Glam slam: Photographer’s exhibit focuses on glamorous women in Vegas tradition

Wednesday, May 31, 2000 | 9 a.m.

What: "The Fabulous Girls of Las Vegas: A Robert Scott Hooper Retrospective."

When: 8 a.m.-4:45 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday, through June 17.

Where: Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History.

Cost: Free.

Information: Call 895-3381.

UNLV's Barrick Museum is dedicated to the natural history of the Southwest -- and until June 17, au naturel history as well.

"The Fabulous Girls of Las Vegas: A Robert Scott Hooper Retrospective" is on display at the museum, exhibiting photographs of some of the most glamorous women who lived and worked in Las Vegas during the years when it was on an aggressive campaign to become an international tourist destination.

While entomologists, ornithologists, herpetologists and other scientists have documented the birds and the bees and the plants and the snakes native to this area, Hooper has documented the women who helped bring real life to the desert.

This is Hooper's first public exhibit since he arrived here in the mid-'60s and began shooting the pictures that helped make Las Vegas an international household word.

His photographs have appeared in newspapers around the world, in Playboy magazine and countless other publications, all of them creating a glamorous image of the city, titillating potential visitors with what they might experience when they arrived.

"He worked under me for a number of years," recalled Don Payne, retired manager of the Las Vegas News Bureau, which then was the publicity office of the local Chamber of Commerce but now is part of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Hooper was with the News Bureau from 1966-71. "Our mission was to create publicity that would give people from all over the world a reason to come to Las Vegas," Payne said, adding that Hooper was one of his best glamour photographers.

"That was pretty much Bob's bailiwick," he said. "He was very creative."

In Des Moines, Iowa, in the late '50s and early '60s Hooper was a commercial artist by day, an amateur photographer by night. When he moved to Las Vegas he couldn't find a job in his profession, so he changed professions, becoming first a news photographer with a local paper and then with the News Bureau. He often held several jobs at the same time. He liked his work -- and the long hours spent with beautiful women didn't bother him.

"I loved photography and I loved women," said Hooper, a soft-spoken, unassuming man who seems unaffected by a career that routinely put him in the company of scantily-clad showgirls.

During the 1960s and '70s he took most of the publicity photos for the Palomino Club on Las Vegas Boulevard North, long before there was an explosion in the number of nude dance clubs. The Palomino had an international reputation as a classy place where you could take your wife or mother.

While employed at the News Bureau Hooper began shooting glamour photos for the weekly tabloid Vegas Visitor, which at the time was the only entertainment publication allowed inside the hotels and casinos on the Strip.

The paper no longer exists but for 17 years, until the death of publisher Bob Campbell in 1984, Hooper photographed a girl for the cover of almost every issue -- more than 800 of them. Each picture always appeared on the left side of the page, two columns wide and about 14 inches long.

"They printed 100,000 papers a week that went everywhere publicizing Las Vegas," Hooper said. "It looks like we did a pretty good job."

In 1973 he began shooting for Playboy, producing such pictorials as "The Girls of Las Vegas," "Sex and the Automobile" and "Ladies of Joy."

Hard choices

Hooper has photographed thousands of women in various stages of undress, but only about 70 of them are part of the museum retrospective that opened on May 5.

The chore of selecting the samples of his work went to his wife, Theresa, who has been with him for 30 years. The Las Vegas native was an 18-year-old Playboy Playmate candidate when she met her future husband. She was an aspiring photographer, preferring that to modeling, and went to work for Hooper as an assistant. Today she is his producer and business partner.

For the show she chose pictures from the 1970s and '80s that are not too risque but are provocative enough to attract the interest of the general public and give it a sampling of what the glamourous life was like back then.

"This is a window into Las Vegas' history," she said.

Among the subjects in the photographs are women who were at that time, or one day would become, centerfolds for Playboy and Playmates of the Year.

There are pictures of well-known personalities at the start of their careers, such as actress Raquel Welch and TV's most famous letter-turner, Vanna White, before she joined "Wheel of Fortune."

Also among the photographs are Susan Anton, when she made her first appearance at the Hacienda hotel-casino, Cassandra Peterson (Elvira, before she became Mistress of the Dark) and Marilyn Chambers, the one-time Ivory soap model who became a porn star.

There are pictures of sexy young girls who became businesswomen, such as Paige Fleming, founder and publisher of the magazine Nevada Woman. And there are pictures of girls whose moments in the spotlight were fleeting. After flirting with careers in show business they became housewives or pursued other interests.

The common theme in all of the photographs is glamour, with underlying tones of sensuality.

"I try to show everything I can without showing everything," Hooper said. "I try to be right on the edge. If you're not on the edge, you're just taking up room."

Hooper spent his career on the edge, focusing on the glamour and sensuality without crossing the line into pornography. His wife appreciates the difference.

"Hustler, Penthouse and magazines like that are explicit," Theresa Hooper said. "The girls may be erotic, but they're not glamorous. But a glamorous picture may be erotic -- it's a matter of showing the best and hiding the worst."

Larry Flynt, Hustler's founder, once tried to entice Hooper into shooting for him when the magazine first started. "Flynt came to town and took Bob out to dinner and told him about all the things they had to do make the (Hustler) pictures look the way they do, the use of surgical tape and glue, all this stuff," Theresa said. "Bob came back and said, 'You know, I just can't ask a girl to do that.' "

One of the reasons for Hooper's success is knowing where to draw then line when asking a model to do something. "There's a lot of psychology in photography," he said. "First of all, it's being open and honest. It's respecting and really caring for women and not asking them to do things they didn't want to do."

Changing times

A lot has changed since Hooper began his career here. For one thing, rampant cosmetic surgery is ruining the natural qualities he finds most appealing in the women he shoots.

"Women used to be voluptuous. They carried some body weight," he said. "Now (with breast implants) women have (large) breasts with bodies that have no body fat."

Hooper said that the implants affect the overall image of the model and even have an impact on lighting, with the tight skin over the implants reflecting light differently than natural skin.

"I still think of myself as a naive, small-town boy from Iowa. I haven't lost my fascination with women," Hooper said. "But I'm not particularly fascinated with anything that isn't real."

The camera equipment also has changed. Today the camera and film operate almost automatically. "I used to have to know what the film was, how fast it was," Hooper said. "I used to have to focus the camera and figure the exposure. Now I don't have to. Today everybody's a photographer."

Because taking a picture has become so easy, the marketplace has been flooded with pictures of women, although the pictures aren't of the highest creative quality. "What's happened," Theresa Hooper said, "is that the bar has been lowered. You look on the Web and everybody has a camera. It's automatic. You can take this girl and do this or that and it may be perfectly exposed and perfectly in focus but a terrible picture."

One of the the qualities that made Las Vegas women exotic years ago was their scarcity. Now they are everywhere, a fact she attributes partially to AIDS.

The sexually transmitted disease created a change in attitudes about sex in this country, Theresa Hooper said. Nude dance clubs, so-called "gentlemen's clubs," sprang up all over the country as a safe alternative to sex.

"Before AIDS the Palomino Club was the only one of its kind in the country," she said.

With the proliferation of dance clubs there were more dancers, which resulted in diluting the role glamour plays in Las Vegas. "Why would you go see a showgirl on a stage with feathers when you can go down (to a nude dance club) and for a few bucks get her to dance in your face?" she asked.

Other changes have taken place, especially within Las Vegas.

Hooper said that "when I started here I lived in a little town in the desert close to an international airport. I haven't moved and the airport hasn't moved so why does it take me an hour and a half to get anywhere when I was only 20 minutes away from everything before?"

Another change, brought about by corporations taking over the town, is the attitude toward the press. "Every Christmas a limousine would pull up in front of my house and deliver something from a hotel, and there were 24 hotels at the time," Hooper recalled. "It might be a briefcase with my initials on it, a clock radio or something like that.

"The press was important then, but not anymore."

Hooper still does glamour photography but he has expanded his business to include television commercials, music videos and sales films. He and his wife are working on a book, drawing from his tens of thousands of photographs. And they are exploring ways to take advantage of the Internet.

Although things are different now, Hooper wouldn't have changed anything about his career.

"Photography is my love," he said. "I do it for the fun of it."

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