Atlantic City glory days.

The Last Good Time: Skinny D'Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, & the Rise and Fall of Atlantic City By Jonathan Van Meter Crown, 304 pages, $25.00 Resort cities live and die on their own impermanence. It is their great allure-the idea that what happens in them is somehow less than real-but also their great weakness, for a city built on transient good times will always disappoint itself. The men who build cities like to think that what they are constructing is eternal and important, and the air of frivolity attached to resorts, although important for short-term economic gain, undermines long-term ambitions to be something more. Tourism is a ladder too short, and inevitably the resort tries to climb higher, sometimes tumbling to the ground in the process, other times having its fall arrested by the darker margins of the economy. Think of Los Angeles and its affair with the military-industrial complex; Miami lost in the crosscurrents of the Cold War; or Las Vegas, embedded in its tapestry of crime, politics and the broken-down promises of popular culture.

Atlantic City was all of this and more during the roller-coaster ride that was the 20th century. A beach city in a place where the beach season wasn't nearly long enough, it soon built another identity behind its family-friendly facade. When the sun went down, Atlantic City was a place where the party didn't stop, where liquor ran easily during Prohibition, where illicit card games proceeded without interference from the corrupt local police, where a corrosive combination of racketeering, celebrity and power made it a capital city of the shadow economy. AC in the 50s and 60s became, like Vegas and Miami, one of the nerve centers of a juiced-up America. The Rat Pack got its start here, organized crime outfits considered it neutral ground and money flowed from casinos to campaign coffers and back.

Jonathan Van Meter does a good job of recounting this history in The Last Good Time, his biography of Atlantic City built around a biography of its most renowned resident: Paul "Skinny" D'Amato, owner of the notorious 500 Club. D'Amato was the epitome of cool. He knew how to hold a cigarette, knew how to work a room, knew enough to give Joe DiMaggio his own table. He was not a mobster but had the mob's respect, he was a close friend of Sinatra but never became one of his hangers-on and he wasn't above helping Joe Kennedy out with his son's presidential campaign. And he was, by most accounts, "the nicest guy in the world," a man with few interests beyond making money and keeping the party going forever.

But the party, as anyone who read The Great Gatsby knows, has to end sometime. Those who insist otherwise are often lying, deluded or both. What happened to Skinny D'Amato is also what happened to Atlantic City, and it is the Gatsbyesque lesson of what happens to resorts when the shadows creep out from behind the sunshine. The Last Good Time is not as exhaustive as The Money and the Power, Sally Denton and Roger Morris' incredible history of Las Vegas, nor written with anything near the style of Joan Didion's Miami, but it still offers a trenchant narrative and flashes of brilliance. And all the characters are here: Sinatra, Kefauver, Monroe, Luciano, along with the lesser-known men who ran New Jersey's Republican political machine.

This is the other side of American cool, the story behind the big-tipping men who could handle a deck of cards, men who thought everything they did and the city they did it in would last forever. The best that can be said is that they were wrong. "All these guys" one disillusioned observer says near the end of the book, "never made a bit of difference in history?[they were] all full of big-talking schemes, murdering the innocent and the not-so-innocent, setting people up so their lives would be ruined, being big-shots in a fucked-up business."

But the sun still shines on the boardwalk, and the lights still glow in the casinos. And everyone still likes to dream.