Vegas Confidential
The Green Felt Jungle. By Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris, (Heinemann, 25s.) The Big Wheel. By George W. Herald and Edward D. Radin. (Hale, 18s.) NOT until deposited in a barrack-room with forty other youths of assorted origins was it astonishingly borne upon me that gambling ranks among the most ubiquitously powerful human compulsions. Indeed, it was obviously more attractive than sex or food to many who, in the marginal freedom from bull, instantly grabbed a pack of cards, a racing edition or a pair of dice. In this pressure-cooker of thrills, I re- mained the one unassimilable lukewarm vegetable which registered on the simmerstat utterly different priorities. It was not prudish disapproval felt, but neutral bafflement.
Twenty years later, aberrated I remain in this nation of football pools, betting shops, chemmy. parlours, dog tracks and fruit machines—pos- sibly a solitary freak, a sort of castrato in the giant Crockford's that is Britain (annual betting turnover, £1,000 million). Still willing to be
turned on to the magic charge, I eagerly opened these books about the bingo halls of the rich, Las Vegas and Monte Carlo. No dice. The treat- ments are dissimilar but equally off-putting--or at any rate not on-putting. The mystery of the sacrament stays for me intact.
Messrs. Reid and Demaris are out to curdle the blood with their excoriating, Con fident ial- type report on the sin and corruption of Las Vegas, garish Viceville on the desert barrens where movie stars, sugar daddies, men with golden arms, crooked senators and gangsters jet in for their dreary frolics. Conversely, the atti- tude of Messrs. Herald and Radin is a prolonged William Hickey simper of coy admiration as they prattle on abOut the gossip-column cast of the fusty drama within the gingerbread casino.
For a century Monte Carlo has garbed itself in dignity and etiquette. Las Vegas, a nineteen- year-old mushroom, or toadstool, growth, hasn't bothered with such niceties. It was Bugsy Siegel, the late New York thug, who in 1946 sank the first bore-hole into Nevada's permissive laws and called his gusher the Flamingo Hotel. That luxury clip-joint started today's 'grotesque Disneyland,' a glittering honky-tonk town of bars and brothels, dedicated to putting a vacuum cleaner over every sucker with the utmost celerity. Without gambling, the authors remark, Nevada wouldn't need a governor, just a night watch- man. The gaming rooms have no windows or clocks to distract from self-destruction, no chairs except at the tables. The priest who conducts 4.30 a.m. mass for croupiers and prayer-needy 'tourists points Out: 'After all, there was gambling for the Robe at the foot of the Cross.' The
state prison operates a casino for inmates' play therapy, The authors say Las Vegas is owned by the Mob, the crime syndicate. There seems no cause to question this, especially as the book con- tains wodges from the Kefauver Committee hearings and conversations with bent politicians picked up on tape-recorders planted by the authors. They certainly name names—among the gunmen, call-girls, ex-Capone executives and capi mafiosi, those of Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Hoffa, Barry Goldwater, and several famous show-biz women slyly smeared as lesbians. All this is in a 'some of the most sinister punks that ever slinked out of a sewer' style. Las Vegas is doubtless the sleaziest of neon slums, but it's not easy to decide which is the more cheesy: the place itself or this kind of keyhole prurience.
While The Green Felt Jungle is a squawk of faked righteous horror, The Big Wheel croons the Celebrity Bulletin like a psalm, infatuated with 'the smart and sophisticated wealthy of the international set.' First 'in Monte Carlo's salons cavorted the madcap grand dukes of Russia, showering gold like confetti while their serfs starved'—then the predictable anecdotal parade of King Edward, Lily Langtry,. Charlie Wells (who broke the bank), Mata Hari, Zaharoff, Elsa Maxwell, Churchill, the Dockers and the Rainiers. These authors also name names. In fact, not a name goes unnamed—not even 'the malicious Goddess of Fate's.'
The secret allure remains unexplained. Greed —no more squalid amid Las Vegas's numbing vulgarity than in this pompous stage-set—is what comes across in hot blasts of bad breath. The roulette wheels, we learn, never stopped spinning during the Second World War, and during the Nazi occupation profits 'rose to dizzying heights,' but in the first year the casino lost five million francs. 'The brittle and uneasy laughter of the reduced number of patrons was a painful sound.' War is hell.
KENNETH ALLSOP
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