Wynn also used his new wealth to make a name for himself back at his alma mater. He pledged $2.5 million to the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 to fund a new project, the Therapeutic Initiative for Hereditary Retinal Degeneration. Wynn made it clear that he didn’t want the initiative named for him, according to a thank-you letter from the school.
The thing he wanted named for him was Wynn Commons—part of Penn’s student union quadrangle—for which he pledged $7.5 million in July 1995. It was named for him [renamed in 2018], and the school credits Wynn with a picture of him on its website, but it was Mirage Resorts shareholders who actually paid for the bulk of Wynn’s $10 million in pledges to Penn—$6.6 million, according to the company’s records.
Mirage’s SEC filings show that among the plane rides, hotel suites, meals, and other goodies allowed to certain executives was the use of Mirage employees for “personal services.” The Wynns’ home at Shadow Creek, for example, was designed with help of Atlandia, Mirage’s design subsidiary, which kept detailed records on the entire project—every tchotchke, faucet, electrical fixture, and lamp purchased for the home.
The Wynns’ home at Shadow Creek became a Mediterranean showpiece, with two swimming pools—one a lap pool—overlooking expansive gardens.
The three-bedroom, 12,000-square-foot house was built in a semicircle that opened onto a circular court and a water fountain. The vistas from the windows were of the golf course beyond the gardens. A wide, circular hallway connected the rooms.
The master bedroom faced the golf course’s eighteenth hole. In one direction lay Elaine Wynn’s elaborate suite of closets and her bath. This boudoir consisted of five smaller rooms with elaborate wood millwork, drawers for jewels, racks for gowns. There was a central dressing area. To one side lay a cosmetic room with a television and stereo system, leading out to a private spa with a tiled hot tub and sitting area. Her bath opened onto an outdoor terrace.
In the other direction lay Steve Wynn’s closet—the size of a large bedroom itself—elaborately lit to aid his failing eyes. That closet led to a curious small oval room. It’s easy to imagine this oval room tickling Wynn’s funny bone. At times, it was adorned with two flags on floor poles—a U.S. flag and a presidential seal flag—gifts from George Bush, according to a Wynn executive. The room became George Bush’s tiny oval office during his visits to Shadow Creek.
Later, the oval room contained Elaine’s Pilates machine, says a person who worked there.
Steve Wynn’s boyish playful nature also showed in his round, two-story library. It is the sort of room that people who dream of being outlandishly rich dream up. Its walls are lined with fine books to the high ceiling. Tall brass ladders travel around on rails.
The library held a secret: a small hidden door, masked by an antique collection of works by Dante. The poor old volumes had had their guts replaced with Styrofoam to reduce their weight on the door. Anyone with the knowledge of where to press could open this door and make his or her way into the small oval room and beyond to Wynn’s closet.
Dan Lee was not as fussy about riverboat casinos as his boss in the early 1990s. Lee headed to Biloxi, Mississippi—a beach town with Southern romance, live oaks, and antebellum mansions along the strand tucked among honky-tonk motels and casinos.
Forty-three million people lived within six hundred miles of Biloxi, including population centers like Memphis, Orlando, and Dallas. The region offered low taxes, high population growth, a plentiful supply of labor, and highly cooperative state officials who were keen for commercial investment. To Dan Lee, this looked like unmined gold.
Lee urged Wynn to buy a countrified casino called the Boomtown that sat on Biloxi Bay. But Wynn wasn’t interested in running a Harrah’s-style riverboat. He put another Golden Nugget veteran, Barry Shier, in charge of the project and found a glorious 18.2 acre site just off of Interstate 110, down the road from downtown Biloxi. They bought the property for $27 million—more than the entire cost of the state’s first casino in Tunica.
Legally, the casino had to be a riverboat, but it wouldn’t look or behave like one. Wynn wanted to do for Mississippi what the Mirage had done for Nevada. He called the place the Golden Nugget when he announced the plans in November 1995.
Early discussions with the head of the Mississippi casino-regulatory commission, General Paul Harvey, left the Mississippians with the impression that the project would cost around $110 million. By the time the plans were announced publicly, the cost was already $200 million—paltry by Vegas standards, but a shocking price tag in Mississippi. “Nobody’s ever spent that kinda money here,” General Harvey said in a 1999 interview.
Wynn, unwilling to spend much time in Mississippi, left Shier to get busy there while Wynn focused on his next new casino in Las Vegas, the Beau Rivage.
It was another vacation that changed the destiny of that resort. While the Wynns were on holiday with their friends Paul Anka and his wife, the group took the singer’s boat out onto Lake Como in Italy. Wynn became captivated by the vista of a village called Bellagio, where hotels and houses nestled romatically against the banks.
The giggling group looked up the word Bellagio in an Italian dictionary: “A place of elegant relaxation,” it said. The way Wynn tells it, they all cheered, “That’s the name of the new hotel!”
So the Beau Rivage in Las Vegas became the Bellagio. Eventually, the Biloxi casino would inherit the castoff name of Beau Rivage. In Las Vegas, the planned water skiers and beaches and French architecture were replaced by a splendorous Italianate theme. “Ten months’ worth of architectural drawings hit the trash can,” says Bobby Baldwin.
The world had become accustomed to a Las Vegas of themes—pirates, Egypt, Oz. Wynn wanted a new kind of theme: luxury. Marble bathrooms, peaceful gardens, classical music.
Wynn couldn’t contain his excitement. Dan Lee recalls dining one evening at the Mirage with Larry Haverty, then a managing director with State Street Research. Wynn ran into them and settled right in to give the full spiel, to Haverty’s joy. “He was like a kid in a candy store,” says Haverty. “Two huge strips on either side of Caesars. It was almost like monopoly. He had [reached] critical mass.”
Since the stock market was closed at the time of his meeting with Wynn, Haverty waited until five a.m. Las Vegas time to get on the phone and order his team in Boston to start buying Mirage shares. “We knew enough about the Las Vegas market that one and one equal three,” he says. “This was just one of the amazing opportunities that happen once in a lifetime. I thought [Steve Wynn] had a vision of how to extract money from people, by building edifices that [are] unparalleled.”
By mid-1995, the Bellagio’s price tag had climbed to $1 billion. It continued upward. Within two years, the grapevine—a line that traveled in mere seconds from Las Vegas to Wall Street—was abuzz with Bellagio gossip.
Wynn was lining up an extraordinary list of restaurants and shops. Armani! Le Cirque!—or so the rumors said. This sounded unbelievable to many people. They scoffed. But it turned out that Wynn’s track record of success at high-end gambling was alluring to luxury retailers.
Wynn’s idea wasn’t entirely original. The Forum Shops at Caesars had introduced high-end shopping to casinos. And Wynn had been watching his construction contractor, Tony Marnell, turn an off-the-Strip casino into a hot spot by offering, among other things, fine food in Las Vegas.
Tony Marnell is the son of a bricklayer. A tall, exacting man with tight curls that were once black but are now graying, Marnell’s rugged face looks as though it might have met its share of knuckles. This and his size would suggest a tough manner and a deep voice, but when Marnell opens his mouth, what emerges is gentle and high-pitched. He is shy. To relax, he loves to cook.
Marnell and his construction company, Marnell Corrao Associates, profited mightily from the Las Vegas boom in the 1990s. He built the Mirage and Excalibur, and built or expanded the Forum Shops at Caesars and other Las Vegas landmarks. Then he got the bug himself.
In 1990, Marnell opened a tropic-themed casino and five-hundred-room hotel off the Strip. He called it the Rio. No one on the Strip paid much attention to this locals’ joint, but it became more than a hobby to Marnell. In his spare time, he would head to the Rio’s kitchens, shrug off his designer suit jacket, and slice ingredients for a good marinara like his Italian mama made. “No dish is served in this hotel without me tasting it,” he said in 1997.
When the tourists heard about the Rio’s food, they left the Strip and made their way across Interstate 15 for seafood, French, and astoundingly authentic Chinese cuisine. Marnell expanded, building a second hotel tower—all suites—and more restaurants, slots, and stores. He imported ovens from Europe to bake bread. He put an aquarium in the basement for fresh seafood.
Marnell brought in Jean-Louis Palladin—a Michelin-starred chef who had been running Jean-Louis at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.—to run a restaurant called Napa. Palladin’s arrival astonished foodies everywhere. Las Vegas patrons required some education. “Even foie gras is considered exotic here,” Palladin told USA Today in 1997.
When he was growing up, Marnell’s family drank wine with dinner—usually the bottle came with a screw top. At the Rio, Marnell hired Barrie Larvin, a pudgy British master sommelier from the Ritz Hotel in London. The wine world gasped. Fritz Hatton, then director of the auctioneer Christie’s wine department in New York, described the general response among oenophiles as “wondrous horror.”
The jolly Larvin, afloat with $6 million to build a wine cellar, scoffed, “People come to Las Vegas and think they’re going to be met at the airport by a prostitute.” He put a stop to cocktail waitresses serving white zinfandel over ice, but he also took pains to puncture snobbish wine myths. When Marnell invited him to a party at his house, Larvin was asked by a guest why waiters often hand the cork to a diner to sniff. “Because he’s full of shit,” Larvin replied with a laugh.
Larvin quickly became the toast of wine auctions all over the world. He bought all but nine vintages produced by the legendary Chateau d’Yquem from 1859 until 1989. Francis Ford Coppola launched his prized 1992 Rubicon at the Rio in March 1997. The director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, who was lately devoting his attentions to developing the Niebaum-Coppola winery in Napa Valley, brightened with surprise when he took a peek at the Rio’s wine cellar. Coppola, his hair streaked with gray, announced with a glass of a grand cru Champagne in one hand, “You can see that he’s been given carte blanche.”
Coppola’s winemaker, Scott Mcleod, threw the party at the Rio because he saw the vast potential of millions of visitors. Big-city retailers and restaurateurs, unimpressed by Las Vegas’s 1.1 million residents, had long written the town off as backwater. But at the time, thirty million high-spending tourists were visiting Las Vegas each year—a potential that other retailers and restaurants had been inexcusably slow to grasp.
Next thing you know, business travelers started heading to the Rio to stay in its suites, eat its food, and drink its wine. Soon even the high rollers were making their way across I-15 to play baccarat there.
Even the Rio’s cocktail waitress uniforms were innovative—confetti-colored bathing suits and heels an inch higher than those worn at most other casinos. Babe-a-licious cocktail waitresses played a big role in the hotel’s success with businessmen.
One reason they were such babes was that they weren’t represented by the Culinary Union. Some cocktail “goddesses” at unionized Caesars Palace had been working there since the place opened in 1966, protected by seniority rules. The Rio on the other hand had a reputation for firing waitresses who gained weight. Casino owners pay a lot of attention to the appearance of their cocktail waitresses—and with good reason: They’re an important part of the food chain in Las Vegas.
When Steve Wynn noticed that a dozen of the Mirage’s servers were growing out of their blue uniforms, he offered to build them a gym. “He said, ‘You’re too fat, and I’m embarrassed to have you working here,’” one of the waitresses told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Wynn conceded he had been frank. “We’ve got a couple girls who have let themselves go, and it is unattractive. I tried to use my personal persuasion to get them to take care of themselves,” he said. The waitresses, most of them older than forty, sued Mirage Resorts, claiming they were forced to wear one-and-a-half-inch heels and to sign contracts requiring them to have no more than a six-pound weight variance from their weight at hiring, or they would be placed on “weight probation” and face potential termination. It took six years to settle most of the lawsuits.
All these years later, Tony Marnell is rarely credited with his influence on Las Vegas. While Jean-Louis Palladin was serving up foie gras at the Rio, Wynn was chasing down Sirio Maccioni. Maccioni opened New York’s elite Le Cirque restaurant with five kilos of the finest white truffles, setting New York on its ear, food-wise, in 1974, back before New York was a food sophisticate.
Wynn wanted Maccioni to run a restaurant at Bellagio. The restaurateur’s first response was to laugh. He is an old-world gentleman who expects his restaurant guests to come dressed for the occasion. Elitism, to Maccioni, is an aspiration. “Elite? Of course I believe in elite,” he says.
Maccioni lives on Fifty-third Street in Manhattan, and two of his sons live within two blocks. When Wynn came calling, he had been to Las Vegas once—he stayed at Caesars Palace—and the visit wasn’t a high point. “I swore to myself I’d never go back,” Maccioni recalls.
But Wynn sent his plane. He put Maccioni up in a villa at the Mirage. He did this five times, Maccioni says. Maccioni had a hard time understanding what Wynn was talking about as they toured the site of the old Dunes. But Maccioni’s son Mario understood. So did Elizabeth Blau, Le Cirque’s manager and a friend of Wynn’s daughter Gillian.
It took a year to cut the deal. Wynn promised to build the restaurant, but give Maccioni the right to approve everything. It was the kind of offer that only a casino could afford to make. Sirio Maccioni agreed, but only because Mario wanted to do it.
“People were making fun of me,” Maccioni recalls. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re going to Las Vegas? To do what?’”
A few years later, people would forget that they’d gasped at the idea of great food in Las Vegas. There would be so many people trying to choose among great restaurants that there would even be a special Las Vegas restaurants guide.
It dawned on Wynn that he could fill his new place with celebrity chefs and that they could become a draw, like the volcano and the pirate show.
“Executives in food and beverage are like tits on a bull,” Wynn said once. “They’re unnecessary.”
He dived headlong after the most famous chefs he could get his hands on. He offered Jean-Georges Vongerichten 5 percent of the gross, and 10 percent of the net to bring Prime to Bellagio—numbers that could make a chef rich beyond his dreams with the kind of traffic Las Vegas provides, numbers equaled only in cities like New York. And Mirage Resorts was footing the bill. Wynn pursued Julian Serrano, Todd English, Nobu Matsuhisa. He cut a deal with Petrossian to have caviar 365 days a year.
One weekend, at Gillian’s wedding, Wynn tried another coup—to hire away Elizabeth Blau from Maccioni. Because of her job, the statuesque Blau knew most of the big names in the chef business. Shocked at the offer, she went for a hike to consider it. When she returned, she signed on for the revolution.
Blau got busy pursuing famous chefs who looked at Las Vegas as though it was Green Acres. “The first question Jean-Georges asked is, ‘Where am I going to get my bread?’” Blau says.
Wynn’s basic negotiating stance with the chefs was the same one he took with other artists: “I’ll give you what you want. I want you here.”
Nobu Matsuhisa slipped through Wynn’s fingers, choosing instead to open a sushi restaurant at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. But for bread, Wynn brought in Nancy Silverton, the award-winning Los Angeles owner of La Brea Bakery, and built her a satellit
e bakery. He hired Jean-Philippe Maury to be Bellagio’s top pastry chef. Maury in 1997 was presented with a gold medal from French President Jacques Chirac for winning a competition that crowned him Meilleur Ouvrier de France—best pastry chef in France.
“He made a revolution,” Maccioni says. “What Steve Wynn brought to Las Vegas, nobody brought before.”
At Bellagio, there was to be shopping for the likes of the Wynns’ new social set. Wynn sat down with his retail executive, Frank Visconti, who had come to Mirage Resorts by way of Neiman Marcus and Saks. They identified seven luxury retailers who they deemed essential to the Bellagio’s success: Chanel, Gucci, Prada, Hermès, Fred Leighton, Armani, and Tiffany.
The folks at Chanel responded with lip-curling skepticism. Haute couture in the land of sequins and fanny-packs? One high-level Chanel executive told Visconti, “You know, I love the idea but I can’t bear the idea of having ‘Las Vegas’ on our brass plaques: ‘Paris, London, Las Vegas.’”
“Well, then don’t put it on the plaques,” Visconti responded.
While visiting Wynn’s Old Forge home one weekend in 1996, Visconti confessed that he had no contacts at Armani and didn’t know how to open doors there. “Do you have any ideas?” Visconti asked.
Wynn, Visconti recalls, pursed his lips and scrunched his eyes. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Two weeks later, Visconti says, Wynn was having dinner with Giorgio Armani himself at Armani’s home in Italy. Wynn had called Lee Radziwill for an introduction to the designer.
Wynn even broke his cardinal rule of owning everything down to the photo services in his casinos. “I’ve never given a lease in twenty-six years, but there are seven. I need the cachet,” he said. To get them signed, Visconti had to fudge. No one wanted to sign before the others. Finally, someone asked if Chanel had signed. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m looking at his signature,’” Visconti says. “I had to lie to get the first guy.”
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