B009HOTHPE EBOK (42 page)

Steve is an honest dude and a very tough one. He always cared about his shareholders. I also had a number of conversations with Kerkorian during that period. He was a friend of mine, too, after all. I remember the final key conversation, at a Christmas party at our mutual friend Kenny Roberts’s house. Kirk and I peeled off from the crowd to a quiet corner. He asked me what I thought it would take to buy the Mirage Corporation, informing me that Wall Street would not let him go over seventeen dollars a share. I knew from Steve’s side that this was not going to cut it. I simply told Kirk that I believed if he put a two in front he would have a great chance—and he did, he made it twenty-one dollars and he got it. At the end of the day Kirk bought the Mirage resorts for over six billion dollars. And everyone walked away happy. It was an emotional moment for all of us. In Steve’s case, he now had no place to hang. At the completion of the deal, Kirk thanked me and asked me what I wanted. I said nothing at all—Steve was a friend and Kirk was a friend, and that was that. “But,” I said, “I do love the Mirage and the MGM.” We sat down with Terry Lanni, who I worked for at Caesars, and they gave me a five-year deal. The smartest thing Kirk did—and he verbalized it to me—is that there was not a “no competition clause.” Steve Wynn could do what he wanted. Kirk understood that having him down the street, creating a new hotel casino was good business.

In the 1990s, when I was preparing my new act for my appearances in Vegas and Atlantic City, I teamed up with a couple of writers, two of the most creative people I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years: Buz Kohan and Kathy Stone. And here I’ve also got to mention Marc Shorr. While working with Steve Wynn, Marc was Steve’s right-hand operational manager and always saw that things in that big complicated machine that is a casino hotel, ran smoothly and efficiently.

I have since worked the newest and best spot in town—the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City, run by Boyd Gaming Corporation. It opened in July 2002 and cost one billion dollars. I might add it was the first hotel to have the glamour and appeal that a Vegas hotel had. It became the highest grossing hotel in the history of Atlantic City and I was happy to be a part of it. And in a strange way if it were not for my buddies Skip Bronson and Steve, that hotel would not be standing.

*   *   *

One summer in the late ’90s Steve and I and our wives Anne and Elaine, went to Italy together while he was building his new casino hotel, which at that point he was going to call the Beau Rivage. Steve wanted the four of us to go over to start looking at the terrain up at Lake Como. When we got up there we started tooling around the lake on a friend of ours boat, Gil Nickel, owner of the Far Niente Winery. Steve wanted his new casino to have an Italian look so we’re looking at the aesthetics of the canopies, we were walking around taking pictures of interesting architecture, picking out details—ornamentation, how they framed their Renaissance doorways, medallions, crests, pillars and all that kind of stuff … you know what a detail freak Steve is.

I said, “Steve, we’re checking out all this Italian ornament and ‘Beau Rivage,’ well, it’s French, it’s just not indigenous to Italy, you know, it just doesn’t fit. It means ‘beautiful beach,’ which creates a charming image,
in French
it sounds even better. It may have been the name of the chateau Picasso painted in in the South of France, but you’re building an Italian-style hotel and Beau Rivage is not Italian.”

“No, no, no! It’s got to be called ‘Beau Rivage.’ Beau Rivage.” He was adamant.

It started to rain one day when we were on the lake as we were looking at the vistas and looking at all of the shrubbery and trees for ideas because he wanted to have a lot of flowers and greenery in the entry to the hotel, and we pulled into this little island for lunch to get out of the rain, and we were sitting there at the restaurant and there was a little sign that I could see from where we were sitting and it said
BELLAGIO.
It was the name of this island, this little, tiny town. It means “place of rest, home of rest,” something like that. And I looked at Steve and I said, “Bellagio! That’s the name of the hotel! It’s a great fucking name.”

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 elbow 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.