WAYNE NEWTON'S unlikely enshrinement into the hallowed halls of hipness began with a Las Vegas-style existential crisis. Gazing into his bathroom mirror one fateful day during the winter of 1991, Mr. Newton refused to look below as the first half of his infamous pencil-thin mustache swirled down the drain. Was it too late, the singer fretted, to reconsider his decision to finally lose his Valentino-via-Vegas look?
"I stared at what was left of my mustache, and thought very hard about what it all meant," said the 51-year-old casino crooner, whose collected monikers over the decades include "Mr. Excitement," "the Midnight Idol," "King of the Strip" and, most often, "Mr. Las Vegas."
In the preceding days, Mr. Newton's closest friends had told him he was nuts to even think of shaving off his trademark. To the millions of fans who had made Mr. Newton the highest-paid nightclub singer ever, the mustache was as integral a part of his persona as Groucho Marx's greasepaint or Gabby Hayes's whiskers. Of course, to the cognoscenti who had long lampooned Mr. Newton as the ultimate ham-boned lounge lizard, his mustache had become a symbol of Las Vegas vulgarity itself, as unctuous an icon of Sin City as Liberace's candelabra or Sammy Davis Jr.'s medallions.
Staring in the mirror, Mr. Newton took final stock. "I said, 'If all I am is a mustache, then that's not enough. A mustache isn't a person, it doesn't have a soul.' " And so, with a steely grip Wayne Newton shaved off his remaining sliver of facial hair.
Two years later, that razor stroke reverberates as the beginning of an astonishing counterrevolution of perception wherein Mr. Newton, and the town he embodies, is suddenly hip. More young people are coming to Las Vegas than ever before: last year, according to the city's Convention and Visitors Authority, 31 percent of the city's 22 million visitors were under 40, and 14 percent were under 30.
And the new clientele aren't all coming from trailer parks, or why would Wolfgang Puck have just opened a Spago in Caesar's Palace? True these visitors aren't monolithic in their tastes: several Hollywood brat packs have led the charge to Las Vegas, accompanied by their polar opposites from the anti-rat-race worlds of alternative music and Generation X.
To be sure, part of Las Vegas's new appeal is based on the historic appreciation of fine pop cultural cheese by the baby boomers. Still, young people are putting their money where there irony is: there are enough Armanis and skinny sideburns in casino showrooms to indicate that Las Vegas no longer belongs just to the legions of blue-haired and mutton-chopped Americans who had been scaring off the style-conscious for decades.
Las Vegas's reputation has rebounded among even the most self-consciously cool chronicles. Not long after Mr. Newton shaved, Spy magazine toasted him with a laudatory feature; Spin, the glossy bible of alternative music, ran a lengthy appreciation, topped off with the sentence: "Wayne Newton is, for lack of a better word, God." He even made it onto a popular Zippy the Pinhead button, where the countercultural comic hero elliptically exclaims, "I'm under direct order from Wayne Newton!"
Mr. Newton, meantime, unbowed by decades of critical abuse or a recent bankruptcy, has remained pleasantly shocked at his change in status. "Suddenly the same things I was doing five years ago that were considered pure corn are now perceived to be in," Mr. Newton said at his home in Las Vegas. "I've even got teen-age fan clubs." He paused, and then laughed. "It's a wonderful satisfaction to finally be hip."
Las Vegas chic has spread beyond Nevada. Among the popular party schemes for the young sets in New York or Los Angeles this season are get-togethers based on Tom Jones themes. Mr. Jones, a 52-year-old Welshman, continues to thrill his new audiences at Bally's, his home base, with surreal-sounding renditions of Prince's "Purple Rain" and Junior Walker's "Shotgun."
Among Mr. Jones's most devoted young fans are Luke Perry and Jason Priestley, stars of "Beverly Hills 90210," who recently flew to Las Vegas to see their hero perform. "I heard the fellows were fans, so I said let's get together," Mr. Jones said.
Traditionally, Las Vegas has been where brilliant talents have landed after their gifts have corroded. Few recall with fondness Billie Holiday's gigs at the Dunes, a bloated Elvis Presley at the Hilton or Orson Welles aping himself at the Riviera. Now, even the most current rock acts can prosper on the Strip; last month, Soul Asylum appeared with Keith Richards at Bally's . . . albeit billed in neon below Tom Jones.
"There's not a whole lot of difference between a Las Vegas club crowd and a Seattle club crowd," said Lori Barbero, the dread-locked and tattooed drummer for Babes in Toyland, who recently came to town on a double bill with Faith No More.
Las Vegas square has also been reborn as 90's cool on records and in books. Today, compact disks of the late Louis Prima and Keely Smith, the ultimate Vegas lounge act, are suddenly popular among the young in Hollywood, while Dean Martin, the consummate smarmy Vegas crooner, was recently recast as a totem of hipness via the critically acclaimed biography "Dino," written by the rock-and-roll chronicler Nick Tosches.
"It used to be that you wouldn't be caught dead telling anybody that you were going to Las Vegas on vacation," said Dick Mammen, 42, who was recently dubbed "the hippest man in city hall" in Minneapolis.
Yet, when he left his government job as an adviser on inner-city affairs to set up his own public-interest consulting firm, Mr. Mammen said he had only one thought of where to celebrate his new life. Accompanied by a stack of Frank Sinatra tapes, he drove his 1969 Cadillac convertible to Las Vegas.
"It was a gas," Mr. Mammen said. "You used to go there and feel like an alien from another solar system. Now, you'll run into people who actually look like you."
Las Vegas's last bout with hipness ended in the winter of 1960. Around this time, Frank Sinatra had called upon his show business cronies to convene in Las Vegas for a "summit of cool" to coincide with the filming of "Oceans Eleven," the ultimate "rat pack" movie. John F. Kennedy, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, flew into town to watch Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and other assorted swingers cavort on stage at the Sands Hotel.
According to Nick Tosches's book "Dino," Peter Lawford told the author that after the show, a million dollars in cash was said to have been given to the Kennedy campaign in a leather satchel by a consortium of Las Vegas hoteliers. The next morning, according to "Dino" and several other books, Sinatra introduced the candidate to Judith Exner, who would reportedly serve as mistress to both President Kennedy and the Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. This wasn't Camelot, and Las Vegas, for all intents and purposes, was over.
By decade's end, Sinatra had a new friend, Spiro T. Agnew, and Las Vegas was so square that in 1968 Jim Morrison, visiting the city, was arrested and charged with vagrancy for failing to identify himself to police. By the 1970's, the city was seen as a blight to spirit and soul. "The Strip was an idiot Disneyland of architectural parabolas, overloaded utility poles, celestial hamburger stands and gimcrackery fairy palaces," wrote John Gregory Dunne in "Las Vegas: Memoir of a Dark Season" (Random House, 1974).
THE popular conception of Las Vegas probably reached bottom in the 80's and was embodied in the film "Lost in America," Albert Brooks's 1985 comic fable of a prototypical Los Angeles yuppie who has dropped out to find his soul. "We don't want to stay in Las Vegas!" Brooks tells his wife when she asks to check into a casino hotel. "This represents everything we left behind."
But by 1991, the earth had moved. Steve Wynn, a casino owner, opened the stately Mirage, proving that Siegfried and Roy could be even better attractions for a casino than "Nudes on Ice." Barry Levinson filmed "Bugsy," a stylish hagiography of the psychotic gangster Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegal, who invented modern Las Vegas. And Mr. Newton shaved his mustache.
"Aging baby boomers have the money to travel -- and they're realizing that there are certain things in the United States that they simply have to see in their lifetimes," said Jim Kilby, professor of gaming studies at the University of Los Vegas. "If you don't see Mardi Gras, the Kentucky Derby or Las Vegas, you've lived an incomplete life."
The city at large has boomed as much as the Strip. According to the 1990 census, Las Vegas is the fastest-growing major city in the country. With the sprawl, however, have come urban problems ranging from street gangs to pollution to water shortages.
Nothing, though, is scaring away the weekend crowds. In the current recession, many visit for practical reasons. "Las Vegas is the cheapest vacation in the world," Professor Kilby said. "You can still get a room for $18."
And betting isn't even a necessity for many young visitors. Several months ago, Rob Bragin, 37, joined a pack of fellow Hollywood television writers in a pilgrimage to Las Vegas. "The lure isn't gambling," Mr. Bragin said. "I'll bet a dollar, then get bored. But for me, and a lot of writers I know, the point is trying to temporarily re-create that kind of rat-pack feeling where you walk into a casino wearing a shiny suit while your mental soundtrack is playing Frank Sinatra singing 'Summer Wind.' It's nostalgia for things we were too young to be aware of at the time."
For some members of the even younger Generation X, rejection of baby-boom nostalgia for the 60's is behind the new appeal. "The rat pack may have all been chauvinist pigs, but there's still something romantic about that Vegas-in-the-50's aura," said Maria Larson, 27, a Manhattan-based dealer of vintage movie posters, who has visited Las Vegas three times in the last few years. "I'd so much rather hear Dean Martin sing 'That's Amore' then Fleetwood Mac doing 'Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.' "
A trip through the "new" Las Vegas should perhaps begin at the Graceland Wedding Chapel, situated not far from downtown's Glitter Gulch. Graceland has become one of the premier rock-and-roll marriage spots in the world. Taking the vows can cost as little as $45, and the Elvis impersonator who serves as a witness for each wedding is free.
Jon Bon Jovi began the parade of the famous to the chapel in 1989, when he married his high-school sweetheart outside on the steps. Last March, Phil Joanou, the director of the U2 concert film "Rattle and Hum," tied the knot in a ceremony that was rebroadcast from the stage every night of the band's last American tour. Last winter, three members of Def Leppard showed up at Graceland's door, one to get married and two to renew their vows. You don't have to be famous to get married at Graceland. Around 45 ceremonies are performed a week, a pace that seems to be frazzling Norm Jones, the Elvis impersonator in residence.
"I heard I was on MTV a couple weeks ago, but I haven't had time to watch," Mr. Jones said, escorting a newly wedded couple out the door as another pair arrived. "And Def Leppard asked me to play with them in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve, but things were so busy I couldn't get away."
Moving from camp to the visionary, the next stop is the Mirage, the 29-story, 3,000-room hotel-casino that Steve Wynn opened in 1989 in an attempt to do away with the sameness of the typical Las Vegas casino. At the Mirage, there is no garish neon outside, no shoebox layouts inside and no headdress-and-breast shows in the theater.
Off the casino, patrons can walk through a tropical rain forest stocked with 90-foot-high trees or admire almost two dozen white tigers kept behind glass in a roomy habitat. But the Mirage's best-known feature -- indeed the city's single most popular attraction -- is a throwback to old Las Vegas spectacles that sits in front of the hotel. There, Mr. Wynn built a 50-foot-high volcano that erupts every 15 minutes into a Gilligan's Island-style lagoon of grottos and waterfalls.
While the Mirage represents Las Vegas's future, the Strip's past can best be seen a block away at the recently shuttered Dunes. When it opened in 1955, the resort, topped by a 30-foot plexiglass sultan, was hailed as the world's most luxurious hotel. The hotel was, in fact, Las Vegas at its most vulgar: in 1957, the Dunes made history when it offered "Minsky's Goes to Paris," Las Vegas's first topless burlesque.
Last November, Mr. Wynn purchased the hotel and announced he planned to tear it down and build another project. The closed Dunes still stands, however, and by day, one can still make out the words on the darkened sign in front: "Las Vegas -- City of Change."
The most popular Las Vegas daytime attraction off the Strip is the Liberace Museum, a dizzying collection that includes every diamond-encrusted automobile, piano and hot-pants outfit used by "Mr. Showmanship." By night, the draw is the "Legends" show at the Imperial Palace, where the world's finest Neil Diamond impersonator gives way to a faux-Madonna who seems to dance even more fluidly than the original.
Among the most sought-after Las Vegas tickets for the self-consciously cool are those for high-profile boxing matches. For years, fans like Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, and Billy Crystal have come to the desert to watch the fights. Now, they have been joined ringside by a growing number of Hollywood's younger stars. "You have a group of young actors who aren't interested in boxing, but in the spectacle of a big championship match in Las Vegas," said Seth Abraham, president of HBO Sports. "It's sexy women, sexy jewelry, sexy entertainers, sexy names. Many of these younger people are voyeurs who want only to see -- and be seen."
The hottest ticket, week in and week out, remains Wayne Newton. His show at the Hilton retains all his favorite chestnuts, including "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and "Mack the Knife." But also woven into the act are unexpected gems, ranging from a Sam Cooke medley to "Hard to Handle," the rhythm-and-blues classic that the Black Crowes turned into a big hit a few years ago.
After a recent show, Mr. Newton recalled once again his inspiration to shave his pencil-thin mustache, a decision he says he believes led directly to his current position as an icon of the Las Vegas arrivistes. "A convert," Mr. Newton said, shaking his head, "is the best audience you'll ever have."