Me & Steve Wynn & Picasso & the minibar

a story in 2 parts

This is a story in two parts.

Part One, a piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times:

Fair warning: when you check into the Wynn Las Vegas hotel, be careful with the minibar in the room.

It has a kind of electronic sensor embedded into it, so that when you remove an item – a $20 bar of chocolate, for instance, or a $5 bottle of water – the sensor immediately notices your action, sends a message to the central Wynn mainframe, and adds the charge to your hotel bill.

Even, just so you understand, if you put the item back.

That’s the way the Wynn works: every action, no matter how casual – “Hey! Peanuts! I think I’ll have some – no, wait, maybe I’ll just go downstairs to the Parasol Bar instead, let me just put these back” – has clear financial implications.

It’s comforting, though, to learn that Steve Wynn, the owner and impresario of the spectacularly fun and glamorous Wynn Las Vegas, lives by the same rules.

Wynn is a passionate art collector, and has spent many years assembling a knockout collection of paintings. It’s an eclectic gathering of Old Master, Impressionist, Modern, and American masterpieces, and it really is something. Once, though, while showing off one of his Picassos, Le Reve, he, somehow, someway, managed to poke a hole in it.

Wynn suffers from a degenerative eye disease. And the people who were there at that moment – people like Nora Ephron and Barbara Walters – reported that he was gesturing to the painting, pointing out some of its dazzling masterstrokes (or something) and just misjudged the distance between his elbow and the $139 million canvas.

Perhaps. It’s also possible, of course, that Wynn was so entranced by the simplicity and voluptuousness of the shapes and colors in Picasso’s erotic masterwork that in turning back to his guests, among whom numbered, let us not forget, Barbara Walters, his shock at the contrast caused him to recoil from his guests and into the painting itself.

That’s not the most generous hypothesis, of course. Others have suggested that extremely rich older ladies often look, in source lighting not arranged by professionals, sort of like cubist paintings themselves. So maybe Wynn turned from the painting to his guests and was suddenly all like, Whoa! This is freaking me out! Or whatever.

My guess is, he just didn’t know how close he was to the canvas. Steve Wynn is a rarity: he’s an art collector with incredible taste, but he is also an art lover (these aren’t always, or even mostly, the same thing) and he has an infectious and charming enthusiasm for his eye-popping collection.

At the time of the incident, he was probably pointing to one spot – the delicate, almost mottled background pattern -- and suddenly also wanted to point out the gorgeous neckline of the painting’s subject, got his internal wires all crossed, and pop! Elbow into canvas. Rip along the lower right corner.

Much in the same way that I, as a recent guest at the Wynn Las Vegas, removed a Diet Coke from the minibar before noticing that they also had ginger ale, which sometimes seems like a fun change-of-pace type beverage, but I misjudged the amount of time I had to make a final decision before the sensor pad alerts the food and beverage accounting department (guest room division) of the central Wynn server that the guest in room 1100 has selected both Diet Coke and ginger ale from among the in-room minibar selections and charges the guest accordingly.

Here’s how I handled it: I complained.

When I checked out, I told the incredibly efficient and polite person at the front desk what had happened, and she happily took it off the bill.

Emboldened by this, I then proceeded to tell her that earlier in the casino, I had mistakenly placed certain monies down on certain bets at the craps table – monies, I told her, that were actually better applied elsewhere in my life – and simply misjudged the amount of time I had to retrieve those bets, and the distance between me and the person throwing “garbage numbers.”

She laughed and pretended it was a joke, and so I laughed too, humiliated, got into my car and drove home through the desert. I cheered myself up with some outlet shopping.

Here’s how Steve Wynn handled it: he took it like a Buddhist. In the first place, the painting had been sold to someone else a few weeks before. The agreed upon price, somewhere around $139 million, was the largest price ever paid for a painting, and all that was left was to crate it up and send it to the buyer. But Wynn had mistakenly punctured the canvas, and now, in front of Barbara Walters and God and everyone, he had to call the buyer, tell him that the sale was off, and swallow a $139 million loss.

Which he did, with incredible grace and humor and – I’ll say it – class. The next day, at dinner with his guests, they shared a fantastic bottle of Bordeaux and he waxed philosophical: “It’s all about scale,” he said. No outlet shopping necessary. Steve Wynn is, as they say in the south, a man.

And I’m down there haggling with the lady over a ginger ale. I’ve got a lot to learn.

Part Two, a follow-up a few months later, I did on KCRW, Los Angeles Public Radio:

I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times a year or so ago, about my experiences with the mini-bar at the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas.

It’s a pretty clever mini-bar – well, any machine that manages to charge you six dollars for a Diet Coke is clever – but this one has a twist. It charges you when you remove the item, automatically. No more disruptive knocks on the door from some grim hotel operative with a clipboard and the ability to look into your soul and see that you ate the Jumbo Fun Sized Snickers (for eight dollars) in ninety-three seconds, or ate the entire festively decorated glass jar of cashews (eleven dollars) while scrolling through the adult movie offerings without ever pressing “order” or that there’s only one glass next to the empty bottle of Trefethen Cabernet (thirty-six dollars) and your eyes seem a little red and glazy. And it’s ten thirty in the morning.

Anyway. So I wrote this piece, which was a complimentary article – look, I like the Wynn hotel a lot; it’s fun and spacious and has a great pool area – with one pool that allows what they call with restrained and mysterious suggestion, “European style bathing,” and the whole place has a wonderful glamour to it; and I like the owner, Steve Wynn a lot, too, although I’ve never met him. But I’ve better than met him: I’ve seen him on Charlie Rose, where he was engaging and funny and spoke movingly and without a shred of pompous nonsense about his eye-popping art collection.

So, stage set: I write a piece about Steve Wynn, it appears in the morning paper, I’m out of the house early that day, I’m meeting someone for coffee and then I have to go to the doctor to get some shots for a trip I’m taking and my phone rings and it’s my agent telling me that Steve Wynn has been trying to get ahold of me.

Really? I say, suddenly rereading my article in my mind, sifting through it for possible remarks that taken out of context might possibly lead to some possible misunderstanding, and suddenly I’m in one of those early Woody Allen movies in my mind, “no, you see, it wasn’t, that was not my meaning, it was the newspaper that, with my, total admiration, sir, fellas, what’s with the bats? I would never say such a, with the European style bathing, hey! That hurt! Fellas, that’s my pinkie…

Know what I mean? Nonetheless, I play it cool. And while getting stuck with yellow fever shots and loading up with Ciproflaxin, I start thinking it’s, maybe, you know, the opposite. Maybe he’s my new best friend. Maybe he wants to call me to say, great article. Please, come here to the Wynn and live here as my guest for as long as you shall desire.

So I call him back.

I get his guy. I play it cool. “Just, you know, giving Mr. Wynn a shout back, catch you later bro.” And I leave him my cell number.

And wait for his call.

Which doesn’t come.

So the next day, all cool again, I call the number again and pretend like, you know, I’m so crazy busy that I can’t remember who owes who a call, is it me? Is it Mr. Wynn? What, you know, no big deal, whatever whatever.

He’ll call you, is the reply.

Okay then.

That was sometime in 2006.

And then, telling this story recently to a friend of mine who travels in high circles, he told me what probably happened.

“He didn’t want to talk to you,” my friend said. “Why would anyone want to talk to you? He just wanted to know where you were, and how quickly he could get ahold of you, if he needed to. Guys like him are smart and prepared businessmen. They don’t think about the next move, they think about the moves after the next moves. Unlike you. Who is probably only thinking about the pool.”

“Hmmmm?” I said, lost in thought.

Because in Hollywood, when someone calls you, it’s almost always good news. If it was bad news, they just wouldn’t call you. In Hollywood, bad news is lazy. It just waits for you to figure it out by yourself. You sit by the door with your hair done and in a poufy prom dress, and it’s only later, at 10 o’clock, that you realize that no date is coming to take you, your show is cancelled, your pitch is passed on, your script is dead, your movie is not going to get made, your parking pass is revoked, and your picture is not running in the trades. And if you want European style bathing, you have to drag yourself to Europe.