Down the alley, far toward the end, a man worked the sidewalk with a wide broom. Even from a distance, I could tell he wore some kind of costume. From billboards, I’d gathered that Las Vegas traded in disguise—women in jewels and feathers, adults with mask-like faces wearing perpetually excited looks as they watched outpourings of coins from slot machines. I stayed behind my parents and close to my older siblings—for once my place as third child didn’t bother me. We strolled nearer the sweeper. As we came into range, I stole the inevitable look. He was a sad-faced clown. He wore a suit of rags, battered derby, oversized tie, and big, floppy shoes.
He kept complete focus on his work. His alley-sweeping was not a performance. If not that, then what was it? He was really cleaning up. Maybe even the janitors were part of the act in this strange, out-of-place place in the middle of the Nevada desert.
WHAT HAPPENS HERE, STAYS HERE. IT’S THE LAS VEGAS CREED, a promise of anonymity for the visitor. The slogan is world renowned, the place considered a port in any storm. In the 1990s, the city had billed itself as a family-friendly destination, but that tack just didn’t cut it. Kids weren’t proving to be the big-ticket customers that their adult gambling counterparts could be. A casino host puts it this way: “I have a guy go to the pool and dump like seventy-eight thousand dollars in three minutes. He didn’t win a hand. It was brutal, right?” Meanwhile dads and moms, out of necessity, might dodge any come-ons as they shepherd the kids to the discounted buffet.
“Las Vegas needed a new direction,” the advertising agency R&R wrote in 2002 for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, “for positioning the brand that would tap into the visceral and deeply emotional reasons visitors connect with the city.”
How visceral? No less than the fundamentally American entitlement to independence. How emotional? Our very need for liberty. Drawing on “rigorous brand research and analytics,” R&R concluded that people come to Las Vegas yearning to breathe free. “Adults get tired of adulting from time to time and desperately need some ‘Adult Freedom’—in a place where they won’t be judged.” In Las Vegas, one’s conduct needed to be off the record. The campaigners called the new spin a code, insight, tagline, cause, message, cultural phrase, platform, voice, spark, strategy—by any other name, it was branding. A business proposition.
It worked. R&R’s campaign and tagline entered the fabric of American culture, went worldwide, and “produced some of the most celebrated work in all of advertising.” The Visitors Authority saw a seventeen-to-one return on advertising dollars; year-round hotel occupancy rate boosted to eighty-seven percent, twenty-two percent above the national average; doubling of annual visitation from about twenty-one million guests in the kiddie era to forty-two million in 2016. Recognition in the media. “A stroke of marketing genius” (The New York Times). “A cultural phenomenon” (Advertising Age).
Uniforms for staff at most casinos morphed from those of dirndled, kid-friendly storybook characters to bikini tops and tight, revealing pirate’s pantaloons. Money and water flowed on the four-plus-mile reach of boulevard known as The Strip with a newfound sense of abundance. Families still could find plenty to do, but mostly at Circus Circus, which continued to flash the face of Lucky the Clown on its neon marquee. Fodor’s Travel dubbed the Circus Circus Adventuredome as “a welcome oasis in the frenzied Vegas adult scene.” Otherwise, Las Vegas itself became known as a rest stop away from the demands of parenting, running a household, working nine-to-five, and otherwise grinding on the wheel of daily obligation.
A FRIEND I’LL CALL MIKE RECENTLY SHARED THE STORY OF the power of Las Vegas to lure grownups into its cool embrace. Mike’s father, “Richard,” had reached his nineties after serving in the public sector, retiring in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, and inheriting a fortune in California real estate from parents and siblings. Richard also had acquired three marriages over the years: the first to Mike’s mother (ending in divorce), the second to a successful, working wife (lasting until her death), and the third to a much-younger, struggling single mother.
When I met Richard in his eighties, he walked with a limp and the uneven posture of a man suffering from scoliosis. He was quiet, mostly listening during conversation and responding with few words. He did have alive, interested eyes. When Mike saw him at his ninetieth birthday party in Los Angeles, though, Richard had become homebound. There was no more talk of the world travel he’d done with his third wife, “Annie.” Instead, the age gap between them had grown too wide to cross.
“One night Annie called me,” Mike says, “and was kind of hysterical, saying that Dad was in the hospital doing really, really badly, and was in Las Vegas. She said, ‘I’m giving you a chance to see your father’ before he dies.” Mike felt the sting of her words but wasn’t surprised. Annie had become Richard’s gatekeeper in recent years. Gradually, with a little-girl voice and manner that Mike describes as timid, she’d encouraged Richard to bond with her daughters and their string of live-in boyfriends.
Still, Mike wanted to see his father. He arranged a flight the next day to Las Vegas. Annie called in the morning to say he was too late. Richard had passed in the night.
“Yeah, thanks,” Mike recalls thinking, “but what were the circumstances of his death? What was he even doing in Vegas? Why would anyone load a ninety-something man that frail into a car to drive him all that way?”
Mike still doesn’t know, but he suspects it had something to do with Annie’s own addiction to Glitter Gulch. She’d often flown to Las Vegas to see a good friend there during her marriage to Richard. “Here’s Annie, my age or younger, and Dad’s an old man. I’d suspected some sort of romance, because she’d take off and go there alone. Maybe Dad even knew about it and was okay with it.”
At Richard’s wake, Mike met the “friend,” a private contractor who worked for several casinos. “His job was to keep their best customers happy. He’d give gamblers little tchotchkes and a free meal here and there and make them feel like they’re big shots. Basically he was paid to build people like Annie up. It began to dawn on me that she’d been going to Vegas to gamble, and was probably gambling away all of Dad’s wealth. She led kind of a double life.”
Mike finds it ironic that Richard had been in Vegas at all. “He was very anti-gambling. There was some story about his own father betting away what little money he had. Dad wasn’t one of those people who ‘goes to Vegas.’ He thought it was stupid. He never wanted to go.”
I KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT ADULT FREEDOM. THE GRAND Canyon river trips I worked in the 1970s and ’80s took people out of their day-to-day and into a different world—a deep, barely accessible place both physically and in the realm of regular human experience. The few dozen or so passengers on every trip unwound as they never did on the other rivers I worked in four other states. The letting go wasn’t something prescribed by river management. You couldn’t read about it in the advertising. Several days into a trip, someone might say, “This wasn’t mentioned in your company’s brochure.” The unbinding of souls came from an authentic immersion into a mile-deep place with astounding sights, monumental whitewater, rock walls so tall they inspired constant awe, and desert nights of unequaled tranquility. The physical factors combined, basically, to enchant everyone who made the trek. Bonding was inevitable, born of beauty as well as a feeling of hard-earned accomplishment in getting to camp safely at the end of every day. It took teamwork to make our way through that big, honking gorge, no matter how many times we’d run it.
River canyons, especially the Grand Canyon, are places of secrets, too: hidden green grottoes never dreamed of by the sun-dazed visitor who spends the obligatory ten minutes at the South Rim; unexpected friendships, cemented by the cooperation needed to get down 224 miles of world-class wild river.
Once back in the real world, we didn’t talk much about how a trip had gone. There were the usual disclosures about screwed-up or aced runs through