B009HOTHPE EBOK (34 page)

Teen idols have a tough afterlife. I know because I was one—and so was Donny Osmond. His subsequent career, after the Osmonds initial hits, was checkered, to say the least. His trajectory as a performer is somewhat similar to many people that began very young. They start out as kids and then, like me, they have a big problem dealing with the next phase. In 1972, Don Costa had the bright idea of Donny recording two of the songs I’d had hits with as a teenager and they both became hits for him, too. “Puppy Love” was number one in the UK and number three in the U.S. and “Lonely Boy” got to number three in the UK and into the Top Twenty in the U.S.

Anyway, on this one occasion, Michael Jackson in his fashion floated to Vegas and was staying at a villa next door to us at the Mirage. I saw the parade of kids going in and out—scary. He was at the end of the stay but they were trying to get him out of there anyway. They swore never to let him return.

At first, Steve Wynn and Michael earlier had been all buddy-buddy. Steve even called one of his suites, the Michael Jackson Suite—but he didn’t know then what was about to erupt. And when it did erupt, Michael was ensconced at the villa next door to me. The maids and other hotel staff would come to me and say, “We can’t even go in that room; if we have room service we gotta leave it outside.” When they finally get Michael out, after weeks of trying, they go in and there’s broken glass, perfume bottles, food—the place is an unholy mess, the Jacuzzi has bubble bath pouring out of it, there’s rotting food everywhere. They finally had to renovate that villa for tens of thousands of dollars. Once they got him out, they never did let him back in that hotel.

While we were living in Vegas, I got a place in Sun Valley because the heat became insufferable. My daughter Alex went on to become a ski instructor and lived in Aspen for many years. It was a safe and healthy place to raise kids. In 1975, I got to work on a project that involved my family and expressed my love for them. That was the Kodak commercial, “The Times of Your Life.” Even though I had previously licensed my songs to several companies, I’d never wanted to do commercials. I was always very careful what kind of product was linked with my songs. You associate Kodak with family snapshots, wedding pictures, photos of your children. Kodak came to me with the idea, with Jack Gilardi, my friend and agent at ICM. I loved the concept and together we put this piece together. I produced the record, which became a Top Twenty hit. The campaign was very successful and I was really happy to be a part of it. All of my kids were in it, and I think that’s why it was such a hit—it connected.

Eight

VEGAS REDUX

In the early 1970s I moved my family west from New York to Vegas and that turned out to be quite a very different experience for all of us—what with bright lights, high rollers, mobsters, and movie stars.

But what I remember most about moving to Vegas, regardless of public opinion, was that you could have a wonderful family life there—and we did. The simple everyday joys of the girls coming home from school, making milkshakes and pizzas for them, helping them with their homework. They loved everything four-legged and furry and I loved to see the expression of pure joy on their faces when I’d bring home stray animals, dozens of cats and dogs. Then there was Mary Rizzo, who was my secretary for many years, very much part of the family—and a real character. Mary loved to wear very tight jeans and one day my kids came running to me and said, “Dad! Dad! Come look! Mary’s got hair in her pants.” I peeked at her jeans and I saw they’d split wide open in the crotch area and all her pubic hair was spilling out.

Vegas itself was growing and changing, and soon I found myself very much a part of the new scene. In 1978, I became one of the partners in a lavish discotheque called Jubilation (named after one of my songs) with Steve Lombardo and Marty Gutilla, two guys from Chicago who’d been in the restaurant business, and a third partner, Bob Marsico. None of them were mob guys, but it was from Lombardo and Gutilla that I heard some alarming stories about underworld types they’d got to know through their business dealings. My cousin Bob Skaff introduced me to these guys who owned restaurants and clubs in Chicago. We had a meeting at Sweetwater, one of their establishments. I liked them and trusted them and we became partners. My intuition was to put up the first freestanding disco in Vegas, the first freestanding nightclub. At that time, all these facilities were in-house at the hotels.

But given the Italian surnames of my three partners, even getting a license was a big hassle. As Marty Gutilla says, “We applied for a license to open a club in Vegas—it wasn’t an easy road. Coming from Chicago and being Italian—this was a bit of a problem for us. They didn’t like no I-talians in Vegas in those days. Tony Spilotro, the Chicago mob enforcer, had poisoned their minds so badly they didn’t want to hear about any Italians. You could’ve brought Enrico Fermi there and they weren’t going to like him. No Italians of any kind. Because three of us had Italian names—Steve Lombardo, Bob Marsico, and me, Marty Gutilla—we had to pay a fee and bring the investigators out to Chicago. They sent these two guys to investigate us who were like my old high school principal. Two Western shitkickers. We put them up at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. They had the greatest time. They were investigating everything and they came up with nothing.

“And that was just the beginning. It took three years to build and everybody was robbing us blind. I knew we were getting ripped off but I didn’t know I was getting gunned down in broad daylight.”

Marty would say to a cement contractor, “Maybe you could bid my job.”

The guy comes back with, “I already did.”

“Wait a minute, how could you do that? You haven’t even seen the plans.”

That’s the way they operated. There were five or six cement contractors and they’d trade off the jobs. One week they would select one guy to get the contract, the next week another guy. It was all fixed. They’d make outrageous bids and the guy with the lowest bid would get the job that week—and his bid was still 30 percent higher than the price it should have been. It was all a big joke.

Marty and I often hung around the casinos to get away from this nonsense. Jubilation took from 1975 to 1978 to build. During that time I met some interesting underworld characters. These mobsters weren’t my dear friends or anything like that. I just knew them from hanging around and you would see a lot of these things. Because of the new Howard Hughes era, with its corporate mentality, things got even more complicated. With the old mobster regime everybody knew where they stood—now it was all mixed up. The mob were still around but the corporate structure on top of the mob arrangements confused everybody; even the cops were conflicted. We—meaning me, Marty, Steve, and Bob—were right in the middle of the changing time in Las Vegas. They were great partners, and friends to this day.

I must say Jubilation was one beautiful building. It won all kinds of big-time awards. Jubilation was way edgy for Vegas. It was an oasis in the desert. In those days you walked two blocks off the strip and it would be all cowboys and guys in spurs and ten-gallon hats in any direction you looked. It was wide open. The International Hotel, for example, was in the middle of nowhere. That’s where Elvis spent the last seven to eight years of his life. He rarely ever left.

We brought in three hundred trees we had chosen individually from all over California. We took silt from the bottom of Lake Mead, $100,000 worth of dirt, to put those trees up. People thought we were crazy bringing black dirt from San Bernadino for that amount of money. In 1970, $100,000 was an appreciable amount of dough. There were forty to fifty trees in the atrium that separated the restaurant from the nightclub—the rest we planted outside.

We built a retaining wall around the whole building so you could look out and see shrubs and trees with lights on them, but you wouldn’t see the ugly side of Las Vegas. It was all glass on the outside. The architect was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. You could see outside and look at the trees all lit up. Jubilation was the only place in Las Vegas that had anything green anywhere near it. Not a tree could be found anywhere else in Las Vegas at that time. There were glass windows in the bathrooms so you could look outside. There was a retaining wall and trees all lit up and shrubs in the foreground. You couldn’t see in the bathroom unless a guy wanted to climb up the wall and of course they did do it, by the way. Whatever you think they could do, they did. In
Casino,
they showed booths covered in leopard-skin fabric. Marty was outraged at that; he found it so embarrassing. He would hate anyone to think that he’d ever have put leopard skin in an elegant place like Jubilation. That was such hokey Las Vegas crap. Jubilation was nothing like that.

Opening night of Jubilation in 1978 was a big splashy event with a lot of stars. It was huge. As Marty says, “Those cocktail waitresses we had; beautiful, five-foot-eleven college girls, were sensational—sparkling starlets. I would put them against the Dallas cheerleaders any day.”

There were celebrities packed up there like sardines in the balcony. Joe Frazier was there, as were Tony Curtis and Jimmy Cagney. Bob Hope came. I’ll never forget how he stiffed that beautiful tall blond waitress we had working there. She waited on Hope from ten at night to three in the morning; he had five or six people with him. It was a pretty big bill for something like four or five hundred bucks and that was just for drinks—nobody ate. In those days that was a big check. When the bill came, Bob gave her a napkin with his autograph. I don’t know what he was thinking. She said, “Can you believe that sonofabitch stiffed me? Here is what he gave me, a fucking napkin!” I saw it and I will never forget it. “You’re the greatest, you’re the best. Love, Bob Hope.” I guess he figured that was enough. Funny. But it wasn’t so funny for her. I told my partner Marty Gutilla to go over and give her two hundred bucks to make it up to her.

Months later I met James Cagney there. Marty had met a lot of celebrities, but Cagney was his guy. In the restaurant part of Jubilation we were having dinner with Kirk Kerkorian, an old friend and stand-up guy. Kirk is one of the sweetest men that you will ever meet. I’ve known him since the fifties and he’s never changed. He’s still the same guy. You go to his house and everything is very humble. There would be two sports jackets and one suit hanging in the closet. With Kirk there was none of the Vegas flash and wretched excess. In casino-owner terms, he’s totally the opposite of Steve Wynn. What I mean by that is he doesn’t sit down with crayons and draw everything out in detail and run his business as fastidiously the way that Steve Wynn does. I don’t know if he even goes to his properties that often. He’s a bottom-line guy, not into décor or architecture or any of that.

It was around seven thirty as we were leaving—the nightclub didn’t open until nine o’clock—and there in the entrance to the club was Jimmy Cagney. Kerkorian stopped to say hello to Cagney, whom he knew from before, and he introduced us. The music was just starting to roll inside the club but no one was in there yet. Cagney did a little dance step to the music—it was just amazing. He said, “Nice joint you got here.” Or something like that. Marty Gutilla was just in heaven—for him Cagney was the number one guy. He used to come in and have dinner at Jubilation fairly often. A character from another age, he was an old man then; he died a few years later in 1986.

Atlantic City began happening as a rival gambling location in 1979 and knocked the shit out of Vegas, but Jubilation flourished despite it. You walk in there on a Saturday night and there’d be like three thousand people throwing their money around.

We had the Khashoggis there all the time, birthday parties for his kids and so on. The Osmonds used to come in on a Sunday, upstairs, the whole family. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia’s son went to the University of Southern California. He would come to Jubilation on the weekends and hang there. There would be all these G-men around him, government guys, because he had diplomatic immunity—they wanted to make sure nothing bad happened to him.

The prince went to school somewhere in San Diego or L.A. He would come in every weekend. He only got like two hundred thousand a day allowance, poor kid, and when he ran out of his money gambling, he would come over to the joint. He had a Ferrari and a limo. The Ferrari was there in case he wanted to take a girl for a ride in his fancy Italian sports car.

One night I remember the prince was sitting at a table with ten or twelve women and drinking champagne. There was an empty table next to his with couple of seats, so Marty Gutilla went and sat down at the table. A guy comes over and says, “Excuse me, you can’t sit there.” This guy had a button, I swear to God that had a “G” on it—to say he was a G-man, a government agent. And Marty looked up at him with his you-talking-to-me expression and said, “Excuse me?”

The G-man tells Marty, “The prince doesn’t want anyone sitting behind him.”

“What the hell!?”
says Marty. “Tell the fucking prince that him and his whole outfit they can go fuck themselves,
blah-blah-blah.
”

Now Mike Weber, the maître d’, sees Marty going into his act, and comes over to me. “Paul, we got a situation here. What should I do?”

I go over to Marty and plead with him. “Marty, please don’t screw with this guy, he’s a Saudi prince and it could get ugly.” Marty calms down. This G-man wanted to throw him out. He wasn’t one of the prince’s bodyguards, he was a secret service guy, and apparently Marty was sitting at his stakeout table.

Jubilation was open from 1978 to 1984. It did big business, it was the hot club in Vegas—twenty-five-thousand square feet of wall-to-wall Vegas swank. I’m going to guess it brought in on average $250,000 a week—we did close to $180,000 in two days at the party for HBO alone. In other words, Jubilation brought in roughly 4 to 5 million a year.

Meanwhile we needed a guy to sit there until seven in the morning and watch that these people who worked for us didn’t rob us blind. There wasn’t anybody there to do that. I wasn’t going to do it. My dad wasn’t going to do it. My dad was ready to retire and get out of it by then. Anyway, at his age he couldn’t stay there till five in the morning. I’m sure the people who worked at Jubilation were robbing us every which way you could imagine. From three to five in the morning they were on their own. We had some managers and we had some good guys, but people in Vegas will take your eyes out if given a chance. You had to keep tabs on these guys. It would require a guy that did nothing but watch these people. We did a lot of business there, and I used to say, where is the money?