Wynn Magazine - Las Vegas
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/615999
STEVE WYNN PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF FONTAINEBLEAU MIAMI BEACH S hould you ask Steve Wynn about himself as a real estate developer and hotelier, he might describe a composite of Jay Sarno (the founder of Caesars Palace), Ben Novack (who built Fontainebleau Miami Beach), Bill Harrah (founder of the Harrah's empire), and Walt Disney. In fact, on a recent visit, he went so far as to suggest that if you were to shake them all up in a test tube, out would pop a fully devel- oped Steve Wynn. His component personalities couldn't have been more diff erent. Sarno, for instance, rode into Caesars Palace in a fl ower-bedecked chariot for the resort's 1966 grand opening, while Harrah studiously avoided the limelight, allowing the Harrah's brand to take center stage. Disney, meanwhile, worked diligently to conjure up a Magic Kingdom that would forever occupy an important piece of real estate in every child's brain. Novack and his hotel were symbols of the glamorous party culture of midcentury Miami Beach. But each man belongs to the postwar pantheon of dream weavers most infl uential to a young Steve Wynn. Even as an adolescent, Wynn had an innate sense for luxury, and he grew up in the golden age of burgeoning resort kingdoms—Disneyland and Fontainebleau—criti- cally evaluating them from the age of 15. The obvious opulence of Wynn's resorts belies his sophisticated ideas about luxury, based on the notion that guests should be cared for as if each is the most important person on earth. At this moment, you can conspicuously consume a $10,000 cocktail (the Ono) at XS; dine on a beef even rarer than Kobe (Hokkaido Snow Beef) at Mizumi; design your own exotic bag at the bespoke table in the new Prada boutique; bask in the refl ected light from a monumental Jeff Koons sculpture; be serenaded by a frog with the voice of Garth Brooks at the fantastical Lake of Dreams—and any number of other things impos- sible to do in whatever city you came from. "Listen, the commodious rooms with the hand-woven fabrics, the beautiful stone and ornamental iron—all of that is pretty standard stuff ," Wynn says. "If you're surrounded by beautiful things, you could feel lonely and disconnected. But when you're being attended to, then the story comes to life. I could put you on a nylon carpet in a chair that cost a fraction of the one you're sitting in, but if your every need was met, you would have the feeling of overwhelming luxury." In Wynn's last year of prep school, his parents sold the family home in Utica, New York, and moved to Miami Beach, a change of address that he calls perhaps the biggest factor in determining his future career. "From spring break at prep school my senior year until my father died fi ve years later during my senior year at Penn, I spent every holiday in Miami Beach at our home on Pine Tree Drive," he says. "My folks had cabana 364 at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, which in the '50s was the single most important destination on the planet. The Fontainebleau was a world unto itself. There were French gardens, shopping, restaurants, swimming pools. Goldfi nger was fi lmed there. You see the cabana there where he was playing cards? Right above him was cabana 364." In the consumerist years following World War II, everyone was talking about luxury, Wynn says. "All of them, men and women, would sit around the coff ee shop in the hotel and talk about the owner, Ben Novack, and his glamorous wife, Bernice." That downstairs shop, Chez Bon Bon, was the hotel's nerve center, a 24-hour-a- day New York deli (despite its French name). Legendarily, the air-conditioning in the hotel lobby was turned up high so that female guests The Fontainebleau Miami Beach entrance in 1955. 28 WYNN