Drawn to Las Vegas for work, they had each become unexpectedly affectionate about Las Vegas. Woodroffe, a Brit more accustomed to working concert tours with the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan—although he once lighted Buckingham Palace—had been working in Mexico City when Wynn called to say he wanted to turn his lake red. “He hired me before we even talked about money,” Woodroffe said, and he thereafter spent so much time working on the Wynn project that he purchased, in addition to the London home he shared with his wife and kids, a vintage ranch house in Las Vegas that had formerly been built for Bill Boyd, one of the town’s early gambling entrepreneurs. Wynn sent Woodroffe four double beds as a housewarming present.
After dark, the Lake of Dreams became a theater for nine brief shows that melded video, music, light, and, in the case of a three-minute bit called “Jungle Bill,” large, elaborate puppets. At times, a twenty-seven-foot fiberglass head rose from the depths, water sheeting from its face. The features of a woman could be projected onto it, wriggling her eyebrows and making smooching expressions with her lips.
Under the lake’s water were 4,400 LED lights whose colors could be programmed with the aid of a computer. They turned the lake into a crude pixel screen. At times, air bubbles were released underwater. When the light was diffused through the tiny bubbles, the lake became a broiling psychedelic cauldron.
Curry joined Woodroffe around eleven fifteen one night shortly before the opening wearing a white, gauzy peasant shirt. They sat on a cushioned bench at the Parasol Down bar.
“I’m having a hard time letting go,” Woodroffe confessed gloomily.
“Do you always have this postpartum depression?” asked Curry. Earlier in the evening, he had told an installment of an ongoing bedtime story to his small children at home in Oregon.
Woodroffe gestured toward a terrace that overlooked the Lake of Dreams. “That was my terrace for months,” Woodroffe said.
Curry nodded. “I always have this,” he said. “And the bigger the hit, the bigger the depression.”
Outside, people were already lining up on the Strip to gawk at the mountain. Television news stations had been running nightly updates. Newspapers griped that they hadn’t been granted open access. Security guards chased people who sneaked in for a forbidden peek.
Inside, employees, dressed shyly in their Sunday best, brought their families to dine, sleep, gamble “on the house,” and put the place to the test. At eleven o’clock the following morning, Marc Schorr’s daily staff meeting became a litany of things gone awry. Missing ashtrays, ice buckets, lightbulbs, remote-control batteries, construction dust clinging to furnishings—things expected in any new resort.
Employees caused bigger problems by taking advantage of their chance to romp. Resort operators handled six hundred calls from employees trying to change their assigned restaurant reservations. Front-desk managers upgraded friends to suites the hotel wasn’t prepared to fill. The SW Steakhouse ran out of steak when people ordered two and even three entrées.
“Our employees are pigs,” Schorr griped. “The general public will not be eating and drinking like that.”
A dozen oversized banquet waiters were still waiting for their Armani uniforms to be re-cut, because Armani, being Armani, didn’t make sizes large enough for them.
Wynn was still meddling. He wouldn’t allow his restaurant prices to fall below Bellagio’s. So at Bartolotta, the price of a twenty-eight-ounce prime rib-eye steak was hastily raised from $38 to $48.
A customer due to arrive the next day was causing a ruckus about his suite. “[He] likes to stay in number seven but he won’t stay in a red suite,” reported a hotel operations manager. She suggested that the villas be renumbered. “I don’t want to change it for one gentleman. Just leave it. He’ll get over it,” said Schorr.
The casino was full of rumors that Dragone’s show was in trouble. Marc Schorr filled the staff in on the latest news on Le Reve. “They took the pole act out,” he said. “That made such a difference—the slapping of the women around.
“They’re still dropping the pregnant ladies,” Schorr added.
Chapter Twenty-six
BLIND MAN’S BLUFF
MGM thought they’d gotten rid of Wynn—they never thought he’d get the money. If you’re gonna hurt ’em, be sure to kill ’em: They didn’t kill Wynn.
—ANONYMOUS INHABITANT OF THE LAS VEGAS STRIP
April 2005. Steve Wynn likened Wynn Las Vegas to a beautiful model on the cover of Vogue. He tended to think in more explicit terms, but he told a G-rated audience of his new employees, “This hotel is about having that woman hug you. Let the huggin’ begin.”
On a rainy spring Sunday three days before the opening, Wynn had stood in a hallway outside the doors that led into the resort’s Lafite ballroom. The floor beneath his big feet was a brilliant swirl of red and gold and green—inspired by a Cézanne painting that had caught his fancy. He shrugged his shoulders, a showman preparing for his debut.
In his sixth decade, he was taut, artfully sculpted, polished. His face was burnished from forty-seven days of skiing that winter at Sun Valley. As always, he wore his hair Vegas style: blown dry with sideburns, brushed back at the sides and a tad long in back so that it swept into the merest hint of a ducktail behind his lantern jaw.
In a spirit of renewal that befitted his return as a Las Vegas casino mogul, Wynn had embarked six months earlier upon a low-carbohydrate diet. He liked to say it was no diet, but a way of life. Wynn said he had shed thirty pounds by eliminating pizza and pasta from his diet and dining instead on Atkins cereal with Silk soymilk for breakfast, and poached salmon for lunch.
In the past year, Wynn’s sixty-three-year-old waistline had dwindled to a svelte 32-1⁄2 inches. He did not shy from boasting about this after trying on pants at the Mojitos Resort Wear shop that week. He did not mention liposuction, though one executive in Las Vegas who is closely familiar with the Wynns says, “They don’t lose weight like you and I do.”
Wynn wore a dark suit over a silky black Chinese-collared shirt. Between the shirt and his hairy chest lay a silver pendant with the initials “CM” placed vertically, the C facing backward. For as long as Wynn could remember, this necklace had been worn by his father’s former bookie, Charlie Meyerson. After Wynn’s father had died, Meyerson had befriended Wynn and later went to work for him as a casino host, catering to gamblers. He had died of cancer the previous November, shortly before turning eighty-nine. A few weeks later, a package arrived. The note said with understatement, “Thanks” and there was the pendant. “So I put it on and I haven’t taken it off since,” said Wynn.
Wynn Las Vegas was set to open the following Thursday at the stroke of midnight. On the other side of the ballroom doors, about a third of the resort’s 9,700 employees waited as though expecting a rock star. They were card dealers, cocktail waitresses, housekeepers, sous chefs, security guards, dog handlers, gardeners, lighting techs, and a few special guests. Wynn’s daughter Kevyn sat in the front row, her first baby gurgling on her lap. Soon she would have two more babies—twins—with her new husband, a Las Vegas cantor and former stage actor.
Many in the cultish audience had quit better jobs elsewhere, wagering that higher tips and upward mobility at the Wynn would pay off in the long run. One, Michael Martin, thirty years old, said he had left a bigger guest-services job and ten years of seniority at the Paris and the Flamingo casinos (not to mention four weeks of annual vacation) to park cars at Wynn Las Vegas.
Music from The Wiz—the ’70s soul musical based loosely on The Wizard of Oz—filled the ballroom. With a vaudevillian’s sense of timing, Wynn entered the room at its crescendo and walked unescorted through the wild applause. His gaze was fixed on a short set of stairs that led to the stage. He climbed these steps carefully, wobbling once. Reaching the dais, Wynn grinned sassily, doffed his jacket, and shimmied.
The crowd was screaming now.
It is worth contemplating what Wynn saw from this vantage point. The ligh
t in the Lafite ballroom was low, and would have seemed even darker to Wynn—people like shadows, disappearing in the dark. Yet he walked to the platform’s edge and opened his mouth and laughed big.
“Upstairs on the roof is a sign that says ‘Wynn, period.’ And it’s the name of the hotel and it’s my last name,” he told them. “And I, on behalf of myself and Elaine, I’d like to get something straight. As of this minute, you will be doing me a big favor, each of you who are in this room, if you refer to me as Steve and her as Elaine. There’s enough Wynn plastered around this building.”
They cheered.
“I was self-conscious about calling it Wynn. Elaine didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it. It had come up before in the past, but it turns out that names do make a difference before the fact; before it opens, it’s helpful to create expectations. The research and the focus groups and the advertising people that did these polls said that it was important, before the place was opened, to remind everybody that this was a hotel by the guy who did—or the team that did—Mirage, Bellagio, Golden Nugget, Treasure Island.”
As he spoke, Wynn approached the stage’s edge and moved away, always looking out into the rapt audience.
“The cast is assembled. The show’s about to begin in what is undoubtedly the fanciest theater that ever was. OK, it’s the fanciest theater that ever was. When it comes to the physical plant, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist. We don’t have to use hyperbole.
“It’s game. Set. Match. We won the beauty contest. And we knew we were gonna win the beauty contest.” He grinned.
“This is the most complicated, high-tech, cutting-edge, technological environment ever created on earth—including the Space Station. This is a tricky building. It does stuff. It opens, it closes, it squirts, it yells, it sings, it saves people’s lives. How Tony Marnell managed to finish the place is a miracle to me. We did it in thirty months, and that was too short a schedule. It should have been thirty-two. Bellagio took thirty-six. This is the same size and it’s ten times more complicated.
“All right. It’s new. It’s fancy. It’s done. And now you guys gotta take over the place.”
Wynn became serious, the father urging his children to make the most of themselves, in a speech that sounded a lot like the ones he gave to employees before Bellagio opened. “You are the fanciest group of people ever assembled in terms of your backgrounds and knowledge. It is a privilege to work with you.… The name on the sign is nothing but a bunch of bulbs. This place on Wednesday belongs to you.
“Any chance that you have of experiencing a better life, of finding more self-esteem, of looking in the mirror and saying, ‘Yeah,’ is gonna come from someone other than me. And you can meet that person by going to the closest ladies’ or men’s room and looking in the mirror. As much as possible, I’ll be right there with you. Especially if it’s not the ladies’ room.”
Chuckle. Wave of appreciative laughter.
“Everybody and their uncle of every description from every country is gonna beat a path to this door. And they won’t be disappointed. They’re going to walk in and go, ‘Wow.’ And after they get through looking at the flowers and the trees and the vistas that are open to them in this place, they’re gonna get real serious and they’re gonna turn around and look at you.
“The future is in this room. And the only way that you can make their dreams come true is, you have to decide that it’s OK to play with these people. They’re coming here to play. That’s what Las Vegas is all about. It’s a playpen. And this is the fanciest playpen of them all. Anywhere.
“This hotel wasn’t built to be the best hotel in Las Vegas. We had done that a couple times already. This hotel was designed to be the best thing that was done on earth.
“It was created to give people an experience that they couldn’t get anywhere else on the planet. And that’s not developer-speak. That’s actually what we set out to do. Which is why it cost so much money. This was a very serious effort to create an experience that could not be duplicated on earth.
“I’m very serious today. This is not a pep talk.… I’m short-tempered sometimes and don’t make the best impression. But today I’m trying real hard to make an impression, a sincere impression, mano a mano, [that] all the dreams you’ve got can only come true because of you.
“My biggest fear is isolation. That somehow I’ll get disconnected from you guys and I won’t know what’s really going on or how it’s working.… This market’s not going to stay the same. Indian tribes are building casinos. Companies are merging, getting bigger, trying to figure out how to… spell their name. Like it’s not tough enough to run one joint, you wanna run twenty-four of them or fifty-six of them or ninety-three. That’s not us. We will never be the biggest at anything, ’cause I don’t wanna be the biggest. I just want to be the best.
“So it’s time for us to perform. The show’s about to begin. It’s time for us to give this place its real vitality.… Being successful in business ain’t being right or wrong, it’s about being nice, gettin’ them to love us.”
Then Wynn roared.
“They came to play. PLAY with them!”
To film the resort’s television ad, Wynn waited for a cloudless day. Exiting through a door near the top of the building, he climbed a ladder to a higher rooftop. From there, he walked along a parapet to stand atop the fifty-story tower, where he was invisibly harnessed to the building. A cinematographer—who had been recommended by Wynn’s friend Steven Spielberg—filmed from a hovering helicopter. Wynn delivered his lines and ad-libbed at the end, “Can I get down now?”
As the first guests were checking into their hotel rooms, crews were still planting flowers and brushing black paint on wrought-iron fencing. Forgotten in the hubbub were the protective plastic sheets that covered the newly installed skylights of the luxury villas. For days after the resort opened, the sheets flapped in the desert spring breeze like white flags waving from the roof.
The Wynns had decided to open with a four-day party for their friends much the same way they’d opened Bellagio. The party started with a benefit for the Foundation Fighting Blindness and two local education charities. Invited guests paid as much as $7,500 per couple.
Dan Lee, Wynn’s former chief financial officer from Mirage, was there. Gary Loveman bought tickets for Harrah’s entire board of directors.
The pollster Frank Luntz arrived on Wednesday afternoon. His reaction suggested that Wynn might manage to impress people who aren’t typical Vegas types. The Washington political junkie was so enthused at wandering about the place that he failed to check his e-mail for two whole hours. “I love this place!” Luntz announced, sweating, his sandy hair mussed and his shirt coming untucked from his wrinkled khakis.
That evening, Le Reve was the centerpiece of the evening’s entertainment. At around ten p.m., near the show’s midpoint, Loveman rose from his seat in the theater and left with Robert Miller, chairman and chief executive of RiteAid Inc. Their reactions foretold the host of troubles facing the show.
“I didn’t get it,” Loveman said, as others filed out as well. “The guy sitting next to me said, ‘Is the target audience for this gay Asian males? Because that’s pretty much all you get in the first half.’”
“I’m tired,” Miller added, looking it.
At midnight, the doors opened and the hordes poured in. A blubbery couple in shorts raced in, pumping their arms—first in! They ran for slot machines. A man in a wheelchair whizzed by in white tube socks but no shoes.
Elaine Wynn went home to bed, saying she was unable to watch and too worried about the following evening’s gala. Steve Wynn, with a walkie-talkie in his hands, wandered the casino floor flanked by his friend Allan Zeman, a Hong Kong entertainment developer. Wynn posed for pictures that the crowd, wielding cell-phone cameras, was shooting in violation of every casino rule. “Mr. Wynn! Mr. Wynn! Thank you for everything you’ve done for Vegas,” they called, jostling for his attention.
Within m
oments, visitors began to e-mail their photos, which landed on the Internet, scooping a heavily protected photo-exclusive that had been offered to Vanity Fair.
Then Wynn went to bed. “Look,” he explained, “once the casino’s open, you know what it looks like, right?”
On Thursday, the Wynns’ out-of-town guests began to arrive. People joked that private jets were stuck in airborne traffic jams trying to land in Las Vegas. (By September, the number of people flying into Las Vegas by private jet had risen 50 percent from the year earlier, according to Douglas Gollan, editor in chief of Elite Traveler magazine, which is distributed on private jetcraft and in other places the super-rich hang out.)
The Today show’s Katie Couric got right to the point when she began an interview with Wynn. She asked him about being blind, catching Wynn off guard. He was furious and later screamed at his publicity executive, Denise Randazzo, “Didn’t you prep them?”
The following evening, Hugh Jackman performed a bit from his Broadway show, The Boy from Oz, to celebrate Elaine Wynn’s birthday. The elastic actor sang “Happy Birthday” and pulled Elaine onstage, where she did a demure bump and grind in her ruffled red Oscar de la Renta gown. The evening’s guest list included Elizabeth Taylor, who arrived in a wheelchair; Jackman briefly sat in her lap. Siegfried and Roy were there. Former President George Bush had as his dinner partner the actress Teri Hatcher. In the kitchen cooking were Wolfgang Puck and Alain Ducasse.
At around five thirty p.m., the hotel’s exclusive South Tower lobby was doing its job to separate the classes. While the masses filled slot machines beyond, the singer Harry Connick Jr. chatted near the exit to the swimming pool. The music mogul David Geffen looked bored in a queue waiting to check in. The actor George Hamilton preened in a corner, his trademark tan glowing a strange orange. Richard Branson strode past, a gray-blond billionaire adventurer with a wicked grin.
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