Winner Takes All Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2008 by Christina Binkley

  Introduction and Chapters 29, 30, and 31 copyright © 2018 by Christina Binkley

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Originally published in hardcover by Hyperion Books in March 2008 and in trade paperback in March 2009.

  Revised trade paperback edition: November 2018

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  LCCN: 2018947121

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-48792-4 (trade paperback, new edition), 978-0-316-48790-0 (ebook)

  E3-20180920-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue:

  FRIENDLY

  One:

  BULLDOZED

  Two:

  “RIFLE RIGHT”

  Three:

  SAY “HAIR-UHS”

  Four:

  1989

  Five:

  THE GREAT RACE

  Six:

  BLIND

  Seven:

  BRASS BALLS

  Eight:

  THE OUTSIDERS

  Nine:

  HIGH LIFE

  Ten:

  CRUSHED VELVET WORLD

  Eleven:

  HUNGRY ALLIGATOR

  Twelve:

  TAA-DAAAAH!

  Thirteen:

  SOUTHERN BLUES

  Fourteen:

  IMPLOSION

  Fifteen:

  MISS SPECTACULAR

  Sixteen:

  CHOMP

  Seventeen:

  WALKING ON AIR

  Eighteen:

  DUPED

  Nineteen:

  PROPELLER HEADS

  Twenty:

  AVID

  Twenty-one:

  VICE

  Twenty-two:

  PICASSO’S PENIS

  Twenty-three:

  SUNDAY NIGHT FEVER

  Twenty-four:

  CAESARS

  Twenty-five:

  RETURN OF THE KING

  Twenty-six:

  BLIND MAN’S BLUFF

  Twenty-seven:

  META-VEGAS

  Twenty-eight:

  NO END

  Twenty-nine:

  HAPPY PLACE

  Thirty:

  ELAINE

  Thirty-one:

  TIME’S UP

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Praise for Winner Takes All

  Newsletters

  To James, Harper, and Saskia.

  INTRODUCTION

  Las Vegas has been a playground for men since the city’s Mormon founding fathers arrived in 1905, leaving no mystery in why Steve Wynn made the city the center of his life’s work. Wynn understands how adults play, and how to cater to their pleasures better than most people on earth. He has catered to his own pleasures there also—pet dolphins, Impressionist masterpieces. While he isn’t a child of Las Vegas and hasn’t fully made his home there for years, the city is part of his soul, and vice versa: Steve Wynn is the soul of Las Vegas.

  Even today, as he prepares to summer on the Aquarius, the yacht that is currently making its way from Monaco to Cap Ferrat, Wynn says he is starting a new business in Las Vegas—an online art dealership. Housed in a stuccoed suburban shopping mall by McCarran International Airport, the listed office isn’t the sort of place Steve Wynn would likely actually work. It’s a placeholder for his new future—one he has assembled in the matter of months since his world imploded for the second time.

  It’s a rare thing for a human being to build an actual empire. Wynn did that twice, and in doing so he molded Las Vegas—which is both a city and an industry—into what it is today, a world center of hedonism in sport, shopping, sex, theatrical entertainment, and gambling. His proclivity to chase his own passions has sometimes alarmed those around him, and this has been his Achilles’ heel.

  Las Vegas has an uncanny way of attracting rule breakers, philistines, art collectors, owners of megayachts, political backers—people who don’t color within the lines. A Venn diagram of Las Vegas moguls and their friends extends in circles outward to Hollywood, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. The 2016 elections and their aftermath have been threaded with Las Vegas relationships: Sheldon Adelson, founder of the Las Vegas Sands empire, is one of the nation’s most generous Republican political donors. Wynn, until recently, was the finance chair of the national Republican Party. President Donald Trump is a wannabe Las Vegas mogul who never quite managed to do much there. An example of the way influence travels among this group: As U.S. president, Trump wished so urgently to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that he was willing to wreck the United States’ relationships with many of its allies. Coincidentally, perhaps, Adelson wanted that Jerusalem embassy so badly that he offered to help pay for it himself.

  Several characters in this book have transformed themselves in the past decade. Donald Trump, who failed to succeed in duplicating Las Vegas at his Atlantic City casinos, became president of the United States of America. Sheldon Adelson parlayed his investment in the Las Vegas Sands, where Frank and Dino once partied, into a casino dynasty with its weight in Asia, becoming one of the richest men in the world. Gary Loveman didn’t succeed as he’d hoped in the gambling business, but he is one of the few gambling chief executives to find an afterlife outside it—a feat in itself. He has been working in the health care industry.

  If this were a Hollywood film, it would be tempting to begin at the end, with the lens focused on a trim, blond seventy-six-year-old Elaine Wynn dressed in head-to-toe Oscar de la Renta, leaning in, fists planted on a vast table. The camera would pull back to reveal her surrounded by frowning men in suits, then thread a long hall into a casino with ringing slot machines, and then it would rise through the ceiling, high over the crazy quilt of themed Las Vegas Strip buildings—an Eiffel Tower, a Venetian palace, frothy dancing fountains. The scene would snap to azure Mediterranean waters and seagull calls—the lens closing in on a long yacht with a younger blond woman standing on an upper deck. Lounging on a chaise with brilliant yellow cushions would be a craggy seventy-six-year-old Steve Wynn, with disconcertingly raven-colored hair, talking urgently and loudly on his cell phone.

  Prologue

  FRIENDLY

  I’m a Buddhist and I think Buddhist things.

  —STEVE WYNN

  Las Vegas. It is April 2006.

  Steve Wynn is eating a yogurt-covered energy bar in an office with walls lined in
chocolate velvet. He is spiffy in a snug yellow sweater; on the back is a rampant black panther with crimson eyes.

  This place is a circus of Wynn-ness. There are three dogs in the room—two precision-trained German shepherds on the floor and a cocker spaniel named Loopy Lou who dances on Wynn’s lap for kisses and baby talk.

  Wynn’s wife, Elaine, is in an office next door. His nephew and brother-in-law are somewhere around. A valet, eyes downcast, delivers two bottles of water and two napkins to Wynn’s desk.

  Two women outside the door control access to the sanctum. One is Cindy Mitchum with her big hair and unflappable cool, a Wynn veteran since 1979. The other is new—a cutie pie with bursting décolletage.

  Two men await an audience with Wynn out there. One has the red robes and shorn head of a Buddhist monk. He is Tensing, a kind-looking emissary from the Dalai Lama. The other is Patrick Woodroffe, the Rolling Stones’ lighting designer.

  The valet is back. More water. Another napkin.

  Sitting across from the desk is Wynn’s former dolphin trainer, who has stopped by to give his regards. And there’s me. I am headed for the door. But before I go, Wynn has an urgent question.

  “Is there going to be anything in this book that I won’t like?” he demands. And then loudly, face reddening, “WAS IT A FRIENDLY OR AN UNFRIENDLY DEAL?”

  The dolphin guy looks confused by the non sequitur, but this subject has obsessed Wynn for six years. Pride and legacy. The syntax is vital: When I sold Mirage Resorts to Kirk Kerkorian, Wynn says. Not: when Kerkorian took my company, the one I spent twenty-seven years building with my own meaty fists.

  Wynn is yelling now and he is big and loud. He is just over six feet tall. His body is broad but self-consciously svelte. At sixty-four, he has recently allowed a tickle of gray hair to appear at his sideburns—the rest of his expensively maintained head is jet-black, like when he was a cocky young stud. His capped teeth gleam white, white, white.

  His big head swivels, searching. Wynn is going blind with a sort of tunnel vision, and I had slipped out of his view upon returning to my seat.

  “It was a FRIENDLY deal!” he says, answering his own question.

  The day after Wynn’s nemesis Kirk Kerkorian bought Mirage Resorts in the spring of 2000, the London Independent headline stabbed Wynn in the gut: THE KING IS DEAD. Six years later, Wynn’s fury and frustration at being written off are still palpable.

  To Wynn’s way of thinking, Kerkorian’s coup wasn’t a hostile takeover, it was a lucky break. Nothing was out of his control. Got it?

  “Kirk called me up when it closed. I told him it was the happiest day of my life,” Wynn says, strident. “I made more money in five minutes than I made in twenty-seven years.”

  In a few weeks, Wynn will receive two honorary PhDs—one from his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. He will be named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, alongside Pope Benedict XVI and Bono. Elaine Wynn is recently returned from fashion week in Paris, where she spent time with their friends Oscar de la Renta and Karl Lagerfeld.

  Theirs is a high life.

  But the issue on Steve Wynn’s front burner is free will.

  Why can’t he get it through my thick skull? Suggesting in this book that it was a hostile takeover would be “illegal.” Do I understand what he’s getting at? What’s more, we will be finished, he and I. No more interviews. Steve will be mad. He will Cut. Me. Off.

  The phone rings. Cindy announces a call from national security secretary Michael Chertoff. Wynn says he’ll call him back—“It’s personal”—and he turns to me to say wickedly, “I’ll bet you wanna know what that’s about.”

  He blusters on, still red-faced, “It was a friendly deal. The only thing that Kirk Kerkorian did was give me my price!”

  Wynn doesn’t blame Kirk for leaving the impression that he vanquished Wynn. Nope, Kirk is a nice guy. They played tennis together, eons ago.

  One can’t help thinking it’s an artful thing to make a man sell you his life, convinced of your generosity. Of course, Wynn has come back from the dead.

  “Kirk is a gentle, kind man. He is my friend,” says the once-again king of Vegas. “And if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be as rich as I am.”

  There is, after all, some Zen in this thought—that goodness can be hidden in adversity. A man can enjoy building his kingdom twice.

  The audience is over. Outside, there is Tensing, the monk waiting patiently and perhaps a bit tentatively, smiling in his red robes.

  Chapter One

  BULLDOZED

  In this town, nobody likes each other. It’s all veneer covering the seething hate.

  —JAN JONES, FORMER LAS VEGAS MAYOR

  The dust has cleared. Kirk Kerkorian controls the western half of the Las Vegas Strip. Gary Loveman and the vast Harrah’s and Caesars empire commands the central zone. Steve Wynn is the overlord of an island to the north.

  So Las Vegas is set for a showdown. The town is in the full swing of its most robust renaissance. A good $60 billion worth of new casino resorts is under way there—more than the United States’ planned spending on Homeland Security in 2007.

  A recent Google search for “Las Vegas” revealed 179 million hits. This compared with 132 million hits for “Rome,” a city some 2,700 years older than Las Vegas but with a similar history of gluttony. What this tells us is that Las Vegas, as a cultural reference and as a city, has taken on greater worldwide significance than the place may deserve. Also, it’s heavily advertised.

  Yet there it is. Las Vegas is visited annually by forty million people and it is growing like mad. Like mad.

  Las Vegas has been reborn many times, always emerging bigger and more boisterous, wriggling and howling to make its presence known. Pioneers Bugsy Siegel and Gus Greenbaum built the Flamingo in 1946: a two-hundred-room resort that cost $6 million. That is less than one-third the $20 million that Caesars Palace recently spent on each of six snazzy new high-roller suites.

  These huge casinos are the result of an extraordinary partnership of ego, nerve, and greed on the part of a handful of men. But they couldn’t fill them without you, the public—people who can’t get enough of Las Vegas, and those who hate it but go anyway.

  Each year, at least a million more people visit Las Vegas than the year before. The city has twice as many hotel rooms as New York City, and on many weekends all 135,000 of them are sold out.

  The town’s popularity conquers many inconveniences. Las Vegas Boulevard is tackier than the old Times Square—children can collect prostitution flyers from the sidewalk in front of Caesars Palace. In Las Vegas, visitors stand in queues: at airports, hotels, buffets, valet parking, taxi stands, and theater box offices. The only places where there are no lines are at the slot machines.

  Yet in a time when vacations have been so curtailed that they amount to long weekends, people visit Las Vegas for a whopping average of 4.5 days. They arrive prepared to spend cash and, while there, they dutifully participate in an ecstasy of consumerism.

  Roughly as many people visit Las Vegas as New York City each year, but Sin City’s visitors spent 62 percent more in 2005 than their counterparts touring the Big Apple. This explains why Guy Savoy has opened a restaurant in Las Vegas; by most estimates, it is the most expensive restaurant in the world. Luxury retailers have noticed too. By 2009, if all goes as planned, Chanel will have more clothing boutiques in Las Vegas than in New York. And if you desire a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes, you will find no larger a collection anywhere than at the Blahnik boutique in Las Vegas.

  One might easily assume that people go to Las Vegas to gamble. But of the $36.7 billion that sinners spent in Las Vegas in 2005, only $9.7 billion was wagered away, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. If not to gamble, why go? When it’s all averaged out, most folks see a show, spend $248 on food and drinks, $136 on shopping, and $60 on local transportation. Those who did gamble sat at slot machines or tables for an averag
e 3.6 hours per day. Which is, when you think about it, a long stretch spent on your butt.

  People go to Las Vegas for things that are plastic but couldn’t happen anyplace else. Kobe beef for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A Nordic sake sommelier. A massage at Canyon Ranch before a six-hour blackjack spree. Even the entertainment is mind-bending: If you haven’t seen Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, then you haven’t seen what Cirque can do on a stage that will disappear underwater or flip sideways and toss its actors into space.

  There are many other stunning and stimulating parts of Nevada, but few visitors bother to venture even a few miles to see Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, or the vast, lovely lunar landscape that stretches past Death Valley to the west and the Grand Canyon to the east. On average, sightseeing absorbed a mere $8.21 of visitors’ trip budgets. That won’t buy entry to the Liberace Museum—not even with the senior discount.

  The convention authority understandably did not account for how much people spent on sex, sex shows, drugs, or other illegal activities. Given the billboards, advertising flyers, and prostitutes visible around Las Vegas, it’s a safe bet that this, too, plays as significant a role in the Las Vegas economy as gambling.

  So. If that many people are having so much fun visiting Las Vegas casinos, just imagine what it’s like to own one. No industrial titan is likely to equal the lifestyle of an average Las Vegas casino boss. A trip to the Far East for a casino mogul is likely to include socializing with the wealthiest industrialists in China as well as eager dignitaries in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. For a dinner at his home several years ago, Steve Wynn simultaneously hosted his friends former U.S. President George H. W. Bush and the actor Bruce Willis. Clint Eastwood got married on the Wynns’ Las Vegas terrace; Wynn has vacationed with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and has hosted the Dalai Lama at his home.