In Nevada, gambling and prostitution are legal, there is no state income tax and inheritance tax, and one can be married immediately, and divorced in six weeks and five minutes. It takes six weeks to become a legal resident and court proceedings are usually cursory.
It was the last of these facilities that first attracted me to this free-and-easiest of the 50 states. I was fresh out of the Royal Canadian airforce. The war was over and I was impatient to disencumber myself of a marriage for which I had rashly volunteered in those olden days when many people felt they had to get married before sleeping together. An RCAF legal officer had put me in touch with Pat Mc Carran, of Mc Carran and Kane, specialists in divorce. When I arrived in Reno, I discovered that he was US Senator Patrick Mc Carran, who dominated Nevada politics. He made my six weeks and five minutes in Reno blissfully unstressful. When he died a grateful state named the Las Vegas airport after him.
The next time I visited Nevada was when Howard Hughes sent a group of us easily tempted journalists on one of his TWA Constellation jets from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to publicise a Jane Russell movie, which, with brain-numbing originality, was named The Las Vegas Story. Hughes owned RKO and could call his movie anything he liked. As we left the plane in Vegas, each of the junketeers was given a small canvas bag containing 50 dollars for the casino in our hotel. I suppose if I were a British MP, the whole trip, especially the 50-dollar gratuity, would constitute sleaze; but in Nevada petty bribes are regarded as fun.
Back again, years later, I found The Strip in Vegas enormously built up. Nevada is now the fastest growing state in the Union. Sugar Ray Leonard fought with boring efficiency at Caesars Palace (no apostrophe, if you please), which was then Vegas's most famous hotel. Such elegance! A subtly gorgeous hooker in a Chanel suit accosted me as we waited for a lift. `Do you dally with sporting ladies?' she mellifluously enquired. However, in my self-appointed role of sociological investigator, I had a date downtown, at a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous (listed in the telephone book), just off Glitter Gulch. Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, the gambling addicts were not at all repentant. There was animated discussion of roulette systems and there was eagerness to try them out. In Reno, I once worked an eight hour shift in Harold's Club, as a shill, betting with house money on roulette, twenty-one and craps, to make the place look busy and to assuage hunger.
Las Vegas has recently taken to offering "family entertainment", Disney-style, rather than escapism for neurotic loners. I have found compensation adventuring into the desert, vast plains under a vast sky. It is still possible to find many interesting ghosttowns, such as Aurora, Goodsprings and Midas, and small settlements where a few refugees from technocratic civilisation live oneiric lives.
And now about this book. In Nevada by David Thompson, a London-born Californian, the author of acclaimed works on cinema, is the widest ranging, most vividly evocative book on Nevada I have ever read. Rich in descriptive colour, information, entertaining anecdotes, and shrewd psychological insights, it is well worth a place beside A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town (about the World Series of Poker) and Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (about drug induced hysteria).
David Thompson has transcended those classics by contemplating an enormous hole in Nevada's freedom. There is a region larger than the state of Connecticut, between Las Vegas and Tonopah, where the Department of Defence conducts operations in strict secrecy. This is where, according to the uninformed public's paranoiac rumours, flying saucers and aliens from outer space have been sequestered under military guard. Quite certainly, this is where international radioactive waste is dumped underground, and where, in the Nevada Test Site, experimental nuclear explosions have caused fallout and a higher than average incidence of cancers as far downwind as Utah. As Thompson points out, laissez-faire Nevada's highest stake gambling is conducted out of sight.
Happy, clappy middle America comes to Reno: couples photographed by Dana Fineman in A Day in the Life of America, photographed by 200 of the world's leading photojournalists on one day, May 2nd, 1986, and published by Collins.
In Nevada, gambling and prostitution are legal, there is no state income tax and inheritance tax, and one can be married immediately, and divorced in six weeks and five minutes. It takes six weeks to become a legal resident and court proceedings are usually cursory. On the other hand, there is a region larger than the state of Connecticut, between Las Vegas and Tonopah, where the Department of Defence conducts operations in strict secrecy. This is where, according to the uninformed public's paranoiac rumours, flying saucers and aliens from outer space have been sequestered under military guard.
Quite certainly, this is where international radioactive waste is dumped underground, and where, in the Nevada Test Site, experimental nuclear explosions have caused fall-out and a higher than average incidence of cancers as far downwind as Utah. As Thompson points out, laissez-faire Nevada's highest stake gambling is conducted out of sight.