JACKPOT

Whether the cause is finally the unforgiving elements of geography, the tales of lost mines, the UFOs in night skies, or the slot-machine jackpots, writers as diverse as Mark Twain, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and John McPhee have found something compelling about Nevada. And the latest addition is David Thomson, an author known for a number of books about Hollywood, including Beneath Mulholland.

In Nevada, his new book, is a series of short chapters — forty-seven snapshots, if you will — on the history, culture, and contemporary mores of the “Silver State.” Nevada drew its nickname from its first boom: the discovery of the Comstock Lode near Virginia City in 1859. This famous silver strike drew the usual fortune hunters and lowlifes. It also attracted a man named Orion Clemens (a Lincoln administration appointee sent to serve as secretary to the territorial governor) and his younger brother Samuel.

Twenty-seven-year-old Sam Clemens’s literary pretensions led him to the editorial office of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, where he confidently announced, “I’ve come to write for your newspaper.” The pseudonym “Mark Twain” soon followed (pseudonyms were a defense mechanism adopted by newspapermen in lawless western towns where journalists were sometimes shot in the street for their printed opinions), and one of his first pieces was a hilarious review of The Book of Mormon.

Despite periodic upsurges in the mining and cattle industries, however, Nevada remained a backwater (even by western standards) until 1931. That was the year that the state legislature — seeing the Great Depression’s ravages of the state’s mines and ranches — passed two new laws. One legalized gaming, and the other reduced the waiting period for divorce from ninety days to six weeks.

The first produced nascent stirrings in the little town of Las Vegas. And the second turned Reno into a boom-town full of well-off East Coast socialites and Hollywood stars seeking to break the bonds of matrimony in the crystalline desert air. All this coupled with the Hoover Dam Project of the early 1930s (Las Vegas’s prosperity always depended on water) gave Nevada a jump-start in its recovery from hard times. Savvy sagebrush politicos, used to the boom-bust economy of the West, hadn’t waited to be rescued by Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. And so the modern Nevada of Rat Pack glitz and casinos run by the Mafiosi was born. If it had nothing else to offer, the bleak desert presented to a world of sinners an almost endless variety of sin.

Las Vegas is the place many people think of when the word “Nevada” is mentioned, and Thomson devotes a considerable portion of In Nevada to its bizarre saga. In Vegas, water is life, history is biography, and the sound of prosperity goes ring-ding-ding. Over the years the town has had its share of boosters and philanthropists (though some got their start breaking kneecaps with baseball bats).

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel is credited as being the visionary who is the father of modern Las Vegas. He foresaw that the post-World War II economic surge would bring to the desert city hordes of middle-class Americans with both leisure time and discretionary income. That, along with Nevada’s liberal gaming laws, made the state a magnet for organized crime in its endless quest in the post-Prohibition era for influence in semi-legitimate, or at least legal, enterprises.

Bugsy Siegel opened his Flamingo Hotel the day after Christmas in 1946, and promptly made the sort of financial blunders typical of a novice with a great idea. Since he was already in extreme debt to several of the major Mafia figures of the day, he became a business liability. Siegel was murdered in Los Angeles in June 1947, and the Flamingo was passed into fiscally conservative hands and thereafter prospered.

Frank Sinatra came in on the postwar mob coattails, buying a small share in the Sands Hotel and owning, at one point, 50 percent of the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. In Las Vegas, Sinatra cultivated the infamous image of the boorish-bad-boy-mob wannabe, an obnoxious “runt with bodyguards,” as Thomson calls him. But Las Vegas can thank the boy crooner for inventing the “lounge act,” the staple of its casino entertainment for decades.

Thomson’s strangest character is Howard Hughes, the near-billionaire exmovie mogul who from 1966 to 1970 resided in obsessive seclusion on the top floor of the Desert Inn, surrounded by a staid Mormon entourage. When Moe Dalitz, the hotel’s manager, complained that Hughes was taking up too many suites that could be used to “comp” gamblers, the eccentric Hughes simply bought the hotel. It wasn’t a great investment — he was, in fact, taking up too many suites — and in the end his financial losses (along with an irrational fear of nearby underground nuclear testing) caused him to decamp for the Bahamas.

Since the advent of the Cold War, Nevada has been — along with some remote atolls in the South Pacific — the primary nuclear test site used by the Atomic Energy Commission. In the 1950s, guests on the upper floors of Las Vegas hotels could rise at dawn and watch from their windows the quick, bright flashes and the mushroom clouds sprouting on the desert horizon. Las Vegas enjoyed the show, but, being upwind, never suffered the consequences. Downwind, towns in southern Utah such as St. George have high cancer rates that persist to this day.

Thomson doesn’t hide the dark side of the neon. He reminds us that Las Vegas has the highest suicide rate in the nation, hosts gangs running a lucrative drug trade, and publishes a local Yellow Pages featuring a hundred pages of “adult entertainment” listings.

But Thomson is convinced the future is brighter. A new breed of entrepreneur is emerging, personified by Steve Wynn. Wynn first saw the Emerald City as a child of eleven in 1953, and he seems to be one of those people who foresee their life’s work at a tender age. By the time he was in his twenties he was managing the slot machines at the Frontier, and from there — through hard work and an eye for the main chance — he has attained his current status as “Mr. Las Vegas.”

In 1989, Wynn opened the Mirage, with three thousand rooms and a huge lobby containing a live tropical rainforest — out-glitzing Caesar’s Palace and the MGM Grand, and inaugurating the new family-friendly city: Las Vegas as a Disneyesque multi-theme park.

But Wynn was right that something needed to be done to keep the city attractive to the tourists it depends upon. Today, thirty-six states offer casino gambling or lotteries, and gambling is now a $ 500 billion business in the United States. Six percent of the gross national product went for gambling in 1996. Eight percent went for groceries.

Wynn was among the first to realize that prosperity would depend less and less on casino revenues. Thus the Mirage. And the Bellagio, the Venetian, the Paris, and the Mandalay Bay. Eleven of twelve of the world’s largest hotels are in Las Vegas, and lately daily occupancy runs at 90 percent. Venerable Rat Pack haunts like the Sands and the Dunes were sacrificed to make room for the new mega-hotels. In Las Vegas, there is no such thing as the National Historic Register.

Politically, an annual influx to the city of 75,000 new residents is tipping the state’s demographic scales and pushing a western conservative bastion toward liberalism. With their dependable Las Vegas base, Democrats are increasingly being elected to national and state offices, and this doesn’t sit well with the folks in Reno and Elko. The southern counties around Las Vegas are growing so fast that they have become an almost autonomous political entity in themselves: They get the water, have the political clout, and create wealth on a grand scale. In northern Nevada, ranchers struggle; in Las Vegas, twenty-year-old waiters make $ 60,000 a year.

Thomson’s In Nevada is history scattered like birdshot, but his short, disunified vignettes do, in fact, capture something of our most peculiar state. At least, they capture something of Nevada’s intrinsic disunity — the difficulty everyone has holding in mind all at the same time the salt-flats outside Wendover, the clear waters of Tahoe, the sheepherders’ restaurant in Winnemucca, the cattle ranchers’ cafe in Elko, the ring-ding-ding of Las Vegas, the water piled up at the Hoover Dam, and the endless desert. Of course, what we’re really waiting for is not a writer who can show us how the pieces of Nevada don’t fit together, but a writer who can show us how they do.

Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming.