A Whole New Image : Las Vegas Pins Its Hopes for Civic Reform on the Flashy Saleswoman Who Is the New Mayor

She has been in office barely a week--the “Good Luck” balloon still floats above the vase of roses on her desk--and Jan Laverty Jones, the city’s first woman mayor, is already beset by a nasty scandal.

The imbroglio, which involves a newly elected councilman, made for scintillating news throughout the campaign. A private investigator, hired by his opponent’s camp, audiotaped the candidate in a series of compromising situations, notably auditioning an underage stripper with the promise of finding her a job.

Now, on the phone with the councilman, Jones is pumping confidence through the receiver: “They can run this all they want, but if you just stay straight. . . .”

As Jones speaks, the latest episode of the scandal flashes on the evening news. Later, “Hard Copy,” the nationally televised tabloid program, will play the salacious story, complete with testimony by the stripper.

It is just the sort of Sin City smut that the new mayor fervently wants to avoid. Following the previous administration, which was felled by illicit land deals, Jones won a 2-1 victory in May on a platform to restore confidence in City Hall.

The Establishment’s answer to the bad press, Jones was a political first-timer who projected the sort of untainted, upbeat image that sends positive vibrations through corporate boardrooms. And in a campaign of personalities that pitted the novice against a maverick muckraking councilman, image was everything.

Not only did Jones champion the region’s economic viability, she embodied it. The 42-year-old wife of an influential businessman and a millionaire in her own right--her grandfather founded the Southern California grocery chain Thriftimart--she was part of the city’s rich-and-famous in-crowd. A native of Santa Monica, she was graduated from Stanford University, had 20 years of experience in marketing and human resources and sat on a bevy of business and organization boards, including Security Pacific bank and the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

There was, however, at least one overriding problem: The name of Jan Laverty Jones made most people laugh. To the Las Vegas populace, Jones was best known as a glamorous gal who hawked automobiles in quirky commercials for the Fletcher Jones car dealerships owned by Ted Jones, her husband.

In five years of funky television spots, Jones cavorted as everything from Little Red Riding Hood to a glitzy casino moll stroking the hindquarters of a sleek new automobile. She crinkled her nose and cleverly teased her niggardly father-in-law, the company founder, with the famous tag line “Nobody’s cheaper than Fletcher Jones.” And, in her most outrageous mode, she ad-libbed soap-opera vignettes with a female impersonator who plays Vegas lounges.

“She had an acute image problem,” affirms Jon Ralston, political columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “She was no one you’d ever expect to go into politics.”

The success of her campaign “was taking Jan Jones from a car salesperson, a socialite and dilettante to a serious mayoral candidate,” says Boston political consultant Dan Hart, who was brought in to reveal “the real Jan Jones.”

Suddenly, a fresh but serious face was replacing the rascals and, as such, Jones became a classically popular figure in the tradition of American politics.

“The idea of a political amateur is very appealing to many Americans,” says Douglas Imig, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who specializes in political parties and power structures.

Officeholders from Ronald Reagan to Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono have successfully parlayed celebrity status into politics. “The spark that ignites them publicly, along with a little political savvy, makes for a potent combination in elected office,” Imig says.

Moreover, Jones’ opponent, then-councilman Steve Miller, was someone a lot of powerful people loved to hate. “The issue was ‘She’s not Steve Miller,’ ” Ralston says. “He was a loose cannon, and he hit a few targets.”

It was Miller who brought down former mayor Ron Lurie and the city manager; Miller who proposed opening competition to the sole cable television network in town, operated by Brian Greenspun, who owns the newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun. And it was Miller who attempted to halt expansion of Arizona Charlie’s Hotel and Casino into the suburbs, running afoul of the Becker family, influential hotel and real estate developers.

With a collective sigh of relief at the election outcome, prominent citizens of Las Vegas are praising Her Honor’s potential for governance. Former three-term mayor Bill Briare predicts she will have “an astounding” impact on the city, though allows that he is not familiar with specific programs she plans to implement. Jones is similarly touted by Sun executive editor and former Nevada governor Mike O’Callaghan: “I don’t know of anybody in this town who doesn’t want her to succeed.”

Even Imig, who notes that “social services take a back seat” in Las Vegas, is hopeful. Whereas Lurie bulldozed shanties, saying, “There. No more homeless problem, “ Imig says, Jones was seen on television meeting a homeless delegation at City Hall. “Coaxing money into those kinds of programs could be the mark of this particular administration,” he speculates.

Meanwhile, Jones is bringing in the kind of flamboyant style not often seen in City Hall. Coiffed in a champagne-tipped lioness mane, she unabashedly sports short skirts, hot slot-machine colors and earrings the size of silver dollars.

“I’m exciting. I’m different from what people expect,” she avows of her markedly mismatched personas. “It was one thing to be cute, funny and outrageous, but they didn’t expect cute, funny and outrageous to be smart.

“It’s very sexist. Men can be all of them. Women cannot.”

Contemplating the fall of the former mayor and the brewing brouhaha over the new councilman, she says, “Perception is much more important than reality. In fact, it’s everything.

“I believe in taking what I do very seriously. But you have to be able to laugh at yourself. I mean a lot of this is really very humorous. In fact, it borders on the ridiculous.”

Jones is sitting in her office, the tools of her new trade at hand: a copy of “Robert’s Rules of Order” and “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun,” a management guidebook that contains such aphorisms as “Never give a Hun a reward that holds no personal value to yourself” and “Every Hun has value even if only to serve as a bad example.”

After calming her beleaguered councilman, Jones faces Problem No. 2: the announcement that land the mayor hopes to broker to the county for office space has been found to be contaminated by benzene.

The day’s final incident: another councilman who is off to address constituents who are furious about the council’s recent decision to allow a liquor deli with slot machines in their neighborhood. Jones cast the swing vote for the developer. “They couldn’t articulate what they didn’t want,” she says of the homeowners.

Jones sees herself dealing in solutions, ones that are not politically motivated, she insists. “I have nothing to gain from political office. Perks aren’t going to affect me.”

“In the past,” says Ralston, “mayors here have been figureheads” in a government administered by a city manager. “There’s a sense that Jones is going to be a vibrant, hands-on leader.”

She has verve, charisma and energy--characteristics that symbolize the city. “She motivates people without trying,” says Cindy Glade, office manager at the Fletcher Jones Management Group.

Adds Wade Killefer, a Santa Monica architect and longtime friend, “She doesn’t take any crap from people, but she doesn’t deal it out either.”

Above all, she is going to be herself, Jones says. “It’s good to bring some style to the city.” If that style contrasts with the sober demeanor of many women in business and government, she says, “I think what it’s about is me, my performance.”

Her office will be a study of teals and burgundies to project “femininity and strength,” she says, and after a campaign stint in drab navy and khaki, she’s back in her fashion stride.

Wearing a short white suit with glittering white hose and black patent heels, she swings up into her customized van at the end of the day, slinging a Vuitton tote bag of toiletries into the back seat, and heads for dinner at the Golden Nugget Casino.

The mayor has no personal truck with gaming. “Gambling to me is like taking your money and putting it in the toilet,” she declares.

However, it is casino revenues that “make Las Vegas such a pleasant place to live,” drawing about 6,000 new residents a month to what Jones calls a conservative city of Mormon bankers, real estate developers and, until now, an almost monolithic male power structure.

“Women haven’t put themselves forward and asked to be recognized,” says Jeanne Hood, president of the Four Queens Hotel and Casino downtown and the only woman to head a casino. “That’s coming.”

Also coming is a new image for the downtown, which, as Vegas becomes a megaresort with theme-park-style casinos on the Strip, has remained sleazy and out of date. A proposed solution for the Glitter Gulch--five blocks of casinos and pulsating lights--is a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” of fantasy. The streets would be turned into watery canals complete with bridges and gondolas, the sidewalks transformed into lush tropical gardens.

“We need a thing you’d call an attraction,” says Hood, and Jones “is going to help get that done.”

The glitter and clamor of slot machines are a far cry from Jones’ upbringing in Santa Monica, where her family lived on a genteel, tree-lined street and faithfully attended Easter Sunday brunch at the Los Angeles Country Club.

A student at the exclusive Marlborough School in Hancock Park, Jan Laverty fell in love with Ted Jones, a Beverly Hills High School pupil. But after she left for Stanford, leaving him at USC, each wound up with another spouse and began raising their separate families.

It wasn’t until more than a decade later that the two met again over lunch, when Laverty went to see Jones about buying a car. He walked her out of the restaurant and told her, “I’ve always loved you,” the mayor remembers.

Two years later, after obtaining divorces, the couple was married in a chapel on the Las Vegas Strip.

“Jan was never going to be a stay-at-home person,” Ted Jones muses, despite their combined six children, including the Latino baby-sitter they adopted seven years ago when she was a teen-ager.

On a tour of Las Vegas, Jan Jones shows a visitor the imposing Spanish-style house the couple wants to buy (Howard Hughes built it for a mistress), the 12-acre ranch they abandoned before her campaign so they could move inside city limits and the sleek habitat they currently rent in a posh tract development.

For a moment, waiting for an attendant to open the gates to the ranch, Jones’ good humor vanishes. She barks orders into her car telephone and jumps out to push her shoulders vainly against the iron bars.

How will she react should she have to push against the city’s movers and shakers?

“There’s a small group of very powerful people here,” observes political scientist Imig. Though organized crime is bygone, he says, “it is a tough group you probably wouldn’t want to cross.”

For now, however, the casinos are humming, the town is booming and there may never have been a better time to be mayor of Las Vegas.

Still, the post may put a slight crimp in Jones’ freewheeling style. When campaign volunteers hired a male stripper to top off Her Honor’s victory party, the mayor-elect felt obliged to cancel the act after learning that journalists were present.

“It would have been inappropriate,” she says. Nevertheless, crinkling her nose and grinning, she quips, “he was a darling guy. He was just as cute with his clothes on as off.”