As we reported in the previous QoD, Winner Takes All -- Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas, is a highly recommended new book by Christina Binkley, the former Wall Street Journal reporter (now columnist) who covered Las Vegas and gambling for 10 years.
The book contains extensive behind-the-scenes coverage and a deep inside view of the biggest events, largest deals, and grandest personalities of the new Las Vegas, as seen by a business reporter who had nearly unfettered access to the seats of power in the Nevada casino industry for more than a decade.
The book opens with Christina Binkley sitting in Steve Wynn’s office. Wynn is eating an energy bar and three dogs are in the room (two German shepherd security canines and "Loopy Lou, who dances on Wynn’s lap for kisses and baby talk"). Two people waiting to meet with him are an emissary from the Dalai Lama and a lighting designer for the Rolling Stones. Wynn is threatening Binkley over his perception that in her book, she’ll characterize the MGM acquisition of Mirage Inc. as a hostile takeover, whereas he insists it was his happiest day ever.
"One can’t help thinking it’s an artful thing to make a man sell you his life, convinced of your generosity" is Binkley’s concluding comment on Kirk Kerkorian’s takeover of Steve Wynn’s company.
Binkley has plenty of rich material from which to draw. "No industrial titan is likely to equal the lifestyle of an average Las Vegas casino boss" (meaning, specifically, the owners, board members, and executives she covers), and she goes on to prove the point with voluminous quotes from direct interviews, descriptions of events she personally witnessed, and accounts from numerous participants, observers, analysts, commentators, and pundits.
Kirk Kerkorian, she writes, "keeps life as simple as any mogul can." The book’s accumulated details on the notoriously publicity-shy billionaire is impressive: Kerkorian doesn’t use credit cards or wear a watch; he drives a Jeep Cherokee and travels the world in his private 737; he bought and sold the same 192-foot yacht several times; and he has three daughters, two adopted.
Kerkorian met Steve Wynn in the ‘60s when they played tennis together at the Desert Inn courts; their relationship dates from then, and Binkley quotes Elaine Wynn as telling Kerkorian, "You know, Kirk, Steve wants to be you."
Binkley had much greater access to the publicity-hungry Wynn, whom she obviously finds more colorful and fun, though at times tough to swallow. He runs his businesses as a "mom-and-pop thing," with his wife Elaine, brother Kenny, and various friends, relatives, and close connections on the payroll. His offices are a menagerie of dogs and circus animals. We get various glimpses of Wynn tripping over things, bumping into walls, skiing off cliffs -- he’s "a hazard on construction sites"; "he can’t drive but owns Ferraris."
There’s some reporting of the opening of the Mirage -- when 29-year-old Gary Loveman was just finishing his Ph.D. in labor economics -- Treasure Island, and MGM Grand, but the book really gets going with the design, redesign, and re-redesign of Bellagio and Wynn’s "thousands upon thousands of hours" at the architect’s drafting table; personally recruiting celebrity chefs by promising them the moon, then delivering; hiring a company to invent the technology for the water show; buying up precious artwork by the great masters to hang on the walls, and generally "meld[ing] his wacky passions with a resort."
But all the while, costs are mounting, stockholders are grumbling, and Wynn is shown to have no patience for the short-term vision and quick-buck attitude of Wall Street. He has to sell off his $25 million estate in Tahoe, plus shares in Mirage, which further dampens Wall Street’s enthusiasm for the company; with the stock price steadily declining, Kerkorian starts to pick up the scent of blood.
Wynn forgets to invite
