In the midst of Harrah’s negotiations with Apollo and TPG, Wynn called Loveman on his cell phone and proposed talking again about opportunities in Macao. Wynn’s focus was on two fronts at the time: He had one foot in Las Vegas and the other in Asia as he pursued the strategy that Kerkorian had either forced or allowed him to follow—to be the best, but not the biggest.
Loveman was eager—both for a shot at Macao and for another close-up of Wynn. A week later, Loveman arrived at the appointed time at Wynn Las Vegas. Steve Wynn, though, wasn’t there. He was “at the ball game,” a car valet said.
Wynn’s nephew, Andrew Pascal, rushed up and said, “Steve wants you to come to the game.” Pascal then drove Loveman directly into the University of Nevada Las Vegas basketball arena. Loveman was ushered to center-court seats on the floor and was seated smack dab between Steve and Elaine Wynn. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God, it’s going to be in the paper that Steve and I were meeting,’” Loveman recalled later.
Nothing came of the meeting. In fact, Loveman was still wondering about its purpose months later. With Wynn, you never know; he might have had a purpose in being seen publicly with Loveman at that moment. Or maybe he just felt like going to the game.
“We got about eight substantive sentences in between hot dogs,” Loveman said. “It was just another visit to the theater of the bizarre.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
NO END
Are those people suckers? Honey, I have to answer that like this: You’re talking to a sucker. Gambling is a vice. Drugs are a vice. Prostitution is a vice. You can’t sell the poison unless you’re willing to take it yourself.
—BOB STUPAK, GAMBLER AND CREATOR OF VEGAS WORLD, NOW THE STRATOSPHERE CASINO, IN 1997
It’s hard to love a place that tries so hard, yet can’t respect itself—like the class slut.
Kirk Kerkorian owns a home in Las Vegas, but lives in Beverly Hills, California. Terry Lanni’s real home—the one where his wife and kids live—is in Pasadena, California. Gary Loveman commutes from Boston. Richard Mirman bought a summer home in Chicago. Ron Kramer, Wynn Resorts’ president, lives in New York City.
Dan Lee, who has a pilot’s license, flew his young family out of Las Vegas almost every weekend when he worked for Steve Wynn. Phil Satre commuted from his ranch in Reno. Glenn Schaeffer bought homes in New Zealand, Taos, Los Angeles, Miami, Barcelona, and Orange County, California. Jim Murren aches to move to Europe.
It is gambling that brought Elaine Wynn to Las Vegas, and it’s gambling that keeps her there. “I consider Sun Valley my real home,” she once said.
The fortunes of Las Vegas’s gambling leaders may be tied to the kingdom of Las Vegas, but they flee the place with alacrity.
Many Las Vegas executives yearn to push their companies beyond the confines of casinos, dreaming of partnerships with Disney, film studios, media giants, and big hotel chains. Those deals have been few so far.
All that will change. They will manage, because they’ll never give up and because the more we all go to Las Vegas to do something other than gamble, the more normal the place can claim to be.
In coming years, gambling profits will continue to dwindle as a percentage of the casino resorts’ total take. Las Vegas visitors today are overwhelmingly married and well-educated—nearly two-thirds have attended college. Thirty-two percent have household incomes greater than $80,000 per year—making them far wealthier than the average American—and a lucrative bunch of consumers. Big media companies will soon relax about hobnobbing with casinos as young Harvard, MIT, and Cornell graduates take jobs in Vegas. The town will get better private schools, arts programs, top-notch hospitals—and surely even a major-league sports franchise.
As the rest of the country seeps into Las Vegas, Las Vegas is seeping into the rest of the country. Consider Times Square, which resembles the neon and billboard flash of the southern end of the Las Vegas Strip, and the Time Warner Center in New York City—an oversized mix of shopping, dining, and other heavily marketed pleasures. Consider Palm Springs, Tampa, and even parts of Connecticut. Gambling has come to Pennsylvania now—surrounding New York City with casinos in every direction except the Atlantic Ocean.
When the anticelebrity chef Anthony Bourdain visited Las Vegas for his travel show a few years back, he wandered through Kerkorian’s New York-New York casino, with its imitation Greenwich Village streets, and he wondered aloud where the pigeons were. But he found the place all too weirdly familiar and he concluded his film diary with a philosophical thought.
“My fear,” Bourdain said, sounding melancholy, “is that my beloved New York, with each passing year, is beginning to look more like Las Vegas.”
So where does it all end?
It doesn’t. There is no end of Las Vegas.
Chapter Twenty-nine
HAPPY PLACE
Giving no sign that he was aware of the storm that was brewing, Steve Wynn appeared energized on the morning of Monday, January 22, 2018. It was time for his year-end conference call to discuss with Wall Street analysts Wynn Resorts’ 2017 financial results, and he was prepared to dazzle. More than a decade after he’d conceived of a huge recreational lake behind the Wynn and Encore—one that harkened to his boyhood in upstate New York—construction for the $3-billion project was under way. Wynn Resorts had survived the global financial crisis, which had waylaid most development plans in Las Vegas. The economy was booming. The resort’s golf course had been closed, and trees were being removed to make way for the lagoon and a beach—part of the next stage of its Las Vegas development.
Wynn announced on the call that he had recently amassed several additional parcels of land across the Strip near the Trump International Hotel, a non-casino hotel developed in part by his friend, the current U.S. President Donald Trump. Wynn said he was calling the property Wynn West, and that he intended to build a 2,000-to-3,000-room hotel on the thirty-eight acres, which once included the old Frontier Hotel. He wasn’t ready to announce his concept for that property, but it would be built in just two or three years, he said, keeping the company growing on its home turf through the next decade.
“I’m pretty enthusiastic today about Las Vegas,” Wynn said. “But this is probably the first conference call we’ve had when our whole development ambitions have finally matured. We kept sort of low key because we wanted to get the other side of the Strip. Now that we’ve completed our assembly, I’m excited and really having a good time sharing it with everybody. And we’ll be doing a lot of that in the next few months.”
This reflected an underlying truth about the Sisyphean cycle of constant renewal in which Las Vegas exists. For modern Las Vegas, that cycle began with the Mirage in 1989.
In 2018, no truly groundbreaking resort had been built in Las Vegas since Wynn Resorts’ Encore in 2008. In the ensuing decade, resorts had focused on surviving the financial crisis and expanding into Asia. There was also, for Wynn Resorts, a matter of opportunistic domestic expansion—a $2.4-billion Wynn-branded casino near Boston, set along the Mystic River, was set to open in 2019.
Years earlier, Wynn had predicted that his would become an Asian company, and by that January—and despite his fondness for Las Vegas—he had in many ways turned out to be correct. Nearly 65 percent of the company’s operating income in 2017 had been produced by its Macao properties. The famous Asian proclivity to gamble, paired with the limited number of casino licenses approved by the Chinese government, had turned Macao into a true gambling paradise for those who had obtained those licenses. Sheldon Adelson, who had been rubbing shoulders with tech titans on the Forbes Richest list for years, got there by getting to Macao first and biggest. The island produced three times the gambling revenues of Las Vegas and was full of promise. Macao’s gamblers preferred table games to slot machines, losing more than $5 billion to the Wynn Macau and Wynn Palace casinos in 2017, compared with the $465 million lost at table games in Las Vegas. (The differences were not so great in slot machines. Wynn Resorts’ Macao gamblers lo
st $320 million on slots that year, compared with $219 million lost on the company’s slot machines in Las Vegas.)
A downturn that had followed the Chinese government’s crackdown on luxury spending—a dramatic move that sent luxury conglomerates such as Louis Vuitton and Kering scurrying to refocus on selling handbags and footwear to American clients—was recovering by 2018 as business was replaced by the growing Chinese middle class. Thousands of vacationers and weekenders came to gamble, shop, and dine, creating a family-style expansion reminiscent of Las Vegas in the 1990s. It was about to become even easier for the middle class to get to Macao. By summer, a new, long-awaited bridge-and-tunnel system would bring carloads of gamblers and guests to Macao from Hong Kong—easing a trip that had once required a hydrofoil, helicopter, or plane.
In the spring of 2018, Donna Campbell, the executive director of public relations for Sands China, Sheldon Adelson’s empire there, made a tour through the United States. “The government wants to turn Macao into more of a family destination,” she said over coffee in Los Angeles. The Sands, which dominated Macao’s Cotai Strip with a string of hotels and casinos, was developing themed attractions to appeal to five-to-eight-year-olds—Thomas the Tank Engine and Angelina Ballerina, for instance. The resorts—the Venetian, and the Parisian, which had a bigger Eiffel Tower than the one in Las Vegas, she said—were creating fashion events such as the Sands Macao Fashion Week, staging runway shows around the pools. There were Broadway shows—Beauty and the Beast, Cats, Shrek the Musical, and The Sound of Music. David Beckham, she said, was the “face” of the Macao Venetian resort. There was a big conference business—Mary Kay cosmetics had recently sent five thousand delegates, she said—which filled rooms midweek, an innovation that Adelson had brought to the Las Vegas Strip.
Opportunities in Asia—Japan was another frontier—were driving Wall Street’s optimism for Wynn Resorts’ earnings growth via Wynn Macau, opened in 2006, and the more upscale Wynn Palace, opened in 2016. The company had more developable land there, and Wynn sounded pleased when he announced that his management team from Macao was in Las Vegas to design the next resort in Macao.
“The Macao market is still only touching a tiny percentage of the potential market there,” Wynn told the analysts cheerily. A few minutes later, he hinted that he would wall away his customers from his rival Sands properties run by Sheldon Adelson. “I assure you that we know exactly where we’re going. And we think that the only place in the world so perfectly suited for this is Macao. Perfectly suited to create an enclave. Oh, and I’m sure there’s going to be some gambling in it.” He chuckled, using one of his favorite phrases to suggest that he created the ultimate entertainment places for adults: “Rooms for people to play!”
At seventy-six, Wynn had plans to keep himself busy well into his eighties, like his hero, Kirk Kerkorian. “We’re going to use our real estate to show some people some new moves,” he boasted, sounding jaunty.
Wynn was in his happy place—the midst of designing and building and planning the legacy that he had years before said he would leave for his grandchildren. “My board is going to see a room next week that we built that is going to be the bedroom going forward,” Wynn announced, ticking off the new hotel room’s features: a sprawling 650 square feet with a twenty-four-foot-wide window; a gentleman’s bath on the left and the lady’s bath on the right. “We have his-and-hers bathrooms! That qualifies as a suite, according to Forbes Travel Guide,” he said with pride. An eighty-inch television set; a sitting area; going for rates of $400 to $500 a night. (In 2017, the average daily rate of Wynn Resorts hotel rooms in Las Vegas was $305, according to the company’s financial statements.)
“I’m feeling pretty safe and I’m going to get those damn buildings done as fast as I can, because I want to capture more of the absolutely inevitable visitor and tourist traffic that Las Vegas will experience in the next fifteen or twenty years,” Wynn said.
Wynn, who had talked himself into a buoyant mood, wanted to talk about another piece of good news for his company—the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which had recently passed in Washington, D.C. Wynn’s stature among Republicans got a boost when Donald Trump became president of the United States of America. Trump made Wynn Republican Party finance chairman.
“With Republicans in Washington, we are seeing this fabulous renaissance! This tax bill! This tax bill!” Wynn crowed. He pointed out that the bill would particularly benefit real-estate developers. “With one-year depreciation on new and used equipment! The lowering of the corporate rate! Later this year, I’m going to give my employees a raise—a bonus.” He segued into a short diatribe against Democrats.
If Wynn was feeling heat from questions being asked by a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal, he conveyed none of it. He couldn’t resist taking a swipe at his wealthier rival, who controlled Sands with a majority of its shares. “If I’d been a little more conservative, I’d have gone public when Sheldon Adelson did and have a lot more money,” Wynn said apropos of nothing.
Wynn’s behavior on that earnings conference call showed he had matured as a corporate leader. He lectured but he didn’t insult anyone, didn’t once call UBS analyst Robin Farley “honey.” Despite his obvious enthusiasm for his new projects, he never did anything scary like bursting into song, and no dogs barked in the background.
By this time, Wynn’s Las Vegas home was a two-bedroom suite overlooking the golf course behind the Wynn Las Vegas; he had been leasing it from the company for more than a decade. He had moved there originally as a temporary arrangement in 2008, when he and Elaine were renovating a new home in the Southern Highlands neighborhood of Las Vegas—after selling their Shadow Creek manse to Kerkorian’s team. The Wynns had other homes—in New York City and Sun Valley, notably—and had planes at their disposal, so a Las Vegas pied-à-terre was convenient. It was also an example of how difficult it could be to separate the Wynns’ corporate and personal lives. Luxuries seemed to spill back and forth between them. In August 2008, Steve Wynn bought Elaine the 230-carat pear-shaped Wynn Diamond, the largest stone ever set by Cartier at the time. (The Hope Diamond, by comparison, is 45.52 carats.) In an article in the Los Angeles Times that December, Elaine Wynn said she didn’t like to wear the ostentatious jewel, which was set in a platinum necklace. But was it a personal bauble? The diamond was on display at the opening of Encore, Wynn Resorts’ second casino in Las Vegas, that month. Perhaps the diamond was more like the Desert Inn, which Wynn had long ago claimed he’d purchased for Elaine’s birthday, before building the Wynn on it.
Elaine Wynn often took on a patient mien with her rambunctious husband, with whom she sometimes seemed mismatched. In 2008, Steve supported John McCain’s candidacy for president. Elaine campaigned for Barack Obama. But over a lifetime together, Elaine and Steve Wynn had created something distinctive—two huge casino resort companies that operated with a literal mom-and-pop sensibility. Steve had the big ideas and pursued them as a force of nature; Elaine was his full partner, contributing good taste and maintaining the roots of the company’s broader relationships with Las Vegas and Nevada. It was Elaine who was active in the state’s education programs and, later, in the Nevada arts.
Wynn said they would often discuss the company as they turned in for the night, passing thoughts and ideas back and forth. Publicly, if not speaking in her own right, she filled in for Steve at corporate speaking engagements and meetings. Elaine for years handled the constant parties and entertainment operations, toured countless VIPS and press around the properties, and served as a sounding board for employees at all levels. They worked from neighboring offices. Executives who were fearful of taking bad news to the explosive boss would seek Elaine’s counsel. Many employees were afraid of and awed by Steve, while they were often fond of Elaine. Yet by assuming traditionally feminine roles at the company, Elaine was often underestimated or dismissed entirely.
Forty-nine years after they’d started dating, Elaine and Steve Wynn divorced for th
e second time in 2010, this time for real. The two kept their separation secret for several months until the New York Post broke the news about a younger woman in his life—a jet-set mother of two teenaged sons named Andrea Hissom whom he’d met in St. Tropez. Steve stayed on in the hotel suite overlooking the golf course.
He was disarmingly honest about his feelings in a May 2010 interview with the South China Post in which he called Elaine “my partner and my best friend” and noted that the two women had not met because “Elaine does not want to meet Andrea.” He sounded, at age sixty-eight, like a man in middle-aged crisis.
“I get to go to bed at night with this lady who is sweet and perfect,” he says. “She’s 46 but looks 18. She is genetically lucky. I grew up with Elaine. We went steady after our first date. But this whole thing [with Hissom] is like getting to relive my young years.” He pauses to laugh with what sounds like a mixture of relief and amazement. “She has not heard all my stories. They are still new to her.”
Naturally, Wynn wanted it all—a younger girlfriend and the good wishes and friendly companionship of his former wife. “It’s like God made a woman for me. The only thing that stops my world from being perfect is that Elaine is not happy,” Wynn told the reporter.
In her own interview for the piece, Elaine Wynn revealed the attraction Wynn held for her all those past years:
“I obviously needed a man like Steve for his charisma, passion and enthusiasm and I am sorry we don’t have a personal relationship any more,” she says, as she meditates on the longevity of her relationship with Wynn. “But his character is a very demanding one and I am an alpha female. I found I had to compromise to maintain the relationship and I did that because of our children.”
Winner Takes All Page 31