Self-portrait with Shaded Eyes was the title of the Rembrandt bought for nearly £7-million earlier this month at Sotheby’s. The picture had apparently been painted over by one of Rembrandt’s pupils, and recovering it has been a delicate task of excavation. Equally intriguing is the task of recovering the life of the man who bought it.
Billionaire Steve Wynn seems like one of those characters who could only exist in Las Vegas. Now 60, he has played as great a part in the creation of modern Las Vegas as anyone — and is now poised, with his latest, most spectacular venture, to leave his name permanently on the city’s skyline.
By 2005, his most ambitious gamble, a $2,4-billion hotel resort — with its own man-made lake and, of course, with its own Ferrari and Maserati dealerships — is due to open. Originally, it was to be named Le Reve, after one of the Picassos that Wynn and his wife own; but, as of last month, it is to be called Wynn Las Vegas, embodying a dream of a different kind.
He may be best known in Europe as one of the world’s most active art collectors — a couple of months ago, he spent more than $25-million in the space of 24 hours, buying works by Cézanne and Renoir at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York — but in Las Vegas he is casino magnate, philanthropist, city father and enigma all rolled into one. ”It’s hard to find anyone in Las Vegas, friends or enemies, who doesn’t admire him for the sheer feats he has pulled off,” says writer and journalist Marc Cooper, whose book, The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas, will be published next spring.
When Wynn started operating in Las Vegas in 1967, the city was famous but small, with a population of around quarter of a million. Now it is around six times that size and the fastest-growing city in the country. Wynn’s own phenomenal success has had much to do with that growth. His personal links with the city go back to the 1950s and the times when his father — an old-time gambling man who had a small bingo operation on the east coast — would take him along on trips shooting dice at casinos such as the Flamingo, the joint opened by mobster Bugsy Siegel.
”It was like stepping back into the frontier,” Wynn said in an interview with AL Hopkins of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. ”Casino owners were king; they owned the town. They were glamorous; they had beautiful women and lots of money.”
When his father’s attempts to enter the game on a bigger scale in Las Vegas failed, the family returned to Utica, New York, where Wynn attended military prep school before graduating at the University of Pennsylvania. He married a former Miss Miami Beach, Elaine Paschal, daughter of a Miami hotelier who was also an old gambling pal of Wynn’s father. They had two daughters, Kevyn and Gillian.
Wynn returned to Las Vegas in 1967, where he both invested in and worked at the Frontier hotel, a place that at the time was rumoured — like most of the big money-making ventures in the city then — to have mob ties. (Las Vegas’s current mayor, the amiably savvy Oscar Goodman, made his reputation as a lawyer defending mobsters.) When Howard Hughes bought up the Frontier and wanted his own people running it, Wynn looked elsewhere. Then a legendary high-rolling banker called E Parry Thomas spotted the young Wynn’s acumen and loaned him the money for his first ventures.
Wynn made his first small fortune in 1971, with a handy piece of real estate dealing in Las Vegas. With this as his stake money, he parlayed his way into a takeover of the Golden Nugget casino, then in old, unworldly hands. Wynn turned it into a massive hotel and used the money from that to move into Atlantic City, which had just become the only other place in the US to legalise gambling. He built another Golden Nugget there, threw $10-million at Frank Sinantra to sing for his supper for the next three years, and thus brought millions of gamblers to the casino, and millions of dollars of profits to Wynn.
What Wynn pioneered so successfully in Las Vegas was the introduction of entertainment on a major scale and the realisation that there was money to be made not only in the casinos, which had traditionally dictated the way resorts were run, but in all the previously peripheral areas. He also realised that if Las Vegas’s seedy image was changed, it could bring in a new clientele. ”Wynn was able to understand that spectacle had to go first,” says Marc Cooper, who credits Wynn with the notion of making great luxury available to ordinary people.
Back in Las Vegas, he continued to buy property and spent $630-million to build the famous Mirage resort in 1989. The break-even mark was $1-million a day. It worked and he followed this in 1998 with the Bellagio, which was famous for its art collection and for bringing the concept of high art to the city.
Success came at a price. In 1993, daughter Kevyn, then 27, was kidnapped. There was an immediate ransom demand of $1,5-million and Wynn did not hang around. He paid up in full within hours and was told he would find his daughter at the airport and still in her car. He found her, tied up but still alive, in a parking lot.
”Whatever I was going to find in the car, it was going to be me doing it,” he would testify in court. ”But after three steps, I couldn’t do it … I called her name, ‘Kevyn.”’ She responded and the family was reunited. The kidnapping team did not stay free for long. Within a week, one of them, Ray Cuddy, had been arrested in California, unwisely paying cash for a Ferrari. He was jailed for 25 years along with two accomplices.
Wynn also learned how to roll the dice politically in what had traditionally been a Democrat city. When Bill Clinton started examing the idea of an additional 4% federal tax on gambling profits in the mid-1990s, Wynn was the man who started to organise the opposition, hosting the biggest fundraiser there for Bob Dole, Clinton’s opponent in the 1996 presidential election. But he has been a big donor to the Democrats, too, and is reckoned to help both sides pretty much equally. He is also credited with investing some of his profits into the local educational system, putting money into schools and colleges. He has always resented any suggestion of mob ties and sued successfully in 1995 over the publicity surrounding a biography that hinted as much.
Las Vegas has lived well, even through recessions, but even Sin City took a hit after September 11, and the local economy wobbled. The family-friendly image of the city that Wynn helped to foster has now been replaced with a return to the more traditional image of the city. ”What happens here, stays here,” is the slogan Las Vegas now uses to market itself to America.
Wynn, as it happened, had already sold off his famous landmarks in 2000 for around $6-billion in a classic piece of Las Vegas wheeler-dealing. This allowed him more money for his art collection, which he still enjoys despite badly deteriorating eyesight and which he exhibits to the public. It also left him with a money-chest for what may now be his final throw, the Wynn Las Vegas.
There will be two theatres in the complex and the opening show, masterminded by Franco Dragone, a Cirque du Soleil director, will be a fable about a boy’s search for flight. ”Our boy’s going to fly, and people will come from everywhere to see it and marvel at it,” Wynn said when he announced the venture.
The whole project will also involve Wynn flying close to the sun. ”Everybody is watching to see if he can pull it off again,” says Marc Cooper. ”And they want him to succeed, they want him to do it again.” The bets are that Wynn will.
And if it doesn’t work, at least there will always be Rembrandt. – Guardian Unlimited Â