Mr. Smith Goes to Vegas

Las Vegas may be in Nevada, not California, but it’s an outpost of Hollywood in more ways than one. Hollywood mega-tycoons and mobsters have all had a part in its founding. Hollywood stars have traditionally gone to Vegas to both to play and to perform. (And, of course, to get married.) My parents used to love heading for Las Vegas not to gamble but to see celebrities on their own turf, frolicking in hotel swimming pools, displaying their talents live on-stage in showrooms. Back in the day, there was a kind of relaxed glamour about the place: if you went to see Frank Sinatra, you might find other members of the  Rat Pack casually invited up to the stage. And who knew what rising star you might discover in one of the free lounge shows.

And then there are all those Las Vegas movies. Some try to capture the raw exuberance of the place; see everything from Elvis’s Viva Las Vegas to Swingers to The Hangover. Some focus instead on the dark forces beneath the glittering service: Bugsy (about the life and death of one of Vegas’s founders) and Martin Scorsese’s take on the city’s corrupt side, Casino,

Martin J. Smith had Las Vegas on his itinerary when he set out to chronicle the oddities of daily life in a small, charming essay collection called Mr. Las Vegas Has a Bad Knee, and other Tales of the People, Places, and Peculiarities of the Modern American Southwest. Marty, with whom I’ve shared a panel on several delightful occasions, is an award-winning journalist and magazine editor who also moonlights as a writer of suspense fiction. He once wrote a book called The Wild Duck Chase, chronicling a group of artists competing to win the Federal Duck Stamp Contest.  (Yes, there is such a thing—see Marge Gunderson’s husband struggling with his entry in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo.) Smith’s 2012 exploration of the ins and outs of the contest became the source material for a 2016 documentary, Million Dollar Duck.

Marty’s Mr. Las Vegas Has a Bad Knee includes his interviews with fascinating real-life characters (both the famous and the unknown) from all over the Southwest. In Orange County, he catches up with Dick Dale, SoCal’s one-time King of the Surf Guitar, who accepts life’s ups and downs with admirable equanimity. Near Palm Springs, he interviews the man who erected giant dinosaur statues along the highway, then saw them eclipsed by modern construction. Also in the Palm Springs vicinity, he gets to know the folks standing vigil outside Liberace’s desert home, waiting reverently as the glitter god breathes his last

The title story, “Mr. Las Vegas Has a Bad Knee” (from 2006) zooms in on a hero of the Nevada oasis, crooner Wayne Newton. Here’s Marty’s unforgettable opening sentence: “Wayne Newton arrived in Las Vegas as a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old singing sensation, looking like the result of a science experiment involving Brylcreem and estrogen.” Ultimately Newton settled in the area, bought a 52-acre ranch, and continued to pack showrooms full of ageing “Wayniacs.” Old pleasure palaces like the Stardust and the Flamingo: he knew them all. Because Newton has been a local fixture—and booster—for so many years, Marty jumped at the opportunity to take an insider tour of his personal “Wayne’s World.” Marty’s hope was to learn the behind-the-scenes realities of a place that seems all façade. Only problem: the promised tour never materialized. Driving back to SoCal,  thinking about the lost secrets of imploding hotels, Marty realized that “it’s hard not to worry about the way Vegas treats its ageing legends.”

Lights Out in Las Vegas

Las Vegas -- a place where anything’s possible, a place that encourages visitors to let go of everyday reality -- has now become a site of all-too-real death and destruction. The events of Sunday night won’t leave my head anytime soon.

I’ve always had mixed emotions about Las Vegas. When I was a kid, it was where my clean-living parents went for adults-only weekends, during which they swam in glamorous pools and celebrity-gazed at classy low-rise hotels like the Sands and the Dunes. (No, they never gambled—and I was startled to learn that they occasionally ordered a round of something called Dubonnet.)

When I was old enough to drink and watch shows featuring topless women, my in-laws treated my spouse and me to a few Las Vegas weekends. My father-in-law, who was born into abject poverty, loved Vegas. For him it was a place to put on his best suit and check out the craps table. He certainly never gambled to excess, but I think just being in that atmosphere made him celebrate how far he’d come in the world. Even when he was elderly, bereaved, and sad, he perked up in Vegas: the place seemed to give him a new lease on life.

Moviemakers too have always loved Las Vegas. Its garish atmosphere combined with its proximity to workaday Los Angeles has made it a destination in countless movies. Remember Vince Vaughn’s exuberant shout as he and his buddies drive toward the Strip in Swingers: “Vegas, baby, Vegas!” For his playboy character, Las Vegas is a place of escape from the humdrum world, a place where anything can happen. It plays a similar role in countless other wacky and raunchy comedies, from 1964’s Elvis flick, Viva Las Vegas, to 2009’s cringe-worthy The Hangover. Given how much money changes hands in Vegas, it makes a great setting for rollicking heist dramedies like Ocean’s 11, both the 1960 Rat Pack original and the all-star 2001 remake. And it enjoys an effective closeup in Rain Man, where Tom Cruise’s character sends his autistic brother (Dustin Hoffman) to the blackjack table, to take advantage of this savant’s unlikely talent for numbers.

It’s no secret that Las Vegas has had a long association with mobster types. One source of the Strip’s frenetic glamour has always been a struggle for power between tough guys who fully intend to hold all the marbles. In the town that some would-be wits call “Lost Wages,” the winner takes all. This fact has resulted in powerful Vegas dramas like Bugsy and Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Films of this sort link the Vegas gambling-joints with dangerous men, femme fatale women, and bloodshed on tap.

But the Las Vegas film that lingers in my memory banks is not about the city’s big “machers.” Leaving Las Vegas, from 1995, explores the seamier side of life just off the Vegas Strip. Nicolas Cage, in an Oscar-winning performance, plays a failed Hollywood screenwriter who has taken up residence in Vegas in order to drink himself to death. By his side in his seedy final abode is a kindly prostitute (Elisabeth Shue) with troubles of her own. When Cage’s character leaves Las Vegas, it’s clear it will be feet first.

It’s a life (and a death) he’s chosen. But those poor souls who came to Vegas last weekend to enjoy a country music concert didn’t deserve to have their lives shortened. If their killer found the need to leave Las Vegas in grim fashion, how tragic (and how unfair) that he chose to take them with him.