Lovin' Las Vegas

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?"