Shelf Life -- Scott Dickensheets: Formative years of Vegas dissected and celebrated in print

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him [email protected] or 990-2446.

Vegas in the '50s was another city altogether. You can see it in "Fabulous Las Vegas in the '50s" ($26.95, Angel City Press), a small, celebratory coffee-table book by Fred E. Basten and Charles Phoenix. Check Page 44. There's an aerial shot of the Strip from 1956 -- look at all that vacant land! Blocks of it! Enough to set a Steve Wynn adrool.

Next, look at the buildings that are there: Not a high-rise in the bunch. Nothing remotely mega. "The hotels along the Strip were low and sprawling, and rarely more than one story high," the authors note in their introduction. "It was a different world then, one with a look, style and pace all its own."

It was a heyday, all right, as you can tell from the book's daddy-o typefaces and swinging retro design; this finger-snappin' volume is in a mood to party! Forget all that Mob stuff, the skimming, the federal probes. "Those seamy aspects were just a small part of the little boomtown's allure." "Fabulous Las Vegas" is about the rest, and tells its tale mostly through pictures and short texts -- you can breeze down this memory lane in one sitting.

Chapter 1, "Welcome to Las Vegas," opens with a colorized photo of downtown, an atomic cloud rising behind Vegas Vic. The caption is all about the nuclear chic that swept the city, bomb parties and restaurants serving "atomburgers," that sort of thing. No mention of the perils -- hey, Vegas Vic ain't worried -- or those poor suckers in Utah who'd get face-fulls of wind-borne radiation. Let them bring down someone else's party!

In that old Las Vegas, the gap-toothed Strip of Page 44 hadn't yet eclipsed Fremont Street. "Throughout the '50s, downtown was Las Vegas," the book gushes. For those who've forgotten the era, weren't here then, or weren't born yet, the pictures are eye-opening. There's the Mint's hot-pink entry arch that swept upward to become the star-topped sign. Very cool. Same for the colorful harlequin roof line of the old Silver Palace.

Bugsy shows up in Chapter 3, "The Strip," long enough to hog all the credit for the Flamingo (history has edged his prominent partner, Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson, out of the picture) and get gunned down. The Strip itself does better, seeing its first high-rise, the Riviera, go up in mid-decade.

Subsequent chapters dwell at superficial length on dining, "fun in the sun" (don't miss the picture of bandleader Spike Jones in a mermaid getup), gambling, the night life and the marquee entertainers (Liberace jumped by female fans, Mae West onstage, surrounded by a ton of Grade A beefcake wearing loincloths). The book closes with a shot of the Rat Pack in front of the old Sands sign, a portent of the Strip's emergence as the motor of Vegas cool, and all the megaresorts to come.

The bright pages are collaged out of publicity stills, lounge fliers, brochure illustrations, pictures of matchbook covers and swizzle sticks, and snapshots taken by ordinary vacationers. It makes for a zoomy, energetic, whirlwind tour of a formative period in the city's history -- but, ultimately, history it ain't. "Fabulous Las Vegas in the '50s" lacks the context, scope and dispassionate eye for that. It's perhaps best viewed as a memory trigger for the Vegas-was-better-in-the-old-days crowd, the long-timers who will look at pictures of the very cool old Thunderbird sign and say, Yep, that's when Vegas was Vegas!

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King Louie: The same era is carefully and affectionally evoked in David Kamp's December Vanity Fair article on Louis Prima revivalism. As "Fabulous Las Vegas" notes, Prima and wife Keely Smith's house-rocking stint in the Sahara's Casbar Lounge pretty much inaugurated the era of Vegas lounge acts.

Kamp traces Prima's current vogue -- from the use of his "Jump, Jive and Wail" in the now-classic Gap Khakis commercial to the swing phenomenon -- and attempts to restore his place among music's innovators. "If you take stock of 20th century American popular music, you'll find Prima's fingerprints all over it," Kamp asserts.

Prima adapted easily to various musical genres, leading a top Dixieland outfit in the 1930s, writing Benny Goodman's theme song ("Sing, Sing, Sing"), becoming one of the first white regulars at Harlem's Apollo Theatre -- and he was the voice of King Louie in Disney's animated "The Jungle Book." That's range, people.

More Vegas: Two other noteworthy books about Las Vegas are out now, "The Real Las Vegas" ($30, Oxford Press), edited by David Littlejohn, and "In Nevada" ($27.50, Knopf), by film critic David Thomson.

A few brief observations: I've addressed Littlejohn's book in this space before (quite prematurely, as it happens; it's just come out), and gave it generally high marks for the in-depth reporting on Vegas conducted by his squad of University of California, Berkeley, grad students. That still goes. It's compelling stuff.

But since then I've developed a few more misgivings about the attitude underpinning the enterprise, a sort of high-minded Berkeley disdain for the vulgar jangle of Las Vegas. In retrospect, it's no surprise that they found so little positive to report; you have to wonder how open to it they were.

As for Thomson's book, it's received, shall we say, mixed reviews, particularly from the Nevada-savvy. While I enjoyed much of it, and found it full of intriguing nuggets, it, too, has some weak planks. At the very basic level, Thomson doesn't seem to know tumbleweeds from sagebrush.

Although his scheme to alternate chapters on Las Vegas history with chapters on nuclear history seems clever (contrasting the gambling in Las Vegas with the atomic gambling at the Test Site, get it?), the same idea was explored to much more stunning effect by local painter Robert Beckmann, who painted triple sevens paired with mushroom clouds.

And, overall, the writing assumes a lyrical tone that has the effect of depicting Nevada as a land of metaphor and symbolism instead of the mostly ordinary place -- only equipped with slot machines -- that we live in.

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