Jones was becoming accustomed to helping propeller heads adjust to the wilds of Las Vegas. “My guys are the science club,” she said, her shapely legs descending into the highest stiletto heels imaginable.
If they were the science club, Jones, with her big hair and expensive wardrobe, was the lead cheerleader and valedictorian wrapped up in one. Her corner office was a jarring mix of political clout and girlish clutter. Pink stuffed animals and assorted bric-a-brac surrounded photographs of herself in the Clinton White House. She had raised her children while working her way through four wealthy husbands.
“Gary and Rich are genuinely nice. And so naïve,” Jones once said fondly, noting pointedly that most of Harrah’s senior staff were still married to their first wives. “There’s nothing Machiavellian about these guys.”
For Mirman’s moral concerns, Jones offered a simple-minded sound bite: “You can’t make people do something they don’t want to do,” she told him.
This gave Mirman a peg to hang his hat on. He’d attached himself to the gambling industry and he was seeking absolution. “She talked me off a ledge,” he said.
Five years and two job promotions later, Mirman hadn’t shaken off that meeting with Maranees, Montgomery, and Ratliffe. He conceded that he had started to feel queasy as he listened to three top customers describing their gambling habits. These were not the comments of the cheerful AEPs that he and his colleagues were basing their theories on. Mirman thought these people would be better off if they curbed their gambling habits.
The feeling had stuck with him as he spent more time on the floors of Harrah’s casinos in places like Shreveport, Louisiana, and East Chicago, Indiana. “You start to see who’s gambling,” he said one day. “Especially our VIPs.… I think that problem gambling is more pervasive than the research commonly says. I think it’s a lot more than two percent.”
In his next jobs with Harrah’s, Mirman stopped coming into contact with customers. Mirman worked instead with advertising partners—credit-card companies, Maxim magazine and, later, with governments around the world that were considering legalizing casinos. “I’m more comfortable being in this industry than the credit-card industry,” Mirman said, eight years after joining Harrah’s. “The credit-card industry just exploits people’s desires to buy things that they can’t pay for.”
The Mirman family was established in Las Vegas, their two boys growing up. His wife homeschooled their autistic son. They were able to afford a second home in their hometown of Chicago to spend summers in. Harrah’s had been good to them.
“I’m at peace with it,” Mirman insisted flatly, his boyish bounce gone. “I’m at peace with it. I am. It’s just like any other business.”
Chapter Twenty-two
PICASSO’S PENIS
You know, Kirk, Steve wants to be you.
—ELAINE WYNN TO KIRK KERKORIAN AT A HAPPENSTANCE MEETING AT THE RESTAURANT CIRCO
Wynn hung Le Reve on a deep-red wall in his dining room at Shadow Creek.
Pablo Picasso was a fifty-one-year-old lothario in 1932 when he painted the portrait of his ripe, twenty-one-year-old mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. In this painting, she has fallen asleep on a crimson chair, her eyes closed and her head resting on her shoulder, seductively unaware. Her dress has slipped down over her shoulders, exposing one pale breast. Her face is divided in shadows.
Wynn described Le Reve (“the Dream”) to the television interviewer Charlie Rose in July of 2005:
Now, this picture has half of Marie-Thérèse Walter’s face in a shadow and half in the light. And if you look at it that way, it’s two eyes and her nose and her profile. But if you realize that the part in the light is just the profile, then the part that’s in the shade is a penis, and her tongue is on the penis.
Now, Pablo Picasso did this deliberately, self-consciously, and it’s called The Dream.
“Now, it’s my picture,” Wynn said, a sixty-two-year-old pit bull marking his territory. “And I have a take on this. And my take is, it’s not about Marie-Thérèse Walter’s dream—his girlfriend who was twenty-one when he was fifty-one. If you’re fifty-one, you’re old, with a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend. Your fantasy is that she’s thinking of your body parts.
“The picture should have been called Wishful Thinking. Pablo—Pablo looked—Maybe he saw his girlfriend sleeping, you know, and hoping, ‘Well, gee, I hope she’s got the right idea about me.’ You know. So I get humor from Le Reve.”
The painting garnered one of the highest prices ever for a Picasso when Wynn paid $48.4 million for it during his art-buying spree in 1997. “Now this is the most celebrated picture of the twentieth century still in private hands,” Wynn the carnival barker told Rose with satisfaction. “It’s a masterpiece. Has inestimable value. Everybody wants to own it.” Wynn had no idea how notorious the painting would become within a few years when he agreed to sell it for $139 million to the hedge-fund billionaire Steven Cohen. Before shipping it off in the fall of 2006, Wynn invited a few friends to see it in his office, including the writer Nora Ephron. One wild gesture—so typical for him—and Wynn had put his elbow through Marie-Thérèse’s left forearm, leaving a six-inch rip. The sale was off, the now vastly less-valuable painting was repaired, and Wynn, ever the optimist, called the whole thing fate.
Wynn had cut a deal to buy the old Desert Inn before Mirage’s sale to Kerkorian had closed. It was April and Wynn made a little joke. He claimed that he had bought it as a birthday present for Elaine.
The Desert Inn was once the haunt of movie stars and glamour queens. It was where Howard Hughes holed up for several years near the end of his life, where Hughes stored jars of his own urine as he descended into madness. But by 2000, the casino had been for sale for several years. In his dotage, billionaire oil wildcatter Marvin Davis offered to buy it, then backed out. It eventually ended up with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide when that company bought ITT Corp.
Barry Sternlicht, then Starwood’s chairman and chief executive, was no fan of Las Vegas. The town still had the aura of has-been about it, and unlike Kerkorian and Wynn, Sternlicht did not foresee its imminent comeback. Sternlicht came from a world of bargain-priced hotel deals that came from the Resolution Trust Corp. Until recently, he had been flying coach class on commercial airlines, and he had not yet become the luxury-obsessed mogul into which he would eventually transform himself.
Sternlicht visited Las Vegas shortly after Starwood had obtained the casinos. His lip curled with disdain as his stretch limo ferried him up the Strip. At Caesars Palace, he fussed about how much the casino’s new ballroom had cost.
While Wynn was trying to right himself in 1999, Sternlicht unloaded the Caesars empire on Park Place Entertainment Corp. for the handsome price of $3 billion. Sternlicht says that selling Caesars was the weirdest deal of his life: “Wild! Wild! Wild!”
The way Sternlicht tells it, he called Wynn just before heading to Las Vegas for the fortieth birthday party of his former Harvard roommate, Jean-Marc Chapus, where he stayed at the Desert Inn.
Arthur Goldberg, Park Place’s Machiavellian chief executive, had offered $2.5 billion for Caesars and wasn’t budging. Sternlicht called Wynn to get an auction going. “Can you pay $3 billion?” Sternlicht says he asked after sharing some of Caesars’ financial data. To which Wynn replied, “Yes.”
“So I flew out there myself,” Sternlicht says.
By the next day, Wynn had changed his terms slightly. “Two point eight five billion, but you keep the Indiana riverboat.”
“He didn’t wanna buy a boat,” Sternlicht says. “But his offer was higher than Arthur’s.… But somehow, Arthur had perfect information. We started getting frantic calls from Arthur: ‘I’ll pay anything.’”
Over the weekend, Wynn invited Sternlicht to play golf at Shadow Creek. “I get out there and he’s got my name on a locker next to Michael Jordan and George Bush,” Sternlicht says. “There’s me. There’s Michael Jordan!” Sternlicht breaks into a cackle of lau
ghter.
When Arthur Goldberg ultimately won the gem, Wynn looked like a loser. It always seemed odd that he took it so well.
Wynn now says the bidding war was a ruse. “Sternlicht paid me twenty-five million to pretend to be interested in Caesars,” Wynn said in an April 2006 interview. “[To be paid] I hadda walk through Caesars Palace and the Indiana boat [to look interested],” Wynn said. Goldberg had to agree to increase his initial bid by an established amount, which he did.
Goldberg died a year later of a chronic disease.
Financial records confirm that an unexplained $25-million wire transfer was made to Mirage from Starwood at that time. Mirage’s Bobby Baldwin, who had argued against buying Caesars, calls it a “breakup fee”—as does Sternlicht. There is no record of a merger agreement or other contract calling for a breakup fee, however, which would be the standard way to handle such an agreement.
According to Mirage’s records, the payment was made “in connection with a letter from Barry Sternlicht saying, ‘We owe you $25 million’ with no explanation,” says Jim Murren, who looked into it in 2006. “It was very unclear as to why exactly that money was owed,” Murren says. “So Steve’s story is very likely to be true.”
A year later, Wynn worked a quick deal with Barry Sternlicht to buy the Desert Inn for $270 million. “Barry owed me a favor,” Wynn says. It would turn out to have been a crucial favor—the basis for his comeback.
Later, when Las Vegas was hip again and highly profitable, Sternlicht would seek to buy a casino or hotel there. It’s impossible to imagine that he didn’t regret having sold Caesars and the Desert Inn. In fact, selling it could be counted as one of Sternlicht’s worst real-estate moves: Over the next five years or so, the value of land on the Strip rose 2,000 percent.
Others had quailed at the ailing Desert Inn’s cash-flow statements, but Wynn was eyeing its acreage, which included a golf course. It was enough to create Wynn’s Disney dream. He called his new company Valvino Lamore, after his grandfather’s old vaudeville act.
From Mirage Resorts, he took along a handful of corporate loyalists and ninety architects and designers. He moved his office into a former high-roller suite at the Desert Inn. Nothing fancy, just a couple of Warhols on the walls and Elaine’s girlish wedding photo. His assistants Joyce and Cindy were dispatched to an office-supply store for furniture.
To avoid taking his new company public, Wynn needed a wealthy partner and found one in Kazuo Okada, chairman and president of Aruze Corporation, Japan’s largest maker of pinball-like pachinko gambling machines. Okada’s fortune was estimated at $5 billion. The two men required an interpreter to communicate, but they came to a happy understanding. “It’s a chance to be in on the ground floor of what promises to be the next generation of Las Vegas’s growth,” Okada said in a translated statement.
Okada went halvsies with Wynn, agreeing to put up $260 million for a 50-percent stake in October 2000. This pledge coincided with a flurry of investigations into Okada’s tax problems in Japan, where he was accused of concealing income. Okada was later cleared of the charges, which could have threatened Okada’s gambling licenses in Nevada. Wynn once again had bet right.
In August 2001, Wynn filed plans with Clark County, Nevada, planning authorities to build a 45-story, 2,455-room resort on the site of the Desert Inn. The plans sounded familiar: They called for a resort dominated by water themes, including a four-acre lake and fountain.
Wynn named it Le Reve and went about designing it undaunted by cost. He opted for a crescent-shaped skyscraper, more costly and less efficient than the Y-shaped and X-shaped towers he had built before.
He spent months considering the color of the building’s glass shell. “Blue glass makes everything look blue on the inside—including women’s skin—very bad thing,” he said one day. He had six sliding-glass doors installed in the Desert Inn’s old St. Andrews tower, which had been added in 1963, the year before the casino was sold to Moe Dalitz and friends. Each sliding door was in a different shade of warm bronze. Wynn stared at them until he had narrowed the choices to two, and then he had those doors installed on the Desert Inn garage so he could see them in the light.
The final choice—Wynn Bronze, he liked to call it—was a complex piece of glass with a reddish film electroplated to the back, then a clear sheet of glass attached for temperature control.
In a sign that Wynn had learned from losing Mirage Resorts, he went ballistic when the Associated Press reported erroneously that his new resort would cost $1.3 billion. “I’m going to look like an idiot,” he fussed, knowing it would cost far more and fearing investors would believe his spending had gone out of control. “[With Bellagio] we announced a number with nothing but a lick and a guess,” Wynn said later. “That was one of our mistakes.”
In fact, Wynn never considered the ballooning costs of Bellagio and Beau Rivage to be overspending. “I never was over budget,” he yowled as he complained about the mistaken wire story. “We had scope changes. In Mississippi, we went from four hundred rooms to eighteen hundred rooms.”
Wynn fashioned a prototype Le Reve casino interior in a warehouse behind the Desert Inn. There, he squinted at the colors, inspected the lampshades, tried out various styles of seating. He settled on chocolate drapes, thickly padded stools, and rich, low lighting.
One never knew who might wander through. Steven Spielberg’s appearances stirred up rumors that the Hollywood mogul was involved in the casino. “He’s just a cheerleader,” Elaine Wynn said. “He’s a fan. Like we love his movies, he loves Steve’s hotels. Steve loves to get his reaction because they’re both so creative.”
Former Nevada Governor Robert Miller wandered in one day as Wynn chatted on a bar stool. “Bob, you see the sheared drapes here?” Wynn demanded, pointing to a wall. “We’re going with that up there, by the ceiling.”
“I love the lamps,” the governor said admiringly.
With his German shepherds, Palo and Bora, at his heels, Wynn settled onto the same scruffy drafting stool he had used for twenty years. He hung blueprints of his former casinos on the walls of his drafting room. “Thank you, Bellagio,” he said with a chuckle one afternoon, referring to the lessons he’d learned. After discovering that he’d failed to put a restaurant overlooking the Mirage’s volcano, he’d put restaurants by Bellagio’s lake. But he put the choreographed music on the sidewalk. “I got it so screwed up that I put the people at my restaurants behind the fountains so they couldn’t hear the music,” Wynn said.
“It started with Mirage—a primitive place,” Wynn said. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have put a Volcano restaurant and bar where you could enjoy the volcano. I put a tiger habitat, but I didn’t put a restaurant there.”
Wynn’s eyesight continued to be the proverbial elephant in the room. The designer Vicente Wolf, hired to consult on restaurant design, says he felt unnerved after a design session where Wynn was presented with varied brown and bronze fabric swatches. Wynn rejected them all. “No—these are all the same color,” Wynn said.
To make the huge building feel more intimate, Wynn wanted shorter-than-normal hallways, so he built a taller building, which required expensive heavily reinforced concrete.
“All my suites have their own entrance, their own lobby. It’s a small hotel inside a big hotel,” Wynn said in November 2002. “It’s seventy-four feet through to the atrium to the VIP lobby. There is an atrium that is the single most luxurious thing we’ve ever built. It’s designed to make everybody ooogle.” There would be five elevators, fifteen feet from the front desk. “The farthest you’ll walk is fifty-eight feet. You’re in a boutique hotel. It’s so intimate.”
Wynn used his hands to draw pictures in the air and he was passionate about explaining the painstaking detail. Once, when I was scribbling notes, he insisted I stop writing to get the full impact of the place. “Look up at me again,” he guided. “On the left side of the restaurant…
“I want to resonate with thirty-to-th
irty-five-year-olds,” Wynn said. “Bellagio was designed for an audience that was”—he paused—“mature. Le Reve is a navy blue blazer with jeans. But it’s cashmere and Armani.”
Wynn was designing as he talked, off the top of his head. “You want to eat Japanese,” Wynn said. “You gonna go to Mikado at the Mirage—a little box? Or are you going to go to Kyoto—no, I won’t call it Kyoto. If I call it anything, I’ll call it Okada. Or Kazuo. Thank you, Kazuo!” (And he did call it Okada.)
Marc Schorr, who would be Le Reve’s president, suggested that Wynn install a Maserati and Ferrari dealership. The idea worked on so many levels that Schorr giggled to think of it. High rollers could spend their winnings there. The public could buy logo wear in the Ferrari gift shop. And Ferrari owners in Las Vegas, like Schorr and Tony Marnell, could finally get their cars repaired without shipping them to California.
Wynn’s goal: “Could we make it so you could not stand to leave the building for three days running?” Wynn demanded. Chatting by telephone one morning while lying in bed—or so he said—in a Singapore hotel room, Wynn sounded infatuated with Le Reve. “It’s lovely,” he said. “It’s the first building I’m proud of architecturally.”
Unfortunately, the neighborhood left much to be desired. Across the street were a shopping mall and the no-frills Frontier Casino, which beckoned gamblers with a $13.95 fajita feast and ladies’ mud wrestling.
One afternoon, architect DeRuyter Butler suggested using berms along the Strip to block the ugly view. That night, Elaine Wynn was sitting in the kitchen at Shadow Creek around eleven p.m. She thought, “Let’s make that the backdrop of an amphitheater.” She called her husband at work. “I knew I had to justify this to Steve,” she says. “It’s definitely a departure.”
Winner Takes All Page 22