Stephen Fry - Stephen Fry in America

My taxi and I are on our way to a place that has hammered its own nails into the coffin of Jersey’s reputation for refinement. Atlantic City.

Best known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its boardwalk, all seven miles of it, Atlantic City on the south Jersey shore was one of the most prosperous and successful resort towns in America. After the Second World War it freefell into what seemed irreversible decline, until, as a last-ditch effort in 1976, the citizens voted to allow gambling. Two years later the first casino in the eastern United States opened and ever since Atlantic City has been second only to Las Vegas as a plughole into which high and low rollers from all over the world are irresistibly drained.

And so I find myself driving into hell.

The weather does not help; heavy bruised skies brood over grey Atlantic rollers and on the beach the tide leaves a line of scummy frothing mousse and soggy litter. The signs advertising ‘Fun’ and ‘Family Rides’ on the vile seaside piers tinkle and clang in the sharp wind, a forlorn and spindly Ferris wheel squeaks and groans. Styrofoam coffee cups and flappy burger containers are rolled and tossed along the deserted boardwalk – New Jersey’s urban, eastern reinterpretation of the mythic tumbleweed and sagebrush of the West. Above tower the hotels, the ‘resort casinos’, blank façades in whose appearance and architectural qualities the developers have taken a precisely double-zero interest.

Would it not have been better to let this seedy resort town, the home of Monopoly and remnant of another way of holidaying, simply fall into the sea? Instead we are given this obscene Gehenna, a place of such tawdry, tacky, tinselly, tasteless and trumpery tat that the desire to run away clutching my hand to my mouth is overwhelming. But no, I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all … The Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk. It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. I am not an enemy of developers, per se; I know that people must make money from construction and development projects, I know that there is a demand and that casinos will be built. I can pardon Trump all his vanities and shady junk-bonded dealings and financial brinkmanship, I would even forgive him his hair, were it not that everything he does is done with such poisonously atrocious taste, such false glamour, such shallow grandeur, such cynical vulgarity. At least Las Vegas developments, preposterous as they are have a kind of joy and wit to them … oh well, it is no good putting off the moment, Stephen. In you go.

The automatic doors of the black smoked-glass entrance hiss open and I am inside. I see at once that the exterior, boardwalk side of Atlantic City is deliberately kept as unappealing as possible, just to make sure people stay inside. All you need is within, mini-streets complete with Starbucks and burger outlets, there is even a shop devoted entirely to the personality of Donald Trump himself, with quotes from the great man all over the walls: ‘You’ve got to think anyway, so why not think big?’ and similar comforting and illuminating insights that enrich and nourish the hungry human soul. Everything sold here is in the ‘executive’ style, like bad eighties Pierre Cardin: slimy thin belts of glossy leather, notepads, cufflinks, unspeakable objects made of brass and mahogany. There is nothing here that I would not be ashamed to be seen owning. Not a thing. Oh, must we stay here one minute longer?

Perhaps I am just in a bad mood. At the top of the main staircase that leads to the gambling hall I meet up with the PR lady who has arranged for me to be trained as a blackjack dealer. She is perky and charming and seems to love her work.

‘You’re so very welcome indeed to this facility,’ she breathes. ‘If there is anything I can do to make your visit with us more pleasurable …?’

It would be churlish to suggest a flame-thrower and bazooka, so I grin toothily and follow her to the servants’ quarters, the backstage area.

Down we travel, by service elevator and stairway, through numberless corridors until we reach the zone where the staff uniforms are kept. Thousands and thousands of tunics are held on rails which, at the touch of a button leap to life. Great circulating loops of human-shaped shirtings process around like flapping zombies in a spooky dumb show reproduction of the gamblers above, the same robotic gestures – animated but with all the flesh sucked out.

I am given a ‘butter’-coloured chemise (a new colour line which has just come in to replace the ‘garnet’ still widely in use) and a strange black thing edged in gold that goes around my waist. Where a purse would be if I were an Austrian café waiter. A name tag tells the world that I am ‘Stephen Fry: Trainee’.

Blackjack is universally referred to as BJ without a trace of humour or even any apparent awareness that those initials have another common application. A girl called Kelly has been deputed to initiate me into the mysteries of BJ and she is fierce. Really fierce. I am familiar with blackjack as a player and think myself reasonably competent with a pack of cards. But Kelly’s impatience and contemptuous astonishment at my inability to work out the 3–2 insurance coverage on aces dealt to the dealer, my use of the right hand instead of the left hand to collect money from the left-hand side of the table, my slowness in payout calculation … all these conspire to make me feel more than usually clumsy and behave more than usually ham-fistedly.

Slap. ‘No, no. You get it wrong!’

‘Sorry, but …’

‘No “but”, no “sorry”. Not difficult.’

By the time a group of real players come along I am feeling hot, bothered and nervous. Kelly, originally a Vietnamese ‘boat person’, is happy to let me sink or swim.

Slowly, after a few mistakes, gently pointed out by the seasoned pros sitting opposite me, I start to get the hang of things.

Above my head glitter the chandeliers that for some reason Trump is so proud of. ‘$14 million worth of German crystal chandeliers, including 245,000 piece chandeliers in the casino alone, each valued at a cost of $250,000, and taking over 20 hours to hang,’ trumpets the publicity.

‘An entire two-year output of Northern Italy’s Carrera marble quarries – the marble of choice for all of Michelangelo’s art – adorn the hotel’s lobby, guest rooms, casino, hallways and public areas.’ Yes, it may well have been the marble of choice for Michelangelo’s art. English was the language of choice for Shakespeare’s, but that doesn’t lift this sentence, for example, out of the ordinary. And believe me the only similarity between Michelangelo and the Trump Taj Mahal that I can spot is that they’ve both got an M in their names.

‘$4 million in uniforms and costumes outfit over 6,000 employees.’ Including one butter-coloured shirt as worn by me.

‘Four and a half times more steel than the Eiffel Tower.’

‘If laid end to end, the building support pilings would stretch the 62 miles from Atlantic City to Philadelphia.’

‘The Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort can generate enough air conditioning to cool 4,000 homes.’

You see, all this mad boasting says to me is ‘Our Casino Makes A Shed Load Of Money’. They can afford to lavish a quarter of a million bucks on each chandelier, can they? And where does this money come from, we wonder? From profits from their ‘city within a city’ Starbucks concession? From sales of patent leather belts and onyx desk sets? No, from the remorseless mathematical fact that gambling is profitable. The house wins. The punter loses. It is a certainty.