8 SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020
“THE ONLY RULEin 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 chande-liers 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 midcen-
tury Hot Springs: steamy, sumptuous,
flashy, vaguely illicit and supremely indul-
gent. “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 book-
makers, con artists, prostitutes, shills,
crooked auctioneers, outlandishly corrupt
politicians and boldface-named mobsters.
From about 1870 until 1967, when the re-
formist 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 exhilarat-
ing place to be in the entire country.”
Hill, who grew up in Hot Springs, filters
its history through three main figures: Ha-
zel 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 HotSprings and, eventually, opening the Va-
pors; and Owney Madden, a former Cotton
Club impresario, the onetime “Duke of
New York, the potentate of beer and politi-
cal power in the city’s underworld,” as
William Kennedy described him in the nov-
el “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 begin-
ning in the 1930s, and, via rotating chap-
ters, 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 Gen-
ovese, 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, over-
saw the local betting wires, took up golf
and refrained from murder.THE RAP SHEETHill assembles in “The Va-
pors” is mostly nonviolent. (The still-un-
solved 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 orga-
nized crime here is less the crime than the
organization. Most mob stories — even
“The Godfather” — are essentially busi-
ness stories, their dramatic conflicts aris-
ing from structure, succession and compe-
tition (and their appeal, I suspect, derivingfrom their portrayal of capitalism without
its inert ingredients). In “The Vapors,”
Madden and Harris’s rise is fueled by
palm-greasing, ballot-stuffing, judge-brib-
ing, 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, Ha-
zel Hill’s role in this triad is initially un-
clear. 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 pre-
cisely, anyway. Yet Hazel’s story, as “The
Vapors” progresses, provides the emo-
tional 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 — com-
plex, 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 bap-
tism, but Hill leaves her fate untold. The
hint, perhaps, is that hers mirrored the fate
of the Vapors itself: “After trying to re-
invent itself over the years as a disco and
later a honky-tonk,” Hill writes, “the Va-
pors was eventually turned into a
church.” 0Sleaze City
A history of Hot Springs, Ark., during its sin-soaked heyday.
By JONATHAN MILESTHE 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
Illustrated. 400 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28. A singer in a Hot Springs nightclub, 1960.PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCIS MILLER/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGESJONATHAN MILESis the author of three novels,
most recently “Anatomy of a Miracle: The
True* Story of a Paralyzed Veteran, a Missis-
sippi Convenience Store, a Vatican Investiga-
tion, and the Spectacular Perils of Grace.”Taste the
World,
From Home.
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