The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (44 page)

“V
ERY SALUTARY,” SAYS
Qian Qichen, “but I asked about Steve Wynn.” Sheldon G. Adelson doesn’t miss a beat, and the slides keep coming. Canaletto’s rich canvas dissolves into an image of Atlantis, where tropical fish swim amid the towers and domes of a submerged civilization.

The Mirage is a city housed in three golden towers that rise from a lush jungle. Every fifteen minutes a volcano erupts amid the palms, and the air is filled with the tropical scent of piña colada. The people
who have gathered to watch the eruption applaud and whoop, and then they wander off to explore. In a giant fishtank at the reception area, sharks and angelfish swarm through the ruins of a sunken city. Dolphins disport themselves in a private sea, and in a secret garden Siegfried and Roy perform magic tricks with the white lions of Timbavati. Of course, to get there, one has to pass the slots and the gaming tables. The Mirage is just what it says it is: an illusion. It’s a grind joint in disguise.

Those who try to leave the Mirage only encounter more mirages. The bridge to Treasure Island crosses a Caribbean lagoon, around which a ragged village of white houses tumbles down to the water. Two galleons carved with buxom bowsprits are moored by the dock, their rigging and sails torn by tempests. At the same time every evening, a band of dreadlocked pirates defend themselves against a bevy of scantily clad sirens; the sirens always win. After the show the crowds whoop and applaud, and continue over the bridge to the roulette wheels and the fruit machines.

Those who try to leave Treasure Island only encounter another one. The path to the Wynn winds through tropical foliage to a hidden lake where a thundering waterfall cools the air. Endless corridors are lined with impressionist paintings, exquisite porcelains, and fragments of antiquities. These corridors lead to a golf course whose lush grasses and whispering pines dissolve into the hot desert air. Along the way is shop after designer shop, all “tailored to one lifestyle—
yours
.” Later, those who’ve played enough golf or bought enough in the boutiques make their way to the theater and watch the Cirque du Soleil perform “Le Rêve.” “Dream with your eyes open,” the billboards say, and that’s just what happens. The dream they are all dreaming is the dream of Steve Wynn.

Q
ICHEN DOESN’T REALLY
need to ask about Steve Wynn; he already knows everything he needs to know. He just did it to make Adelson feel like he was paying attention. Handsome, funny, and clever, Wynn started small, just like everyone else: he ran a bingo parlor in Maryland. After a while he made his way to Glitter Gulch to seek his fortune, working his way up from grind joints to hotels. He
seemed to be able to attract the sort who hadn’t been interested in Las Vegas before: respectable family folks from out East with plenty of money.

And Wynn soon realized that they weren’t coming for the gambling. The Mirage and Treasure Island were considered great risks in the early nineties: they weren’t really casinos but resorts, aimed squarely at Wynn’s well-heeled market. Wynn later said of the Mirage, “Our goal was to build a hotel so overriding in its nature that it would be a reason in and of itself for visitors to come . . . in the same way that Disney attracts visitors to Orlando, Florida.” Like Disney World, the Mirage and Treasure Island were constructed as endless, magnificent, spectacular carnivals. It wasn’t an easy task, but it was well worth the work. “It’s much more difficult to give a party than a roll of quarters,” Wynn explained. “Any damn fool can hand over a roll of quarters, and we have a lot of damn fools handing over rolls of quarters.”

Qian casts his eye over the Hall of Purple Lights and listens to the murmur of the waves of the Grand Liquid Sea outside. It is ironic, he reflects, that an imperial pleasure palace has become the seat of a regime that once tried to abolish pleasure. Qian remembers the Red Guards stoning the idle songbirds and ripping up the useless grass in the name of the Cultural Revolution. His mind wanders south to the Cotai Strip. It is part of the old Portuguese colony of Macao, which had long been a hedonistic refuge from the People’s Republic before being transferred back to China in 1999. There’s nothing there now, but the Cotai Strip is ripe for pleasure.

Sheldon G. Adelson is of the same opinion. He is determined that he’ll make it to Cotai before Wynn does. He’s sick of following him around, and Qian knows that he has been for some time. Three years after Adelson bought it, the Sands was looking more and like a losing proposition. It had made its name on the backs of its great entertainers, but by 1991 it couldn’t afford to attract new talent. The president of the hotel said: “What was famous then is not famous today. You can see by the headliners. We are almost a waxwork museum now. There’s nothing new anymore.”

By comparison with Wynn’s Mirage, Adelson’s Sands felt like a dusty truckstop. He wasn’t happy: “Their reception desk looks better than our entire hotel!” He had to do something. On 30 June 1996,
the last gamblers were ushered, blinking, out of the artificial gloom of the Sands. For five months the place stood empty; the only visitors were the film crew for
Con Air
, who resurrected the casino for a week or so and then crashed a plane into it. Then, at 9 p.m. on 26 November 1996, the old neon sign was switched off for the last time, and the Sands crumpled in a cloud of dust.

The photo of the implosion slides into view on the PowerPoint presentation. It disappears, and the Hall of Purple Lights goes dark for a moment. There is a silence. From the shadows, the rich voice of the narrator speaks: “What stood in its place three years later was someplace else altogether.” A videotape starts to roll before the glazed eyes of Qian Qichen.

A
SELF-MADE
A
MERICAN
billionaire hands a beautiful woman down into a gondola. She turns and smiles at him graciously, and he chuckles a little, because it is Sophia Loren who reclines on the cushion by his aging side. Their gondolier, dressed in a straw hat and a candy-striped shirt, sings to them as he steers his craft through the canals of the Venetian.

The happy couple ascend the marble steps into the Piazza San Marco, where they drink champagne and watch the masked figures of the Carnival amuse the crowd. They wander through gardens thick with cypresses and scented jasmine where the moonlight sparkles on countless pools of water. They pause to listen to soft music echoing from a hidden source around the vaults of a stone cloister; they crane their necks to admire the frescoes that adorn the ceiling of a great cupola. Then they stroll down the crooked streets, peering through shop windows at glittering carnival masks and fauns spun from glass.

They pass through doors whose bronze handles have been wrought in the form of the
férro
that adorns the prow of a gondola, and find themselves in the upper loggia of the doge’s palace. All around them, Venetian monuments glow in the gloom. On the hour, the deep bell of San Marco resounds in the night air, and as it subsides it is joined by the peal of hundreds of church bells. Amid the clamor, the aging American billionaire and the ageless Italian film star watch fireworks scatter their colored gems on the rippling lagoon.

They scarcely notice the volcano across the road, spewing out its piña colada–scented lava. They don’t care about sirens battling pirates or about the dreams of Steve Wynn. They go back inside, where Cher belts out “If I Could Turn Back Time” to a packed auditorium.

The camera pans around the scene and takes in the assembled stars. The doge’s palace is center stage, framed on one side by the Ca’ d’Oro and on the other by the Rialto Bridge, which in turn leads straight to the bell tower of San Marco. It is as if the chief monuments of La Serenissima have huddled together for a group snap. Together, they resemble the seductive canvases that Canaletto painted to help his English milordi remember their grand tours.

It’s all a set, of course, and the fanciest camerawork can’t hide it. The Grand Canal, the narrow lanes, and the Piazza San Marco have been turned into interiors: vast sound stages where the soft evening is carefully lit, air-conditioned, and set to the muted strains of Vivaldi. It is always dusk here, the time when it is no longer necessary to do anything other than to stroll, sit down with a drink, and imagine the pleasures of the night to come. This interior city has been freed from the four seasons and then set to their soundtrack.

The Venetian is Venice as it should be: a delightful sequence of spectacles, a city that will never flood, never grow old or cold, a place where nothing untoward ever happens. Nobody says it’s real—the receptionist carefully points that fact out to arriving guests—but it’s a helluva show, thought through right down to the very last detail. Even the candy-striped mooring posts for the gondolas are made to lean slightly, as if they had spent decades sinking into the Venetian mud. The canals have been repainted several times to get the blue just right, and there were fierce debates about the sky in the Piazza San Marco: should the clouds be projected, painted, or made of fluff hung on fishing wire?

The Venetian is not just a great set. The extras are perfect as well: the valets in the porte cochere are dressed as gondoliers, the security guards as carabinieri, and the cocktail waitresses as scantily clad harlequins. Characters from the commedia dell’arte stroll down the narrow lanes and perform in the piazza. They are listed in the hotel brochure as “Streetmosphere.” At the Enoteca San Marco, brusque waiters are clad in stonewashed jeans and crisp white shirts; they
sport Gucci sunglasses on top of their heads and will serve only Peroni lager. The tourists, of course, are picture-perfect too, as they peer from the windows of the Bridge of Sighs and lean sighing on the parapet of the Ponte della Paglia.

A
MOTTO APPEARS
on the screen: “Authenticity is the basis for fantasy.” The Venetian is both at the same time, reflects Qian Qichen. It’s a film of a city, a place of edited highlights spliced together with all the boring bits left on the cutting room floor. It’s Venice turned inside out, illuminated and set to music for dramatic effect. It’s a story with a happy ending, told just as a Hollywood director might tell it.

And Venice is only one among many locations that have been through the elaborate Las Vegas postproduction process. As the Venetian dissolves on the screen, another video begins.

Catherine Deneuve drives up the Champs Elysées, rides to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and presses a button that launches a floral explosion of fireworks into the Vegas sky. Leaning out into the hot night, she sees Lake Como, surrounded by a rocky shore dotted with Roman pines and romantic villas. She just has time to hear the piped chirruping of cicadas before the scene bursts into song. As the voices of Céline Dion and Andrea Bocelli rise into the night, so does the lake itself, in hundreds of fountains dancing in time to the music. The elegant French actress espies the Brooklyn Bridge decked out in fairy lights; the Statue of Liberty; the facade of Grand Central Station; and, rising above them all, the New York skyline, glittering as romantically as ever it might over the East River. She can hear the cries of the taxicab passengers as, strapped into their seats, they career on crazy roller-coaster tracks that twist around the great towers. Farther out, beyond the Statue of Liberty, she can make out visions of other places and times: the towers and battlements of the Excalibur, the gnomic black pyramid of the Luxor, the gilded towers of the Mandalay Bay.