The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  I AM ON the third floor of the Clark county court house talking to Sheriff Captain Ray Gubser, another of these strong, pale-eyed Western-builder types, who is obligingly explaining to me law enforcement on the Strip, where the problem is not so much the drunks, crooks or roughhousers, but these nuts on pills who don’t want to ever go to bed, and they have hallucinations and try to bring down the casinos like Samson. The county has two padded cells for them. They cool down after three or four days and they turn out to be somebody’s earnest breadwinner back in Denver or Minneapolis, loaded with the right credentials and pouring soul and apologiae all over the county cops before finally pulling out of never-never land for good by plane. Captain Gubser is telling me about life and eccentric times in Las Vegas, but I am distracted. The captain’s office has windows out on the corridor. Coming down the corridor is a covey of girls, skipping and screaming, giggling along, their heads exploding in platinum-and-neon-yellow bouffants or beehives or raspberry-silk scarves, their eyes appliquéd in black like mail-order decals, their breasts aimed up under their jerseys at the angle of anti-aircraft automatic weapons, and, as they swing around the corner toward the elevator, their glutei maximi are bobbing up and down with their pumps in the inevitable buttocks décolletage pressed out against black, beige and incarnadine stretch pants. This is part of the latest shipment of show girls to Las Vegas, seventy in all, for the “Lido de Paris” revue at the Stardust, to be entitled Bravo!, replacing the old show, entitled Voilà. The girls are in the county courthouse getting their working papers, and fifteen days from now these little glutei maximi and ack-ack breasts with stars pasted on the tips will be swinging out over the slack jaws and cocked-up noses of patrons sitting at stageside at the Stardust. I am still listening to Gubser, but somehow it is a courthouse where mere words are beaten back like old atonal Arturo Toscanini trying to sing along with the NBC Symphony. There he would be, flapping his little toy arms like Tony Galento shadowboxing with fate, bawling away in the face of union musicians who drowned him without a bubble. I sat in on three trials in the courthouse, and it was wonderful, because the courtrooms are all blond-wood modern and look like sets for TV panel discussions on marriage and the teen-ager. What the judge has to say is no less formal and no more fatuous than what judges say everywhere, but inside of forty seconds it is all meaningless because the atmosphere is precisely like a news broadcast over Las Vegas’ finest radio station, KORK. The newscast, as it is called, begins with a series of electronic wheeps out on that far edge of sound where only quadrupeds can hear. A voice then announces that this is Action Checkpoint News. “The news—all the news—flows first through Action Checkpoint!—then reaches You! at the speed of Sound!” More electronic wheeps, beeps and lulus, and then an item: “Cuban Premier Fidel Castro nearly drowned yesterday.” Urp! Wheep! Lulu! No news a KORK announcer has ever brought to Las Vegas at the speed of sound, or could possibly bring, short of word of the annihilation of Los Angeles, could conceivably compete within the brain with the giddiness of this electronic jollification.

  The wheeps, beeps, freeps, electronic lulus, Boomerang Modern and Flash Gordon sunbursts soar on through the night over the billowing hernia-hernia sounds and the old babes at the slots—until it is 7:30 A.M. and I am watching five men at a green-topped card table playing poker. They are sliding their Bee-brand cards into their hands and squinting at the pips with a set to the lips like Conrad Veidt in a tunic collar studying a code message from S.S. headquarters. Big Sid Wyman, the old Big-Time gambler from St. Louis, is there, with his eyes looking like two poached eggs engraved with a road map of West Virginia after all night at the poker table. Sixty-year-old Chicago Tommy Hargan is there with his topknot of white hair pulled back over his little pink skull and a mountain of chips in front of his old caved-in sternum. Sixty-two-year-old Dallas Maxie Welch is there, fat and phlegmatic as an Indian Ocean potentate. Two Los Angeles biggies are there exhaling smoke from candela-green cigars into the gloom. It looks like the perfect vignette of every Big-Time back room, “athletic club,” snooker house and floating poker game in the history of the guys-and-dolls lumpen-bourgeoisie. But what is all this? Off to the side, at a rostrum, sits a flawless little creature with bouffant hair and Stridex-pure skin who looks like she is polished each morning with a rotary buffer. Before her on the rostrum is a globe of coffee on a hot coil. Her sole job is to keep the poker players warmed up with coffee. Meantime, numberless uniformed lackeys are cocked and aimed about the edges to bring the five Big Timers whatever else they might desire, cigarettes, drinks, napkins, eyeglass-cleaning tissues, plug-in telephones. All around the poker table, at a respectful distance of ten feet, is a fence with the most delicate golden pickets. Upon it, even at this narcoleptic hour, lean men and women in their best clothes watching the combat of the titans. The scene is the charmed circle of the casino of the Dunes Hotel.

  As everyone there knows, or believes, these fabulous men are playing for table stakes of fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. One hundred dollars rides on a chip. Mandibles gape at the progress of the battle. And now Sid Wyman, who is also a vice-president of the Dunes, is at a small escritoire just inside the golden fence signing a stack of vouchers for such sums as $4500, all printed in the heavy Mondrianesque digits of a Burroughs business check-making machine. It is as if America’s guys-and-dolls gamblers have somehow been tapped upon the shoulders, knighted, initiated into a new aristocracy.

  Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo—without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the Riviera casinos. At Monte Carlo there is still the plush mustiness of the 19th-century noble lions—of Baron Bleichroden, a big winner at roulette who always said, “My dear friends, it is so easy on Black.” Of Lord Jersey, who won seventeen maximum bets in a row—on black, as a matter of fact—nodded to the croupier, and said, “Much obliged, old sport, old sport,” took his winnings to England, retired to the country and never gambled again in his life. Or of the old Duc de Dinc who said he could win only in the high-toned Club Privé, and who won very heavily one night, saw two Englishmen gaping at his good fortune, threw them every mille-franc note he had in his hands and said, “Here. Englishmen without money are altogether odious.” Thousands of Europeans from the lower orders now have the money to go to the Riviera, but they remain under the century-old status pall of the aristocracy. At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richness, Cultural Aridity—concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbott and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.

  I AM IN the office of Major A. Riddle — Major is his name—the president of the Dunes Hotel. He combs his hair straight back and wears a heavy gold band on his little finger with a diamond sunk into it. As everywhere else in Las Vegas, someone has turned on the air conditioning to the point where it will be remembered, all right, as Las Vegas–style air conditioning. Riddle has an appointment to see a doctor at 4:30 about a crimp in his neck. His secretary, Maude McBride, has her head down and is rubbing the back of her neck. Lee Fisher, the P.R. man, and I are turning ours from time to time to keep the pivots from freezing up. Riddle is telling me about “the French war” and moving his neck gingerly. The Stardust bought and imported a version of the Lido de Paris spectacular, and the sight of all those sequined giblets pooning around on flamingo legs inflamed the tourists. The Tropicana fought back with the Folies Bergère, the New Frontier installed “Paree Ooh La La,” the Hacienda reached for the puppets “Les Poupées de Paris,” and the Silver Slipper called in Lili St. Cyr, the stripper, which was going French after a fashion. So the Dunes has bought up the third and last of the great Paris girlie shows, the Casino de Paris. Lee Fisher says, “And we’re going to do things they can’t top. In this t
own you’ve got to move ahead in quantum jumps.”

  Quantum? But exactly! The beauty of the Dunes’ Casino de Paris show is that it will be beyond art, beyond dance, beyond spectacle, even beyond the titillations of the winking crotch. The Casino de Paris will be a behemoth piece of American calculus, like Project Mercury.

  “This show alone will cost us two and a half million a year to operate and one and a half million to produce,” Major A. Riddle is saying. “The costumes alone will be fantastic. There’ll be more than five hundred costumes and—well, they’ll be fantastic.

  “And this machine—by the time we get through expanding the stage, this machine will cost us $250,000.”

  “Machine?”

  “Yes. Sean Kenny is doing the staging. The whole set moves electronically right in front of your eyes. He used to work with this fellow Lloyd Wright.”

  “Frank Lloyd Wright?”

  “Yes. Kenny did the staging for Blitz. Did you see it? Fantastic. Well, it’s all done electronically. They built this machine for us in Glasgow, Scotland, and it’s being shipped here right now. It moves all over the place and creates smoke and special effects. We’ll have everything. You can stage a bombardment with it. You’ll think the whole theatre is blowing up.

  “You’ll have to program it. They had to use the same mechanism that’s in the Skybolt Missile to build it. It’s called a ‘Celson’ or something like that. That’s how complicated this thing is. They have to have the same thing as the Skybolt Missile.”

  As Riddle speaks, one gets a wonderful picture of sex riding the crest of the future. Whole tableaux of bare-bottomed Cosmonaughties will be hurtling around the Casino de Paris Room of the Dunes Hotel at fantastic speed in elliptical orbits, a flash of the sequined giblets here, a blur of the black-rimmed decal eyes there, a wink of the crotch here and there, until, with one vast Project Climax for our times, Sean Kenny, who used to work with this fellow Frank Lloyd Wright, presses the red button and the whole yahooing harem, shrieking ooh-la-la amid the din, exits in a mushroom cloud.

  THE ALLURE IS most irresistance not to the young but the old. No one in Las Vegas will admit it—it is not the modern, glamorous notion—but Las Vegas is a resort for old people. In those last years, before the tissue deteriorates and the wires of the cerebral cortex hang in the skull like a clump of dried seaweed, they are seeking liberation.

  At eight o’clock Sunday morning it is another almost boringly sunny day in the desert, and Clara and Abby, both about sixty, and their husbands, Earl, sixty-three, and Ernest, sixty-four, come squinting out of the Mint Casino onto Fremont Street.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Abby says. “Those last three drinks, I couldn’t even feel them. It was just like drinking fizz. You know what I mean?”

  “Hey,” says Ernest, “how about that place back ’ere? We ain’t been back ’ere. Come on.”

  The others are standing there on the corner, squinting and looking doubtful. Abby and Clara have both entered old babe-hood. They have that fleshy, humped-over shape across the back of the shoulders. Their torsos are hunched up into fat little loaves supported by bony, atrophied leg stems sticking up into their hummocky hips. Their hair has been fried and dyed into improbable designs.

  “You know what I mean? After a while it just gives me gas,” says Abby. “I don’t even feel it.”

  “Did you see me over there?” says Earl. “I was just going along, nice and easy, not too much, just riding along real nice. You know? And then, boy, I don’t know what happened to me. First thing I know I’m laying down fifty dollars….”

  Abby lets out a great belch. Clara giggles.

  “Gives me gas,” Abby says mechanically.

  “Hey, how about that place back ’ere?” says Ernest.

  “… Just nice and easy as you please.…”

  “… get me all fizzed up.…”

  “Aw, come on….”

  And there at eight o’clock Sunday morning stand four old parties from Albuquerque, New Mexico, up all night, squinting at the sun, belching from a surfeit of tall drinks at eight o’clock Sunday morning, and—marvelous!—there is no one around to snigger at what an old babe with decaying haunches looks like in Capri pants with her heels jacked up on decorated wedgies.

  “Where do we come from?” Clara said to me, speaking for the first time since I approached them on Fremont Street. “He wants to know where we come from. I think it’s past your bedtime, sweets.”

  “Climb the stairs and go to bed,” said Abby.

  Laughter all around.

  “Climb the stairs” was Abby’s finest line. At present there are almost no stairs to climb in Las Vegas. Avalon homes are soon to go up, advertising “Two-Story Homes!” as though this were an incredibly lavish and exotic concept. As I talked to Clara, Abby, Earl and Ernest, it came out that “climb the stairs” was a phrase they brought along to Albuquerque with them from Marshall-town, Iowa, those many years ago, along with a lot of other baggage, such as the entire cupboard of Protestant taboos against drinking, lusting, gambling, staying out late, getting up late, loafing, idling, lollygagging around the streets and wearing Capri pants—all designed to deny a person short-term pleasures so he will center his energies on bigger, long-term goals.

  “We was in ’ere”—the Mint—“a couple of hours ago, and that old boy was playing the guitar, you know, ‘Walk right in, set right down,’ and I kept hearing an old song I haven’t heard for twenty years. It has this little boy and his folks keep telling him it’s late and he has to go to bed. He keeps saying, ‘Don’t make me go to bed and I’ll be good.’ Am I good, Earl? Am I good?”

  The liberated cortex in all its glory is none other than the old babes at the slot machines. Some of them are tourists whose husbands said, Here is fifty bucks, go play the slot machines, while they themselves went off to more complex pleasures. But most of these old babes are part of the permanent landscape of Las Vegas. In they go to the Golden Nugget or the Mint, with their Social Security check or their pension check from the Ohio telephone company, cash it at the casino cashier’s, pull out the Dixie Cup and the Iron Boy work glove, disappear down a row of slots and get on with it. I remember particularly talking to another Abby—a widow, sixty-two years old, built short and up from the bottom like a fire hydrant. After living alone for twelve years in Canton, Ohio, she had moved out to Las Vegas to live with her daughter and her husband, who worked for the Army.

  “They were wonderful about it,” she said. “Perfect hypocrites. She kept saying, you know, ‘Mother, we’d be delighted to have you, only we don’t think you’ll like it. It’s practically a frontier town,’ she says. ‘It’s so garish,’ she says. So I said, I told her, ‘Well, if you’d rather I didn’t come …’ ‘Oh, no!’ she says. I wish I could have heard what her husband was saying. He calls me ‘Mother.’ ‘Mother,’ he says. Well, once I was here, they figured, well, I might make a good baby-sitter and dishwasher and duster and mopper. The children are nasty little things. So one day I was in town for something or other and I just played a slot machine. It’s fun—I can’t describe it to you. I suppose I lose. I lose a little. And they have fits about it. ‘For God’s sake, Grandmother,’ and so forth. They always say ‘Grandmother’ when I am supposed to ‘act my age’ or crawl through a crack in the floor. Well, I’ll tell you, the slot machines are a whole lot better than sitting in that little house all day. They kind of get you; I can’t explain it.”

  The childlike megalomania of gambling is, of course, from the same cloth as the megalomania of the town. And, as the children of the liberated cortex, the old guys and babes are running up and down the Strip around the clock like everybody else. It is not by chance that much of the entertainment in Las Vegas, especially the second-stringers who perform in the cocktail lounges, will recall for an aging man what was glamorous twenty-five years ago when he had neither the money nor the freedom of spirit to indulge himself in it. In the big theatre–dining room at the Desert Inn, The Pa
inted Desert Room, Eddie Fisher’s act is on and he is saying cozily to a florid guy at a table right next to the stage, “Manny, you know you shouldn’a sat this close—you know you’re in for it now, Manny, baby,” while Manny beams with fright. But in the cocktail lounge, where the idea is chiefly just to keep the razzle-dazzle going, there is Hugh Farr, one of the stars of another era in the West, composer of two of the five Western songs the Library of Congress has taped for posterity, “Cool Water” and “Tumbling Tumbleweed,” when he played the violin for the Sons of the Pioneers. And now around the eyes he looks like an aging Chinese savant, but he is wearing a white tuxedo and powder-blue leather boots and playing his sad old Western violin with an electric cord plugged in it for a group called The Country Gentlemen. And there is Ben Blue, looking like a waxwork exhibit of vaudeville, doffing his straw skimmer to reveal the sculptural qualities of his skull. And down at the Flamingo cocktail lounge—Ella Fitzgerald is in the main room—there is Harry James, looking old and pudgy in one of those toy Italian-style show-biz suits. And the Ink Spots are at the New Frontier and Louis Prima is at the Sahara, and the old parties are seeing it all, roaring through the dawn into the next day, until the sun seems like a par lamp fading in and out. The casinos, the bars, the liquor stores are open every minute of every day, like a sempiternal wading pool for the childhood ego. “… Don’t make me go to bed …”

  FINALLY THE CASUALTIES start piling up. I am in the manager’s office of a hotel on the Strip. A man and his wife, each about sixty, are in there, raging. Someone got into their room and stole seventy dollars from her purse, and they want the hotel to make it up to them. The man pops up and down from a chair and ricochets back and forth across the room, flailing his great pig’s-knuckle elbows about.