with burlesque, which is the kind of stripping Janet Jackson was supposed to do. Burlesque dancers do shows at Tangerine at TI, which opened in early July, and 40 Deuce, which opens at the Mandalay Bay in a few months.

But most of Vegas agrees that the casinos will eventually find a way to bring the strip clubs inside. "It's guaranteed. It's just a matter of when," says Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, 64, a former defense attorney for alleged mobsters who officially oversees just a small part of town north of the Strip called Glitter Gulch, a technicality that does not stop him from representing everyone anywhere near Vegas. Goodman, a spokesman for Bombay Sapphire gin, sponsor of monthly "martinis with the mayor" events, is a proponent of allowing strippers in the casinos as well as expanding legalized prostitution, now allowed in some parts of Nevada. But in a struggle replicated in most families, Vegas is changing faster than the older, more conservative gaming-control board wants. The board yanked two billboards that the Hard Rock put up this year — one had a naked woman lying on a blackjack table with a card in her mouth above the line THERE'S ALWAYS A TEMPTATION TO CHEAT. The casino agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a claim that the ads hurt Nevada's image. This, remember, is a state where some cities have legal whorehouses. And yet strip clubs are such a part of the Vegas mainstream that high-end ones often have tables not only of couples but also groups of women. Japanese tour buses stop at the Palomino Club so the riders can check off a requisite Vegas experience. Strip clubs are so institutionalized that an fbi sting to find Mafia connections instead discovered that two clubs were funding the campaigns of local politicians in exchange for their pushing laws to make it difficult for new clubs to open.

Sapphire, billed as the world's largest strip club at a cavernous 6,600 sq m, opened two years ago with a party attended by Rachel Hunter, Carmen Electra and Tommy Lee. It was a mega-gym until the owners decided to turn it into a club. "In real estate, the land goes to the highest and best use," explains co-owner Peter Feinstein. Now, instead of gym fees, he charges women $60 to $100 a night to sell $20 lap dances, and draws on more profitable revenue streams such as drinks and a $5 atm fee that almost makes usury a sin again. He does not, however, get the $20 cover charge nonlocals pay; as at all Vegas strip clubs, that goes to the taxi driver who dropped his riders off. Driving a cab in Vegas has become less about ferrying passengers than about strip-club promotion.

"To someone from Minnesota we're sluts, but in Vegas this is a respectable job to the locals," says Sami, 33, a Sapphire stripper known as the Fire Bitch because she can light on fire a surprising number of her body parts. She says she's not that good at the gig, except for the fire part, because she's too straight-talking to give guys the doting GFE (girlfriend experience) for which they spend the big money. Sami doesn't drink, likes dogs and just bought a nice house. Toward the end of our chat, she lets me touch her breast to feel the implant. I cannot figure out if this is an intimate form of bonding or just a Vegas handshake.

The new Vegas has upped not only the sex but also the violence. Boxing has been outdrawn by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (U.F.C.), a chain-link-caged, rule-free (unless you count "no biting, no eye-gouging") contest so bloody it has been decried by the American Medical Association, banned by New York and dropped by pay-per-view cable. At a bout last month, spectators included Cindy Crawford and basketball player Shaquille O'Neal — who, the owners say, once asked for the date of a fight to be changed because he had a game. The U.F.C., which seems to involve a lot of submission holds and smeared blood, may surpass both frat-house hazing and Mel Gibson films as the world's most homoerotic event. And while the hooting crowd is clearly loving it, my front-row seats are reminding me just how weak my stomach is.

With all its clean bawdiness, the weirdest part of Vegas is that, for a tourist town, it looks as if it might be growing a real urban center, where people not only party but meet, live and perhaps form the kind of community Vegas has never had — one in which people no longer change cell-phone numbers every six months to escape from debts and exes. Developers are racing to put up 20-story condo towers near the Strip. Retirees and people with second homes like the condos because they are easy to maintain, but a surprising number of locals buy so they can be near what Mayor Goodman calls, without irony, the intellectual center of Vegas. That center is being defined, in true American fashion, not by an ocean or an island but by a stretch of highway. "That's the view," says casino owner Lorenzo Fertitta from the presidential suite at the Green Valley Ranch. "The Strip is the beach and the water."

"We're going through the reverse of what so many cities have suffered through, this flight out of the city," says Jim Murren, president of MGM Mirage and a longtime Vegas resident. Two weeks ago, the city unveiled a $650 million monorail that runs the 6.5 km from the convention center up the Strip to the MGM Grand. Turnberry and CENTRA Properties plan to build a 112,000-sq-m mall near the Mandalay Bay, which will further the invasion of stores such as Saks, Macy's and Nordstrom, now housed at the Fashion Show mall, which is close to finishing a $1 billion renovation. And a giant furniture showroom is being built downtown. Mayor Goodman hopes that in the future people will think of Vegas for gambling, sex and furniture. It's conceivable that in a few decades, Vegas will have completely shed its shame and kitsch, that it will be a multidimensional one-industry town like Los Angeles, only more urban and with better food. Already the young and old come to Vegas without irony, and its faux architecture and grand showmanship are thought of around the globe as simply American. If New Vegas foretells something about America's future, then the culture wars are all but over, and culture lost. The only thing I miss about it is that culture went to bed at a decent hour.

• JOEL STEIN | LAS VEGAS
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