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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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.
In 1999, Clarke moved to Las Vegas.
Clarke has written two books to date.
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."