(9 of 10)
It is understandable that the citizens are a bit embarrassed by their criminal founding fathers (Steve Wynn calls the Dunes "the original home of tinhorns and scumbags"), but the mixed feelings go beyond the mob. Last year Davy-O Thompson got zoning-board approvals to establish his haircutting salon, A Little Off the Top, where the female stylists were dressed in frilly teddies or paste-on breast caps and panties. But the board of cosmetology denied him a license an hour before he was set to open, citing concerns over "safety" and "hygiene." (He was eventually allowed to operate.) A similar protest contributed to the demise recently of a car wash featuring women in thong bikinis.
"We Las Vegans have been living under the stigma of Sin City for so long that we are desperate to prove that this is a very conservative, God-fearing, average American community that just happens to have gambling," explains Under Sheriff Eric Cooper, who along with his boss, Sheriff John Moran, has been waging a 10-year antivice campaign. "The best thing that ever happened was when the Baptists had their convention here four years ago." The category of "Escort Services" is no longer listed in the local Yellow Pages.
It isn't just sex. Las Vegans are even ambivalent about gambling. Political discourse often revolves around keeping casinos away from decent people's homes. The promotional video produced by the Nevada Development Authority makes no mention at all of casinos. Even when a casino is a part of a new development, it is described as something else. Jack Sommer's Mountain Spa, the posh pseudo-Mediterranean resort about to start construction, will have a small "European-style" casino. But, says Sommer, "it's not really a casino. I call it a gaming amenity."
Semantic nuance, it turns out, is important. "They don't see themselves as gamblers," says Steve Wynn of the new tourists he is attracting. "They think of themselves as folks who are on vacation, and while they are there -- hey, let's put some money in the slot machine." Wynn hired screenwriter Jim Hart (Hook, Bram Stoker's Dracula) to write a one-hour family-adventure TV movie (NBC, Jan. 23) set at Treasure Island, and while Hart says the movie reaffirms family values and he flew his children out during production, he understands the place has an intrinsically dark edge. "You can come out for 24 hours and lose the tuition," he says. "There are a lot of desperate characters here."
For while the city is no longer the "Genet vision of hell" that John Gregory Dunne described in his book Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season 20 years ago, it is still, for the moment, a stranger place than Omaha or Sacramento or Worcester or even Atlantic City, if only because there are so many cheerfully offered temptations to lose the tuition and so many normal-looking people flirting feverishly with that risk. The mobs on the casino floors are in a kind of murmuring trance, each middle-aged housewife or young lawyer at the slots or the poker tables mentally grappling with a nonstop flow of insane hunches and wishful superstitions, continuously driven to unworthy leaps of faith that result in unwarranted bursts of self-esteem (Blackjack!) or self- loathing (Craps!).