From Chapter Nine
The Furniture of Love
In the early surly days of Las Vegas, high-roller suites were basically unknown. Hotel rooms were a long way down th
pecking order in the Las Vegas scheme of things. The first resort-casinos -- El Rancho Vegas, Last Frontier, Flamingo, Desert Inn, Sands, Sahara -- had barely 1,000 rooms among them. Tourists and passers-through might rent one for a night or two from the
clerk behind a tiny front desk, but most rooms were controlled by the casino bosses, kept available for players and the boys, as
well as the boys' buddies, the boys' families, the boys' girlfriends, and even a few juiced-in squares. The rooms were so low in
priority that one old-timer remembers being comped at the Sands for his honeymoon -- into a room with twin beds.
The hotels were built with a few suites. They had a sitting area or an extra bedroom to appeal to superstar headliners like
Frank Sinatra or VIP visitors like Senator Jack Kennedy. But no one had yet thought of using them as bait to lure the fish.
In those days, as far as the bosses were concerned, Las Vegas hotel rooms were nothing more than places to sleep,
shower, and do it -- all in as brief a period of time as possible. They were designed specifically not to be comfortable and
relaxing. The average room lacked a radio, TV, or clock, and there was no room service. Case in point: Into the late '80s, Circus Circus decorated its digs with orange shag carpeting, pink walls defaced by clown murals, red bedspreads and towels, and
extra-loud air-conditioners, all aimed at driving guests back into the madhouse casino.
The high rollers back then had $5,000 credit lines and fired it up with $100 bets. Small change today, but back then the
table maximums weren't much higher. For years, the upper-limit bet at the Stardust was $200. At the Desert Inn, Sands,
Tropicana, and Flamingo, it was $500. (If you wanted to play for higher stakes, there was only one place to go: Binion's
Horseshoe, where your first bet, even if it was a quarter-million dollars, was your max bet.) Even Caesars, which had a
reputation as the high-roller capital of Las Vegas and therefore of the world and was the first casino to go to a $1,000
maximum, required a full meeting of the operations honchos to approve a player's request to up the highest bet on a single
number at roulette from $50 to $100.
On the other hand, every comp but fancy suites was within the grasp of all but the lowliest pukes. When the boys ran
things, there were no electronic data files to check average bets or time played, no comp equivalencies, no lifetime-loss
records. If a boss knew your name and you bought in for $2,500 and played for an hour or two making $50 bets, you'd be
all set up. The Big Five complimentaries--room, food, booze, show, and girl -- were yours for the asking. And you
requisitioned them right in the pit. In those days, the pit and shift bosses doubled as the hosts. (It was when these same
guys shed their boss responsibilities that the first dedicated casino marketing executives came into existence.) They'd
write a comp ticket to take to the front desk where you'd get the key to a room. Or they'd bring a key right to your table.
The room itself was just that -- standard-issue hotel accommodations. As long as there was a bed, a shower, and
an air-conditioner, no one gave it a second thought.
In the early '60s, the Flamingo underwent a change of ownership. A group of Miami hotel operators bought Bugsy's
old joint and flew in a planeload of preferred guests from the Fountainbleau and other luxury Miami hotels for the grand-
reopening party. The junket had been born. Soon, planeloads of gamblers who qualified for free airfare, room, food, and
beverage by putting up $5,000 to $10,000 to play with were arriving at the Flamingo, Dunes, Sands, and other premium
Strip casinos on a twice-weekly basis. These cosmopolitan players were used to fancier places to sleep, and in 1962,
when the Flamingo underwent its first expansion -- a four-story "tower" complete with elevator -- the entire first floor was
given over to 16 high-roller suites, Las Vegas' first.
The suites were all one-bedrooms, but the big attractions were individual swimming pools in fenced backyards for
privacy and, of all things, Japanese houseboys (which presaged butlers 35 years later). But because most junket
gamblers came solo, without their wives or girlfriends, they were asked to share the suites, two to a room. The road from
there to where we are now was long and winding, but the era of using bigger and better accommodations to cater to high
rollers had been inaugurated.
As usual in Las Vegas, the other hotels followed suit(e). In the mid-'60s, the Stardust remodeled a two-story hotel
wing and introduced bi-level suites with spiral staircases. Unlocking doors enlarged certain suites to two and even three
bedrooms. The original MGM Grand (now Bally's) opened in 1972 with nearly 3,000 rooms (largest in the world at the
time; today it's the 13th largest just in Las Vegas), with one floor of 1,000- to 2,000-square-foot suites and two floors of
oversized connecting rooms that could pass for makeshift suites in a pinch.
Penthouse suites were introduced in the late '70s by Caesars Palace, which had by then assumed the mantle of
Big Fishville, bringing in the heaviest hitters in the world. The 600-room Olympic Tower was built in 1979 for an unheard
-of $50 million; the whole hotel-casino had been built, 13 years earlier, for half that cost (today, the same $50 million will
finance a small casino expansion with, perhaps, a fast-food court). The Olympic Tower boasted 10 two-story two- to four-
bedroom suites, complete with floor-to-ceiling picture windows, round beds, mirrors on the ceiling, sunken tubs, and
wet bars -- the height of high rollerdom at that time.
As late as the late '70s, Las Vegas casinos continued the 50-year custom of marketing exclusively, except for
select high rollers, to a domestic clientele of tour and travel visitors. The earliest international travelers to Las Vegas
were the Japanese, who began coming in after a bright young executive from Japan Air Lines put together the Asian
penchant for gambling with big long-distance jetliners and came up with Tokyo-to-Las Vegas 747-sized planeloads.
These weren't Asian whales, to be sure; the Japanese tour groups mostly played the slots, since they didn't have to
speak English to do so. But they began to raise occupancy rates all along the Strip. Even then, there was no active
marketing involved. One former Flamingo executive remembers meeting with JAL in San Francisco to thank them
for their business -- "I didn't even have to go all the way over there to Japan."
Around that time, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority began opening international marketing offices.
They weren't the first -- Hilton had a one-man branch office in Hong Kong in the early '70s to try to keep its baccarat
room busy -- but it signaled Las Vegas' intention to market to overseas travelers and big players in earnest. Meanwhile,
Caesars, under the stewardship of Terry Lanni, began to develop and refine international marketing to superwealthy
gamblers who expected a level of luxury and service otherwise on a par with New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong,
and the like, utterly unknown in dumpy pre-Mirage Las Vegas.
Despite these efforts, up through the mid-'80s, Caesars' suites maintained the outdated look of overwrought
boudoirs straight from a Hollywood soap opera, full of pastel walls, linoleum floors, formica counters, and brass-plated
fixtures. It didn't matter. Caesars retained its monopoly on the whale business. Anyone with a lot of money who came
to Las Vegas, from anywhere in the world, went to Caesars. It was one of the most famous hotels on Earth. It had a
reputation for unbridled, unmitigated, unparalleled opulence. It was the Casino of Casinos. It was a large part of the
reason that Steve Wynn felt he had to spend $650 million (roughly $649 million more than he had) to build a joint
next door.
