Bellagio couldn’t draw the numbers of people necessary to support it without a very special show in its showroom six nights a week. What with Mystere’s success at Treasure Island, Wynn went back to that well, asking for a new specially created Cirque du Soleil show. Still harkening back to his boyhood days on the lake, he asked for a show based on water. At first, it was to be called Eau—the French word for water. But people feared that Americans would mistake it for “Eww,” according to people involved in the discussions. So they lit on something appropriately surreal: O.
Outside Bellagio would be more water. Not waterskiing, as Wynn had originally imagined, because he needed the space for a convention center and theater. Instead, he would build an eight-acre lake with water fountains that would be choreographed to perform like dancers.
Wynn hired a Southern California company called Wet Design that had been founded by three Disney alumni. Naturally, he threw himself into the technology. He became an overnight expert in fountains. He wanted the tallest, fastest, most graceful water fountains in the world.
He brought in Kenny Ortega, the Emmy Award–winning choreographer of Dirty Dancing, who would later go on to direct High School Musical. So the fountains danced to “Singin’ in the Rain,” an aria by Luciano Pavarotti, “Luck Be a Lady,” “Big Spender,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” and a Rachmaninoff rhapsody.
To make water dance, streams must jet high for a crescendo. Spurts must leap and stop for a staccato movement. Water must sweep horizontally and in circles, and it must halt instantly and then fall back to the lake on tempo.
All this wasn’t possible with existing technology. Wet Design set about inventing new machinery. There were robotic nozzles capable of moving water 180 degrees in any direction. There was a controller to send water at 698 miles per hour along an arc of the circles. There were “hypershooters” that could shoot water 250 feet in the air using air pressure at 200 pounds per square inch. And the hardware had to disappear into the lake so it would be invisible between performances.
The robotic nozzles came to be called “oarsmen” because of the way they could swish water from side to side, causing it to swing and twist in the air.
A scientist from the California Institute of Technology was brought in to figure out why the “hypershooters” were firing wildly and inconsistently. It turned out that compressed air was chilling to fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit when the jets fired, clogging the works with ice balls.
Ultimately, Bellagio’s fountains would operate with 1,203 nozzles, 4,500 submersed lights, 5 miles of piping, and enough electrical wire to run from Las Vegas to Los Angeles—all built in two concentric rings and settled in 25 million gallons of water. The water could be blasted 240 feet in the air, with as much as 17,000 gallons of water in the air at any time. It’s enough to cool a Mojave summer’s day, if you’re standing close enough.
The fountains were tested on Bellagio’s dry construction site, the tower rising behind, on a vast expanse of flattened dirt that would one day fill with water. Wynn fussed and fumed. He changed the color of the lights from multicolored to white, which he said seemed classier.
Bellagio’s price tag was rising so fast that even Wynn was shocked. He asked Dan Lee, his financial ferret, to look into things. Lee hired the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, at a cost of $80,000, to take a look at Marnell’s books. They wanted to compare the prices Marnell was charging for Bellagio and the Rio. “If we were getting screwed somewhere, we knew it would show up at the Rio,” Lee explained in 1997, about a year and a half after the audit.
Lee didn’t want to appear to question Marnell’s honesty, so he claimed that Wynn wanted to compare Bellagio’s costs to the Monte Carlo—a 1996 casino joint venture between Mirage Resorts and Circus Circus that Marnell had also constructed. “If [Marnell] was getting kickbacks, the subcontractors would have factored the cost of the kickbacks into the price of their bids,” Lee said. But the subcontractors’ prices were basically the same for the Monte Carlo and for Bellagio. “We found nothing,” Lee said.
Bellagio was simply bigger, more deluxe, more complicated.
Was the world ready for it?
Two years before Bellagio was due to open, Alan Feldman launched an education project for the national media. National magazines and newspapers saw Las Vegas for what it had always been: a tacky home to has-been entertainers and drunken bachelor parties. Wynn, meanwhile, wanted onto the pages of fashion and high culture outlets.
Feldman started making the rounds in New York in 1996, approaching the editors of publications like Travel & Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Vanity Fair. He went with his head down, hat in his hand: “I know we’re Las Vegas, and we’re not really on your radar…”
Chapter Ten
CRUSHED VELVET WORLD
Las Vegas allows people to try things outside their comfort zones.
—TONY MARNELL, CASINO ARCHITECT AND BUILDER
Shortly before Labor Day in 1997, several Mirage Resorts executives got calls inviting them to the Wynns’ home at Shadow Creek that Thursday for dinner.
“It was a very odd invitation because Steve and Elaine weren’t known to have you over,” says John Schadler, one of the attendees. Others included Marc Schorr; Arte Nathan, head of human resources (who had been the little brother of one of Wynn’s boyhood friends in Utica); Alan Feldman, his public relations guru; and the executives’ wives.
Wynn appeared to want to introduce them to a new idea. Bellagio was due to open in a little more than a year. “Because this place is so elaborate, it needs to have a masterpiece,” Wynn told his guests. He proposed buying one piece of rare art to serve as the hotel’s center attraction. Like the volcano, only classier.
“We’ll buy a Caravaggio, we’ll buy a Titian, and we’ll put it behind the front desk at Bellagio,” Wynn said.
It occurred to Schadler that this could be like buying the Mona Lisa: lines out the door to see it. With an initial art acquisition budget of $10 million, according to one knowledgeable person, Wynn set the plan in motion. This reflected Wynn’s attempt to draw yet another crowd that had avoided Las Vegas in the past. With the Mirage, he had introduced middle-class vacationers to Sin City, and they had spent less money on gambling than any group of visitors before. With Bellagio, Wynn was aiming to move up the social ladder to the upper- and upper-middle classes—educated professionals with more expensive spending habits—the kind who shop at Chanel and Prada, and would spend money on a very expensive dinner. These people’s sensibilities had been insulted by Las Vegas in the 1980s and early 1990s, but Wynn was betting that they’d respond favorably to a little well-publicized culture.
Wynn later told the interviewer Charlie Rose about the germination of his interest in art:
I was building Bellagio, and I was thinking, like, gardens. What could be another qualitative statement about this hotel? Not quantitative. I wasn’t trying to attract a crowd. At a billion seven, I thought I—if I hadn’t attracted a crowd at a billion seven, not likely a picture would help.
But I thought what—what could tell people that we understand you come to Las Vegas for all kinds of stimulation, the animation of a casino, the restaurants and all the rest, but we know that people care for quiet moments of reflective beauty. So if there were paintings in Bellagio, it would make a statement that we understand who you are, and we intend to stimulate you on all levels. And if you want a quiet hour with wonderful paintings by great masters, there’s also that here. That was my qualitative statement of the art.
By some accounts, Wynn had been out buying art for himself for nearly a year by the time of his Labor Day dinner. According to Bellagio’s own records, he was actively buying and selling major pieces of art as early as October 1997—a month after the dinner at Shadow Creek.
There is no neatly laid-out account of Wynn’s art trades, which were sometimes made with Mirage Resorts money, other times with his own, and sometimes involved trades between himself and Mirage. The art world
is secretive, and trades among wealthy collectors are often cloaked behind nondisclosure agreements. The details of Wynn’s art career can be pieced together from interviews, reports in the art press, and from a series of lucrative contracts he made with the Bellagio to buy, sell, or lease the art.
Also, Steve Wynn, with his vaudeville genes, sometimes couldn’t resist showing off. As he had with the dolphins, Wynn studied his subject closely. He consulted art experts. He traveled around looking at art. He bought art. He got himself a dealer’s license.
Caravaggios and Titians, dating from the sixteenth century high Renaissance, are extremely rare. So Wynn turned from his original concept to nineteenth-century Impressionists and embarked upon an extraordinary buying spree that lasted for several years and eventually contributed to one of the most dramatic events in his life.
He bought for $12 million Edgar Degas’s Dancer, Taking Her Bow—a fine but largely unknown work that had been displayed publicly only twice, in 1924 and 1948.
In the same month, for $1,650,000 he picked up a painting by Pablo Picasso called Seated Woman. It was based on Françoise Gilot, the mother of Claude and Paloma Picasso.
On December 5, he bought a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Pointing Man, for $7,350,000.
Five days later came a Henri Matisse still life, for $4,562,812.
Then a real masterpiece, on December 19: Vincent van Gogh’s Woman in a Blue Dress. The stunning price was $47.5 million—a handful more than the cost of the entire Shadow Creek Golf Resort.
Wynn soon became enamored with contemporary artists.
In March 1998, he paid $50 million for works of art by Jasper Johns (Highway), Franz Kline (August Day), Willem de Kooning (Police Gazette), Roy Lichtenstein (Torpedo… Los!), Robert Rauschenberg (Small Red Painting), and Cy Twombly (Untitled).
Wynn let it slip right from the auction tables that the art he was buying would be hung on the walls of a Las Vegas casino. The response resembled the oenophiles’ horror of fine wine in Las Vegas, only louder. Masterpieces for philistines and sexpots? The gasps were audible.
But a few people in Las Vegas began to stand a little taller. Like Roger Thomas, the son of Wynn’s former banker, Parry Thomas.
Thomas had been Wynn’s head designer for nearly twenty years. He is responsible in one way or another for most of the fabrics and carpets, furnishings, and other decor of Wynn’s casinos. Thomas grew up with his nose in art books and then hustled off to art school. It was Roger Thomas who arranged, in 1983, for Wynn to be invited to lunch with the artist Andy Warhol at his studio in Union Square in Manhattan. According to Wynn, who wrote about the meeting years later in one of his self-published art catalogs, Warhol put a tape recorder on a table in his office and asked to speak with Wynn for his magazine, Interview. Wynn at the time was a fledgling celebrity for his ads with Frank Sinatra for the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City. At the end of their conversation, Warhol snapped three Polaroid photos of Wynn seated backward on a chair, unsmiling, but with the intense gaze of someone who likes being the focus of the camera’s attention.
Warhol tossed two photos on the floor, stepping on them as they left. One day, back in Las Vegas, three silk-screen Warhol portraits arrived—one in white, one in blue, and one in gold with diamond dust. Four years later, Warhol was dead.
The portraits wound up in the collection Wynn was amassing.
Like many well-educated Las Vegans, Roger Thomas felt affection and shame for his hometown. “I grew up in Las Vegas. I was embarrassed by Las Vegas,” Thomas said in April 1998. “I always aspired to fine art. I thought this was kitsch.
“The world wants Las Vegas to be a sinful place of tasteless glamour,” Thomas continued. “They consume it at an incredible rate. People don’t think of Las Vegas as a place where children are being educated and adults have discussions about minimalist art.
“People envision Las Vegas as a place with a craps dealer talking to a hooker about a gambler. I don’t think they want to allow us membership in the real world, the normal world.
“Crushed velvet has its place in the world,” Thomas concluded, “but Las Vegas doesn’t have to be a crushed-velvet world.”
It was cash from that crushed-velvet world that allowed Wynn to hang out at New York art hot spots like Mary Boone’s gallery. He spent so much time and money at Sotheby’s that rumors would one day circulate that he wanted to buy the auction house. He outbid the world’s biggest art buyers, such as Ronald Lauder and S.I. Newhouse. He carried enough weight at Sotheby’s that when he was bidding on a Cézanne still life in May 1999, Sotheby’s chairman Diana D. Brooks personally took Wynn’s bids by telephone.
Wynn was adopted by Bill Acquavella, one of the art world’s most prestigious art dealers. As he ushered them around, the Wynns began to appear in gossip columns alongside Wendy Vanderbilt, Count and Countess von Berckheim, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, and Eugenie and John Radziwill—socialites of the Acquavellas’ acquaintance.
Wynn, or rather Mirage Resorts, hired a curator—Libby Lumpkin, wife of Las Vegas–based art critic Dave Hickey.
When Wynn started competing with renowned museums, it became apparent that he was amassing a major collection. When Wynn picked up a Georges Seurat, Paysage, L’ile de la Grande-Jatte, in May 1999 for a reported $35.2 million, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight criticized the Getty Trust for missing out.
Wynn became obsessed with Picasso, another man of enormous appetites. He flew off to meet Picasso’s children. He flew to Europe in pursuit of Picasso’s former mistresses. He created a restaurant at Bellagio called Picasso and decorated it with Picassos and photos of Picasso by Man Ray. He hired Picasso’s son Claude to design the restaurant’s furnishings. Wynn put himself on a first-name basis with the long-dead artist. “Pablo,” Wynn called him.
The Mirage jets were now ferrying art back to Las Vegas. Works arrived at the Mirage casino in crates.
At first, the pieces were stored in Wynn’s office. Then they were stacked in the boardroom. For a time, the thin Giacometti sculpture propped open the door to Wynn’s office, according to a person who worked for the company. (Later, the Wynns’ home at Shadow Creek, with its full bar in the living room, became a depository for art. The walls were wired for security as paintings were hung. Extra art went into the bay of the three-car garage which was converted, according to security staff at Shadow Creek, into a giant safe.)
Mirage officials and the company’s insurers began to fret about art storage. “I can’t stick it in the warehouse, because I’d have to put a guard on it twenty-four hours,” Dan Lee griped in January 1998. “So Steve says, ‘Stick it in the salon privé.’”
So off went the art to decorate the salon privé—Mirage’s baccarat pit, which consisted of several rooms separated by a balustrade from the sea of slot machines.
The art was expensive, but the publicity was priceless.
“We decided to build the single most elegant place ever created—regardless of whether you’re talking about Paris or London or anywhere else,” Wynn said of Bellagio. “Now, this is a very lofty goal.”
Gastronomy at the Rio. Art at Mirage. Other casinos began to enter a dialogue with the higher classes. Sheldon Adelson, the would-be mogul who bought the Sands from Kerkorian, announced he would build a high-quality replica of Venice—from the Doge’s Palace to the canals. Adelson irked Wynn by claiming he would have the biggest, nicest all-suite hotel rooms in Las Vegas. While dividing his time between Israel and Las Vegas, Adelson sent his executives around the world to find Italian artisans, fine marble, and even plump curtain tassels at bargain prices.
Suddenly, Las Vegas was generating buzz, drawing people who had never before deigned to visit. Tim and Nina Zagat went just in time to catch Wynn’s act with his art. The founders of Zagat restaurant guides say they find the city disturbing, but they had to see what the chatter was about.
The Zagats are a pair of New York lawyers who hit upon a better thing. Tim Zagat is a grega
rious fellow, Nina is more organized. Years ago, they and their friends began to compare notes about restaurants in New York City, where they live. They began to scribble their notes and to share them collectively, voting on the restaurants’ qualities. Next thing you know, the thin, red, pocket-size dining-out guides were born. The Zagats, pronounced Zeh-GAHTs, just liked to eat, but they became famous food aficionados.
In Las Vegas, the Zagats booked themselves into the place they’d heard was the best. All their preconceptions about Las Vegas were confirmed. “We stayed at the Rio,” Nina Zagat recalls over tea in her breezy suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. “It was supposed to be the nicest place in Las Vegas at the time. It was unbelievable. Going up in the elevator, there were people with alcohol in paper bags!
“They upgraded us to a suite. It was so big, Tim and I couldn’t find each other,” she says. “In the bathroom, the soap dish and tissue box were nailed down.”
Steve Wynn heard the Zagats were in town and invited them over to the Mirage. It happened to be the day he was hanging some of his art in the baccarat pit.
When the Zagats arrived at the appointed hour of 12:30 p.m., they found Bill Acquavella and a crew of professional picture hangers in the salon privé. Wynn gave them the full blast of Steve Wynn-ness. But the Zagats were hungry.
“I thought we were being invited to lunch at twelve thirty,” says Tim Zagat. “But it turned out we were there to consult on where to hang the paintings. I knew he had vision problems. He was asking us, ‘What do you think about here—and here—and here?’ I don’t know anything about that.”
“It was weird,” says Nina Zagat, widening her eyes.
Wynn was now planning on putting the art in a gallery at Bellagio and charging admission. This meant he hadn’t solved the problem of decorating the front desk and lobby after all. So he lit upon the glass artist Dale Chihuly, who creates swirly colorful blown-glass sculptures.
Winner Takes All Page 10