May 26 2004

Battle of the Book Events

by Megan Edwards

Alzheimer’s disease and wife swapping. They don’t ordinarily come up in the same conversation, but this is Las Vegas, a city known for juxtapositions that don’t exist in nature. We’ve got penguins and flamingos living side by side at the Flamingo, for example, and the Sphinx is only a stone’s throw from Grant’s Tomb. Last night, when Maria Shriver and Jack Sheehan went head to head with simultaneous events promoting their latest books, Alzheimer’s disease and group sex suddenly belonged in the same sentence.

Which author would draw the larger crowd? I couldn’t help wondering. Maria’s got Kennedy, Arnold, and NBC in her corner, but Jack’s got local hero status and a tantalizing topic. Maria’s gig, promoting her book about how to explain Alzheimer’s to children, was at the Summerlin Borders on Rainbow, while Jack’s event to launch his exposé of the local sex industry was at the Golden Nugget. Obviously, I needed some kind of rating system to make any kind of reasonable prediction.

Hmm. They’re equally attractive, I thought. That left only one way to find out the truth. For the first time ever, I attended two book events in one evening.

I went to Borders first. Even though it’s located in a giant shopping center, parking places were in short supply. When I got inside, no doubt remained that the reason was Maria. Tall stacks of What’s Happening to Grandpa? stood on a table just inside the door, and most of the people in the checkout line were buying copies.

The line to get to Mrs. Schwarzenegger, made up mostly of women in Capris and t-shirts, snaked through half the bookstore, and I followed it toward the children’s department. On the way, I came across a young Borders employee.

“How many people do you think are in line?” I asked.

“A hundred and eleven,” he said, showing me the counter in his palm.

I made my way up to the table where Maria was busily talking, writing, and smiling for cameras. People seemed at least as interested in having their pictures taken with her as they were in her book. Probably more interested, I surmised, and I took a picture myself.

The line continued to grow as I walked back past it.

“How long a wait do we have?” a man in a tank top asked the guy with the clicker.

“Probably an hour or an hour and a half.” The man sighed but didn’t give up his place.

I drove over to the Golden Nugget, where Skin City posters pointed the way upstairs. In a meeting room with muted lighting, a crowd far different from the gang at Borders was enjoying an open bar and a cheese-and-fruit buffet. A pale-skinned man with white-blond hair caught my eye. He was wearing a see-through black lace shirt and black pants with flashing pink lights down each leg. A platinum blonde woman who looked like she might be with him was clad in a black satin bustier with laces up the back. Most of the other people were less flamboyantly dressed, but there wasn’t a single woman in Capris, and most of the men were wearing sports shirts and slacks.

Jack Sheehan was sitting at a table autographing copies of Skin City and chatting amiably with fans. When it was my turn, I asked him if he had found anything surprising while researching the book.

“The amount of money some of these people make,” he said. “There are people in this room who make a thousand dollars an hour.”

Whether the man in the flashy pants was one of those sixty-minute men, I can’t tell you, but I did find out that he and the woman in the satin bustier host swing parties in their fancy home. “We’re in chapter five,” the woman told me as she autographed my book. “David and Virginia Cooper.”

I stuck around the Skin City party for a while, enjoying the conversations and snapping pictures of Jack Sheehan and two ladies in classic Las Vegas showgirl outfits. When I left, I wandered through the Golden Nugget, noting a number of people with copies of Skin City tucked under their arms or hanging from their wrists in the bright “Books are a Great Gift” bags provided by the Stephens Press.

After I left, I found I was no longer interested in comparing the two events I had attended or declaring a winner. Both Maria Shriver and Jack Sheehan had successful evenings created by distinctly different audiences. Like penguins and flamingos, they inhabit separate life zones. What’s worth noting is that Las Vegas is now big enough to host two celebrity authors on the same night, but it’s still small enough that it was easy to attend both. I love this place.

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