In November 1993, Wynn gathered a group of Las Vegas casino executives at Shadow Creek to meet Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour. Wynn asked them each to contribute “a quarter”—$250,000—to the Grand Old Party. Shadow Creek hosted more Republican political fund-raisers in Wynn’s battle against Clinton, including a $1,000-a-plate luncheon in 1995 for Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. Clinton’s proposed 4 percent national gambling tax was quickly killed.
The Wynns chose their own address as they moved from Bannie Avenue to Shadow Creek: One Shadow Creek Drive. The romantic Wynn, who had grown up in the woods in Upstate New York, loved it. “It was like going to a cocoon—tranquil,” recalls Elaine Wynn. “There was nothing out there, not even a 7-Eleven. I complained to him. He said, ‘It’s beautiful.’”
Wynn offered home sites to his friends and executives. Only one, a Golden Nugget loyalist named Marc Schorr, was unwise enough to take him up on it. Schorr built a modern house—white and stark like a spaceship. Wynn did not like looking at it as he drove to and from his own home, according to several people close to the company. So he had a forest of trees planted to obscure Schorr’s house.
In June 1991, Steve and Elaine Wynn remarried at the Waldorf Towers in New York, on the same date and in the same place as their first marriage twenty-eight years earlier. Since their divorce in 1986, they had never separated. “Steve just never got around to moving out,” Elaine said.
“We regret to say that the divorce just didn’t work out,” Steve Wynn quipped.
Steve Wynn pointed to a vein bulging in his arm.
“This company runs on my adrenaline. It’s tapped right into my vein!” he hollered at Daniel R. Lee, his chief financial officer, who was trying to negotiate a new employment contract for himself in the late 1990s.
At the time Lee thought it was a “really egotistical” thing to say. Years later, he realized Wynn had been right.
When Dan Lee was a wee, towheaded child in the 1960s, he lived in Syracuse, New York—roughly the same neck of the woods where Steve Wynn had grown up. Lee didn’t have a fancy childhood. His mother raised her children by working as a banquet waitress.
Lee became a self-starter at a young age. He had a friend who managed to get his hands on Playboy magazines. Lee snipped out the pictures and sold them to other kids: 10 cents for a whole girl, 25 cents for a “boob,” more for a “boob and a butt.”
“It was like buying a Mercedes and selling the parts,” Lee says.
This entrepreneurial spirit carried Lee through an undergraduate degree in hotel administration as well as Cornell University’s MBA program. During a summer internship at the hotel company Marriott, Lee saved money by camping in a tent in a park near Marriott’s Bethesda headquarters.
Dan Lee loved minutiae. He read bond indentures late into the night. He pored over offering statements with a clue-seeking relish that most people reserve for a good murder mystery. By the time he was middle-aged, Lee was the chief executive of Pinnacle Gaming, a riverboat casino company, when a hurricane was bearing down on his casino in Lake Charles, Louisiana. From his desk in a Las Vegas high-rise, Lee familiarized himself with nautical charts and studied the stress loads that could be borne by the casino barge. He apprised the remaining staff of where they should hide in the casino for safety and while the winds were still gusting, Lee formulated his plan to pilot his own plane to Lake Charles in the aftermath.
After Marriott, Lee worked as a financial analyst in Boston, where he covered casinos and hotels, including Mirage Resorts. Lee published a report that criticized Mirage for behaving in a surly and amateurish manner with its investors.
Wynn raged, then offered Lee a job in a challenge, as if to say, “You think this is so easy?” Off went the boyish Dan Lee to Las Vegas in 1992 to be Mirage Resorts’ chief financial officer.
This was an astounding career decision. Most Wall Streeters in those days wouldn’t loan money to casinos, let alone move to Las Vegas to work for one.
Lee moved into an office just down the hall from Wynn’s. Soon he was answering to Wynn’s hollers of “Danny Boy!”
All the flotsam of casino life—designers, entertainers, gamblers, politicos, salesmen, cops, and old friends made their way through. “My first day, a kangaroo came into my office,” Lee says. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s a kangaroo. I’m not on Wall Street anymore.’ That place was fun.”
Right before their eldest daughter Gillian’s wedding, Elaine Wynn tried out the decorations in the board room, tying the chairs with big bows. Wynn bellowed instructions to his assistants, Joyce Luman and Cindy Mitchum. Smooching sounds emanated from his office as he baby-talked to Toasty and Harry, his dogs.
The journalist Mark Seal, sent to interview Wynn at the time of Treasure Island’s opening, included the following description of his office at the Mirage in an essay entitled, “Steve Wynn: King of Wow!”
I am led by a publicist through rooms that seem to grow increasingly brighter in color, from a merely bright magenta waiting room into Wynn’s absolutely electrifying office. The carpet is streaked with rivulets of primary colors. The chairs are such a bright shade of magenta they seem to be floating. And leaning back in a white leather chair with armrests big as hotel pillows, his white tennis shoes kicked up on his desk, wearing blue jeans and a black Donald Duck T-shirt, is Steve Wynn.
The Wynns considered Mirage Resorts to be a family, and Wynn saw himself in the role of father. “Every company needs a dada,” he would say.
When the daughter of Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman needed a cochlear implant to allow her to hear, the family-attuned company approved payment in a single phone call, astounding the hospital.
Once, when Dan Lee’s wife lay groggily in a hospital recovery room after a surgery for varicose veins, she overheard the nurses discussing her anxious husband: “Who is this asshole? He thinks we’re going to wheel her into a private room? She’ll recover here like everyone else.” Lee was incensed and mentioned the episode to Wynn.
A day or so later, a senior hospital executive appeared at the Lees’ front door to apologize. Wynn had called, offering Mirage Resorts’ employee training facilities to train the nurses on customer service.
Dan Lee and Glenn Schaeffer at Circus Circus brought new resources to Las Vegas by pioneering relationships with banks that had previously shunned casinos. Lee also bought up land for Mirage Resorts’ expansion and, perhaps in his most vital role, shielded Wall Street from Steve Wynn’s increasing theatrics.
Once a spoiled boy, Wynn was now catered to as a genius. Those who worked closely with him developed a cultish environment.
“When he hates something, he lets you know it. When he loves something, he lets you know it. It’s a great thing to leave a ‘Good Steve’ meeting,” says John Schadler, Mirage Resorts’ former head of advertising. “Which is why there are people who live from meeting to meeting.
“If you didn’t have really thick skin, you didn’t know if you were going to last there, but you wanted to because you wanted to be a part of what was happening there,” continues Schadler. He left Mirage in 1999 and formed his own ad agency, Schadler Kramer Group, taking on Kirk Kerkorian’s company as his primary client.
While choosing photographs for the company’s annual report one year, Wynn tossed the photos down the length of the boardroom table and shouted, “Who the fuck chose these?” And there at the table cringed poor Alan Feldman, the PR guy who had chosen them.
“He’d throw [things] against the wall and say, ‘This is bullshit. What do I pay you for?’” says another longtime executive. During a negotiation with the wild-haired fight promoter Don King, Wynn got up on his chair and then climbed on his desk to make a point.
Wynn’s battle-fatigued executives learned to duck when shrapnel was incoming. His assistants Joyce and Cindy would warn people away, rescheduling his calendar around his temper, but sooner or later, every senior executive had his or her turn. “The first time you have ‘The Moment’ with Ste
ve, your life is changed,” one former executive explained. “From that point, you’re more careful, more of an ass-kisser.”
In an ugly lawsuit—stemming from years of rivalry with Donald Trump—the Golden Nugget’s president, Dennis Gomes, accused Wynn of a litany of abuses. Gomes had been recruited to run Trump’s Atlantic City properties in 1991, before his contract with Wynn was due to end. Wynn sued for breach of contract. During the ensuing legal snarl, Gomes accused Wynn of racism, sexism, and financial malfeasance. In interviews and legal papers that included a 660-page deposition, Gomes portrayed Wynn as a womanizer and as a brutal employer who lambasted his staff.
“His face turned completely red and all puffed up and his eyes bulged and he started screaming at the top of his lungs and banging his head on the table,” Gomes asserted in one interview.
Gomes said Wynn used the company jet to fly his dog to a surgeon, to vacation in Australia with Elaine, and to travel to New Jersey so Wynn, Gomes, and another casino executive could be fitted for new suits.
Wynn dismissed it all as lies. No court ever ruled on the veracity of Gomes’s claims. The civil lawsuits were settled before what had promised to be a juicy trial.
George Mason had sat on Wynn’s board of executives since 1973. He joined MGM Grand’s board in 2000, and he was a friend of both Wynn and Kerkorian.
“[Wynn’s] board meetings were always fun. They were exciting. They’d get you involved,” Mason said. “Most board meetings are just boring.”
Las Vegas casino titans’ ideas about personal security were changed on a Monday night in July 1993 when the Wynns’ twenty-six-year-old daughter, Kevyn, was kidnapped from her home in Spanish Trails.
The kidnappers ordered Kevyn to call her father. She later testified that her father suspected his zany daughter was making a prank call until she began to cry. “Don’t worry, honey, I’m gonna take care of this,” Wynn told his baby girl.
When the kidnappers demanded he remove $2.5 million from the vault, Wynn gave them a blast of his classic temper, worried that taking so much money from the casino would draw the interest of regulatory authorities. “I said, ‘You can’t do that, it will cause a complete stir,’” Wynn told the jury when the case went to court.
The kidnappers then asked if taking $1.45 million from the vault would cause a stir. “How the hell do I know?” Wynn replied. “The chairman of the board doesn’t come down to the vault every day.”
As it turned out, he did withdraw the ransom in hundred-dollar bills from the Mirage’s coffers. Wynn called the police after delivering the money with the aid of Mirage security. Kevyn was found, bound but unharmed, at McCarran International Airport where she had been left on the floor of her black Audi, whose license plate read BIONDA—Italian for “blond.”
Elaine Wynn was told of the incident when it was over. Wynn said he didn’t think she could have handled the stress. “I was terror-stricken, a word I did not appreciate until that happened,” Wynn said.
The bumbling kidnappers, who turned out to be amateurs, were captured (after one began spending the cash), tried, and convicted. The FBI advised all casino operators to review their personal security precautions.
Wynn didn’t want to travel around with a phalanx of bodyguards like Donald Trump. (Trump has been schooled in such security practices as allowing his bodyguard to exit an elevator in front of him into a public space.) Instead, Wynn’s friend Bo Derek recommended a Los Angeles dog trainer, Howard Rodriguez, who once trained narcotics dogs and advertises in the Robb Report. Wynn thereafter employed a steady stream of highly trained German “Shutzhund” attack dogs that he cuddles and claims are pets.
There was a secret office. In the Mirage days, it was tucked away on Industrial Road, a mile or so from the Mirage, at the offices of a subsidiary called Atlandia Design.
In this office was a long drafting table and two tall drafting chairs for Wynn and his architect. The table was lit vividly to aid Wynn’s failing eyes. There was a bucket full of colored, felt-tip pens that he used to move walls, enlarge hallways, and eliminate staircases. Wynn’s designers learned never to give him an original blueprint.
Once, Wynn peered at blueprints for a resort he hoped to build in Atlantic City. He wanted to make a point about human traffic—where people would walk and where the gardens should go. He grabbed at the basket of pens, fumbled, sent them all flying, retrieved one, and began scribbling with bold lines and arrows.
Blind or not, Wynn mentally crawls into blueprints. He envisions what it will feel like to be in that hallway, to turn that corner, to arrive at the top of that stairway. He smells the air and touches the cold marble.
It’s here in this other office of his that it’s possible to grasp how truly complex these Las Vegas casino resorts have become.
He imagines how long it will take to load a cart with plates, napkins, utensils, salt and pepper shakers, one pink orchid, and an entrée from the room-service assembly line; roll this into the elevator; rise to the correct hotel floor; and proceed down a not-too-long corridor to the room of a guest who will hungrily lift the lid on a plate of scrambled eggs garnished with a sprig of fresh chervil and—if Wynn has put the kitchen close enough to an elevator that is the Lamborghini of its class, and if he has hired a top-notch room-service manager who can turn the Barnum & Bailey of a hotel kitchen into an efficient and organized workspace—then this guest, among 8,000 others, will see steam rise from her still-warm eggs while her butter waits dotted with chilled beads of perspiration.
“We’re all funny creatures in the morning,” Wynn says. “The sugar, the Sweet’N Low, the jam and butter—it all has to go on the cart. You can’t miss the sugar—it screws up the whole breakfast because people can’t drink their coffee.”
He worries about the front desk. Will guests be appropriately awed and wait no longer than a few minutes in line? He considers the placement of architectural support columns in the porte cochere: They mustn’t get in the way of speedy parking valets. The swimming pool should draw the sexy and beautiful, who will in turn draw the old and rich. It should have a wide-open area to entertain parties of conventioneers, wading steps for children, and nooks for romance. There is the casino, with its dealers and pit bosses and floor supervisors and slot machines and coin fillers and cocktail waitresses.
It isn’t unusual for the members of Wynn’s design team to consider taking a year off or a change of career direction after working on a project with him. At the age of fifty-seven, the architect Joel Bergman conceded that the week that Treasure Island opened, he’d had enough.
“I worked a lot of hours over the fifteen years with Steve, and I think I want to take a rest,” Bergman said in a local newspaper interview at the time. “I’m not going to quit working, but I am going to slow my pace down. If you notice, there are two drafting stools at my rather long drawing board. One is Steve Wynn’s. Steve and I spent thousands upon thousands of hours there.”
Wynn designed the Bellagio at those offices. His original idea for the Dunes site would have been an echo of his youth—a hotel modeled after the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, where he and his parents had often stayed. Outside, he planned a fourteen-acre lake for championship water skiing—harkening back to Old Forge.
“I envision a place where we could host the world windsurfing championships and waterskiing championships,” Wynn said. Styled in the French architectural mode, he called it Beau Rivage, or “beautiful shore.”
Aviation regulators thought the hotel tower was too tall. The county wanted to split the property to make room for a thoroughfare and sewer line. Manmade lakes had been banned in water-starved Clark County.
Wynn dispatched these issues with the efficiency of a politically connected businessman. He lopped twenty feet off the tower, pledged $1 million for local road projects, and convinced local authorities that the Dunes’ former golf course used more water than his lake.
In January of 1993, Wynn estimated that Beau Rivage would cost $400 milli
on—more than the Mirage, but not frighteningly so. He expected the new resort to be completed in 1996. Then he scribbled all over the blueprints. By the following fall, the cost had reached $900 million.
Early on, he had described a resort with 3,000 hotel rooms in a 49-story blue-glass hotel tower, fronted on three sides by a 17-acre island in a 50-acre lake. Shops and restaurants would nestle among cliffs and waterfalls. There would be no swimming pool—only a 980-foot beach where guests could rent paddleboats or ski. Wynn dubbed it the “single most extravagant hotel ever built on earth.”
In the midst of this, Merlin, the eldest Mirage dolphin, died in October 1994. He was thirty years old. Wynn sadly issued the same sort of statement he would have made for a relative: “He lived a long life and has left us a wonderful legacy as he fathered three calves at our habitat—Squire, Bugsy, and Picabo.”
Even the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran an obituary: “Besides his cows and calves, Merlin leaves Sigma and Banjo, his younger companions from Florida.”
In those years, Wynn was visited by his past. The old gang from Utica’s Jewish Community Center held a reunion at the Mirage, not because Wynn invited them—he didn’t—but because Wayne Blank dropped Wynn’s name with the sales office and negotiated a better price than the offer from Caesars Palace.
About seventy people showed up, and so did Wynn. “I’ve never been invited to a party at my own place before.” Wynn chuckled. He escorted his old friends backstage at the Siegfried & Roy show and even invited a group to lunch at the club at Shadow Creek.
Arthur Resnikoff found his old Boy Scout friend little changed in middle age: “Same brass balls, but more polish.”
Chapter Eight
THE OUTSIDERS
We do not get intoxicated with Las Vegas.
Winner Takes All Page 7