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Cavorting in Hot Springs, Ark., During Its Sin-Soaked Heyday
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THE VAPORS
A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice
By David Hill
“The only rule in Hot Springs,” Virginia Clinton Kelley once wrote, “was to enjoy yourself.” Kelley raised two boys in Hot Springs, Ark. — one of them, Bill, went on to become our 42nd president — while scrupulously obeying that rule. Gambling, smoking, dancing, drinking, flirting and “laughing and cutting up” were the favored enjoyments, and Kelley’s preferred venue, “by far,” was the Vapors.
When it opened in 1960, the Vapors — a nightclub with an (officially illegal) back-room casino — was “as plush and glittery and showy as anything Las Vegas ever dreamed of,” Kelley wrote, with red velvet everywhere and “these imported chandeliers like nothing I had ever seen in my life.” Liberace would play the front room while oil tycoons threw dice out back. The Vapors was the perfect epitome of midcentury Hot Springs: steamy, sumptuous, flashy, vaguely illicit and supremely indulgent. “Hot Springs,” Kelley wrote, “let me be me with a vengeance.”
Hot Springs, as David Hill writes in “The Vapors,” a history of the town during its sin-soaked heyday, let a lot of people be — with varying degrees of vengeance. Among them were workaday gamblers and good-timers like Kelley, but also bookmakers, con artists, prostitutes, shills, crooked auctioneers, outlandishly corrupt politicians and boldface-named mobsters. From about 1870 until 1967, when the reformist governor Winthrop Rockefeller shut off the vice spigot, the town’s chief municipal expression was a wink. The mayors winked. The cops winked. The preachers winked, or at least averted their gaze. Winking was how a Bible Belt town of 28,000 (circa 1960) attracted upward of five million visitors per year and why, as Hill writes, on any given Saturday night, there may have been “no more exhilarating place to be in the entire country.”
Hill, who grew up in Hot Springs, filters its history through three main figures: Hazel Hill, nee Welch, his grandmother, who was abandoned in Hot Springs at 16 by her itinerant father and was a decades-long witness to the town’s seedy underpinning; Dane Harris, a native son who rose from managing inventory at his father’s liquor store to managing all the gambling in Hot Springs and, eventually, opening the Vapors; and Owney Madden, a former Cotton Club impresario, the onetime “Duke of New York, the potentate of beer and political power in the city’s underworld,” as William Kennedy described him in the novel “Legs,” who, on the heels of bloody mob strife and a prison sentence in New York, decamped to Hot Springs to serve as a kind of ambassador from mob land. Hill trains his lens on each of these characters beginning in the 1930s, and, via rotating chapters, tracks them into the 1960s, when Hot Springs’ fortunes, and its barrooms, ran dry.
Mario Puzo opened “The Godfather” with an epigraph derived from Balzac: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” The crime in Hot Springs flowed steadily, like the springs from which the town took its name, but its temperature stayed mostly cool. Visits from notorious mobsters such as Sam Giancana, Vito Genovese, Al Capone and Lucky Luciano were absent of gunfire. Owney Madden had killed six or seven people back in New York, Hill writes, but in Hot Springs he married the postmaster’s daughter, oversaw the local betting wires, took up golf and refrained from murder.
The rap sheet Hill assembles in “The Vapors” is mostly nonviolent. (The still-unsolved 1963 bombing of the Vapors, which injured more than a dozen people — one later died of his wounds — was an anomaly, and likely precipitated the state’s reform measures.) What distinguishes the organized crime here is less the crime than the organization. Most mob stories — even “The Godfather” — are essentially business stories, their dramatic conflicts arising from structure, succession and competition (and their appeal, I suspect, deriving from their portrayal of capitalism without its inert ingredients). In “The Vapors,” Madden and Harris’s rise is fueled by palm-greasing, ballot-stuffing, judge-bribing, loophole-hunting and various other tricks and ploys designed to keep the feds and rival mobsters at bay. The closest we get to a mob hit is when Frank Costello, the New York crime boss, visits the Maddens for dinner, and, after a single taste, insults Agnes Madden’s spaghetti and meatballs. “Agnes did not hesitate,” Hill writes. “She picked up the bowl and dumped it right on Costello’s head.” Southern hospitality has its limits.
Aside from her relation to the author, Hazel Hill’s role in this triad is initially unclear. We wait for her story — a country ballad filled with no-good men, pills, whiskey, evictions and dodgy casino gigs — to intersect with those of Harris and Madden, but it never really does, not precisely, anyway. Yet Hazel’s story, as “The Vapors” progresses, provides the emotional ballast, the counterweight to all the good-timey glitz, the darkness behind the neon signs. It gives the book its heft, and its warmth. The mob, Hill writes, turned to gambling after Prohibition partly because it considered gambling, like alcohol, to be a “victimless crime.” Hazel’s story — complex, turbulent, as haunting as a pedal steel solo — serves as a soft rebuttal to that idea, and is the wellspring of David Hill’s achievement here.
Our final glimpse of Hazel is on the shores of Lake Hamilton, at a country baptism, but Hill leaves her fate untold. The hint, perhaps, is that hers mirrored the fate of the Vapors itself: “After trying to reinvent itself over the years as a disco and later a honky-tonk,” Hill writes, “the Vapors was eventually turned into a church.”
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