Winner Takes All

by Christina Binkley

  Wynn Las Vegas’s genius lies in social stratification, the way it guides its human traffic and creates safe zones for the kind of people who stay at the George V in Paris or the Pierre in New York. The resort functions something like the Hamptons. A hotel within the hotel, known as the South Tower, serves as Easthampton, with its own exclusive lobby. This region connects to the baccarat salons via the discreet passageway.

  This South Tower enclave draws the tanned and siliconed—celebrities and billionaires who withdraw amongst their own. The South Tower’s swimming pool and cabanas are elevated above the pools that serve the rest of the resort, which become Westhampton by default—rich, yet lower-crust. The cocktail waitresses there, in discreet-yet-revealing white bathing suits and skirts (designed under the supervision of Elaine Wynn) are sublime in their care and cheerfulness.

  There exists an echelon of people with wealth in the world that is willing to spend almost any amount on amusement, as long as it is exclusive enough. The Wynns knew this, from personal experience. “I tried to do here with intimacy what I did with grandeur at Bellagio,” Wynn said, echoing his thoughts when he was designing the earlier Atlantic City resort. “Because people with money and discernment don’t take pleasure in vast places. They’re looking for places to be cozy.”

  In those final countdown hours before the opening, as morning television crews prepared to record live from the new resort, Wynn roamed and meddled. He might have been in his element while designing resorts, but he was miserable opening them. Five years of design and construction, late nights poring over plans and honing them. Weeks to pick the perfect color of chocolate for the tower’s skin. Two months spent choreographing the show on the lake, in the rain with umbrellas, in the wind. And then putting it out there for the reviews and results: sheer terror.

  Farther south on the Las Vegas Strip, Kirk Kerkorian was just about to close on the Mandalay deal and control half the rooms on the Strip. Kerkorian couldn’t find his way to the men’s room in almost any of them, he’d never been there.

  Kerkorian “never breaks a sweat,” Wynn said that March with a note of wonder in his voice. “All those deals he’s done—and he never sets foot in the building. He never misses a tennis game. He just likes bigger. He measures the cost of construction and the rate of inflation. I like the creative process,” Wynn concluded flatly, “so I’m stuck.”

  Elaine had trouble letting go of Wynn Las Vegas—putting it into the hands of a public that might not appreciate it. The Wynns viewed the resort as an extension of their home and hearth. They had found the chocolate maker in Monte Carlo, discovered the florist via a happenstance meeting at the George V in Paris.

  The Wynns’ pain at letting go was contagious and spread to executives and flowed out through the rest of the staff. On the day of the opening, Elizabeth Blau, who created his restaurants, winced as the first diners picked up the utensils she’d picked out. Denise Randazzo, head of communications, joked sadly about turning Wynn Las Vegas over to the “unwashed masses.”

  Wynn was memorizing the resort until he knew it inch by inch. He barreled along the casino’s shopping corridor two days before the opening, passing his destination without a glance: the dessert shop called Sugar & Ice. He came to a sudden halt before walking into a tall potted plant. Squinting at the waxy tropical leaves, he pursed his lips and peered upward, with an aspect of minute inspection.

  Two days later, his appearance in the hall would draw crowds. People holding out cell-phone cameras would call out: “Steve!” “Mr. Wynn, Mr. Wynn!” “Thank you, Mr. Wynn, for everything you’ve done for Las Vegas!” But in the resort’s pre-opening privacy, Wynn turned from the plant and swung his head in a wide arc, until his narrowly focused eyes lit upon the ice-cream shop’s row of glass doors. He reversed himself and exited into the sunlight, as always, a master of recovery.

  After wandering through the Bartolotta restaurant, Wynn decided with only days to go that his designer Roger Thomas’s choice of carpeting was gaudy. He insisted on ordering new carpeting at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. “You better not screw with Roger,” Elaine warned him. And Wynn heeded her words, chuckling about his brief mistrust of Thomas.

  “The man carries a sketchbook,” Wynn said of Thomas. “And he keeps it like Picasso. It’s about five by seven. He keeps it in a shoulder purse. You know he’s a gay guy,” Wynn said, and then his mind leaped to another old friend, Roy Horn, the lion-tamer of Siegfried & Roy. Wynn waved his arm, gesturing around the resort. “This is swashbuckling nerve. Gay or not—Roger and Roy Horn. You can’t get sexual preference confused with guts.”

  To Elaine, Wynn confessed that he feared his anxiety would hamper his employees. “Steve was in that pre-opening anxiety mode,” Elaine said later. “And he gets impatient and he can’t wait for things to get finished. He was driving me crazy. I wanted to commit him.”

  He continued making rounds, involved in every detail. One afternoon, a soprano, blond and thirtyish, auditioned for a lounge singer’s job at the casino’s Parasol Up bar. She wore a clingy string-strapped evening dress of maroon satin. Accompanying her were a bearded pianist and the last-minute drilling and hammering of construction crews.

  Wynn arrived in a natty pink polka-dot tie, straight from his lunch and a manicure. He leaned across the piano, so close that she must have felt his breath. Without taking her eyes off of him, the singer leaned in to Wynn and shimmied her torso.

  She finished her song, languid and throaty, and began another. Her index finger tickled the piano’s lid. “I like that,” Wynn said. When he turned and headed across the casino to inspect the baccarat pit, the back of his head revealed a bald spot, artfully concealed by blackened hair.

  Outside, three Clark County cranes tied up traffic working overtime to build three pedestrian overpasses to the Wynn. An emergency call was routed through to Les Henley, a county public works director. The emergency was Steve Wynn, who had gotten caught in a traffic snarl on the way to work that morning.

  Wynn’s side of the conversation was typically bombastic:

  “Les? Steve Wynn.”

  (… )

  “A little hassled by my trip this morning. It took me forty minutes to go the length of Treasure Island.”

  (… )

  “We’ve got a two-point-seven-billion-dollar hotel opening with ninety-seven hundred employees. The county can’t pretend they didn’t know it was coming. My employees can’t get to work.”

  (… )

  “Your guys have gotta work on a graveyard shift. Unless you’re gonna cut us loose here.”

  Shadow Creek had long since ceased to feel like a permanent home. Wynn’s anger lurked just beneath the surface. Staff at Shadow Creek told Wynn a year or so after MGM took over that they had been ordered to shoot his exotic birds—pheasants and others—that Wynn had loved like pets. “They did it because the feed was sixty thousand dollars a year,” Wynn growled, his eyes angry.

  People at MGM Mirage profess to know nothing about any birds being shot.

  Eventually, Bobby Baldwin called Steve Wynn to tell him he’d sold the two hundred acres around Shadow Creek, where Wynn had once planned to build a luxury community.

  “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is who’d you sell it to?” Wynn asked.

  “Centex Homes,” Baldwin replied, according to Wynn.

  Wynn called his wife. “Elaine, the neighborhood is about to change,” he told her.

  They sold the Shadow Creek home to MGM Mirage that summer in accordance with their contract. They settled into one of Wynn Las Vegas’s high-roller villas. Thereafter, Steve Wynn could be found haunting the resort at all hours, scratching his chin and reworking his decisions like Banquo’s ghost. Wynn Las Vegas became the Wynns’ own Versailles—the palace where they entertained the world and their friends.

  At Okada one evening, the Wynns signed for the check for the table of five, leaving a crisp $100 bill for a tip. Elaine Wynn dismissed one of her guests’ attempt to
pay with a firm wave of her hand. “If I cooked for you, you wouldn’t pay,” she said, motherly.

  Her office was a study in feminine chic—all creamy, sheer curtains and walls covered in squares of rice paper, surrounding a living area where she liked to nap on the couch in the afternoons in front of the television. Elaine Wynn kept a framed photo of herself and Steve in their youth. It was taken at a costume party, and they are dressed country-western. Her head is thrown back, laughing, while the young mogul-to-be nuzzles her neck, a white cowboy hat on his head.

  “I have never been as stressed as I was in the endgame here,” she said one morning three months after the resort opened, her legs curled on that couch. “Will they like it as much as what we’ve done before?

  “The expectation that was created out of Bellagio for this place was overwhelming to us. We’d go out to the movies, to dinners—Steve and I are regular Joes really—and people would come up to us and say, ‘I can’t wait to see how you exceed that place.’ Of course, it was a double-edged sword.”

  Her role had grown at each of Wynn’s resorts until she was her husband’s most trusted adviser. She had warned him at Bellagio not to place the spa far from the hotel tower elevators: He had ignored her, leaving spa guests to march through the entire casino, their faces flaming from the latest chemical peel or facial. “I had a good I-told-you-so,” she says. “You’ll notice that in this property, the spa is by the hotel tower. I think he trusts my instincts more and more as things have progressed.

  “Steve’s process is his unique process, and it drives me crazy,” she said of her husband’s way of going about designing. “He draws it out, and he’ll call me in and I’ll critique it and the next morning I’ll go in and he’ll have thrown it away. He wants me to sit there on the stool with him while he measures, da-da-da-dupp”—she took her hand and mimicked drawing in the air.

  That spring of 2005, Wall Street experienced a wave of enthusiasm for Wynn Resorts Ltd. Ground had broken for Wynn Macau, off the coast of China, and drawings were under way for the second phase of Wynn’s Disney-esque plans in Las Vegas, christened Encore by Elaine Wynn.

  Steve Wynn spoke of an empire with more resorts in Singapore, perhaps even Thailand. “We’re going to be an Asian company,” he said once, his eyebrows raised in surprise. Wynn knew how to do business in Asia. To help this along a few years later, he would buy a rare Ming vase at auction for $10.1 million and donate it to a museum in Macao—currying great favor in China while overlooking his hungry hometown art museum, the Nevada Museum of Art in Las Vegas.

  With no properties open and no revenues, Wynn Resorts stock was trading on pure speculation. It shot up like one of the dot-coms of yore. From its initial offering price of $13 in October 2002, it had risen to $76.45 a share on March 16, 2005. Wynn was a billionaire.

  Wynn noted cheerily in a moment of uncanny prescience that winter that the reality of his casinos could hardly live up to the expectations. “I’ve made more money in four years with this company than in fifteen years at my old one. I open that property, and I screw the stock,” he said, chortling.

  He had finally figured out the stock market.

  And in fact, the casino hadn’t yet opened on the April Saturday when David Anders put on a pair of Levi’s and a T-shirt in his Upper West Side brownstone and decided to pull the plug.

  Anders covered the casino business as a stock analyst with Merrill Lynch. It was his job to advise the firm’s clients on when to buy and sell stocks. At thirty-nine, he was one of the older analysts in the field, and he felt he was seeing something he’d seen before—a bubble of irrational investor enthusiasm in China.

  This bubble was creating all sorts of new billionaires. The eccentric Sheldon Adelson had recently taken public his Las Vegas Sands Corp., parent of the Venetian, which was built on the property Adelson had bought from Kerkorian years before. Going public catapulted Adelson from obscurity to number 19 on the Forbes List of World’s Richest People with a net worth of $15.6 billion. This happened to Adelson because he, like Wynn, had obtained permission to build a casino in Macao that would cater to millions of Asians on their own continent. And Adelson’s Macao casino was going to open long before Wynn’s.

  Adelson’s astounding jackpot unseated Las Vegas’s reigning billionaire, Kirk Kerkorian, who racked up a mere fortune of $8.9 billion that year.

  As Anders headed out into the damp Manhattan springtime for a coffee and newspaper, he concluded—wrongly, as time would prove—that China couldn’t possibly deliver on the high expectations. Wynn’s stock was an obvious “sell,” he thought. There was no news that could drive the price up further. He said later, “It just popped into my head.”

  On Tuesday afternoon, while Wynn was fretting over Bartolotta’s carpet, Anders presented Merrill’s research committee with his thesis. “We knew it was going to be a controversial call,” he says. “This was a very high-flying company.”

  Anders called Wynn’s balance sheet “exhausted,” and he argued that investors were assuming a best-case scenario for the opening of Wynn Las Vegas. Had Wynn any idea of the icy blast that was about to hit his company, he would no doubt have felt the chill of déjà vu.

  Anders spent the evening prior to his report’s release on his couch, nursing his nerves. His report was released around seven fifteen a.m. He sent calls from Las Vegas’s 702 area code into voice mail to “let them cool down for a few hours.” Unfortunately for Anders, Ron Kramer, president of Wynn Resorts, was working out of his New York office that day. Anders picked up the phone and received the full blast of Kramer’s freshly minted wrath.

  When the markets closed for the weekend, Wynn’s personal net worth had been shorn by $153 million.

  Franco Dragone is an old friend of the Wynns. A cofounder of Cirque du Soleil, he created Mystère at Treasure Island and O at Bellagio. Dragone split from Cirque while Wynn was building his comeback casino.

  With the trust of years of friendship, Dragone was given carte blanche to design Wynn Las Vegas’s main entertainment attraction. Wynn had initially ordered up an outdoor show on a lake, with Jet-Skiers and other water performers—much like he had once planned for Bellagio. But by the time he added a roof and climate control to keep away the desert heat, the lake became an elaborate indoor theater-in-the-round.

  Wynn built his Belgian friend Dragone a theater unlike any in the world—2,080 seats encircling a million-gallon pool of water in which lifts could rise and fall, creating sets for performers, some of whom worked in scuba gear. A domed roof rained on the pool, housed pigeons, and served as another point of entry to this circus of the surreal.

  Originally, Wynn wanted to call the show Genesis—the Comedy. But when pollster Frank Luntz tested the name in focus groups, baby boomers were confused. They were unsure whether this was a reference to the Bible or to the Phil Collins rock group of their youth. What’s more, the show wasn’t funny. “Thank God Elaine talked him out of that,” said Luntz. The show inherited the name Le Reve.

  Unfortunately, Le Reve was just plain bad. Conceptually, it followed a character named Wayne as he dreamed from nightmare to redemption. But few early viewers even realized there was a character named Wayne. Populated by aerialists, acrobats, and swimmers, the show was dark, depressing, and confusing. For no apparent reason, pole-dancing women were beaten by men in a sadistic dream sequence. Wynn executives warned that women’s groups would be picketing outside the resort. In another scene, pregnant women dressed in white were dropped, over and over, from high in the theater’s domed ceiling. Even some of the show’s collaborators winced.

  Wynn watched the rehearsals and became frantic. Daily, he asked Elaine Wynn to attend the rehearsals. “Please,” he begged her. Each day, Elaine refused. “My plate is full,” she told him. “I can’t go—I’ll be sick if I don’t like it.”

  The following August, four months after the opening, at which time she still hadn’t managed to see the whole show, she said, “I love Franco. That’s anoth
er reason I didn’t want to go see the show. I didn’t want to see my opinion of Franco diminished.”

  So the unnerved Wynn turned to Frank Luntz, who was on business in Britain. When Wynn insisted it was an emergency, Luntz bought a $6,000 plane ticket and flew in for the job.

  “If Steve says ‘shit,’” quipped Luntz, “I say, ‘How much?’”

  Luntz’s test audience complained. “The only thing they liked is the theater,” Luntz said.

  Dragone, a chubby doe-eyed man with unruly dark hair, acknowledged that Wynn was “freaked out” and scared. But he clung to his show with palpable desperation, resisting Wynn’s push for a clear narrative. “I don’t want to have a story line that pulls us by the nose and we don’t see what’s going on around,” he said in French-accented English.

  “With his eyes, he can’t see everything that’s going on,” said Dragone, his voice rising in frustration. “My shows are the opposite of Steve. He can’t see all that’s going on onstage.”

  A day or so later, a group of Wynn’s artists gathered over a slow dinner and several bottles of wine at the resort’s SW Steakhouse, which had served them for a test run.

  The group included the puppeteer Michael Curry and the lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe, who wanted to work out kinks in the timing of Fiesta Fatale, one of several short shows that would play on a reflecting pool at the foot of Wynn’s mountain. Wynn called the pond the Lake of Dreams. In it, a tall stone wall served alternately as the spillway for a dramatically lit waterfall and as a film-projection screen.

  Curry is best known for his creations for Disney on Broadway’s The Lion King. He is small of stature with boyish, round features and a self-contained Oregonian manner that contrasts with the angular features and heart-on-sleeve manner of Woodroffe.