He went on. “It’s a terrible mistake to underestimate the taste of the public. These kinds of spectacles stir people much more deeply than things that are superficial.” He threw back his head.
“People will dig an orchestra and a glass of wine,” he said. And then he revealed the strategy behind Bellagio and also of his entire career: “There’s a tremendous population in the world that does not come here. That’s critical to us.”
The fountains launched into “Singin’ in the Rain.” Wynn did a little soft-shoe. He hopped. He swayed. He tiptoed. The oarsmen—his fountain oarsmen—danced on the water. He smiled serenely and opened his mouth to sing, “I’m siiiingin’ in the rain.… I’m haaaappy again.”
It seemed appropriate to ask how Wynn would like to be remembered in Las Vegas.
“WHO CARES?” Wynn shouted, arms akimbo, as the tourists watched. He grinned wickedly. “You can be damn sure they won’t forget me!”
Chapter Eleven
HUNGRY ALLIGATOR
February 1998, eleven a.m. A half-dozen men exited the small boardroom at the executive offices at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
The decor was bland as far as corporate offices go. Beyond the office walls, the resort offered gamblers preposterous hotel suites and thickly carpeted baccarat salons. Here, though, the rows of utilitarian rooms fronted by the gray cubicles of assistants could have furnished an insurance brokerage or mortgage lender.
Two of the men paused by the boardroom door. One was wizened, with a long upper lip, wavy gray hair, and an air of quiet. He was Kirk Kerkorian. The other was taller but forty-five years his junior, button-nosed and obsequious.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” stammered the younger man. His name was Jim Murren. He had recently come to work as the chief financial officer of MGM Grand Inc. The job was merely a taking-off point for Murren, who was transitioning into the Las Vegas action after an early career as a Wall Street analyst. The key to his aspirations was standing right in front of him.
Skin folded in deep wrinkles around the old man’s weathered mouth, but his eyes were sharp and alive. Quietly, he began to recite a tale about a hungry alligator:
An alligator rested on the riverbank, unmoving and invisible, watching small fish swim by. The alligator was hungry, but it didn’t go after the small fry. The creature waited so calmly that the river’s inhabitants became busy with their own interests and stopped noticing the alligator. After a long while, a particularly big, succulent-looking fish swam by.
That’s when the beast opened its maw. The alligator gulped the big fish whole.
“I’d like to think,” Kerkorian suggested, “that we can be like the hungry alligator.”
Chapter Twelve
TAA-DAAAAH!
It’s fun.
—ELAINE WYNN
There is a great tradition of gala casino openings in Las Vegas. One of the most infamous was the Flamingo’s in 1946, when bad weather in Los Angeles had grounded flights, leaving only a smattering of Hollywood celebrities willing to drive to Bugsy Siegel’s ill-planned party. George Raft, Charles Coburn, and Vivian Blaine arrived to find the place still under construction and their hotel rooms uninhabitable—an opening-night disaster that wasn’t matched until the Venetian “opened” its unfinished hotel in 1998. (At least the Flamingo’s entertainment was good: Xavier Cugat and Jimmy Durante played.)
Four years after the Flamingo, in 1950, Wilbur Clark opened the Desert Inn with an evening of black-tie glamour. The Desert Inn had cost $4.5 million to build—roughly the price of advertising for Bellagio’s opening. Clark’s wife, Toni, recalled the fete nearly fifty years later. Jimmy Durante was there again, as were Donald O’Connor, William Powell, Alice Faye, and three hundred other guests. The evening included dinner, a show with the Ray Noble Orchestra, and a pool party. “All the stars were there and everybody looked beautiful,” Toni Clark said in 1998, when she was a frail eighty-three years old.
In this tradition, Bellagio’s October 15, 1998, opening was anticipated in some circles as if it were a royal wedding. “Steve Wynn does everything beautifully,” Clark rhapsodized.
To manage it all, Wynn had taken on labor ballast, hiring 1,000 more employees than the 8,500 that Bellagio would need on a running basis. Elaine Wynn planned the parties—from seating charts to taste-testing the menus. The opening was “an opportunity to make a first impression,” Steve Wynn said. “It’s like a symphony. All the movements have to be right.”
Over the coming months, the worst performers among the employees would quit or be fired, bringing the employment levels down drastically. But in the final week before opening, Bellagio employees were the hotel’s first guests, sleeping and eating there as they simultaneously learned their jobs and put the resort through practice laps.
The celebrating was to begin on Thursday with a private black-tie charity gala. Paying $1,000 each for the event only, or $3,500 for a suite overnight, 1,000 guests would enjoy Bellagio without the crowds for a few hours, and proceeds would go to retinitis pigmentosa research.
At the end of this evening, Wynn would find a place with a view of the doors and, walkie-talkie in hand, give the order to throw them wide. Outside, a horde in T-shirts, waving cameras, would race to the slot machines, watched by the glamorous crowd within with a tinge of horror.
The following day, as Bellagio’s slot machines steadily cha-chinged, 1,200 of the Wynns’ closest friends would arrive for the weekend. For them, there would be no charge.
On Sunday, the media would arrive just in time to not annoy these invited guests on their way out the door. Over three more days—paid for by Mirage Resorts for any media whose rules would permit accepting such goodies (mostly the foreign press)—reporters and their crews would be toured through the art collection, the conservatory, the fountains, and the shops of Giorgio Armani, Prada, Chanel, Tiffany, Gucci, and Hermès.
Press were flying in from overseas to cover the event for the Paris daily Le Figaro, Le Monde, Femme Actuelle, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Bild, the Evening Standard—roughly 350 news organizations from around the world, excluding the food press and the art press, who would follow in November. Mirage Resorts set up a satellite broadcast service, providing a satellite truck and a half-dozen news crews for television stations that couldn’t afford to send more than one reporter.
The whole gambling world was in a frenzy.
The Venetian, not yet open and horribly behind schedule, had hired an outside public relations agency to call around to The New York Times, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and the morning television shows. Were journalists working on a Bellagio story, by any chance? If so, would they like to come by and see the Venetian?
“I hear everybody else talking about going, and I think there are going to be some big games,” said Phil Hellmuth, then a rising professional poker player who figured Bellagio would be chock full of rich suckers.
Wall Street was as caught up as anyone.
“The pre-opening excitement is as high as I’ve ever seen in the gaming industry,” said Jason Ader of Bear Stearns, one of the gambling industry’s top analysts.
Ader’s wife at the time, Lori, spent weeks shopping for the right gown in New York. She finally settled on a $1,050 Heidi Weisel creation from Saks Fifth Avenue. It was a minimalist brown knit with cutouts to display cleavage.
“It’s been hanging over my head. I waited for the invitation,” Lori Ader said three weeks before the opening. “Steve Wynn. Everything he does is just so big.”
In what had to be both an ominously telling oversight and a snub, the Wynns had forgotten to invite Wall Street. It was Dan Lee who realized that so many analysts, investors, and bankers—so important in Mirage Resorts’ financing—had been forgotten. At the last minute, Lee scrambled to find $204,000 to throw a party for 340 Wall Streeters, piling them into one of the ballrooms on Monday night. He persuaded Wynn, exhausted by nearly a week of celebrating, to stop by.
The Wall Street
guests, of course, were never told they’d been forgotten. As far as they were concerned, their invitations had simply arrived later than expected.
Chapter Thirteen
SOUTHERN BLUES
I thought it was terrible! It’s heavy. It’s too heavy. He did marble in every cranny.… They walk in there with their Bermuda shorts and they’re not comfortable—it’s like a tomb.
—DONALD TRUMP
Say what you will, Donald Trump and Steve Wynn do not love each other. Trump visited Wynn’s new casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, and was rewarded to find it troubled. Trump crowed deliciously, “He’s got huge problems!”
Trump at the time was between Marla and Melania. It was 1999, and he had as yet no Apprentice reality television show. Trump did have bad hair and a bad temper and some pretty bad troubles at his own publicly traded casino company, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts.
One of Trump’s big anxieties was a complex series of lawsuits and competitive skirmishes over Wynn’s development plans in Atlantic City. Salt in his wounds: Wynn got great press and was the “king of Vegas”—a place Trump himself wanted to break into. Trump reveled in anything that resembled bad news for Steve Wynn.
Wynn responded nastily to Trump’s criticism. “He’s an expert on everyone’s business but his own,” Wynn snapped. “Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and I refuse to have my business shaped by anything that imbecile says.”
Strangely enough, though, Trump was right.
In November 1995, when Wynn left his lieutenant Barry Shier to oversee Biloxi, the casino was expected to cost $200 million—more than anyone in Mississippi could have imagined—and to open in 1997.
Barry Shier worshiped at the altar of Steve Wynn. He wore his hair with a Vegas mini-ducktail, like Wynn. He took his German shepherd to work. He was caught up in building himself a fabulous 14,000-square-foot home in Las Vegas. While others called Wynn Steve, Shier began to call him Stephen. Once, when Wynn was being fitted for a suit in his office, Shier clucked around him familiarly, repeating the words of the tailor—“Oh, that’s a great fit, Stephen”—while others in the room rolled their eyes.
While Wynn devoted his attentions to Bellagio, Shier created the Biloxi project in its likeness.
Biloxi is a former fishing village, where Barq’s root beer was first bottled in 1898. Beyond its historic center, dripping with live oaks and antebellum mansions, Biloxi become a daytripper’s casino market in the 1990s. Gamblers drove to feed $40 into the slot machines there before splurging on a steak and heading home. They liked bingo, country music, and a generous Southern buffet with hush puppies and greens.
Wynn aimed to do with Beau Rivage what the Mirage had done in Las Vegas in 1989. “We thought it was going to compete with the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Florida,” says Alan Feldman.
To those working on the project, it wasn’t clear that there were any budgetary constraints at all. “The finest casino that could be built. That was the goal,” said Bill Yates, chairman of the resort’s builder, W. G. Yates & Sons Construction in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Concrete ceilings were sanded to a perfect smoothness, rather than sprayed with a cheaper and more common rough “popcorn” to cover flaws. Shier hired a boat captain to advise him as they traveled all over inspecting the finest marinas so he could build a top-notch one. Eventually, Shier spent $10 million building a thirty-one-slip marina of Brazilian ipe wood. It was touted as the most expensive marina in the world on a per-slip basis. According to people at the company, Shier bought expensive speedboats for high rollers without consulting Wynn, who was a speedboat aficionado.
Shier had absorbed his boss’s penchant for luxury. While living in a Best Western Hotel across the street during Beau Rivage’s construction, Shier personally taught the maids how to triple-sheet his bed—a luxury practice where a third sheet is laid atop the blanket.
Wynn’s well-established abhorrence of riverboats was troublesome. Most riverboat casinos are boats parked at water’s edge with ramps connecting the land-based hotel to the floating casino, in accordance with state laws. But mooring ramps rise and fall with the tides on the Gulf of Mexico. Wynn didn’t want his customers walking up or down a steep ramp to the casino.
Wynn’s refusal to use the standard technology “drove the naval architects crazy,” said Mac Johnson, Yates’s project manager. Adapting technology used to stabilize offshore oil platforms, they floated the casino on five barges that were anchored by nine million pounds of structural steel. It was like holding a float just underwater by anchoring it from below. It was so strong that years later, when Hurricane Katrina chased other Biloxi riverboats onto land and across the road, Beau Rivage’s held steadily.
Like Bellagio, Beau Rivage was to have an elaborate conservatory. It was planted with fully grown magnolia trees that had been dug up from surrounding homes and farms. Unfortunately, no one advised Shier or Wynn that magnolias fare poorly indoors. As the magnificent trees defoliated in the ensuing months, crews wired fake leaves and blossoms onto the trees to make them look alive.
Shier may even have out-Wynned Wynn in his attention to detail. He released seven mating pairs of finches into the conservatory to provide authentic birdsong. The recorded variety—used to great advantage around the Mirage’s volcano—just wouldn’t do. “It felt right,” Shier explained. “When you’re sitting in a park and a bird lands on your table, you say, ‘This bird’s friendly and I’m friendly.’”
Early plans had Beau Rivage fronted by dancing water fountains like Bellagio’s. To cut expense, the water show was changed to something more Southern, said Mac Johnson. Gracing Beau Rivage’s drive were fifteen seventy-five-year-old live oak trees—transplanted from a local farm at a cost of $67,000 each.
Spa treatment rooms were lined with 250 yards of fine silk. The sushi bar was made from Rosso Verona marble. In hotel rooms, a tiny museum light was attached to each picture that hung from the wall.
Wynn didn’t pay much attention to Beau Rivage until after Bellagio had opened. “By the time Bellagio opened, they were in so deep with Beau Rivage,” says one former Mirage executive.
Beau Rivage ultimately cost $680 million—quadruple its original rough estimates. It swelled to 1,780 rooms from 1,200. Four restaurants had grown to a baker’s dozen. “Every time you’d turn around, it’d be another ten million,” says a former senior executive. “They kept raising the operating assumptions to make it look like they were going to earn what they needed to earn.”
Wall Street remained obliviously sanguine as the costs rose, predicting returns of as much as 20 percent—well over the returns being earned in Las Vegas at the time. Shier was now suggesting that Beau Rivage would become a competitor to big casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
Internal reports from Mirage Resorts suggested the casino needed to draw customers from a six-hundred-mile radius across the Southeast. That required regular, cheap jet service into the Biloxi area. Shier tried but failed to entice rival casinos to subsidize flight service. Three months before Beau Rivage opened, he settled a deal with fledgling AirTran Airways Inc., formerly known as ValuJet, which was trying to recover from a devastating 1996 crash into the Florida Everglades. Beau Rivage subsidized flights from Dallas and Atlanta and paid to open a gate in Nashville, which research showed was an important feeder market.
Wynn came up with his own idea to advertise Beau Rivage on television. He asked Elizabeth Taylor to do the voiceover for a television commercial, says John Schadler. She wouldn’t take money—“I don’t do that anymore, Steve”—but instead asked Wynn to make a donation to an AIDS charity.
They did the recording at Elizabeth Taylor’s Bel-Air home in Los Angeles. The crew waited more than two hours in her living room while the aging legend got prepared. They were led to her boudoir, where Taylor worked from her bed in a purple muumuu and a wig, her poodles in her lap.
She spoke in a lilting Southern accent, her voice soft and dreamy, melting like ice cre
am on a summer day. Later, her voice was laid over filtered film of Gulf life—a lady picking flowers, shrimp boats, a girl on a tree swing among live oaks.
People said it was bound tah happen. Kinda half-wishin’, half-knowin’, thinkin’ if they said it enough that would make it so. Then everybody’d go back to just smellin’ the wet Gulf air. The shrimp boats would sail. The magnohhlias would bloom. But nothin’ would change.
And then. One day. It happened!
We looked up and there it was, jest like a stohhry book written lahrrge across the sky. And they gave it suuch a pretty name! [sweeping aerial shot of the new casino tower and its sign.]
And after that, nothin’ was evah the same.
Course. We still lahk smellin’ the magnohhlias.
“Steve loved it,” former spokesman Alan Feldman recalls.
But it landed in Biloxi with an ugly thud. Taylor’s put-on Southern accent insulted Mississippians. “We fucked up,” says Feldman. “The number-one question we heard was, ‘Is that actually how they think we talk?’ The whole tone and tenor of the commercial was, ‘There ain’t shit going on in this community until Beau Rivage came along.’”
Beau Rivage opened on March 16—a Tuesday—with plenty of proud state politicians in attendance. The New York Stock Exchange remained blissfully unaware of any troubles brewing in Biloxi. The excitement surrounding the opening drove Mirage Resorts’ shares up a dollar to a heady $22 a share. In May, two things happened to boost them even further.
Wynn was already planning his next new casino—this one in Atlantic City, where he would go toe to toe with Donald Trump. Mirage Resorts announced an equity offering with Goldman Sachs to raise money for this casino. Snaring Goldman, one of the last anti-casino stalwarts on Wall Street, attested to Mirage Resorts’ new panache. In fact, Goldman competed aggressively for the assignment, agreeing to buy 16.6 million shares at $25 apiece that it planned to resell. It was an all-time high for Mirage Resorts shares.
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