Question of the Day - 20 August 2024

We were aware of this book when it came out late last year and didn't think at all about it. But when this question came in, we found What REALLY Happens in Vegas in the library and read it. 

We didn't expect to like it -- another couple of writers showing up for a month and regaling the world with their slapdash take on what happens here. But we gave it a chance and, surprisingly, we wound up thinking that, other than a couple of major flaws, it's not half-bad. 

First, James Patterson is one of the most prolific writers who's ever lived. At 77, he's written (or put his name on) literally hundreds of novels, mostly action and romance, and non-fiction titles. He's sold upwards of 500 million books, was the first author to sell a million ebooks, and regularly tops Forbes' list of the world's highest-paid authors. Eight of his books have been made into movies. In other words, he's well known enough to have access to Las Vegas personalities of whom the average travel or culture writer can only dream. His co-author, Mark Seal, has written a dozen non-fiction books and is, as the question states, a veteran editor at Vanity Fair. The long and short of it is, these guys talked to the movers and shakers, they can certainly tell a story, and they picked a lot of good ones.

To wit: behind (more accurately under) the scenes at the Bellagio fountains; the invention and selling of the slogan What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas; the Arizona slot player whom the Gaming Control Board tracked down to pay off a $200,000 jackpot he didn't know he won; the many machinations behind the building of the Forum Shops at Caesars, including how Wolfgang Puck was convinced to open the first celebrity-chef restaurant in Vegas; the Cosmo's Reserve private casino, heliyoga at Valley of Fire, and much much more.

The stories are also highlighted with extensive direct quotes from interviews by the authors with the big-time power brokers and other heavy hitters, such as Billy Vassiliadis (CEO of R&R advertising agency) and his wife Rosemary (director of Reid Airport), Elaine Wynn, Oscar Goodman, Dennis Barrie (developer of the Mob Museum), Wolfgang Puck, Roger Thomas (Steve Wynn's interior designer), Shin Lim, Guy Laliberte (founder of Cirque du Soleil), opera superstar Andrea Bocelli, restaurateur Barry Dakake, Circa's Derek Stevens, and the like. 

All that said, this book is nothing if not the sanitized version of Vegas, the LVCVA-approved squeaky-clean happy-endings treatment. It's the view from the Lear jet, the penthouse, the boardroom, the limo, where "no matter where you go in Vegas, everyone is attractive, pretty, outgoing. Beautiful people are required to staff the beautiful buildings" (Chapter 20). The gritty sweaty streets packed with the suckers and losers, the bewildered, and just the hordes of exhausted visitors on forced marches? Nowhere to be found. In What REALLY Happens in Vegas, the tens of millions of those specimens do not exist.  

For instance, in one of the "racier" chapters, the stripper is earning money to work her way through EMT school, the good girl pretending, temporarily and for a good cause, to be bad. The two soccer moms who lie to their families about their annual trips to Las Vegas "never do anything to betray their husbands or families: Their wedding vows are sacred." The Arizona CPA who won the big slot jackpot on a Mask machine at Treasure Island and was tracked down by Gaming Control agents is summed up thusly, "It's the quintessential Vegas story: a fortune won, lost, and won again." Hm. Is that what really happens here? Not from where we sit -- and we dare say, almost of you can take issue with it as well.

Even the chapter on Elaine Wynn, one of the longest and most colorful, glosses over her ex-husband's indiscretions. "The details have been written in endless court documents and headlines. But all that matters now is this: Elaine won." In this book, everyone's a winner.

And speaking of winning, we kept waiting for any mention that what really happens in Vegas is gambling. What we found, instead, were stories about everything but, except for the Mask slot player. And evidence of how square the authors are when it comes to casinos, a single mention of the money people bring to gamble with is "bank roll" -- yes, two words, incorrectly, and in quotation marks, as if they (or their editors) felt the need to identify the term as jargon or slang. 

And here's one more quibble. Rather than what really happens in Las Vegas, this book is more about what happened in Las Vegas. The preponderance of the stories are historical. We certainly understand the impulse; Las Vegas's past is irresistible to storytellers. But it renders the title somewhat misleading.

In the end, we don't mind saying that it was an enjoyable read, we learned some things we didn't know, and you'll get a glimpse of Las Vegas that you wouldn't ordinarily see. But you won't find what really happens in Vegas for the vast majority of visitors between these two covers.