B009HOTHPE EBOK (40 page)

I had a lot of big canvases, really large-size paintings: Ellsworth Kellys, Frank Stellas, the bird series, the Rauschenberg, huge, huge pieces, and
Jasper’s Dilemma—
a very important black-and-white and color Stella.

We had come west to Vegas, then Sun Valley, and then I took my family up to Carmel. Sister Carlotta’s nuns ran a girls’ school up in Santa Catalina. I was so into the art I built a house in Pebble Beach designed by two great architects, Buff & Hensman. I built the house around the art collection, with plenty of wall space and forty- to fifty-foot ceilings to accommodate all the pieces.

After all my kids were in college—the only one left was Amelia, and she wanted to live in L.A.—we left and moved down to Los Angeles. The Pebble Beach house sold for a record amount of money—and a woman moved in with thirty cats. Obviously we couldn’t accommodate all these huge paintings in a smaller house and we started selling it all off. By that time, the value of my Rauschenberg had gone through the roof. Everybody had started ruining the market. It escalated to a point where it was prohibitive to buy an art work. One of my last pieces, was a beautiful Rosenquist piece, his 1977 painting,
Terrarium.

When I lived in Sun Valley, Idaho, I started
The Painter,
one of my favorite albums. I finished it up in Carmel, and I said, okay, it’s going to be called
The Painter,
and I’m going to commission Andy Warhol to do the cover. I flew Andy out to Vegas and met with him and we had some preliminary discussions—such as they were. Andy did eight portraits, I paid him forty, fifty thousand, and I used a couple of the portraits on the cover of the album. I donated four to the museum in San Francisco and gave the rest to Anne.

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I’ve known Steve Wynn since the late ’50s when we were teenagers together in Florida. I was performing at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Steve and his parents came to see my show and the following afternoon he was out by the pool and his father who was involved with the hotel in some way came over and introduced us. I was maybe twenty, Steve was nineteen, in his second year of college—we’re almost exactly six months apart in age. He was home for Christmas vacation and wanted to meet me, not so much because he was a big fan of my records but he envied all the girls that would hover around me.

The Fontainebleau opened in 1954, and, in the fifties, it was
the
place. When you walked into the Fontainebleau you went, “Oh shit!” It was the spectacular glitzy palace of Golden Era glamour invented out of the scene itself, the swanky vision of legendary architect Morris Lapidus, with a luxurious stage on which everyone could play out their fantasies. When you walked in you entered a perfect rose-colored and gilt world of your ritziest dreams. It was the ideal architecture to go with the mock-gangster allure of Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin, and sultry high-heeled women. It was an architecture spun out of torch songs.

There was a seven-foot-wide staircase that winds counterclockwise out of the center of the lobby, like those stairways to heaven in movies—it looks like it doesn’t go anywhere, but actually went to the card room, a choice, if shady, location where under-the-table gambling went on. It had a balcony that came out of the lobby in an arc but the balcony wasn’t actually cantilevered—there was a curved wall that ran about forty feet underneath it with a mural in brown paint on it that looked like a Roman wall painting of a canal and columns. Behind the curved wall was the pool bar, which was the hooker bar. That’s where the call girls were. Steve and I were too young to go into the bar but Steve was always going up those stairs—his dad played gin and pinochle with a mobbed-up guy named “Sonny” and other gamblers there.

The card room was not run by the hotel per se. There was always a heavy presence there of a guy with the name of Max Raymond. Maxie Raymond and some dark skinned Sicilian guy were always in evidence, watching over their shady business interests. Raymond was hooked up with the unions, which was code for being an Outfit guy and that card room at the Fontainebleau must have had a rake at the tables, some kind of fee. It must have also been the kind of place where you could bet on sports. I think the bookmakers worked out of the card room and paid a fee to this guy Raymond, who had been put there by whoever it was that got the Fontainebleau’s owner, Ben Novack, his loan from the bank. The owners of the hotel were Novack and his brother for about 30 percent of the building. A major chunk of the equity was put up by a guy named John Frumkis from New York, a connected real estate guy and Abe Rosenberg who owned J & B Scotch. Abe took this obscure British brand and made a fortune, made millions—but that’s a whole other crazy story from this crowd.

The Fontainebleau was the only place to play in Miami. The
only
place. Belafonte worked at the Fontainebleau, Mathis, Sinatra, everyone. Meyer Lansky used to sit in the lobby in the morning—that’s where he dictated his letters and contracts.

It impressed me and left a lasting impression on Steve, too. Steve has always been in love with the idea of trying to create out-of-this-world resorts. The two of us were just that right age to see what the future could be.

My dear friend and fellow prankster Steve Wynn is the boy wonder of Vegas. He’s the guy who single-handedly changed the face of the place. Vegas has always been my second home. Whatever I did, wherever I went I’d always touch base with Vegas. I’d go off to Europe, make some records over there, play all around the world but always come back. I never gave up on the place. I was there when Vegas was seedy and mobbed up, I was there when it was swinging with Frank, and I’m still there now that it’s family-oriented, thanks in a large part to Steve Wynn. Steve is mainly responsible for helping clean up Las Vegas’s image. But, as he once pointed out to a convention of casino owners, “We don’t want to make Vegas
too
squeaky clean—it’s got to be a little edgy, a little naughty; otherwise why would anyone want to go there? How would it be different from Omaha?” Which I guess is how they came up with the phrase, “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.”

Steve created a new era and style in Vegas. He had a vision that changed an entire city. He and his wife moved there in 1967 and invested in the Frontier Hotel. He’d hardly been in Vegas the year, when the state authorities, concerned about Vegas’s reputation, persuaded billionaire Howard Hughes to buy the Frontier, believing that his corporate security people would clean up the town. Through most of its history as a resort, illegal gambling, hidden ownership, and skimming schemes had been winked at, but now the federal government was focusing on corruption and criminal activity in Vegas.

Steve’s first big coup was essentially a parking-lot ploy. Hughes had neglected to buy a small strip of land adjacent to the Frontier, which Steve and banker Parry Thomas happened to own. Steve called Hughes’s bluff by announcing that he was going to build the world’s narrowest casino on that strip of land, forcing Hughes to buy it for $2.5 million. With his profits Steve began investing in the Golden Nugget, borrowing funds from Parry Thomas’s bank, and by 1973 had become the major shareholder. When he took over the Golden Nugget he became the youngest casino owner in the history of Vegas. The hotel rooms at the Golden Nugget were appointed impeccably glamorous beyond belief.

The next wave in swanky Vegas casinos came with Steve Wynn in 1989 when he built the Mirage. The Mirage took it away from Caesars and everybody else in town—sixty days and it was over. Steve’s always been in search of his casino dream palace. With the Mirage, the motif was nothing like Vegas had seen before. A hotel with great art, shops like you’d find in any great metropolitan area, as well as restaurants that could match those of any city in the world.

I saw how Steve changed the town with the Mirage Hotel, where the consumer received a lot more that they had ever received before in Vegas. He could multitask. He is so multifaceted. I have seen all sides of him, from his lovable side to his volcanic temper—which he has never directed at me. I have great memories of Shadow Creek—the golf course he built in 1999. He bought me a set of clubs, and he and I would go alone to play the course. Of course it was immaculate and esthetically beautiful. I had my own locker down from Steve, near Michael Jordan.

Steve’s genius in the late 1970s had been to reeducate Wall Street money managers and pension fund people about gaming. He took them up on the catwalks so they could look down on the tables and see the inner workings of the gambling industry. Once these people had been disabused of all these stereotypes about casinos being a seedy enterprise and saw it was just a business like any other—and firmly based on statistics—their attitudes changed.

And this is where Michael Milken, the wizard of Wall Street—and to some the black prince of finance, who unleashed the plague of junk bonds on the world—enters the picture. Milken said that the gaming industry needed a white knight, and in Steve Wynn he found him. Steven stood for integrity and the Wall Street people needed somebody they could believe in. When someone like Steve brought that kind of business logic into the marketplace, they were willing to give him everything he wanted.

I’d known Michael Milken ever since I met him and his wonderful wife Lori with Steve Wynn in Hawaii, and we have remained close friends ever since. I’m very fond of him and his wife. We played tennis and I sat around the pool with him as he talked to Steve about using junk bonds to finance his new casino hotel, the Mirage. I realized then and there that the guy was brilliant—he was a financial genius, one of the smartest human beings I have ever met.

I flew home with Steve who was still feeling his way with Milken. Long story short, Milken raises the money for Steve’s new hotel casino, the Mirage. Among other things, it featured an artificial volcano. The Mirage opened on November 22, 1989—a bold move since this was at a time when Vegas was in decline. It was the most expensive hotel casino in history, costing an estimated $630 million, built with Wall Street money, principally junk bonds. These were risky investments that however paid high interest rates—essentially it amounted to betting on risk.

*   *   *

Then you’ve got the battle of the giants. I believe the feud between Donald Trump and Steve Wynn began in the early 1980s when Steve took Dennis Gomes, a key executive, from Trump and brought him to Vegas to work at the Mirage. He got sued by Donald for millions. It was settled out of court.

They were both huge personalities then. Steve had Nevada wrapped up, Donald had the East Coast. They hated each other with a passion. I knew them both; I worked for them both. There I was in the middle, juggling these two, with ferocious name-calling on both sides—and I do mean major language. The insults and allegations went on and on.

Donald was famous for his oversize personality, Steve for his clever TV commercials, like the ones he did with Frank Sinatra for Atlantic City. I wound up doing three of them myself. It was a brilliant promotional tool. On the other hand there was Trump branding his own name, and we know the power of personality; on the other was the meticulous Steve, planning beautiful, aesthetic resorts.

I was with Steve when he made the transition to Atlantic City. I worked for him in Atlantic City. When they legalized casino gambling he built an incredible hotel, also named the Golden Nugget. It was smaller than a lot of the other casinos there but the most profitable. Everyone loved working for him there. I was there with him when they opened in 1980. In the city where there were many poor people, the casinos had not done much to improve that environment. There you had over-the-top hotels with all of their riches, etc. surrounded by all that poverty.

Meanwhile there was Donald Trump. He came into Atlantic City with all the power of the New York real estate development that he had taken from his father and built into a mega real estate company. He had a tall imposing figure to go with it and all that hair and the personality backed by a lot of confidence. He opened the Trump Plaza in 1984, where I worked. And the Taj Mahal in 1990. Where Steve flourished and made money, though, unfortunately Donald struggled. My impression of Atlantic City after working the steel pier in my teens to what it became when gaming arrived was totally different than my impression of Vegas and its allure. Vegas had it all: great hotels, etc. Atlantic City was not a destination stop. Vegas was. The exteriors and interiors in Atlantic City could not match the styles of Vegas. I loved working in Atlantic City, at Steve’s place, the Golden Nugget, where my old friend Charlie Meyerson, one of the most special caring human beings in our business, was head of casino marketing.

In Atlantic City, where Steve was trying to make his next move, Donald Trump and his associate and fellow casino owner Arthur Goldberg had it in for Steve from the start. It was a huge rivalry and they were out for Steve.

Goldberg was a tough and nasty executive from New Jersey, who’d been in the trucking business. But he had neither the celebrity of Trump’s name-branding nor Steve’s savoir faire. But behind the scenes he was lethal. We all knew he was jealous of Steve and did not want him in Atlantic City.

I met Trump originally through Roy Cohn. Here’s how it came about. ABC Records, my first record company, was owned by Leonard H. Goldenson who started the ABC television network. His children had cerebral palsy as did the children of another successful New York businessman named Jack Hausman. So Goldenson and his wife, Isabelle, hooked up with Hausman and his wife, Ethel, to find ways to improve the quality of life for their children and for other children like them with cerebral palsy. And through Leonard Goldenson I got to be friends with Jack Hausman. From the day I met Jack Hausman, I committed to be a part of his and Goldenson’s charity, which was a yearly televised telethon to benefit cerebral palsy. I was proud to be a part of it from the beginning in New York City in 1963, and did it every year with Steve Lawrence. In 1979, I was awarded the Cerebral Palsy Charity Honor.