LAS VEGAS: THE GAME IS ILLUSION

ALREADY the Land of Plethora, Las Vegas last week reached a new pinnacle of preposterousness. Two huge new hotels flung open their doors within the space of 24 hours, to the accompaniment of a 21-gun promotional salvo. "In France, it's the Eiffel Tower. In India, it's the Taj Mahal. In Las Vegas, it's the Landmark," boasted TV spots for Howard Hughes' 476-room Landmark Hotel, whose qualifications for uniqueness include "the world's longest swimming pool" (240 ft., shaped like a hot-water bottle) and the only high-altitude casino (on the 29th floor) in town. The usual spate of show-biz celebrities turned up to collect souvenir plastic orange blossoms at the opening --but Billionaire Hughes was nowhere to be seen.

Hats and Tops. Maybe he was across the street, casing the competition: Kirk Kerkorian's new 1,519-room International Hotel, which laid claim to a few superlatives itself. The "world's biggest" eternal flame (35 ft. high) burned brightly outside the entrance, while the "world's largest" swimming pool (350,000 gallons), located on the second-floor-roof "recreation deck," leaked water into the "world's biggest" casino (30,000 sq. ft.), directly below. Dwarfed by a stage as large as that of Radio City Music Hall, Barbra Streisand belted out Hello, Dolly and On a Clear Day for 2,000 champagne-swigging guests, while slot machines clacked merrily in the background.

The openings, plus the usual Fourth of July holiday crush, combined to make last week the busiest in Las Vegas' history. Hotels were jammed, switchboards hopelessly overloaded, gamblers stacked six deep at the craps and blackjack tables. TIME Correspondent Jon Larsen and Writer Charles Parmiter were on hand to record the frenetic scene. Their impressions:

A trip to Las Vegas is enough to restore your faith in the old values. LADIES MUST WEAR BATHING HATS AND SWIMSUIT TOPS, reads the sign by the Flamingo Hotel pool. Where else in the U.S. can you still find big bands, a 49-c- breakfast, and a bellhop who says: "Why don't you just relax, sir, while I unpack your bags?" How many other cities the size of Las Vegas (pop. 290,000) can boast 143 churches and 159 Boy Scout troops?

Campus disorders? Nevada Southern University in Las Vegas has eleven fraternities and sororities, but no S.D.S. chapter. Racial riots? The 30,000 Negroes who live in Las Vegas' west-side black ghetto have not yet even discovered the sit-in. Hippies and drugs? Rare in Vegas. MARIJUANA--THE SOCIAL ASSASSIN, read the billboards that District Attorney George Franklin has erected along the main drag. Townsfolk are still chuckling about what happened to the two hirsute, peace-bead types whom a deputy sheriff discovered on The Strip a month or so ago. He drove them out into the desert, pointed them toward Barstow, Calif. (153 miles away), and ordered them to start walking.

Las Vegas is sick, of course, but in a curiously moralistic way that perhaps reflects its Mormon background. Pawnshops such as Stoney's (motto: "Hock It to Me, Baby"), the oldest in town, cheerfully advance money on wedding rings and spare automobile tires. They do draw the line at false teeth, eye glasses and hearing aids. Although prostitution is technically illegal in Las Vegas, an estimated 1,000 whores ply their profession on The Strip.

There are, in fact, two Las Vegases --real and illusory. The real one is a sprawling, dusty desert town in which sex education is banned in the public schools, 50-odd people committed suicide last year, and the crime rate is higher than Chicago's. A Methodist Church survey shows that 27% of Las Vegas residents are divorced. The illusory Vegas is the one that will be seen by 14 million visitors this year. Like giant mirages created by the heat vapors of the get-rich-quick furnace, the neon-lit, freon-cooled sand castles of The Strip rise amid the cacti and creosote bushes, massive monuments to hedonism. Inside their carpeted, clockless confines, nothing seems real: time stands still, and $100 is just a black gambling chip. This Las Vegas is a jet-age Sodom, a venal demimonde in which the greatest compliment that can be paid a man is to say that he has "juice" (influence in the right places). The city is the ultimate affront to taste.

Pig in a Pool. Consider these vignettes. A notorious mobster is honored publicly with a good-citizen award--because he contributed a large sum to a local college football team. A nun, in full habit, draws cheers from onlookers as she leans over a craps table and screams: "Cooooome, seven! A promoter dreamily describes one of his latest brainstorms: for the opening of a new restaurant, he plans to fill a reflecting pool with piranhas and toss them a live pig.

Thin-skinned Las Vegans have almost religious awe for such entrepreneurs as Billionaire Hughes and Multimillionaire Kerkorian, a onetime used-plane salesman who now is the largest stockholder in Western Airlines. They are seen as saviors sent to rescue the town from its reputation as a haven for crooks. Nobody seems to know how much Mafia money is still invested in Vegas (estimates range from none at all, which is patently ridiculous, to upwards of $100 million), but Hughes and Kerkorian have indeed lent the town at least a patina of respectability. In Hughes' six casinos, for example, gaming operations are supervised by ex-cops and ex-FBI agents rather than by gamblers. But Las Vegas retains its image as the wickedest town in the West, which is, of course, just what its visitors want it to be.

For now, moralists and esthetes can only bemoan the vulgarity of Vegas. But the distant future may hold some hope. Las Vegas currently consumes 19 billion gallons of water a year, most of it pumped through wells from a water table that is fed only 3.72 in. of rain every twelve months. As a result, depletion of the water table over the past 20 years has caused the whole town to sink 3 ft. At that rate the earth may swallow up the city of Las Vegas--in a million years or so.

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