B009HOTHPE EBOK

by Paul Anka

  He looked at me like, O my god! “Shit, Bellini … that’s it!” So he renamed the hotel right there, and that’s how the Bellagio got its name. Eventually Steve used Beau Rivage as the name of the casino he built down in Biloxi, Mississippi.

  The Bellagio opened on October 15, 1998 on the site of the demolished Dunes Hotel. It was the most expensive resort ever built at that time. It had fountains outside dancing in sync to music, and contained Steve’s famous art collection—he’d become a serious art maven—which included paintings by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Alex Katz, Helen Frankenthaler, and Roy Lichtenstein.

  How Steve became an art connoisseur is a very Steve tale. Well, he’d seen my modern art collection for years and other collections and had never taken any interest. Didn’t get it, didn’t like it, until … later on. So when he finally flipped and got into it, he did it with ultimate Steve style, because there’s no one like Steve when he gets on a kick. He does his homework, absorbs it, and gets it—just amazing.

  I went with him on his first art discovery trip. Steve hired the gallery owner Bill Acquavella to accompany him to Japan—because that’s where a lot of the great art on the market was at the time. On this first art discovery trip to Tokyo, he called and said, “Bellini, you are coming with me.” We would walk through these bank corridors, climbing over piles of platinum and gold bars to look at the art. Eventually it became so tedious for Steve because of his eyesight that we went back to the hotel and had them bring the art to us. And that’s when Steve got the art bug, that’s when it really kicked in. Before that he couldn’t have cared less. But anything Steve puts his mind to he becomes an expert in. He started reading and studying and developed a brilliant understanding of buying art and the art world.

  * * *

  When you hang out with high-powered guys like Donald Trump, Michael Milken, Skippy Bronson, and Steve Wynn you can find yourself involved in some pretty extreme situations. In the late ’80s with two friends of mine, Steve Wynn and Michael Milken, and an acquaintance, Ivan Boesky, I found myself somewhat in the middle of a huge financial scandal.

  I knew Ivan Boesky before he became a corporate raider and über arbitrageur. He was the son-in-law of Ben Silverstein who owned the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that’s where I used to stay when I came out to California as a young kid. It was there that I first saw Howard Hughes—he had a suite there. Since Boesky was married to Ben’s daughter Seema, I frequently saw him socially so when I came to New York to perform in the late ’80s he suggested we have lunch together it seemed a perfectly normal thing to do.

  But the morning before I was going to meet with Boesky, a guy I knew in Washington who used to do investigative work for me called me up and said, “I know you see Ivan Boesky socially from time to time, but I want to warn you about what’s going down with him. It’s a dangerous situation and you should be very careful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Boesky’s cooperating with the feds; he’s going to be a government witness. There’s a big financial scandal coming and it’s going to spread. Like this guy Dennis Levine, he’s the managing director at Drexel Burnham Lambert.”

  “What’s up with him?”

  “Well, what we know is that he’s going to talk to the feds; he’s cutting a deal. He’s already involved Boesky, and Boesky’s cooperating, too.”

  “Wait a minute. What’s this all about?”

  “Rudy Giuliani is going after the big insider traders on Wall Street; he’s going to nail Levine and Boesky and we think he’s going after Michael Milken next. Milken would be a big trophy for him.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Well, you’re going to have lunch with him, right? And I thought you might want to know he’s going to be wearing a wire.”

  “He’s doing what? Jesus.”

  I go to meet with Boesky as if nothing had happened, just two old acquaintances having lunch at a fancy New York restaurant, where the biggest question generally is, “Is the fish fresh?” But I’m getting very nervous. My concern was whether my friend Steve might mistakenly get brought into this because Milken had helped finance his resorts.

  I’m sitting there making small talk with Boesky and wondering whether the guy’s wearing a wire! I don’t know what his agenda was but I was extremely careful how I phrased my answers. It was a very disturbing situation to find myself in. Was he trying to pump me? Was he trying to get me to tell him something about Steve Wynn?

  How Milken got ensnared in this is a long story I don’t know, but I figure he can take care of himself. He was so smart that you had a better chance getting a sunrise past a rooster than outsmarting Mike. Boesky was something else again. He was just a corporate trader and unrepentant financial predator. They based the character of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street on him. That famous speech he gives in the movie? That’s really him. In 1985, at the School of Business Administration at the University of California at Berkeley, he gave a speech in which he said. “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy, and still feel good about yourself.” But in the end it turned into poison—and prison—for him and Milken.

  I go back to Vegas where I was living at the time. I take Steve to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I tell him, “Steve, I’ve got to talk to you about something that could be potentially explosive. I’ve been informed by someone in Washington that Milken is in Rudy Giuliani’s crosshairs. He’s going to try and bring him down any way he can. As you know, Boesky’s been indicted and the whole situation is going to blow up. Dennis Levine is down in the islands with the money—and he’s going to talk.” I said, “Steve, you better call Michael right away and tell what you know.”

  I liked Milken and his wife Lori a lot. Around that time, I said, “Michael, don’t kill the messenger, but…” And I told him about my lunch with Boesky, how Giuliani was gunning for him and so on. Milken didn’t seem that concerned. “Paul, thank you for calling me about this. I’m only too aware of what’s happening. The truth is I have nothing to do with it. It’s not going to touch me.” Well, you know the rest of the story.

  Insider trading was illegal, but had not been strictly enforced until Giuliani prosecuted Boesky for it. Boesky cooperated with the Securities and Exchange Commission and informed on Michael—and that was a devastating blow to Milken. Once the feds had Boesky as a witness, it was just a matter of time until Milken would also get prosecuted because Boesky could directly implicate Milken in insider trading transactions.

  In April 1990, Milken cut his deal with the government. He pled guilty to six felonies. Milken paid $1.1 billion in fines and ended up spending less than two years in what’s called Club Fed. You have got to hand it to the guy—he does the time. He comes out of prison the same day he finds out he has prostate cancer. He focuses on it—and beats it. Boesky himself was convicted of insider trading, got three and a half years and was fined $100 million. He and his wife are still friends, unlike many who prospered because of him and are no longer loyal to him.

  * * *

  Sometime in 2001, Steve Wynn and I were hiking in Sun Valley, Utah, which we love to do together, and during our climb he was on the phone with Barry Sternlicht, the head of Starwood Corporation about buying the land at the Desert Inn. They quickly closed the deal. The next thing I know I was riding around in a golf cart in 2002–2003 as his new hotel casino began to be built. Ultimately it opened in 2005 but he had shared with me for years as to the kind of new masterpiece he was creating. I cherish the days and nights I would sit with him, where the fellow perfectionist would sit with the plans and show them to me with such enthusiasm for what he was doing. My buddy Steve Wynn is still the eminent name in the gaming business.

  Steve and his dream palace came up again in 2005 when he began to think about what to call his current hotel-casino. He’d originally wanted to call “La Rêve,” which means “the dream” in French. It’s the name of the famous Picasso painting in Steve’s office, which Steve equally famously put his elbo
w through due to his eye condition. “La Rêve” is a beautiful lyrical name but there was a problem with it. In order to use La Rêve as the name of his hotel-casino he’d have to add a lot of other information as well. For one thing, people don’t know how to pronounce it or what it means, plus it has a circumflex accent, which strikes terror in a country like the USA. In addition, in his promotional materials Steve would have to include his name and mention all the other hotel-casinos he’d previously created in Las Vegas.

  To figure out what he should name his new place Steve hired David Arnell, a famous marketing guy who had done DKNY for Donna Karan. Arnell persuaded Steve not to call it La Rêve. “You want to promote yourself and your other successful ventures,” Arnell told him. “You want people to know you’re the guy who created the Mirage and the Bellagio, so how about you use ‘Wynn’ somewhere in the title, like, say, the ‘Wynn.’” Which Steve did, although he was well aware of the pitfall of using your own name on a building. Donald Trump had done that in Atlantic City with disastrous consequences. Trump’s success has always been with apartment buildings. Gaming was an unhappy, frustrating experience for Donald, plus he was in the unfortunate position of having his name on the building that failed. This is a double misery when things don’t work out.

  * * *

  On April 26, 1981, I celebrated my twenty-fifth year in show business. As the eighties dawned, I found myself in the unusual position of having to reinvent myself all over again in a business where I’d already made it at least twice. My association with Las Vegas as a performer didn’t help—in fact it was a curse at one time for a contemporary artist to even play there. But, true to my code, I continued to perform in Vegas no matter whatever anybody said. I was still playing internationally, but I’d always go back there. The hypocrisy is that all of a sudden everybody showed up there later on—Celine Dion, and eventually Elton John and all the rest. But back then the recording industry had decided Vegas was a dirty word. They developed a very negative image of Las Vegas. Vegas became a bad word; it was a put-down. “Going Vegas” meant selling out. They didn’t to want to get behind any singer who had any connection with it.

  I saw it coming. As far back as the early seventies I was told that no Las Vegas act could expect to have a hit song on the charts. Then I wrote “(You’re) Having My Baby” and it went to the top of the charts. Critics cut me some slack after that, but to this day I’m sure they consider my Las Vegas appearances as a mistake.

  In 1980 I had a top five AC hit on the charts for Sony records with “Hold Me ’Til the Morning Comes.” By the ’80s I figured it was time to try out other media. In 1980, I wrote a song for Louis Malle’s Atlantic City—the movie tied for first place at the Venice Film Festival.

  I’ve done a bit of acting, too. I’d been in all those teen movies and, of course, The Longest Day. I wasn’t too enamored of the movie business but started doing a few cameo parts in the ’70s and ’80s. I played a yacht broker in Captain Ron, a pit boss in 3000 Miles To Graceland. On TV I was on That ’70s Show and Gilmore Girls (where Lorelai named her dog Paul Anka) and in the “Treehouse of Horror VI” episode on The Simpsons—now that’s almost as good as a Grammy.

  Yes, in the ’80s, there was a lot of activity—especially foreign travel. I began touring a lot more in Asia, a part of the world that is fascinating and has my respect. It’s been the most stimulating part of the world to tour and experience. I have sustained a long working relationship with two people who were my first promoters in the Hong Kong region, Florence and David Chan. To this day I hold them very close to my heart for their loyalty and friendship, Florence Chan especially. She is a very special and rare human being. Another couple dear to my heart are Dr. Albert Yeung and his wife Semon. Albert is one of the most successful and brightest men in Hong Kong. They are both giving and incredible hosts. I cherish the moments when I am in their company.

  Ten

  THE BELLINI EPISODES

  I’ve always been a practical joker, ever since I was a kid, but my serious capers started in the late sixties and early seventies and onward. Steve Wynn and I became very close when we were neighbors in Vegas. Steve had never been to Europe so we took a trip there with our wives and families. As soon as we got to Venice we started drinking Bellinis, which is champagne and peach nectar. I loved bellinis so much Steve started calling me Bellini, and that became my nickname. And whenever I’d do a practical joke, he would call it “doing a Bellini.”

  On one occasion, when we went to Monte Carlo with Skip Bronson, who at the time worked with Steve at Mirage Resorts. We went over to look at the Grand Prix race route because Steve wanted to bring it to Vegas. The idea was, shut down the strip, and try and re-create the Grand Prix in the center of the city. He’s a great visionary and we have a lot of fun together when we get away.

  The Grand Prix race lasts two or three days and on that opening night we get invited to the Palace to meet Prince Rainier, the ruler of the glamorous gambling kingdom on the Mediterranean—Monaco is one of the most beautiful spots in the world. We land, we go to the Hôtel de Paris, one of the most well-appointed and stylish hotels in Europe. After attending the second day of the Grand Prix, I feel it is the right moment to pull a Bellini. I pick up the phone and call Skip Bronson. We’re all staying on the same floor, and I say, “Meester Bronson, this is Fridrici Baglatini over at the Palace with Prince Rainier.” I’m doing my corniest Italien functionary’s accent.

  “Yes?” says Bronson.

  “We are so happy to ’ave a Mr. Wynn over here as our guest for the Grand Prix and tonight you know we’re ’aving the big celebration at the Palace. Mr. Bronson, Mr. Wynn we’re very happy to have ’im ’ere, ’e’s incredible business for the casino, and the prince would like to ’ave private audience with Mr. Wynn, to discuss casino business.”

  “Oh, wonderful, I’ll put that together,” Bronson tells me.

  “’Ave ’im up ’ere at six o’clock. And make sure ’e wears a tuxedo, cause ’e’s going to see the prince by ’imself.”

  “Oh, tuxedo? Okay.”

  “We’ll send a car. You put him in the car; we will get him out. We got a department for people with any kind of a health problem”

  “Well, but there’s something you should know, Mr. Wynn has a problem with the eyesight. He has retinitis pigmentosa, so he can’t see clearly when it gets dark.”

  “Don’t vorry,” I say. “You put ’em in the car, and we got a department for people with any kind of health problems. And vill take care of ’em.” Then I add, “This is official visit, you cannot come with him, capisce?”

  He says, “Oh, okay.”

  I say, “’Ere’s my phone number, if anything bup-bup-bup.” And I give him a phone number and he takes the phone number—but of course it’s bogus.

  I go down to Steve’s room; he’s been informed by Skip over the phone that the prince wants to see him alone. I walk into Steve’s room, and he’s on the phone with his wife, Elaine.

  “I haven’t got long,” he says. “Turns out the prince wants to see me. I gotta get this tuxedo ready. I go over to the Palace at six, just the two of us. We’re going to discuss…”

  And I’m going, “Steve…”

  “Honey,” Steve’s telling his wife, “I gotta hang up, Bellini’s here, I’m going up to see the prince. I gotta be there in half an hour.”

  So he hangs up and he says, “Bellini, come on, help me, what should I wear? The black, the blue?” He’s showing me different outfits, because he can’t tell the difference between the colors on account of his eye problem and I’m helping him through all of this. He’s getting more and more revved up for the meeting.

  I realize at this point I’ve gone too far and have to stop it. I say, “Steven, there is no meeting.”

  He says, “What do you mean, Bellini?” I tell him I just did a Bellini on Skippy. “That was me; I called Bronson. I just put him on. Just to get him. He had never experienced my humor before, and needed a “Bellini”
pulled on him.

  He says, “Oh fuck, Bellini, that’s funny. You didn’t!” As we’re talking about it, there’s a knock at the door and in walks Skip Bronson. He’s got a pad in his hand and a pencil and he looks at us and says, “Oh man, these people are something over here.”

  So Steve says, “What do you mean?”

  He says, “You know, I tried to call this guy back, who set this meeting up with you and the prince. I call over there; I can’t get through. I must have taken down the wrong number and I could not reach him. So I called the main number through the hotel operator here and when they answer they said they did not know anything about the guy. So I said, ‘Get me the emissary to the prince.’ I get this guy on the phone, this real snobby French cat; he’s telling me he doesn’t know anything about the meeting. And I said to him, ‘Well, you know what, you’re out of the loop. I’m gonna have Mr. Wynn there at six.’ They’re trying to give me an argument, but I handled it, Steve! Told this Frenchman off, da uh da.”

  Steve says, “You told the Palace that you’re coming with me, and you told the prince’s emissary that he’s out of the loop? And you’re bringing me, hell or high water?”

  Skip says, “Yeah, why?”

  So finally Wynn says, “There ain’t no fucking meeting. That was Bellini on the phone. Not some guy at the Palace.”

  Skip goes white, and he says, “You mean I just bawled out the entire staff over there—for nothing?”

  He gets over it, and we’re laughing and laughing about the thing. We go to the Palace at 8:00, stand in line with a hundred people in the Palace courtyard until they’re ready for us, all still cracking up. Steve thinks it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard, that Skip has told off the entire Palace. So now we get inside and Steve says, “I can’t fucking believe this.” And as we’re talking, the guy who Skip called up and told, “You’re out of the loop,” comes walking by and is introduced to us. He goes white when he hears Skip’s and Steve’s names and storms off.