LAS VEGAS: "IT JUST COULDN'T HAPPEN"

LAS VEGAS: "IT JUST COULDN'T HAPPEN

$200 Million Bonanaza in Glitter Gulch, Paradise A and Paradise B

This is the most fabulous place in the world," sighed Marlene Dietrich. " Any where else--pouf, I would not .go. But this is different. Las Vegas is the only gay place left in the world. This is how Paris used to be before the war." Marlene, 48, was preparing for a three-week engagement at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas next month, for the record-breaking stipend of $90,000. Her opening night has been set for Dec. 15, an arrangement that thriftily divides her paydays into two tax years.

With such a happy holiday season ahead, it is not hard to understand Marlene's extravagant regard for the Nevada boom town. A great many other Americans seem to agree with her. By the end of 1953, 8,000,000 tourists will have visited Las Vegas, gaped at the sights, risked nearly a billion dollars gambling, and moved on. Behind them they will leave some $200 million, a quarter of it in slot machines and on gaming tables. From every statistical point of view, it will be a record-breaking year. But then, it is always a record-breaking year in Las Vegas, or at least it has been for the past eight years.

Weekend Stampede. In 1940 Las Vegas was a scraggly tank town with a tumbleweed economy. But Las Vegas' happy proximity to Southern California and Nevada's benign climate for gambling combined to change all that. By 1953 the population had climbed from 8,400 to 43,000, and business had soared into the financial ionosphere.

In the center of town, "Glitter Gulch," the greatest concentration of inert gas in the world, now casts a neon glow for 30 miles into the desert. Along Highway 91, on which the Californians stampede into Vegas in their Cadillacs at the rate of 20,000 each weekend, lies the Strip, a celebrated three-mile stretch of real estate bounded by seven enormous, luxury hotels. The Strip represents a capital investment of $40 million, and is incorporated (in order to escape municipal taxes) as two townships. Their names: Paradise A and Paradise B.

In Glitter Gulch, the approach to the tourist is straightforward. The Golden Nugget, a large gambling house in the heart of the Gulch, is the richest vein in the big rock candy mountain of Las Vegas. It offers no entertainment, just a multitude of ways to gamble, from wheels of fortune and penny slots to big-time poker games in the back rooms. In Paradise (A or B), the atmosphere is more subtle: air conditioning, deckle-edged swimming pools (with extravagant poolside displays of bathing beauties), fine food at fair prices, top entertainment, well-irrigated golf courses. But all are mere Strip teasers. In Paradise (A or B) as in the Gulch, gambling is the main dish.

Behind the flashy facades of the big hotels along the Strip is a lugubrious lot of wealthy owners. Some are thoroughly respectable, but some are not. The Desert Inn is run by amiable Wilbur Clark, a hotelman with a large following, in partnership with a syndicate of erstwhile Cleveland racketeers. The luxurious Sands, scene of the recent Hayworth-Haymes extravaganza (TIME, Oct. 5), is owned by tiny, wizened Jake Friedman, who made his stake operating gambling casinos in Texas. The sprawling Flamingo was built by the late Bugsy Siegel before Bugsy met his untimely, slug-ridden end in Hollywood.

Explains Robbins Cahill, executive secretary of Nevada's tax commission:

"You can't license a perfume salesman to handle a million-dollar-a-month casino, because he'd be in trouble by the end of the first day and then it would be the public would get the shaft as he tried to make up his losses. We've learned that the oldtime gambler will run a cleaner place, give the public the best breaks and have fewer hoodlums hanging around, than the amateur."

Dancing Goats. In the past three years Las Vegas has become such a glittering entertainment center that Variety now finds it necessary to keep a full-time correspondent in residence. On any night, the Strip offers the tourist such big names as Danny Kaye, Lauritz Melchior, Betty Hutton, Ezio Pinza, Milton Berle and the Jose Greco Dancers. The stars, of course, are just an added attraction, gold-horned Judas goats who lure the herds of tourists to the gaming tables. "We're just the highest-paid shills in history," says Tallulah Bankhead. "Why do we do it? Dahling, for the loot, of course."

Slot machines are far & away the most popular and lucrative form of Vegas gambling. There are 3,141 of them in the area. The other favorites, in order: craps, roulette, 21 (blackjack), bingo and poker. The town has its stories of huge winnings and losses, but individual winnings are restricted by house limits on betting, and nobody ever breaks the bank (the big houses keep week-end reserves of $500,000 and more). Marathon players are commonplace (the local endurance record: 72 hours), and they get breakfast on the house--and lunch and dinner, too, if they are durable.

Beyond the gaudy city limits the desert closes in, and beyond the funereal mountains in the distance lie the ghosts of boom towns past--Virginia City, Goldfield, Bullfrog and the others. Now & then the dice dance nervously and the windows jitter from the effects of a pre-dawn atomic blast at the AEC's test center 70 miles away. But there is no uneasiness, no sense of doom in Las Vegas even when mushroom clouds are rising beyond the horizon. Says a native Vegan: "It just couldn't happen. This is just the beginning. Why, in 1960 we'll have a population of 75,000. The Lord knows how things will go after that."

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