Sarno's two-story suite in the first Circus Circus tower, built in 1971, still exists. It's not available as a guest room, although the company does rent it out as meeting space (see bottom of page). MGM Resorts International has absorbed a lot of casinos over the last 16 years and, with them, a great deal of Las Vegas history. "We do not have a staff historian assigned, per se, but our audio-visual division is logging and storing items for posterity," MGM spokeswoman Yvette Monet says. "We also submit historical items to UNLV Gaming Studies archives, and we also work with Las Vegas News Bureau, which stores historical items."
VegasTripping.com reader "Waffle" actually managed to talk his way into the Sarno suite and filed a lengthy report, complete with floor plans. The Sarno aerie, which the mogul occupied from 1972 to 1983 (at which point he was bought out), has seven bedrooms and occupies part of the 14th and 15th floors of the original Circus Circus tower. If you want to say you've at least found it, take the elevator nearest the steakhouse, go to the 14th floor and look for Suite 1410. In Sarno's day, it would have overlooked the Riviera (and the rooftop of the Circus Circus casino) but now provides a scenic view of a demolition site, soon to be overflow parking for the Las Vegas Convention Center.
From the outside, it's just another hotel room. Were you to get inside you'd find (according to MGM) "refrigerators, full wet bar with ice-maker, Jacuzzi tub" and all those bedrooms. The main living area and master bedroom are two stories tall. Curving staircases at either end of the suite lead to with two bathrooms, two sitting rooms and a study on the 15th floor. Doors on the far ends of the suite connect it with adjoining hotel rooms. (Sarno sometimes shared the suite with pal Evel Knievel.)
At the time of "Waffle"'s stealth visit, the suite was still opulently furnished. The bathroom was described as "something seen in an old Vegas home from 60s in Rancho Circle or the Scotch 80s" (historical upscale neighborhoods). It also the first bathroom we have seen that had a ficus tree next to the toilet. The furnishings in the living room and master bedroom look pretty Hotel Generic – Sarno probably took his furniture with him when he evacuated the suite. Some fixtures, particularly in the bathroom, have a decidedly post-Sarno look. (Said one VegasTripping reader, "the standard room bathrooms at Circus Reno have more style and natural stone.")
In its current form, the suite is fairly nondescript – certainly nothing to get excited about in the era of the MGM Skylofts. Were it not for the fact that Jay Sarno once lived there, it would probably draw little interest. However, one VegasTripping reader who had seen Seventies-era footage of the suite recalled a radically different design concept, dominated by black, white and red, with gold trim. Crystal-chandelier sconces were mounted on the walls, which were dominated by floor-to-ceiling mirrors (which would have had the advantage of making the suite seem even larger). At the time the banisters and balcony railing were done in gold, but they have since been toned down. The master bedroom, likened to a brothel, was supposedly done all in red, which certainly would have made a lasting impression. It almost goes without saying that the Sarno suite has been redecorated in less dramatic – even garish – fashion.
It was built at a time when inveterate womanizer Sarno's relations with his wife Joyce were growing increasingly strained (she would divorce him in 1973). Keeping a pied-a-terre at his casinos – first at Caesars Palace, then Circus Circus – enabled Sarno to enjoy all the comforts of home, unbothered by marital strife. In his Sarno biography, Grandissimo: The First Emperor of Las Vegas, Director of the UNLV Center of Gaming Research David Schwartz describes Sarno's daily routine.
"With a suite in his own casino," Schwartz writes, "Sarno would be living in a beautiful bubble: he would rise when it suited him, make some phone calls from his office downstairs, then head over to the Las Vegas Country Club. After that it would be dinner, some gambling, and back to Circus with whatever conquest he had picked up along the way. Having the tower finished wouldn't just improve his balance sheet. It would make his life just about perfect."
When the bachelor pad was finished Sarno's "eldest son Jay … joked that the suite looked like it was designed by a hooker on acid. A masterpiece of red, gold, and magenta, the main room was dominated by a giant curving staircase … and oversized bookcases with hundreds of serious-looking leather-bound volumes. A sliding ladder was needed to get to them. They made Sarno appear a man of letters. If anyone had actually bothered to climb the ladder, they'd have seen a full run of United States Department of Agriculture reports from the 1930s, Wisconsin highway planning tomes, and not much else. Sarno had bought them by the yard from a supply house and had never cracked a cover."
The grand staircase enabled Sarno to make dominating appearances when he entertained, "in a three-piece suite, toupee firmly in place." After leasing Circus Circus to the more financially responsible duo of Bill Bennett and Bill Pennington, Sarno continued to live in the suite and irked members of the new regime by habitually wandering into the executive offices in bathrobe and slippers, calling out with an assumed familiarity, "Is Billy [Bennett] in?" (Nobody called the austere Bennett "Billy.")
When Bennett and Pennington built a second hotel tower, in 1975, Sarno claimed its penthouse as his new luxury suite, "even gaudier" than the first, according to Schwartz, "and stayed for years, much to Bill Bennett's consternation." In 1981, evidently wanting to be able to have his children around, Sarno bought Sammy Davis Jr.'s old house in the Rancho Bel Air neighborhood, splitting time between it and Circus Circus.
Those good times lasted until 1983, when Pennington and Bennett's Circus Circus Enterprises was enjoying a boom in business and decided to buy Sarno's Ringmaster Ltd. out of the titular casino (the entire transaction cost a now-unimaginable $72 million). Writes Schwartz, "Bill Bennett's first act of business as undisputed owner of Circus Circus was to evict Jay Sarno from his gilded penthouse. Seeing the last of his landlord plodding around the casino in his bathroom and slippers was almost worth $72 million.
Of the second Sarno suite, Monet says, "The physical suite is still there with the same floor plan and layout, however most of the décor and furnishings were removed many years ago. Regretfully, the room is not available." Although Sarno envisioned a Las Vegas where every man was treated like an emperor, living Sarno's lifestyle proxy is one dream we're afraid you're going to have to defer.
