Norm Clarke

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Norm Clarke (born 1942 in Terry, Montana) is an American gossip columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal in Las Vegas, Nevada. His column, "Vegas Confidential," covers celebrities and near-celebrities and their doings in the bright lights of "Sin City." The column appears almost every day.

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[edit] Early life

Clarke grew up in eastern Montana, and got his first break in the newspaper business covering sports for the Terry Tribune. He moved on to newspaper jobs in Miles City, Helena and Billings. In 1973 he went to work for the Associated Press in Cincinnati, Ohio. While there, he covered the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in neighboring Southgate, Kentucky, where 165 people perished. His work in covering the collapse of a 1978 nuclear power plant cooling tower in West Virginia, in which 66 construction workers died, earned Clarke and his colleagues a Pulitzer Prize nomination. He later transferred to San Diego, California and then Los Angeles, where he coordinated AP's coverage of the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Right after the Olympics, Clarke went to the Denver Rocky Mountain News to work as a sports writer, eventually covering the expansion Colorado Rockies. In 1996, he switched to writing a "man about town" column that would become the prototype for his Vegas column. Shortly after moving to Denver, Clarke won $50,000 in the state lottery, using the proceeds to buy a house in Denver and in Las Vegas.

[edit] Vegas fame

In 1999, Clarke decided that Las Vegas was a much more fertile ground for celebrity sightings than Denver, and moved to the Review-Journal. His column started out as a four-times-per-week fixture on the third page, but later was featured six days a week, sometimes even seven.

In his column, Clarke features the sightings of virtually every celebrity to hit the city's nightspots. While Clarke expends a good bit of "shoe leather" in gathering news for his column, he also depends on a network of sources at the major resorts. Usually these sources are valets, bellhops, dealers, cocktail waitresses and the like, but casino and nightclub managers are also keen to provide Clarke with news of the latest A-list star to grace their properties.

Clarke's column is heavily influenced by legendary columnist Herb Caen, who invented the "three-dot column" style in San Francisco.

Clarke was the first to break the news of the short-lived wedding of pop star Britney Spears and her childhood friend, Jason Allen Alexander.

Clarke's only book to date is entitled, Vegas Confidential: Norm Clarke! Sin City's Ace Insider 1,000 Naked Truths, published by Stephens Press (ISBN 1-932173-26-9). The book is a compilation of material from old columns, plus a great deal of new material. In the book, Clarke lists (among other things) the ten worst tippers in Las Vegas.

That list led to a confrontation with baseball player Pete Rose, whom Clarke included among the Top 10 worst tippers. (Rose and Clarke had a history of rocky relations, going back to Clarke's days of covering the Cincinnati Reds with the Associated Press.) In March 2005, ten days after a bury-the-hatchet lunch with Rose, Clarke was dining at N9NE Steakhouse with his girlfriend and Internet reporter Matt Drudge, when Rose came over to their table and slapped Clarke because of the listing. The incident made nationwide headlines, and Clarke ended his account of the incident in his column with the line, "Note to self: Remember what you wrote about someone before giving them a book." In December, Clarke wrote in his column that he and Rose made up, when Rose put Clarke in a "friendly headlock" at the site of the original incident. Clarke added: "Note to self: Hell has officially frozen over."

[edit] Personal

Clarke's trademark eyepatch came about as a result of a childhood injury, which left him blind in his right eye.

Clarke is single, but lives with his girlfriend, always referred to in his writings as the "Leggy Blonde."

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