A Little Bit Illicit

To most Americans, the thought of European roulette conjures up visions of King Farouk squandering an Egyptian fortune at Deauville, James Bond gallantly winning one for a lissome blonde at Casino Royale, or Princess Grace and Ari Onassis presiding over the glittering wheels of Monte Carlo. Titillating, perhaps, but a trifle dated. The true archetype of European gambling today is the sprawling mustard-yellow casino at sleepy Bad Neuenahr on the Ahr River in West Germany. There, few of the blondes among the intense, studious crowds at the tables last week were under 50 years of age or 150 lbs. The average chip on the schwarz and rot was a two-mark piece, worth about 50-c-, and the beverages were local wine, fruit juice or the neighborhood mineral water, Apollinaris, because no burgher or Hausfrau seemed excited enough to drown his sorrows or celebrate his winnings with Sekt before turning the family Volkswagen back to Bonn, Duesseldorf or Cologne.

Real Romance. Bad Neuenahr is typical because gambling, once considered a failing of the decadent aristocracy, has throughout Europe today become awesomely respectable, middle-class--and big. In Monaco, camera-toting tourists just off tour buses from Brussels and Amsterdam clutter up the Grand Casino, while serious Monegasque students of chance clang away at the one-armed bandits lined up across the street from the elegant Hotel de Paris. In France, the postwar development of le tierce, a combination racing bet and lottery, which attracts 3,000,000 Frenchmen every Sunday, has made horse-track betting the country's fifth-largest industry. And in Britain, bookies, football pools and bingo, together with the legalization in 1960 of private table

Public betting pools and slot machines are common throughout Germany as well, but the real romance is still in the wheel of fortune. Explains Carl-Alexander von der Groeben, promotion manager at Bad Neuenahr: "Somehow we are still surrounded by the ancient aura of being socially exclusive, and just a little bit illicit. You can see it in the face of the grocer's wife, who comes in and looks around to see if anyone there knows her."

Protestant Protest. Casinos are still illegal in Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg and Bremen, but the 13 licensed casinos in the rest of the country draw 1,600,000 visitors a year for a house profit of $75 million. They flourish mostly in venerable resorts like Bad Neuenahr, Baden-Baden, Travemuende, Bad Kissingen, and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, even though the crowds are overwhelmingly big-city businessmen, secretaries, clerks and housewives, who go home peaceably after they have lost $10 or $15 in an evening. Protests the Protestant weekly, Christ and World: "The last barrier against the burning German gambling fury used to be the entrance rules. Now one can get in if he earns $200 a month and exhibits a certain chic--which may only mean wearing a necktie." Adds Von der Groeben with obvious relief: "We haven't had a scandal since the casino opened in 1948. We have yet to hear any shots in the night, and the Ahr River is too shallow to drown yourself in."

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