2254_FM.qrk 11/5/01 8:15 AM Page i THE GRIT BENEATH THE GLITTER 2254_FM.qrk 11/5/01 8:15 AM Page ii 2254_FM.qrk 11/5/01 8:15 AM Page iii THE GRIT BENEATH THE GLITTER Tales from THE REAL LAS VEGAS EDITED BY HAL K. ROTHMAN AND MIKE DAVIS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England ᭧ 2002 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The grit beneath the glitter : tales from the real Las Vegas / edited by Hal K. Rothman and Mike Davis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-20529-4 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 0-520-22538-4 (paper : alk. paper) 1. Las Vegas (Nev.)—History—20th century. 2. Las Vegas (Nev.)—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Las Vegas (Nev.)—Economic conditions—20th century. I. Rothman, Hal, 1958– II. Davis, Mike, 1946– f849.l35 g75 2001 979.3'135034—dc21 2001005925 Manufactured in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10987654321 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Contents Hal Rothman Introduction: and The Many Faces of Mike Davis Las Vegas / 1 PART I IMAGE AND REALITY Norman M. Klein Scripting Las Vegas: Noir Naı¨fs, Junking Up, and the New Strip / 17 Francisco Menendez Las Vegas of the Mind: Shooting Movies in and about Nevada / 30 Peter Goin Discordant Infrastructure / 59 PART II NUTS AND BOLTS Eugene Moehring Growth, Services, and the Political Economy of Gambling in Las Vegas, 1970–2000 / 73 Jay Brigham Lighting Las Vegas: Electricity and the City of Glitz / 99 Jon Christensen Build It and the Water Will Come / 115 Robert E. Parker The Social Costs of Rapid Urbanization in Southern Nevada / 126 Courtney Alexander Rise to Power: The Recent History of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas / 145 Mike Davis Class Struggle in Oz / 176 PART III VOICES Brian Frehner “Squeezing the Juice Out of Las Vegas”: Reflections On Growing Up in Smalltown, USA / 187 Shannon McMackin I Didn’t Know Anybody Lived There / 195 William N. Thompson How I Became a Native / 208 Kit Miller Inside the Glitter: Lives of Casino Workers / 214 PART IV SHAPING LIFE Joanne L. Goodwin “She Works Hard for Her Money”: A Reassessment of Las Vegas Women Workers, 1945–1985 / 243 Mike Davis The Racial Cauldron / 260 Constance Devereaux Inside Jean / 268 Amie Williams Looking into a Dry Lake: Uncovering the Women’s View of Las Vegas / 291 PART 5 FROM PARIAH TO PARADIGM Hal Rothman Colony, Capital, and Casino: Money in the Real Las Vegas / 307 Kathryn Hausbeck Who Puts the “Sin” in “Sin City” Stories? Girls of Grit and Glitter in the City of Women / 335 William N. Thompson Nevada Goes Global: The Foreign Gaming Rule and the Spread of Casinos / 347 Richard Misrach Canto: Las Vegas / 363 Contributors / 377 Index / 379 hal rothman and mike davis Introduction The Many Faces of Las Vegas THE NEON OASIS No city in American history has ever changed its clothes as frequently or as rapidly as Las Vegas. No place has grown so fast in so many ways without allegiance to any of the forms of identity its past fostered. No- where has each incarnation of existence been more fleeting, more tran- sitory, less based in anything but the human imagination. Reinvention has been the essence of the place, but what can you expect from a town with no compelling natural reason to be where it is? Malleability is the watchword of Las Vegas, a supple response to the changing cultural, intellectual, economic, and social trends of the nation and the world. In the beginning, there were the first people of the Mojave Desert, the Paiute, and the miraculous, life-saving springs that the Spanish called Las Vegas, “the meadows.” In the mid nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny made this natural oasis a pivot of competition between Brigham Young’s Nation of Deseret and Gold Rush California. At the beginning of the next century, the Union Pacific Railroad built a town to repair trains en route between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. When the rail- road closed its shop to punish the city for its support of the national railroad strike of 1922, Las Vegas was left to die in the desert, to sink back into the sands from which it had sprung. California’s thirst for water and the federal dollars it brought saved the hamlet from withering into another Nevada ghost town. In the late 1 2 HAL ROTHMAN & MIKE DAVIS 1920s, Boulder Dam construction stimulated a new boom, and gamblers and bookmakers expelled from Tijuana and Los Angeles in the late 1930s planted the seeds of the modern casino resort. World War II brought defense industries, a huge airbase, myriad GI paychecks, and a new highway to LA, a lifeline to the outside world. The Cold War added the Nuclear Test Site and the mushroom cloud that was once the city’s eerie official emblem. Cowboys and mobsters, bankers and corrupt trade unionists watered this postwar garden and harvested its sweet, and sometimes bitter, fruit during the so-called golden age of the 1950s and 1960s. The reclusive Howard Hughes, never seen by the Nevada public, transformed Las Vegas again in the 1960s, which ended with a series of dramatic buy- outs and consolidations. Hotel chains, headed by Hilton, followed, pre- paring the way for the corporate revolution that took shape during the 1980s. As family or mob-owned casinos were transformed into giant gaming corporations and merged with hotel chains and entertainment monop- olies, the pace of change dramatically accelerated. Two generations of resort development were compressed into a single decade. Typical Strip locations metamorphosed from overgrown motels into gambling theme parks with Disneyland-like rides, upscale shopping, and world-class spectacles and illusions. People even began to bring their kids. The 1997 opening of Showcase on the Strip signaled yet another new dawn for the fastest-growing metropolis in North America. Topped by an enormous Coca-Cola bottle out of a Warhol reverie, the Showcase is an entertainment superplex, with United Artists theaters, SKG Game- works, the All-Star Cafe´, and Surge Rock, a faux climbing rock named after Coke’s latest sibling. The brainchild of two young entrepreneurs, Barry Fieldman and Robert Unger, Showcase is a perfect melding of entertainment and shopping, a new concept already oft repeated, tar- geted like a cruise missile at the under-thirty market. With the most potent symbol of global capitalism, the Coca-Cola bottle, now crowning the Strip, Las Vegas can claim its rightful place among the great growth engines of the postmodern economy. Since 1998, the Strip can also boast of offering the public not only Mike Tyson and Wayne Newton but Picasso and Renoir. The upscale counterweight to the youthful populism of Showcase is Mirage Resorts’ newly opened Bellagio, where $285 million of impressionist and modern art graces the property, making it a strange hybrid of the old-fashioned slot palace and the Louvre. Steve Wynn, then Mirage’s chairman and INTRODUCTION 3 impresario deluxe, sold his personal stock to pay for the art for his project. The 3,000-room Bellagio, built around a nine-acre manmade lake, is one of the new billion-dollar resorts that have followed in the wake of the MGM Grand (1993) and New York New York (1997). But just as the dreadnought was inevitably followed by the superdread- nought in the naval arms races of the early twentieth century,the current generation of supercasinos will soon be matched by hyper-resorts like the $2.5 billion, 3,000-room Venetian—complete with canals and gon- doliers—that opened in 1999. The price of poker has risen in Las Vegas; the ante is now so high that only the largest sources of world capital can play in the big-time building bonanza that the town has become. No longer an overgrown gambling palace, a carpet joint in gambling parlance, Las Vegas has become one of the premier resort cities in the world. Even Mecca can’t boast as many visitors each year, and while both cities promote forms of prayer, their aims are very different. The transition from the Mafia to Coca-Cola and Picasso is, of course, a modern corporate fairy tale. The old Las Vegas was the epitome of socially sanctioned deviance, a vast liberty port for the Eisenhower-era middle classes, a place where people could cast off their sins as they did in the deserts of the Bible. In an age when Americans reveled in their industrial might and anticommunist righteousness, the mob oasis in the desert was a pleasure most parents did not tell their kids about. It was the place where the money in the cookie jar went—a secret shared by Mom and Dad (or by Dad and his buddies). The antipode of nine-to- five existence, it was emphatically not a place to build churches, offices, and factories. This was true as late as the 1980s, when CitiCorp located a service center in Las Vegas. The Manhattan financial giant was so certain that its credit clients would hesitate to mail payments to a Las Vegas address (“So that’s what the bank is doing with our money!”) that it invented a fictitious town, “The Lakes, Nevada,” to receive payments and reassure customers.