Norm Clarke, the pioneering Review-Journal celebrity columnist recognized around town for his signature black eye patch and splashy scoops, has died. He was 82.
Clarke died at 5:30 a.m. Thursday at Nathan Adelson Hospice after a two-decade battle with cancer. He was admitted there March 12, a week after injuring his hip at his Las Vegas home.
During a visit last Wednesday at Adelson Hospice, Clarke said he hoped to be recalled as a solid reporter above all.
“Being remembered as a reporter was always my hope. I would not want to be known as a gossip columnist,” Clarke said. “With all the time I put in with The Associated Press, wearing the mantle of AP reporter meant everything to me. A lot of pride goes into working for The AP.”
Clarke moved to Las Vegas in 1999, having gained prominence at Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. By then he had forged a long history in newspapers, as a sports writer and man-about-town columnist, in his home state of Montana, and on to Cincinnati, San Diego, L.A., and Denver.
Months before relocating to Las Vegas, Clarke visited his brother, Jeff Scheid, then a Review-Journal photographer. Clarke met then-Review-Journal Publisher Sherman Frederick during the trip.
The two spoke for 90 minutes. The newspaper veteran was sold on Clarke’s experience, passion and disposition.
“It was kind of a serendipitous meeting,” Frederick said. “We just started to talk, and I realized that he’d be a real asset for the newspaper. I’d known that he was doing something similar for the paper in Denver, and I said, ‘If you’re this good in Denver, imagine what you’re going to be like in Las Vegas.’”
Scheid said his brother was always drawn to Las Vegas. In the late 1970s, when Clarke was working in Southern California, he occasionally reported on Las Vegas for The AP. The two met during vacation breaks, with Clarke invariably digging for stories.
“He really started getting this love of Vegas. He’d get this adrenaline rush like, ‘Wow! This is Vegas!’” Scheid said. “There was this drive he had about the city. He just loved it, and loved the energy.”
After 15 years as a baseball writer, sports columnist and man-about-town columnist in Denver, Clarke began penning his celebrity-centric “Vegas Confidential” column for the Review-Journal. It appeared on page 3A and online for 17 years.
Clarke’s many news breaks included Britney Spears’ infamous 55-hour marriage in Las Vegas in 2004, later annulled. He covered Michael Jackson’s secret move to Las Vegas in 2006, with preliminary plans to stage a production show.
“Norm’s Review-Journal column was so popular he became a celebrity in his own right,” Executive Editor Glenn Cook said. “He was a gentleman. Readers loved him. I consistently heard from subscribers who said Norm was the first thing they read every day.”
Entertainment insiders said Clarke brought reporting credibility to the celebrity beat.
“Norm ushered in a new era on how entertainment and celebrities were covered in Las Vegas,” said veteran Las Vegas publicist Dave Kirvin. “He wasn’t always popular, he wasn’t always right, but he was fair and he was never dull.”
Alan Feldman, a former longtime public relations executive on the Strip, said the first quality he noticed in Clarke’s Las Vegas career was his writing voice.
“I remember having a conversation with Sherman Frederick not long before Norm arrived, and I had been just really taken by by the voices of certain columnists in Chicago and San Francisco and New York,” Feldman said. “These were people who seemed to embody the personality of the city. I remember saying, ‘It sure would be great to get someone like that for Las Vegas. And Sherm said, ‘Well, wait a couple months, we’ve got something cooking,’ and that was Norm. He was the community voice.”
Feldman met Clarke at a 2001 news conference hosted by Siegfried & Roy at The Mirage. The duo already were well aware of Clarke, just two years in to his tenure at the R-J, and granted an exclusive interview.
“That press conference was a bit of a last of its kind, because there were a lot of Vegas entertainment writers there who wrote for small newspapers and weeklies,” Feldman said. “Very, very few people had the impact Norm had quickly established.”
Clarke wrote five books, two of which centered on his time in Las Vegas, the last his autobiography.
“Vegas Confidential: Norm Clarke! Sin City’s Ace Insider 1,000 Naked Truths,” and “Norm Clarke’s Vegas Confidential: Sinsational Celebrity Tales” included a compilation of Clarke’s columns, best and worst lists, and his remembrances of celebrities.
A fifth, “The Power of the Patch,” was published just days after Clark was admitted into hospice care. Copies of the book, which will not be sold in wide release, will be donated to college journalism programs.
Endless material for columns
Writing of boxing great Floyd Mayweather Jr., Clarke relayed, “Nobody rolls like Mayweather. One night in October 2007 said it all, when he showed up at Wynn Las Vegas in his Maybach, with his entourage right behind in a Mercedes SLR McLaren and a Rolls-Royce Phantom, each worth about $500,000.
“Around Mayweather’s neck were twin diamond pendants shaped like boxing gloves and studded with rubies. In his back pocket was $15,000 to $20,000 in cash, ‘rain’ money to shower on the chichi crowd at Wynn’s Tryst nightclub.”
Clarke was well-liked in Las Vegas. But he also had run-ins with those famous folks. Clarke and magician Criss Angel were involved in a heated argument at the Planet Hollywood valet after the 2008 Miss USA pageant, when Angel’s girlfriend at the time, Veronica Grabowski, failed to reach the finals.
Clarke had reported in a previous column that Angel had pressured judge Sandy Mecca, wife of Planet Hollywood’s then-CEO Mike Mecca, to give Grabowski high marks. Clarke and Angel butted heads the day after the column posted, with Angel warning Clarke not to “ever write another word about me, or you’ll need an eye patch over your other eye.”
A story Clarke often retold, with a bit of pride in his voice, detailed the time baseball legend Pete Rose slapped him across the face at a crowded N9Ne Steakhouse at the Palms.
Clarke recently had given Rose a copy of “1,000 Naked Truths,” in which Rose was ranked No. 5 among Clarke’s 10 worst celebrity tippers. Clarke had previously covered Rose, unfavorably on occasion, during their days in Cincinnati.
Clarke called out to Rose, who was living in Las Vegas at the time. Rose waved, and seemed to be walking away, then turned afield and slapped the columnist. Clarke was dining with Matt Drudge (best known for his website The Drudge Report). Just after the incident, then-Palms owner George Maloof and NFL star Tom Brady stopped by the table. Clarke told the two they had just missed an epic moment.
“Tom Brady was in disbelief,” Clarke once said. “I’ve had people tell me it’s the greatest Vegas story they’ve ever heard.”
Clarke was in close contact with virtually every Las Vegas celebrity of relevance. He interviewed many on his “Conversations With Norm” stage series at Myron’s at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, including Wayne Newton, Marie Osmond, Shecky Greene, George Wallace, Oscar and Carolyn Goodman, Terry Fator, Carrot Top, Greg Maddux and Mary Wilson of the Supremes.
The series ran from 2013 to 2019, benefiting The Smith Center’s Education and Outreach Department.
“It was a great gesture for Norm to do that series, and we were happy to host his wedding at The Smith Center,” Martin said. “We had wonderful dinners at his home. These were joyous memories.”
Early career
Clarke was born July 8, 1942, in the Eastern Montana hamlet of Terry (population 562 in the 2020 census), located on the banks of the Yellowstone River. “Norm was not an overachiever in grade school, or in high school,” his sister, Nancy Morast, remembered. “No one in our family were good students. But he was definitely an overachiever in his career. When he went to do something, he overdid it.”
Clarke got his first newspaper job at the Miles City Star in Terry, with 35 or 40 customers. His life’s passion was instilled on Sept. 24, 1955. Teenage Norm carried his bag of papers into an eatery full of cowboys, on delivery to its owner. Summoning the famous cry of paperboys he’d seen in the movies, he shouted, “Extra, Extra! Read all about it! President Eisenhower has a heart attack in Denver!” Diners were fast to buy the five-cent afternoon newspaper to know more.
His sister said Clarke was more capable on the gridiron at Terry High. A manager at a job placement office told him he was best-suited for manual labor, preferably outdoors, according to an account in his latest book. He enrolled at Montana State University-Northern, where he would study to be a diesel mechanic, but soon dropped out.
He bagged groceries until he was offered a job writing sports articles for the town’s weekly newspaper, the Terry Tribune.
Clarke moved on to the Helena Independent Record, and then the Billings Gazette, as a sports writer. By 1973, he had landed a job as an AP reporter in Cincinnati, just as the Big Red Machine was building its dynasty, winning World Series championships in 1975 and 1976.
While in Cincinnati, Clarke covered the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in adjacent Southgate, Ky., in 1977 that killed 165 people. A year later, his reporting on the collapse of scaffolding inside an unfinished nuclear power plant cooling tower in West Virginia, in which 51 construction workers died, earned Clarke and his colleagues a Pulitzer Prize nomination. The disaster was called the deadliest construction accident in U.S. history.
He then transferred to San Diego, and soon after to Los Angeles, where he coordinated AP’s coverage of the 1984 Summer Olympics. His next stop was Denver, where in 1991 he broke the story that Denver was getting a Major League Baseball expansion franchise, the National League’s Colorado Rockies. Adam Schefter, ESPN’s senior NFL reporter, was Clarke’s assistant at the time. In Schefter’s forward to “Power of the Patch,” the sports guru said, “It was the biggest story of his life.”
In 1996, Clarke launched his man-about-town column in Denver, a city where pro athletes dominate the celeb culture. Before long, the thrill of writing about a handful of sports stars wore thin, and he set his sights on Las Vegas.
‘Dialed into everybody’
Clarke married the former Cara Roberts, whom he met while she was working in the mayor’s office in Denver, on Oct. 12, 2012. The nuptials were a very Vegas event, held at The Smith Center’s courtyard between Myron’s and Reynolds Hall. Former Mayor Oscar Goodman presided over the ceremony.
Cara Clarke said Norm always worked to find “the newsiest news,” a process that was a daily odyssey.
“I would not go home until 6 or after 6, I’d stay at the office and work, because watching him give birth to a column was so painful,” Cara Clarke said with a chuckle. “I don’t think his readers knew how much he fretted over those columns, and especially if he didn’t get a good lead or a good scoop on a lead. I mean, he was working the phones. He would stress it out every day, every single day,”
Cara Clarke said her husband drew information from all sorts of subjects.
“He was dialed into everybody, but often it was the valet guy or the cocktail server or the cabbie that called him with the tip that allowed him to build a story,” Clarke said. “Some of his best stories came from those tips. He would have a conversation with anybody, and he would remember people. ‘Oh! You’re Joe from Billings! I knew your dad!’
“Norm was an adventure, that’s for sure.”
The Clarkes appropriately named their terriers Rumor and Scandal. In his final days, Norm used the same blanket the dogs slept on for comfort at Nathan Adelson.
Cancer diagnosis
Clarke spent the balance of his career in Las Vegas being treated for, and fighting, cancer. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001. It was the late late Frank Lieberman, Siegfried & Roy’s publicist at the time, and a member of Elvis’ inner circle, who suggested Clarke receive cancer treatment.
He lived with Stage 4 cancer for about 16 years.
Clarke drew strength from his time as an undersized defensive tackle on his 8-man football team at Terry High School.
“You can’t play football without playing with pain, and you can’t live with cancer without playing with pain,” Clarke once said. “I think that being an athlete, being a football player, and dealing with pain is one of the things that has led me to fight as hard as I can.”
His father also died of the disease. The fear of cancer is also why the columnist lost his right eye.
As a small boy during some small-town Montana horseplay, a suspender snapped loose and struck him in the eye. He wailed in pain, but there were no immediate ill effects.
Several years later, that eye had turned a purplish-red. The family doctor, concerned about the family’s history of cancer, told Norm’s mother, “This eye will need to come out, immediately.”
After using an ill-fitting prosthetic into adulthood, Norm opted for his famous black eye patch, looking not unlike like a Las Vegas Raider, for the rest of his career. He set aside the eye patch in his final days, retiring his iconic look before he slipped away.
From his hospital bed, Clarke reflected on his life, surviving cancer for more than a decade to finish his stellar career with an extraordinary final chapter.
“I’ve beaten the odds, to be honest,” Clarke said. “I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’ve had the luckiest run in Las Vegas history.”
In additional to his wife, Cara, Clarke is survived by his brother Jeff, and Jenny Scheid of Las Vegas; sister Nancy and Duane Morast of Kalispell, Montana; and brother Newell and Rene Clarke of Terry, Montana. Services are pending. The Smith Center is establishing the Norm Clarke Entertainment Journalism Fund for student reporters at the Nevada High School Musical Theater Awards. The program is part of The Smith Center’s Education Fund.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on X, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.
