Kerkorian wasn’t as shy in the early 1990s as he would become. Rather than avoiding the limelight, he was joined by Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson for the October 1991 groundbreaking of the world’s largest hotel. He was also flanked by hired actors dressed as Dorothy and her companions from The Wizard of Oz.
By 1991, every Las Vegas casino needed to be slathered with a theme—heavy on the schmaltz, hold the irony. Hollywood was to be the MGM Grand’s theme. Conveniently, Kerkorian controlled Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and its vast library of films, including The Wizard of Oz. The casino would help publicize the studio’s stars like Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson, whose animated video, All Dogs Go to Heaven, was being distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists. A perfect film for the resort’s primary market: families with kids.
Three weeks after Kerkorian stuck his shovel in the ground, Steve Wynn donned a pirate’s cap and coat to announce plans for his own new resort. It would be called Treasure Island. Located on a parking lot on a corner of the Mirage site, the $430-million resort would have 2,900 hotel rooms that would sell for roughly $75 a night—a smorgasbord for the Kmart set that Wynn had so recently criticized.
Advisers suggested that Wynn call it Treasure Island by Steve Wynn. Wynn refused, recalls Alan Feldman, his longtime communications director. “He said he would never, ever put his name on a hotel,” Feldman says. “He said, ‘That’s what Trump does.’”
Two weeks after Treasure Island was announced, Circus Circus unveiled plans for a massive, Egyptian-themed resort, temporarily called Project X. You may know it now as the giant black-glass pyramid casino called the Luxor.
The great casino race was on.
Instead of a volcano, Treasure Island offered passersby a British frigate, the HMS Britannia (it had been called the Sir Francis Drake until African-American groups pointed out that the British explorer had also been a slave-trader) that sailed around Skull Point to confront pirates in a manmade lagoon called Buccaneer Bay. The ensuing battle involved more than thirty actors and stunt performers who fired muskets and cannons. At the end of every show, the Britannia sank under the chilly water in a pit that Wynn had dug deep into the soil of the Strip.
The pirates won. Wink, wink.
With Treasure Island, Wynn made his big break from traditional Las Vegas entertainment and the Tom Jones, Wayne Newton style of show. A French-Canadian circus troupe called Cirque du Soleil had been having conversations with other Las Vegas operators, but they seemed too avant-garde. Wynn was fearless. He installed their Mystère show at Treasure Island. The December 1993 premiere was the troupe’s launch to worldwide stardom. Las Vegas entertainment would never be the same. As of 2006, an estimated seventeen million people had seen one of the five resident Cirque du Soleil shows in Las Vegas.
To promote his new venture, Wynn produced a television movie in which he flashed his brilliant smile and played the role of the owner of a fantastic, kid-friendly resort called Treasure Island. The movie, primarily a one-hour infomercial called “Treasure Island: The Adventure Begins,” aired that January on NBC. Its star was thirteen years old. Any remaining questions about Wynn’s demographic could be settled by his choice of time slot: right at the eight-p.m. family viewing hour.
To celebrate Treasure Island’s opening, Wynn pressed a small red button at ten p.m. on October 27, 1993. This led to a chain of explosions that reduced the twenty-three-story tower of the famous old Dunes casino to a thirty-foot pile of rubble in twenty-seven seconds.
The Dunes, built during the heady rush of 1955, was a Rat Pack gem fallen on hard times. The spectacular show of fireworks, black powder, and aviation fuel that destroyed it was watched by 200,000 people, many of whom cried. Not Wynn. “For me, it was the beginning of a new project, not the end of the Dunes,” he said.
The location of Wynn’s next project came as a nasty surprise to Caesars Palace’s Henry Gluck, who had been negotiating to buy the Dunes. Wynn had nimbly slipped in and picked it up for $75 million in November 1992, leaving Caesars forever sandwiched between two Wynn casinos. “I never for a moment thought he’d buy it,” recalls Gluck.
Wynn was joined at the Dunes implosion by forty-six-year-old Michael Milken, who had been released in March after serving twenty-two months of a ten-year sentence for his conviction on six felony stock trading violations.
“I met Steve in 1978 and felt that Steve embodied Walt Disney,” Milken told reporters, explaining why he had backed Wynn those years ago. “I think we are seeing some of that embodiment tonight.”
Over the next decade or so, Controlled Demolition of Baltimore would handle more than a dozen implosions in Las Vegas. Attendees at the parties would collect the party favors—dust masks, plastic ponchos, identification badges.
The year 1993 produced an all-out race to open new mega casinos. Luxor crossed the finish line first on October 15, followed closely by Treasure Island twelve days later. Kerkorian’s MGM Grand limped across the line on December 18, panting to catch up to the four-year-old Mirage.
“Our typical rooms, at four hundred forty-six square feet, will be about twenty-five percent larger than the typical rooms at the Mirage,” Bob Maxey, president of MGM Grand Incorporated, told reporters. He said the MGM’s showroom would be larger than the Mirage’s. The valet service would be more efficient than the Mirage’s. The elevators would be closer to the front desk than the Mirage’s, eliminating a long walk that disgruntled Mirage guests.
“This is not a bigger and more expensive Mirage,” Maxey said. “This is something new.”
Among the resort’s features were more than 5,000 hotel rooms, a dozen restaurants, three swimming pools, five tennis courts, and a thirty-three-acre theme park. There was to be a day-care center for the children of guests—one of the hotel industry’s first kids’ clubs.
Kerkorian really had Wynn beat in one area: He had a 15,000-seat arena built to rival Madison Square Garden—the kind of place where Rifle Right had dreamed of fighting in his youth.
Boxing is one of those events—like rodeos and trucking conventions—that draws real gamblers to Las Vegas. Boxing makes Las Vegas sizzle. All the rival casinos buy tickets for their customers and throw parties. Hollywood celebrities and Donald Trump cadge great seats.
The Mirage and Caesars Palace held matches in temporary arenas in their parking lots. Kerkorian aimed to knock their lights out. The MGM Grand Garden “means no more fights in parking lots in Las Vegas,” said Maxey.
Kerkorian was so excited, he wanted to share the arena with his friend George Mason, whose support had launched his airline so many years earlier. During the construction, he led Mason to the arena doors, where they were confronted by a guard, Mason said about the incident several years later.
The guard failed to recognize Kerkorian, who was rarely around, and he informed the visitors tersely that no one was allowed in. But what Mason always remembered was Kerkorian’s response.
“Couldn’t we just take a peek?” the mogul pleaded.
When the new MGM Grand Hotel & Theme Park threw open its doors on December 18, 1993, the two things that stood out were its size and the magnitude of its problems.
Kerkorian donned a checked sportcoat and an open shirt. “I think it’s a completely new convention across the board for families,” he said, joined by Lee Iacocca, chairman of Chrysler and a member of MGM’s board of directors.
Alongside the seventy-six-year-old mogul that day was his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend, Lisa Bonder, a tall former tennis pro with ash-blond hair.
Iacocca toured the theme park and gave it a bigger compliment than it deserved. “It’s like a small Disneyland,” Iacocca said, but guests that day complained that the seven rides looked cheap, with little attention to detail.
In her first paid concert in twenty-two years, Barbra Streisand stepped onto the stage and belted out such aptly named songs as “As If We Never Said Goodbye” and “I’ve Come Home Again.” It had been thirty years, Streisand noted, since she had be
en the opening act for Liberace at the Riviera.
As she sang, picketers amassed outside, protesting the MGM Grand’s opposition to an organizing drive by the Culinary Union’s housekeepers, restaurant workers, and other casino employees.
From the stage that first night, Barbra Streisand complained to her audience about her room’s shortcomings. Hundreds of showers lacked hot water. Key cards didn’t work. Phones broke down, leaving guests with busy signals. The pool wasn’t finished.
Guests waited two hours and more for room service. People commonly waited forty minutes just to check in.
Its sheer unwieldy size was irritating. One travel writer counted 290 steps to stroll down one hallway of hotel rooms. His hike from the front casino entrance, with its passage through the mouth of an eighty-eight-foot-tall lion, to the theme park and then up to a hotel room took nearly twenty minutes.
Yet the MGM Grand grossed roughly $1.6 million a day.
It turned out that kids are trouble in Las Vegas. Children weaving past slot machines; parents fending off prostitution flyers on Las Vegas Boulevard; babies in strollers while Mommy plays blackjack—or the opposite: parents distracted from gambling by their babies.
Wynn and everyone else figured this out quickly, but it would prove difficult to unravel the misguided kid-friendly push. Even today, several billion dollars’ worth of Disney-esque casinos contribute to a widely held public belief that Las Vegas is a family sort of place.
Wynn’s flirtation with the pitch for families lasted barely past Treasure Island’s opening. From the beginning, he dissembled uncharacteristically.
“We are not specifically pitching anything to people under twenty-one,” he said in 1993. “This is a place for big kids.”
By 1994, Wynn already seemed to be regretting Treasure Island. “We don’t want families,” Wynn said. “We want adults who gamble.”
Years later, Elaine Wynn would sit in the Wynn Las Vegas casino and glance up at the pirate-themed tower’s peach facade—a weirdly enlarged Victorian motif with false balconies. “Now, that’s an ugly building,” she said. “That was a knee-jerk reaction.”
The kid-friendly thing did help legitimize casinos for those on Wall Street. Once so leery of gambling, big investors were now pouring their money into casinos in the mid-1990s. This pressured casino operators to demonstrate steady, predictable growth, like McDonald’s or Wal-Mart.
There were two problems with this. One was Kerry Packer and his ilk: gamblers known as “whales.”
When Packer arrived in Las Vegas, the whole town got pulsed up. The hefty Australian media and casino magnate would bet millions of dollars in an evening. Packer was Australia’s richest man, and he was also a “george,” a big tipper, in Vegas parlance. According to lore he once paid off the mortgage of a cocktail waitress who brought him a drink. He would eventually die of kidney failure at home in Sydney the day after Christmas in 2005. But while he was alive and in Las Vegas, casinos’ chief financial officers crossed their fingers and prayed for the house. Packer’s runs of luck could throw off a company’s quarterly earnings by a nickel a share. That kind of thing is awkward to explain to antsy hedge-fund managers. The volatility of casino earnings was cited as the reason why casino companies trade for lower prices than, for instance, hotel companies.
What’s more, opening a new casino is tougher than opening a Wal-Mart. New casinos must be approved by state legislators or voters. Fortunately for casinos in the early 1990s, a recession was killing state budgets. Lawmakers began to legalize gambling in places where it had previously been illegal so they could tax the heck out of it.
To make casinos palatable to constituents, many of whom opposed gambling, someone came up with the bright idea of quarantining casinos on riverboats. With many voters envisioning Mark Twain–style paddlewheels churning up and down the Mississippi, riverboats turned out to be the sugar that made the medicine go down. Eventually, the whole thing became a fiction, with “riverboat” casinos built over huge, water-pumping systems on the side of a river or lake.
Many casino operators spent the 1990s desperately sniffing across the United States like bloodhounds for riverboat licenses: New York, Mississippi, Louisiana, Iowa, Florida, and nearly every state in the Union other than Utah.
Harrah’s did this better than anyone, growing from a small company to a big one as it docked new riverboats all over the country. Kirk Kerkorian never seemed much interested in that small-time stuff; his love was always Las Vegas. Still, he did snare a lucrative casino license in Detroit—an opportunity so golden that Wynn, upon learning he himself hadn’t won the license, pitched a temper tantrum so wild that people say they heard glass breaking in his office.
Wynn was enormously powerful in Nevada politics. In addition to making hefty donations, he had created an operation in Las Vegas that polled residents on local issues and elections. He smartly loaned these resources to candidates.
Outside Nevada, though, Wynn’s political batting average was nearly nil. Maybe it was his Vegas hair and flamboyant swagger—a personality too flashy for conservative Midwestern or Southern tastes. He spent millions, but failed to win new casino opportunities when he campaigned in places like New Orleans, Missouri, Illinois, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Australia, and Vancouver, British Columbia.
Meanwhile, a group of guys at Harrah’s Entertainment in Memphis, Tennessee, was snapping up state casino licenses right and left.
The Las Vegas casino elite tended to view Harrah’s in the way that many New Yorkers view people from Birmingham, Alabama—as bumpkins from another planet. The Vegas crowd was a clique, alternately bickering and closing ranks against outsiders. Harrah’s was snubbed for its pedestrian focus on meeting the American lower classes in their own backyards.
Harrah’s offered the convenience of proximity. There was nothing glamorous or even pretty about Harrah’s casinos. They tended to be loud, smoky places that appealed to the blue-collar residents nearby and were often full of people who looked like they could barely afford to be there.
Wynn practically sneered at the riverboat casinos.
“The riverboat is preposterous,” Wynn said in 1994. “When you build a riverboat, you build a gambling hall. A gambling joint appeals to that small percentage of the public that wants to gamble. If we’re looking at a cross-section of the earth, that’s the equivalent of the earth’s crust.… When you talk about a destination resort like Las Vegas, you’re talking about a cut that goes down deep into the igneous rock. We build places for folks who don’t think of themselves as gamblers.”
Wynn wanted bigger and brighter. “My hero was Disney,” Wynn said in 1993, again referring to the theme parks that fascinated him. “I would be just as happy building theme parks as casinos, but it’s been done already.”
Chapter Six
BLIND
I see just fine.
—STEVE WYNN
Steve Wynn steps out of the casino into the bright sunlight of May in Las Vegas. He halts midstep and midsentence and yanks his deeply tinted sunglasses over his eyes. He does not explain this interruption. Two people wait as Wynn’s eyes adjust to the blinding sun—about thirty seconds. When he regains his bearing, he proceeds energetically.
Wynn learned he was going blind as a young man.
Retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease, has been destroying the photoreceptor cells in Wynn’s retinas for most of his adult life. The rod cells around his retinas’ outer perimeters are dying, taking with them his ability to convert light into the electrical impulses that are transmitted to the brain to create vision.
Over years, he has gradually lost the ability to see images in his periphery. It is as though he is staring through tubes, only to view objects within a small circle at the end of a dark cylinder. His perception of light and his ability to adjust to dimly lit environments are altered. In a dark room, he can be completely blind.
Wynn can fix his eyes on a person’s face with urgency, but he won’t see the person’s
torso and may leave a proffered hand dangling naked in midair. At dinner, he fails to see the waiter who is trying to place a plate before him.
He is a hazard on construction sites. He trips over extension cords, bumps into circular saws, and ricochets off walls without acknowledging his fumbles. He is a master of disguise, wrapping his arm around the shoulders of a nearby person in a gesture that seems intimate, but turns that person into a seeing-eye guide—and these guides sidestep and duck and veer around obstacles to save them both.
Wynn is unable to drive, but this hasn’t stopped him from buying fast cars. He bought a red Enzo Ferrari, valued at $1.4 million, and parked it in his casino’s showroom with twenty-seven miles on the odometer. He has enjoyed being ferried around Las Vegas in a Mercedes-Maybach, with double-paned windows and reclining backseats, by his driver, Albert, whose salary is paid for by Wynn’s company.
Wynn, who is easily tickled, says he dreams of buzzing himself around town in a Volkswagen Bug. He gets a vicarious thrill riding shotgun in Elaine’s Ferraris. “I like to watch the guys looking at her,” he says, grinning. She rolls her eyes.
Wynn loves to keep strict company with creative types. Some say they suspect that his perception doesn’t quite match theirs. He might fail to grasp the action occurring across a stage, for instance, or to see the reddish tones in a shade of chocolate. These creatives often comment, privately, on the tragedy of a visual man losing his vision.
Sympathy infuriates him. Wynn plows through this obstacle. He peers at every fabric swatch. He critiques the staging of shows and the engineering of a porte cochere. When he is unsure, he leans on Elaine.
Asked about his eyesight one day, Wynn visibly cringes and growls, “I see just fine.”
“I see like this,” he says, making his hands into conical viewfinders in front of his eyes. “You see like this”—taking his hands above his head and below his chin—“almost vertical.” A special telephone sits on his desk with enlarged numbers for easier dialing.
Winner Takes All Page 5