Resorts: Popcorn Playpen

Who said Atlantic City was a bore? Eddie Fisher was packing them in at the 500 Club, Sarah Vaughan was singing her heart out at Le Bistro, Lyndon Johnson’s two-night stand was an S.R.O. draw at Convention Hall. The Steel Pier featured Mickey Rooney, Milton Berle and The Diving Horse. And over at the Globe Theater, the management proudly presented “Her Sexcellency” Sally Rand in Person. To the surprise of those who thought Strip per Sally had gone out with bathtub gin, she seemed to have changed hardly at all. For that matter, Atlantic City hadn’t either.

The last of the Last Resorts is slightly older (it was founded 110 years ago) and much, much greyer than La Rand, but the stripper and the seaside town both exude a garish, garter-snapping exuberance that has largely disappeared from affluent America. The boardwalk — and for most visitors the boardwalk is Atlantic City — is an unbelievable anachronism, a eupeptic blend of pre-war Coney Island and a Victorian mu sic hall, where vulgarity, dodgem-car din, sentimentality and pushy camara derie reign uninhibited and unabashed.

No Rapport. Oceanfront stores do a roaring trade in mawkish mementos, such as “the J.F.K. Drinking Glass,” a tumbler adorned with a sky-blue caricature of the late President, J.F.K. chocolate-filled gold coins (10¢), and a posthumous J.F.K. prayer (“Special Delivery from Heaven,” $2.95 gift-boxed). Other big-selling souvenirs include martini shakers cunningly shaped like bedpans, rubber and nylon “Golden Goddess Shrunken Heads,” and a coffee-table plaque that reads: GOD BLESS THIS LOUSY APARTMENT. Vacationers stand in line for rococo delicacies ranging from frankfurters stewed in champagne (it says) to chocolate-covered frozen bananas.

Salt-water-taffy stores, sandwich parlors, auction rooms, fortunetellers’ lairs, hotel lobbies—all were so jammed last week that Convention Hall seemed almost empty by contrast. Yet Atlantic City swallowed the 45,000 Democratic delegates like a whale mouthing a minnow. “Why,” brag the locals, “the A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention here was twice as big.”

For disgruntled Democrats, that was part of the trouble. For all the crowds, Atlantic City is a small town (pop. 59,544). Unlike Chicago or Los Angeles, where a political convention takes over the whole downtown area, delegates were deployed in hotels, motels and boardinghouses up and down the boardwalk and as far south as Ocean City, ten miles from Convention Hall. The usual convention tension and sense of self-importance were not only dissipated by decentralization, but also by delegates’ horror tales of price gouging nightclubs, bad, rude restaurants, and Charles Addams accommodations. Above all, perhaps, the fault lay in what one big-D Democrat called “Atlantic City’s total lack of rapport with the middle-class mind.”

Exit Adlai. A few delegates had been warned in advance. On the jet flight east, California Democrats got a mimeographed caveat: “No major hotel has been built in Atlantic City since 1929. and all of them have endured bad years. Such matters as falling plaster, removable doorknobs, detachable shower handles, unopenable windows, droughts (temporary water shortages of one kind or another), inoperable window shades, interminable room service, and lethargic elevators should be reported to the management or shared with sympathetic friends. The latter seems to have the best results. Welcome to Appalachia by the Atlantic.”

To many, that description later seemed almost rosy. Said an appalled Midwesterner: “This is the original Bay of Pigs.” Beds collapsed, bathtubs belched black water, telephone service (and every other kind) seemed to have been suspended for the duration. At one point, Adlai Stevenson tottered out of an elevator at the Traymore toting six bottles (no bellboys) for a lunch he was giving (no waiters). Said Adlai sadly: “I never thought one city could get things so bitched up.”

Ricksha Opulence. The prices were something else to talk about: $28 a day for a cramped hotel room overlooking a garage, sans television, radio, air conditioning or carpet; $8 minimum per person in nightclubs with two-bit floor shows. Atlantic Citians, for their part, complained just as bitterly that the delegates were small tippers, slow spenders and big gripers. They had some reason to complain. Atlantic City had paid the Democratic Party $625,000 to hold its hoedown there.

In all fairness to New Jersey’s popcorn playpen, the resort has much to offer: vast, spotless beaches where no eating, drinking, “disrobing” or ball playing is allowed; miles of boardwalk ideal for cool-hour bicycling (from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. only); an excellent golf course. Its 24-hour jitney bus service at 20¢ a ride is one of the best and chummiest rapid-transit systems anywhere. And for slow-slow transit, the boardwalk’s famed “rolling chairs,” both motorized and hand-propelled, give jaded visitors the most opulent ride this side of a ricksha. Moreover, Atlantic City’s dilapidated hotels and peeling boardinghouses are rapidly being supplanted by clean, comfortable, pool-flanked motels; more than 100 have been built since 1955 and the boardwalk and Atlantic Avenue are peppered with more new structures going up.

A poll of delegates disclosed that 68% opposed holding another convention in Atlantic City. But to some thoughtful Democrats it seemed to have been an inspired choice. As Delegate Arthur Jones of Britten, S. Dak., put it: “Here we’re mingling with the real people who make up America, who are going to decide the election.”