Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

How do you deal with a father who abandoned you at age three? You build up a burden of fear and loathing. But finally curiosity prevails. When the Annenberg School of Communication was founded in 1957, I was in the second year of a Carnegie fellowship to create a new course on The Mass Society for the Penn American Civ department. And when I suggested that the ideal dean for the first Ivy graduate school in communication would be the pioneer pop culture maven, Gilbert Seldes (He wrote the first book on the subject in 1924, The Seven Lively Arts.), it was natural that I would become his gofer.

I criss crossed the U.S. telling what we were up to. I encountered a strange dichotomy that has always sufficiently explained for me the unnecessarily weak impact J schools and comm centers have had on American media. The J-School brass, mainly burned out MEs, mocked me for shilling for Annenberg's money. They said Hearst had tried in the 1930s to buy his way into higher education and he had been rudely rebuffed. On the other hand, the bright young media scholars, social scientists in heart and mind, quietly asked what they were paying full professors!

In August 1960, I was flogging Annenberg in L.A. At NBC the flack told me about Polly Adler's A House is Not a Home. Adler's brother was opening a fancy new restaurant and that Id be a welcome guest. I had never reconnoitred with a Madam before (in my cheapish innocence, I have yet to pay with money for sexual favors) so I decided, as they say, to go along. Polly had just finished an Associate in Arts degree and she was primed to psych out professors: were they phonies or real guys? It was tougher than a doctors Oral Exam, my pretending to be a regular fellow. But as we prepared to bid each other goodbye, Polly gave me her affirmative judgment by giving me a full force Hollywood embrace. At which point the Contaflex around my neck boomed into her considerable bosom. Patrick, she howled, you look like a goddam tourist!! Polly, I replied, I am a goddam tourist. No matter. I later read her book, and I'd give it a B+.

I decided to drop off in Las Vegas and look up my absconding father. (If I could face a High Whore, I should be able to encounter a Deadbeat Dad.) By this time he was a millionaire real estate dealer, paired in business with a former mayor of Las Vegas. I told the taxi driver at McCarran International Airport (the late Senator McCarran, it turned out, was a bosom buddy of my DD), to take me to Hazard/Baker Realty. No problem, he said as he shifted into high gear. I asked the gal in the front office if Harry Hazard was in. She directed me to his office in the rear of the building.

Harry Hazard, I asked as he rose to greet me, no longer the handsome AEF Captain of the only picture of him I had ever seen. 60ish now, not 20. And his hard life of drinking and dealing showed. What can I show you today, he began, hoping I was about to look into footage on the Strip. I'm Pat Hazard, I replied. He fumbled, speechless. Well, it's been a long time, he bantered as he tried to decide what to do. Why don't we get out of here and go visit Hoover Dam?

A strange initiative, but what the hell! As we drove madly away from Las Vegas, past Lake Mead, I took long drags from an ice cold Coke. It was beastly hot. Then it dawned on me. He thought I was gray mailing him, like my brother Mike was wont to do. He'd come out and get in debt gambling, and then force Harry to bail him out. DD, you see, was bigamous. My very conservative Catholic mother would never give him a divorce. Ten years later, when I came to his funeral, I was introduced to a woman as his political secretary. Harry was a king maker in Nevada politics, but sub rosa.

That woman told me when I arrived for the funeral that the Clark Country Democratic Womens Committee was holding a fund raiser tomorrow and that many of my fathers friends would be there. Would you like to come? Huh, are you crazy, I thought. Of course. The reception line began with former Vice President Hubert Humphrey. I was introduced as Hap's second son. Hap, eh? The Vice President was effusive: Your father was a great guy. We're really going to miss him. You have my deepest condolences. Then Senator Bible. Same encomium, but from a more local angle. Next, the local Congressman whose name escapes me. More polite political blather. By the time I got to the Mayor of Las Vegas, I was tempted to say, Tell me what was that son of a bitch really like, but my Holy Rosary manners intervened.

I had got a few angles on him when we'd meet secretly in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Never in Las Vegas, while he lived. He turned down my request that he meet his grandchildren by joining them secretly at the Montreal Expo. He did set up College Funds for all three. But that fiscal fooling doesn't have the same feel as Grampa. Or father for that matter. I knew nothing about his own family, the other hidden branch of my family tree, although he did set up a meeting for me with his brother Joe, a union leader, in San Francisco. Alas, he was just a glib businessman, telling me how bored he was in Mexico, as we had a coffee in the upscale St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

He was a hard man to hate for ever. I can imagine the French putains when he served in the AEF in 1918. Wed to a frigid wife. (Those seven years between Mike's birth and mine, speaks volumes.) And when he ran off with his secretary Ruth, she did get him to stop drinking. She was a born again Christian, but seemed to have a generous heart. She was gracious to my son Michael, his wife Pat and daughter Sonia when they pitstopped Las Vegas in search of family history. And the two of them did leave me a quarter of million dollars which I tried to waste creatively on such ventures as a Walt Whitman calendar, an I.F. Stone journalism award for college students (The Nation magazine picked up the idea pretending they originated it!), a Graveyard Party at the rededication of the restored Whitman’s mausoleum in 1974 after I got the English teachers of the country to chip in to restore it, and most delectable of all, A Sesquicentennial Ball in 1980 in honor of my favorite girl friend of all, Emily Dickinson. You'll have to judge for yourself if I wasted the money creatively enough when I describe those capers later.

Oh, and there’s a Hazard Street in Las Vegas. I certainly wouldn’t want to live there, but it was fun to visit. And across the street there is a really interesting cultural center where my German librarian wife discovered news stories about Harry’s career as a politico and businessman, when we passed through in 2000, on a Greyhound blitz of the West Coast.