Explicit

Steve Wynn: The Man Who Built Modern Las Vegas (Part Two)

Published Apr 3, 2024, 10:00 AM

In the second installment of our interview with the Las Vegas visionary, Steve Wynn opens up about how the Broadway musical South Pacific inspired him to take a half-billion-dollar gamble on The Mirage — a hotel that transformed The Strip — and why the first guests to check in were wild animals. He also reveals how an Italian trip with Paul helped inspire him to create the iconic Bellagio — and also looks back on the time he and Skip got epically pranked by the singer while visiting Prince Rainier of Monaco. 

Our Way with yours truly Paul Anka and my buddy Skip Bronson, is a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, folks, this is Paul Anka.

And my name is Skip Bronson.

We've been friends for decades and we've decided to let you in on our late night phone calls by starting a new podcast.

And welcome to Our Way. We'd like you to meet some real good friends of ours.

Your leaders in entertainment and.

Sports, innovators in business and technology, and even a sitting president or two.

Join us as we ask the questions they've not been asked before, tell it like it is, and even sing a song or two.

This is our podcast and we'll be doing it our way.

Hey, what do you have to did you hear? Beyonce's new album, Cowboy Tarter System came out this week.

Yeah, everybody should be in the country music because I think it's the tourist form of American music is country music. I mean, I grew up on it back in Canada. You know. It was just it's the greatest form that we have that in jazz. But it's a great album. The single's very very cool, and the Joelene they changed the lyrics. I think she sings it with Dolly Partons.

You know, it's just amazing. Isn't country music the number one format now?

I think so.

I don't know the answer to that. I know that it's a very important part of the whole mosaic of music because it's not just country anymore. It's country pop. It's got a little country R and B to it. You've got, you know, a lot of the performers, the stars, they've got the it. They're all glammed up. You never saw that years ago. Beyond that story, the force today in music for me, and she tops it off now are women. There's a song out now by a girl called Dasha and it's called Austin, and it's so real and authentic. The way this girl sings it and the way they've produced it. It's an amazing, amazing record. Dasha Austin. You've got all these women who've come out now and they've got stronger presents than the men.

And talking about country. When you first started, wasn't rockabilly that was sort of the precursor to rock and roll.

Well, rockabilly started. There was a guy in England called Lonnie Ganigan and I used to sing it as a kid. It was that kind of music, the first of its kind, and who tried to make it, Pops little rear. It was Bobby Darren. Bobby Darren's first record on Decca was Rock Island Line David Diggen When You Getting In and it was exactly that. That was Darren's first record on Decca. Of course after that he went rock and roll, But you're right, that was probably one of the first. Ronnie Donogan I think his name was a British artist.

Huh, yeah, can you remember what you had for breakfast?

Me? What's that? God? I don't know where I get this from. Yeah, you know what? You know what I'm excited about. Man. The response to our brother Steve, Steve Winn for the rest of them. I can't believe the response I got. How was it for you?

Unbelievable?

Got so many calls, texts? Yeah, people were you know.

The stories.

Look the guy, he's got great stories and is a great storyteller.

He's a wordsmith, you know the way he puts it all together. And but you and I know that for years, I think what would be cool? Do you want to call him or do you want me to call him? I think we should get him for one more episode.

Yeah, no, it should because I want to get into the design process. You've probably heard this. He does a whole thing about how conflict and tension are so critical. You know, when he first did the Mirage, a tropical themed resort in the middle of a desert, like the last thing you'd ever expect, And that's always been sort of his thing. And I also know he always told me that the movie South Pacific, you know, that really inspired him. So it'd be fun to ask.

Him about that.

I think it'd be cool.

Yeah, I think we should take a shot at him and get him on again.

Yeah.

And then also, we didn't have time to talk about what you did to he and I and Monte Carlo, which was cruel but funny.

He didn't think it was so you didn't think it was so funny.

No, I didn't like it, all of it.

Everybody, You'll never you you know what you want to tell everybody? How do you guys? You've ever had an argument? You and Skip? I said, you know what, We've never ever had an argument because Skip is very, very very smart and I'm always right.

The perfect combination.

There you go. Okay, let's let's take a shot at let's get them.

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, you remember what you had for breakfast as well as you remember the rockabilities think thinking, I'm thinking. So you always can remember everything, but you can no longer guarantee same day delivery, right.

No, I can't. It's very very eclectic day delivery are out.

Here is not very well. I'll you.

And look at the way you've changed everything. I mean with the Mirage that was the first absolute game changer. Was what seven hundred million dollars and changed everything with the Mirage became a place where everybody had to see it. It was a musty attraction. Didn't matter where they were staying, if they were in Las Vegas, they had to come.

It was the first three thousand room hotel on earth in the.

World, and a level of quality that had never been seen in the town. And then with the Belagio getting to the next level after that, in a town that was known for no good places to eat and no really no good shopping, turned it around to a place that where Las Vegas became a culinary capital and where every major retailer in America had to have an outpost in Las Vegas. The changes you know, not to be a sick event, but the changes that all stemmed from your creative jo.

It was like being a football team.

He was the big dreamer that came in and change.

I was I called a play I was like a quarterback. Yeah, but we had we had all pro wide receivers and running backs and the defensive and offensive line. The team that got together. You know, once we started having good taste and imagination, A lot of people with good tastes and imagination want to join up, and you end up with a gang, a really wonderful group. And it only takes eight or nine people like that, maybe six or eight people, and you got You got Gangbusters. It's great. You can really go to town.

But I would see you sitting in that design center hour after hour, agonizing over the font for the men's room sign, sitting originally with Joel Bergman and then later the writer Butler.

That's right.

I never really thought of you. This is going to sound funny. I never really thought of you as a developer in the true sense of the word, because a developer is a guy that has to go out and get the entitlements, the right to build all that. You were a designer. You had this vision where you had your imagination that big. Yeah, no one could compare, and you changed the town. You totally changed the town. And then everybody else when you up to your game, you forced the other operators in town to up their game. That's the reason they did it because they had to otherwise they would just get taken under by this tsunami that you had created. So everybody then had to do something great, and.

They sat by thinking he was never going to make it.

No, it wasn't that easy, no question. If you guys look and people listening to this conversation, you think of modern Las Vegas with all of the massive developments up and down the strip. Some of them are part of Blage and Mirage and win resorts. I think we did five of them. But I can tell you the moment there actually was a moment where modern Las Vegas was born, like a like a big bang theory of the universe. I can track it to the to a two day period. You know, it was what it was up until you know, we did a great job downtown and we made money in the Atlantic cities, sold it and came home and we got our hands on the property that is now Treasure Outland and Blajio and Mirage, and we had money from that we had made by selling the Atlantic City Place, and I bought the property from Howard Hughes's nephew that was Hughes's and now we were on our way. With the help of Mike Milkin and Trexel Burnham, we could design a new hotel. And there were hotels that had fifteen hundred rooms, the Hilton and MGM. It was big hotels, fifteen hundred rooms and they had and Caesar's Palace had twelve hundred rooms. And the Hilton was convention business. MGM was touring travel and slot machines. Caesar's Palace was big fights, glamorous entertainment, you know, the next generation after the Sands. And although they had twelve hundred rooms, they made more money than the other two. But each of these three programs was different. I came up with the idea with my colleagues that we were going to build a three thousand room hotel. We were going to have the glamour and the fanciness and the imagination of Caesar's Roman theme. We're going to do tropical, but we were going to have convention space like Hilton. We're gonna have the amount of rooms in the shops of an MGM. We're going to combine all three ideas in a modern hotel. And that was a town where no one had ever spent more than one hundred million or sixty million to build anything, and we were going to spend north of a half a billion, six hundred and fifty million dollars. And we had some money from New Jersey. We had a couple hundred million that we had made, and we're going to borrow money from Drexel Burnham. And we just sat down and decided how to I remember, I remember I had a two seater Mercedes two EIGHTYSL that was powder blue, and we had just finished by in the land and it was time to start dreaming up the Golden Nugget Strip Hotel. We didn't ever mirage name yet and I took it was a beautiful day, and I drove out to the Sands, which was across the street, the original Sands, and I knew the Valet Parkers for several years. This I stave as I can, I park my car right here by the sidewalk. The Porkershire came out and the column that held up the end of the porkersheare was right next to the sidewalk, and I pulled in and I parked next to the column that was next close to the sidewalk, and I got out of the car and I sat The top was down, and I sat on the left front hood above the headlight, my feet on the ground, my butt against the car, looking across the street at the property that I had just closed on, which included a Castaways motel that was closed there wasn't have to be torn down, some empty property, and then two service stations, a souvenir joint, a budget renner car, and a home owned by a woman named Bracy Hayes that was in an old folks home. But she had owned that house and for some reason preserved it and the Hughes people could never get their hands on it. But they did own the empty land and they owned the Castaways, and I had bought that from Howard Hughes's nephew. And I'm sitting on the car, my arms crossed on my chest on the hood, saying what are we going to do? Okay, here you are. You got a big fat strip location. Turns out to be big enough for two hotels. But what are you going to do? Perfect pristine moment? Now, what you're gonna do? The night before I had been watching Johnny Carson before I went to bed, lay in bed and watch Johnny Carson, and he had Neil Simon on as a guest that wrote all those great comedies. And he said to Neil Simon, how do you how do you make how do you why do you write that humor? How do you write that comedy? Neil? And Neil Simon was like mister Rogers, he was very prefatorial kind of izers. Well, Johnny, I look for conflict because the tension created by conflict gives you a rise for humor and of course tragedy as well. And going to bed saying yeah, tension, conflict creates tension. What you're seeing, what you what's your mind tells you're looking at? I went to sleep. And I's always been a nut about Broadway musicals, and I love South Pacific, and I had seen the movie South Pacific. And in the movie South Pacific, Lieutenant Cable lands on the island on his mission and he's walking up the beach. He bumps into Bloody Mary played by Juanita Hall, and she sees this handsome lieutenant. She calls him lieutenant and thinks he's handsome, and he says, hello, Lieutenant, you're very handsome. And he says hello, and she says, I'm a bloody Mary. And she's a Tunkanese, heavy set, you know, pear shaped woman, not very attractive. And she's decided that she wants to fix up Lieutenant Lieutenant Cable with her daughter, who's over on a neighboring island called bally High. And she said, Lieutenant, you'll see this bally High, very beautiful. You could go there, I take you. He's there in a mission to fight the Japanese. This a World War two movie. And then in order to wh she says to him, look look at bally High, a little talent look island of dreams. And she sings, come to me, bally High, bally High, your island dreams or whatever. He just starts singing the beautiful song from South Pacific called your own special island, bally High. And as as she's singing this beautiful song with full orchestration, you see this gorgeous island a mile or two away, And the director Josh logan used too many orange filters, so it almost this sultry red heat of the afternoon makes it look like it's almost on fire. It's beautiful with this beautiful song. Come to me, Bally Eye. And for some reason, I'm sitting on that damn Mercedes hood and I'm looking at the castaways and and the thing from from Doc you know, from the Night Before from Johnny Carson Show. I say, Bali Eye a dream, Isle of dreams. Suppose what you see with your eyes is in complete contradiction of what your brain. This is the harsh Southern about a desert. Hardly anything grows here. It's cold in the winter, it's one hundred and seventeen in the heat in the summer. Suppose you saw BALIHI suppose you saw a tropical paradise South Pacific. And I swear I heard one ay to Hall's voice in my ear. It'said a tropical hotel with an adream. You could see through the glass the conflict. If you stood on a strip and you saw waterfalls like in the and like in the South Pacific movie, with coconut palms and elephant ears and banana trees, you'd say, wait a minute, this is not supposed to be here. This is wrong. The conflict between which your brain saw and which you thought should be there would create the tension. And I said to myself, people would say, we got to go inside and see what this place is all about. And at that moment is when I dreamt up the Mirage and went and told my colleagues, and everybody got into it, and all but everybody started coming up with great ideas, and the Mirage got designed, and we're spending six hundred and fifty million, and the Wall Street Journal and the Forbes magazine and our competitors up and down the strip said, ah, the six hundred and fifty million. His overhead's going to be a million dollars a day. He'll never make it because nobody had an overhead like that. There used to be two three hundred thous in expenses a day. We actually were going to be a million one a day. And they wrote articles that the Mirage was going to be the great bankruptcy. But it also is a question, is the demand for Las Vegas so elastic that that could happen? Are we all living in an era where small was good, But the world has moved past us is Las Vegas the kind of place you can invest a half a billion or a billion dollars. When we first showed the model of Mirage at the Golden Nugget downtown, it was called the Golden Nugget Strip property. I said, when this place gets built. We had a press conference and it's on tape. When this place is built in three years, its most famous contribution will not be that it's a great place it makes money. It will, but it's going to show the world that Las Vegas can take that kind of money and the demand for Las Vegas is elastic that it won't scavenge the other hotels that'll bring more people to Las Vegas. And I did go on record at the opening reveal of the model downtown at the Golden Nugget that that's what I thought would happen. Well, as I say, they watched it go up, massive place on sixty acres eighty acres, and the whole world was it'll never make it. The overhead, the word got out that it was going to be a million over a million dollars a day to break even, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. Well, the time came The opening was November twenty second Wednesday, the anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. Actually nineteen eighty nine. November twenty second noon on a Wednesday was going to be the opening. We were going to reveal nobody was allowed in accept workmen in this and the people hired, but there was an idea that something extraordinary was in this building that was done at a scale it was different. A whole bunch of us had done our best work there. Really talented people contributed to making that place what it was. Plus we had Sigfried and Roy and white tigers and elephants. Well, we had the street roped off, and the press was that we're going to have a secret We're going to open the hotel by checking in our first secret guest to the hotel. And they had ropes down on the sidewalk so you couldn't come up the driveway, and we had the cameras there and the governor and other VIPs. Mike Milkan was there. We were going to welcome the first check in mystery guest, and then we were going to open up the drop the barricades and let them come. And here's what happened. A rolls Royce pulled up convertible with Siegfried and roy in the front seat and two white tigers in the back seat, and they got out of the car with Acbarkabul and Neva, two giant white tigers with leashes, and walked into the hotel, shook hands with us and took the animals into there that no one knew if we had them on display, and we welcomed our new guests. We're two white tigers. And then I had a handheld mic and I said, security opened the gates, dropped the ropes. Well, the governor, Mike Milkan, and I and David Hersey, who had been the landscape architect that did all the trees in front and all the waterfall. They ran from both driveways, you know, it was a circular driveway. In the lead were young kids that could run, asked, but there were tens of thousands of people all the way up the strip, and they came running and we were right in the middle, and I said, oh my god, they're not going to stop. But they had also roped off. We were standing, and they got to the rope and they all just stopped so we could make remarks. But for a second we thought we were going to get trampled. Well, seventy thousand people went through the hotel the first day. It was awful. You couldn't move. Women came with strollers. It was I stopped. I stopped the strollers after the first day. But seventy thousand people the first twenty four hours. Now Wall Street and the financial community wouldn't know if if we're the last week in November, we're going to have a short report for the end of the year, and then we'll publish those earnings at the end of January, no one's going to know anything about numbers or financial success or not. But in Las Vegas the night that the opened on Wednesday night, by midday on Thursday, every executive at every one of the other properties on the strip knew everything about the Mirage. Number one food and beverage guys talked to other food and beverage guys. Casino executives talk to other casino executives. You know, the hotel guy talks to the other hotel guy. So they're all talking to each other, these pals that work at these different hotels. They're saying every room is booked, that we every room has been booked for almost thirty days already the prices are one hundred and fifty dollars a day more than we thought. You can't get a space of a slot machine. The crap tables are overrun. And everybody in the business in Las Vegas knew within twenty four hours that Las Vegas had turned the corner and that if you build it, they would come. The Mirage did that, and within a week the price of real estate, the adjacent lands on every hotel had doubled because every one of those CEOs up and down the street knew that they had to expand that the Mirage was going to take it away from him, or the Mirage was going to show that there was so much money left on the table. If you built it in Las Vegas, the world would show up. And the Mirage actually had the market grow by twenty percent. One hotel did that. We were supposed to make a hundred you know, we lose money or go broke, but our own numbers showed that we'd make one hundred and forty to one hundred and sixty million dollars on the six hundred and fifty million dollar investment. Pretty fancy. We went right to two hundred and twenty five million. The world loved it, and it was the late eighties early nineties when the Japanese were in the country. So Mirage opened up just at the right time, just the right moment in the history of Las Vegas, for Las Vegas to take its next step. If it hadn't been me and my crowd, my game, it would have been someone else. But we were at the right place at the right time, and that was the moment. The modern Las Vegas was born in the last week in November of nineteen eighty nine, and during the nineteen nineties, four billion was spent and the town lent from eighteen thousand rooms to one hundred and fifty forty thousand rooms in ten years. And between nineteen seventy two and nineteen eighty nine, nothing but the Mirage had been built. And then in the next eight years it culminated with we did Treasure Island three thousand rooms, we did Blagio three thousand rooms, but so did the other guys, and that's how what you see in Las Vegas today came about. But there were seventeen years where nothing.

In the past year, probably the most dynamic thing to happen in Las Vegas was the F one race this past fall, and of super and in the nineteen nineties, the mid nineteen nineties, you, Paul Ank and I went to Monte Carlo because you had an idea.

Terrible thing you did, Paul.

You had you had an idea to bring the F one to Las Vegas and you wanted to have if you recall, the finish line was going to be the port Coashier.

You're going to come up and make of the Bolagio like when you go through the town in money.

And we got we got on on the plane and we went there and you at that time were very interested in having an audience with Prince Renier to talk to him about their casinis, their gaming.

And Paul he asked to see us because yeah, yeah, he had come and stayed at them.

At Paul will let you pick up Bobby.

There was three of us that when.

I think Bobby went, we stayed at the Hotel de Peri.

For the audience to say Bobby Baldwin was one of the key executives that ran our business.

You know, and we go over and we're being treated royally. Obviously, everybody's happy. Steve is there we're looking forward to meeting with Bernie Ecklestone.

I think the guy who owned them had given us his suite at the hotel.

The hotel and I was sitting around one day and I'm saying, okay, this is a little too quiet for me. We're waiting to go to the events. We'd already gone around the track with schu Macher. Remember he put us in the car. So we did our thing. So I picked up the phone and I called up.

Treacherous sent them.

I called up Skip, this is mister Bronson, This is Henry L. Lewis over at the palace. We are honored that you are here with us, you and mister Vinn, and we wanted to just let you know that the Prince is very interested in meeting mister Vinn over here at a private, private, little meeting before the cocktail, before the cocktail party. And I said, it's very important that he'd be here at five point thirty, but in a tuxedo. He must be in a tux.

Sedo explained that when they had the Grand Prix, Prince Reinier would have a big cocktail party up at the palace on the night before the race, and it was a big thing to get invited, right, But that was that from six thirty to eight or nine.

And the meeting was to be before and this for the cocktail party.

The manager, the chief of staff of Prince Reinier calls up, going to be but skip catch the call, says the Prince. He called skip on purpose. The Prince wants to have a private meeting very important with mister Wynn at five point thirty before the big cocktail party, and he'd like him to come in a tuxedo. Correct, please be at the palace at five thirty, Prince Rainier, I would like to talk to him, mister Winn and skip.

You turned him down. He turned me down.

That's not possible, And I said, he puts on this accent.

I put my French action.

Jacques Jacques said, do I'll even tell you the name you use. This is Jacques said, with the French accent, the chief of staff of the palace for Prince Rainier.

And I said, you know, mister Wynn has some vision issues, so I'm going to have to be with him. And they said no, no, no, no, that's not possible. He's going to have to be here. It's it's going to be one on one. It's going to be Regner and mister Wynn and no one else, No one else can be with him. I'm thinking, well, why is that. Well, we have very special protocol and already, so I called Paul and I said, Paul, you're ready for this. There's going to be a meeting. Steve's going to have a meeting of one on one with Prince Renier. And Paul says, you're kidding. It's fantastic. And I walked down the room the hall to Steve's sweet and Steve's in there. He's putting his tuxedo on. He's getting all ready, the whole thing. No tuxedo, I said, I better check and make sure you know. I was on the bed in my underwear. No, but you were getting ready to get dressed up. So I called over to the palace just to make sure everything was going to be coordinated properly. And they said, there's no one here by that name. And I said, well, that's not possible.

He called.

I spoke to him myself, Well no, that's not possible, and we don't know anything about any meeting. There isn't I said, what, No, No, you're not listening you're obviously not in the loop. This has been arranged, it's all been coordinated. Everything he's been taken care of. You don't know who the chief of staff is. Connect it is someone who does exactly.

Meanwhile, I run the Steve's room because I figured this has gone too far and you walk in.

Before they gets off. He gets in an argument with the oppers. If you don't know who it is, I want to speak to the cheapest staff, Jacques the do I've spoken to him. Now put someone on who does know what's going on there. The operator is obviously intimidated. It works at the palace. Click click, ring ring, hello, Hello, my, I'm just get Brian word from mister with mister Wynn and we're supposed to have this meeting. We're meeting the chief of staff for the Prince Rainier speak a five point thirty and I need to get some I need to communicate on behalf of mister Wynn. H to the chiefest staff, Jacques sad silence of one counter. I am the chief of staff of Prince Regnier and there is no such person as Jacques said, do in the palace.

Now.

This guy is a British naval officer with a straight back, no sense of humor, and he must deal with screwballs all the time protecting his boss. And he doesn't like this phone call. And he tells Skip hisses at him.

Did he hang up on your did you? He's furious that, so I called Paul to tell him what had happened.

Well, you could know. First I went over to Steve's room.

He's with me.

I had decide to mend this again. Right you walked in, I'm there with him about to tell me you were on the phone with Elaine. As you walk in, Steve, I just want to let you know I spoke to the palace. I got this guy blah blah blah blah. He didn't get it, and I told him you're not in the loop, so don't worry. I straightened it out. Right now, I'm saying, Skiff, there ain't no meeting. I'm sudou forget about it.

His host, Skip runs and takes a look at Anka. I think maybe Paul's life is in danger because he had just made such a horse's ass of himself. Well, and you're telling me, yeah, I'm on the phone with my wife, Paul. Paul says, it's got a guilty look in his face that maybe this one spun out of control. This ain't like the Chipriani, this was well, there was indeed a cocktail party at the palace and we were indeed invited, and Renier was looking for us. And we end up by the buffet, myself and Paul with Prince Renner on this beautiful Saturday night or whatever night it was Friday night and having drinks in the open courtyard that was beautiful, and Skip walks up and in a few minutes I start to tell the story, and a guy walks up about six to one, sort of sway back, you know, real straight, you know, his back, very British looking with the dark suit and the full windsor tie. Humorless looking guy like a security garden. Mister Win his chief of staff. Ah, And I say, you know, we're we're having a giggle for a but a very embarrassing thing. We are an apology. But the superstar or whatever it decided to have some fun poor mister and played that practical joke that caused him to make the call. And Reinier and I we lay out what exactly what Paul had done, and Rainier is lapping it up and starts laughing. This guy has a face like ice, like rock ice season, not even not even a curl of a lip. Dead quiet. He glares that the three of us like what kind of jerks are you guys? And walks away. He did not get the joke, did Yeah?

Till the end of that story, though, Steve, you meet with Bernie. You're bringing it to Vegas. This guy's all teed up and he flies in to meet you in Vegas, and everybody's in.

The US into the office with six people.

And meanwhile you got the new shepherd. I ax, I think it was.

Rumbus, and I know it was. It was Ramas.

Okay, So now here's the scene. Everyone's in the office. You're getting ready to start this meeting with Bernie, who's flown all the way in. He leans over.

On his way to the Melbourne Grand.

Prix, and he leans over to pet your duck.

Grab somebody ears right, and what happened the dog? There's all these people come in and he reaches down and grabs Rambus by his two ears. Ramas doesn't get it and snaps and takes off the nose of his nose, the top from his bridge of his nose down to the tip about a half inch wide. A strip, but I mean a strip. He stripped it off.

The blood shot all over and there was something I could look like there was a mass murder in there.

They had a rush into a plastic surgeon. Guy had never been in a hospital out of his life. Bernie Ecklestone. He had a big nose. But we should have done a whole nose job. But they took him behind his right ear and made a skin graft. But in order for it to work, the skin hasked. The part that you patch that you put on top has to be held down so to be a blood supply. So what they do is they take a gauze and double it up and make a pressure bandage, and then they stitch threw the skin of his nose over the top of the gauze two loops and tie it down. Now, this piece of gauze one inch long and about a half inch or tree cores an inch wide is sewn to the top of his nose, and of course it's bloodstoked, so pretty soon it turns brown. But it's stitched to his face and has to stay there for ten days, so that the skin graft will take instantly. It worked perfectly, but he had to go to the Melbourne Ground Prix with a great big piece of gauze sewn on the top of his nose. Poor guy.

A year later we go and visit him in London. I said, God, you look good. That nose is the best looking nose for a dollar. And then we're over there seeing fay Ed because now you are into Belago and we were touring Europe. Right, we're meeting everybody. We're going around everywhere trying to.

Spend three radio programs about your dirty tricks, practical joke.

What was cool? The bolage was called Bauabash, right yep. And we're floating around you all to Italy. We're staying in Italy at the Villadesta, at the Villadest and in the middle of like Como, which is shaped like the letter Y.

So when it splits, and it's like why upside down, So this part that goes north then it splits like a letter y almost ninety degrees and there's two sides, but in the middle it to split is land and that's the town of Blagio and it's a beautiful old town. And a friend had a boat gil Nichols. Gil Nichols had rented a house and brought his antique chriscraft to Lake Como for the summer. And he came to the villa to st and picked up an Anka and Elaine and I and we went for lunch at Plagio. And we're coming back at about five miles an hour in the criscraft on this gorgeous July day. And I said, what a pretty word Belagio is. There's also a street in Beverly Hill called Bolagio, where the bel Air Country Club is. I said, what a mellifluous word, Belagio. I wonder what it means in Italian. Well, Paul's wife Annie had in her purse one of those Italian English dictionaries that you can put in your purse when you're traveling and the boat's going along, put put putt, and ann Ankus says, listen to this Belagio. Whether it was the town or the words, she says, she got the book a place of elegant relaxation. And Paul and everybody in the boat goes, ooh, what a good name for hotel.

Ooh.

And we were halfway back to the Villa de Esk and we were going to call the hotel in Las Vegas beau Ravage, which is pretty riverside or watershore beau Ravage, and we said, whoa, And we agreed on the boat that the noon name for the Strip hotel was not going to be beau Ravage. It was it was halfway finished, was going to be Blagio, and we'd use beau Ravage as the name of the other hotel. We're a building at the same time with two thousand rooms in Biloxi, Mississippi, and on the spot, because of his wife, we changed from beau Ravage to Belagio and used beau Ravage in Mississippi. Well, it got famous with the fountains and all that stuff. And we got a letter from the mayor and the city council of Belagio, Italy. Dear mister Wynn, we are so proud that you named your hotel after our town. And so this is a proclamation designating Blagio, Las Vegas as a sister city of Blagio, Italy.

Always going to talk about what happened when you first created, Sir the sole at the tent behind the mirage, and people couldn't relate to the fact that this was a circuit us without animals, and you know, people weren't really coming. And we were sitting at a board meeting, our small Mirage Resorts board and you clapped your hands and said taxi cabs. And we all looked at you, like, what what are you talking about? Taxi cabs? We're talking about why, you know, we don't have enough enough people excited about coming to see this circus. And you said, what's the first thing that happens when people flying to Las Vegas, they get in a taxi cab and they say to the cab driver, Hey, what's a you know, what's good to see here in town? And I want to invite all the taxi drivers in Las Vegas to bring their families to come, no charge for anything and see the show.

And get a dinner, get dinner, and get a dinner.

Right, And they came, and they got so excited, and when people started coming to town, they started talking up.

People went all the way back to the sixties cab drivers.

You know, we we went to an extreme with that when we built Wind deliberately decided to take it to another level. When you came off the strip. You know, cabs line up in order to be called by the doorman to pick up the next fair Well, guys are driving all the time. They need to take a leak, they needed, they want to get a drink, don't carry some in the front water or something. They have a cooler. So when we designed the wind and Encore, we put special ramps that went underground before you came up on the portkachhere and when you went underground there were two lanes and on the left there was a little alcove and there were vending machines and a men's and ladies room, and all of the cart tunes and the decorations were about hacks and cab drivers. And then at Encore we went even further. We had the Ferrari thing going and we were doing business with Roger Penske, and Roger invited Mark and I to the you know the race on Memorial Day and we got to walk out while they were on the ready to start, you know, out on the lined up. I thought it was so exciting when you're in the pits to hear all the engines rivving as they're on the lines, you know and rows. And I said to Roger, can we get someone to photograph as if you're sitting in the driver's seat of your car and you take a picture of the people on your right and the people on your left. He said, sure, or just the people on your right. And someone went and did that at one of the races of the Indye cars, and we had them blown up and we made these things that would stick to the wall. We made tile walls in the tunnel and when you went in your car and you pulled in, because then you went up or ramped right into the porkishere and there was room for like five six cars in this tunnel. The walls had the drivers as if you were looking to the right at other cars on the line, and we recorded the music the sound of the cars, and we played it on an overhead speaker, so the guys would come down. They'd be sitting the car and they looked to the right and hear the sounding to see the cars all in color at life size on this mile our tape that we made these things that go on the wall, and you know, we decorated the wall at life size like you were looking at a rows of cars on your right, and we had nice vending machines and really clean bathrooms. We kissed up to the and then we invite all the cab drivers in Las Vegas when the wind opened to have a free room, one night, free room. The hotel was just for the cab drivers. Just before we opened two days, all the cab drivers and their wives a show and dinner and a room and they could get massages. How could they know to explain the hotel if they hadn't experienced it. And you know, they got all dressed up, and the wives would come and say, almost win. And the husbands they were so grateful, you'd think them as sort of salty. They weren't. No one's ever done as we love it. We own the cab drivers. And it's true even today. Do you miss it? You miss the data. I wouldn't take it if I could have the whole thing for a buck. As God is my judge on my wife's life, I wouldn't go to Las Vegas if he gave me the whole town for a because to art work, boring crowds, twenty four to seven, payroll problems, the design, the competition, the credit, the government, the whole idea of keeping the place a sharp stay on top of it. Been there, done that, Oh yeah, fifty one years. I didn't realize what a tunnel I was in. I got up, did it twelve fourteen hours, went to bed, and got up and did it again. I even lived in a hotel.

When did you fall in love with the whole art thing? Because I took the first trip with you to Japan when we went to I think Tokyo, that was our first trip with Bill Ackuaveella.

Well, the question was, how does Blagio trump Mirage Baldwin. Baldwin didn't want to build another hotel. It'll scavenge the Mirage. We already had the top hotel. Why do you want to build another one? I said, well, someone's going to build a better hotel than Mirage, because you know, it had a one hundred and sixty foot bathroom, you know, a shower tub, one shower in the tub together, an open toilet and a single sink about one hundred and sixty feet. But in a four or five star hotel you have to have two sinks. You have a separate toilet, I mean a separate shower, a separate tub, and the toilet should be enclosed or at least be roomy enough, and we had We had a fabulous public area and casino and showroom and all that, and volcanoes and dolphins and tigers, but we had really a three star bedroom. The sweets were gorgeous, but the twenty seven hundred regular rooms were three star. The three hundred sweets were another story. And I said to my pals, I said, look, someone's going to build a better hotel than us, and we'll be second. If we build it, then we could be first and second. Bobby wasn't real impress but he was conservative, but I wanted to do it. And we bought the dunes for four hundred thousand an acre seventy million dollars, but then they had to close at which cost him five We really only paid sixty five million for one hundred and sixty six acres plus water rights pre nineteen fifty y five water rights so we could build a lake. It was against the law to do that because you couldn't use city water for lakes, but if you had private water rights. The predated nineteen fifty five, there were only two places on a strip that had private water rights, the dunes seven hundred acre feet and the desert in one thousand acre feet. Both companies that built golf courses in the early fifties, and they had built when the desert didn't built the water rights. When the desert inn't built the homes that were around the desert In, there was no water service there in the county. So in order to build the golf course and the homes on the golf course, the desert In guys Mo dalits and those guys had to find there had to dig wells and create a utility, the desert In Water Company, and it went under this authority of the Public Service Commission like the regular water company. When I we bought the dunes the desert In in nineteen two thousand, I got the water company with it, and then we bought the houses. We got the the state Engineer and the State of Nevada to say that we no longer were required to comply with the Public Service Commission the State of Nevada because there were no more homes that we were servicing. The dunes had water rights. So I wanted to buy the dunes, and they wanted to sell that it was in bankruptcy, and and my argument to my colleagues was that if we've got money. Now we built all these hotels. We're now a bigger company. We could we could build the greatest hotel in the world where the dunes was to kill you an idea. How desperate we were to make sure that was true. We built an eight and a half acre lake with twenty three million gallons of water, the fountains of Belagio on the corner of the Strip and Flamingo Road. The entire Dunes Hotel was in the lake. Casino ballrooms, everything was in the lake. Belagio was on the old Dunes golf course. That was a radical thing to do, to not have that up on the street. What about to walk in, said everybody, people promenading up and down a strip. It's it's the old story. It's like Treasure Island. It's like Belagio, like a mirage. Make him die of curiosity to want to get in, make the place aspiration. If what they see in the outside is so terrific, they'll say, let's go see what it's like on the inside. It's the oldest story in the world. It's window dressing. What is every retail street in America? How you dress your window makes people want to go in the fountains, the pirate shows, volcanoes interrupt they're window dressing. They are the things that provoke you and entertain you and say, come to me your favorite island, bally Bally, same old story.

Well leave it on a singing note, listen for me and skip. We've so looked forward to this. I got to tell you, we could probably go on for another twelve hours with this, and it's.

Been three of us with our own personal stories of our adventures.

Yeah, but we want to thank you very much for taking the time. We hang all the time, but to be a part of this. You know, we're getting our feet wet. We're lal your buddy, we know that we're all skippy. Yeah, we're all brothers.

What it's been a blast.

That's made a big difference.

We talked this way when when there is no microphone, that's what's the difference. That's totally true.

What's the difference. You're just making me reminiscent a lot of people. It's going to make a big difference because a lot of people have not heard or even understood about Steve Wynn. They've seen it, they've experienced it, but to hear you articulated believe me, You're going to touch a lot of people in a new.

Way in the level of details. You know, I did they take it for granted.

They don't know. I love doing it with you guys because we've been together all our lives. But you know, the people, the television producers, you know, they wanted to make a series, you know, like they're doing Netflix series, and I just wasn't motivated. You know, I'm not crazy about worrying about posterity. But when you're sitting shooting the breeze with a couple of buddies, I could go on like that forever, because you guys remind me of those stories. I don't want ground thinking of the modesty paul I note, but I like what we just did. I don't want people going to hear this. Who cares? But it was fun just talking about it. We loved it. It's a blast. You're ready for dinner.

We're ready for dinner.

Let's go.

Our Away with Paul Anka and Skip. Ronson is a production of iHeartRadio.

The show's executive producer is Jordan Runtog, with supervising producer and editor Marcy Depina.

It was engineered by Todd Carlum and Graham Gibson and mixed and mastered by Doug Bone.

If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.

For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite children did the fat

Pa

Our Way with Paul Anka and Skip Bronson

Music icon Paul Anka and business visionary Skip Bronson are dear friends, and together they boast t 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 35 clip(s)