Judging from their expansion plans and public relations hyperbole, casino tycoons want to lure whole families onto the Strip-Mom, Dad and the children, too-to bond lovingly in the neon inferno and perhaps feed the slot machines money that otherwise might have gone to the orthodontist.
The Vegas Loves Kids crayon marks were on the wall as early as 1968, when Circus Circus opened with a panoply of juvenile diversions, including midway shell games, sticky food and trapeze artists flying above the craps tables. It was an act of prescience that went generally misunderstood for almost two decades.
Circus Circus notwithstanding, the character of the town essentially remained as it had been since Nevada legalized casino gambling in 1931, a desert crossroads slashed with bright lights, full of sordid amusements and rife with the treachery that goes with easy money.
Around the time Circus Circus was introducing its clean Big Top acts, billionaire Howard Hughes began buying up hotels and casinos, replacing shady operators with upright Mormon managers and paving the way for the city`s move toward largely corporate ownership.
Operators with peculiar middle nicknames and retinues of thugs have largely disappeared. Instead, the latest crop of casino tycoons apparently would rather emulate Walt Disney and appeal to children of all ages.
The most profound manifestation of that trend can be detected in and around the Mirage, Steve Wynn`s 2-year-old, $650 million temple of amusement just up the Strip from Bugsy Siegel`s brainchild, the Flamingo.
Every 15 minutes, evening strollers pause at what appears to be a tropical waterfall surrounded by palm trees, an area in front of the Mirage that might have been boiling with signage if the place had been built a few years earlier.
Suddenly, flames belch from hidden pipes, frightening roars drown out the recorded birdsong, red lights turn the cascade into molten lava and the stench of propane drifts across the strip and into the lobby of the Holiday casino, which has been built to look like a gigantic Mississippi paddlewheeler.
Some of the spectators applaud. Others grab snapshots. Most, however, can`t clap or shoot pictures because their hands grip empty plastic coin buckets, once the repository for their quarters but now merely souvenirs of their frustration.
Mirage owner Steve Wynn is a leading Imagineer for the new Las Vegas fantasy life. His volcano may be obtrusive, but it sends a subtle mixture of messages to the strollers and bucket-clutchers.
Perhaps sad experiences in the gaming rooms have induced despair and tight-fistedness. But Wynn treats the dejected to a crater that flows outward, spreading warmth, a reminder of the inexorable passage of geological time, the might of nature and our fleeting existence. What cosmic difference could it possibly make if we blow college tuition on the Dont Pass line?
Feeling that post-eruption surge of release, spectators well might follow their compulsions into the nearest casino-the Mirage-and try their luck again. There the family finds all manner of wholesome attractions: sharks in one pond, dolphins in another, a tropical rain forest in an atrium, white Bengal tigers in a glass habitat, a 200,000-gallon aquarium behind the front desk.
As fate would have it, the various amusements radiate from the vast area housing the slots and gaming tables. Children gaze, enthralled, at the fauna; parents sidle toward the casino, play for a while and return bearing still more empty buckets.
A break with history
This is the new Las Vegas ambience, something Telly Savalas and the Rat Pack never encountered in their scariest dreams. When the Flamingo opened in 1946, Siegel introduced an ersatz Miami/Havana sophistication to a city theretofore enthralled with its frontier-railroad-minin g town motif. The Flamingo style, with its fizzing neon and overheated glamor, eventually prevailed up and down the Strip.
That gold-chain, white-shoe, pinky-ring flair has persisted almost to the present. Circus Circus hung on over the decades almost as a curiosity, the day-care center for tourists square enough to bring their children and seek out RV hookups on the Strip. Then Circus Circus owners put up the equally hokey Excalibur, which on most afternoons teems with members of the shopping mall set.
They wander through Ye Olde Shoppes in Excalibur and venture up and down the Strip sidewalks, seemingly mesmerized by electric starbursts, oceans of bulbs, flaring rainbows, marquee letters taller than a Winnebago and the opulent parade of apparent ”insiders” who cruise up to the valet parking areas in white or burgundy limousines.
Now, at last, bottom-line Las Vegas corporate types are joining Circus Circus in recognizing the potential of this tourist gapers` block. The stogie- chompers have developed a taste for cotton candy and cartoon characters, theme parks and good, clean fun. They have not, however, forgotten how to count.
Dreams for sale
Those with a big stake in the economic future of Las Vegas recite the city`s history as a chronology of marketing strategies, the story of a region with a major industry that produces nothing tangible. Railroads and ranchers found it attractive because artesian wells beneath the desert made it an oasis (Las Vegas means ”the meadows”). Liberal gaming laws let entrepreneurs rake in profits without selling much of anything but pipe dreams.
After a while it became the city of the Big Writeoff and the Easy Skim, until, beginning in the 1960s, the Internal Revenue Service began scrutinizing the tax returns of those who claimed their visits as a business expense. Meanwhile, law-enforcement officials succeeded in banishing the more obviously Outfit-linked management teams.
City fathers then built up the convention trade, making Las Vegas a
”legitimate” locale for doing deals, and legislators changed the gaming laws so that hotel-casinos could trade their stock publicly. (Previously, each shareholder would have had to undergo a background check in the ongoing effort to cut down on the criminal element.)
Then virtually the whole country began to compete. All but two states-Utah and Hawaii-now offer some form of legalized gambling. High rollers and penny-ante dabblers can take their gaming money anywhere.
Utah bettors reach Nevada simply by hopping across the border. Hawaiians enjoy what amounts to their own Las Vegas hotel, the California, which provides a touch of home with Dave`s Aloha Bar, the Ohana Room and pai gow poker tables. Shuffling their package-deal coupons, Hawaiians arrive at the California from the airport by the busload.
The betting-deprived from two states represent merely a dribble, but the California does illustrate how far casino operators will go to snare various subgroups.
”If you were doing a doctoral dissertation on market segmentation, this town would be the place to go,” says Steve Shiffman, publicist for the Desert Inn. His place, with its health spa, golf course, gourmet restaurants and shows for aging hipsters (featuring Buddy Greco, Frank Sinatra, Paul Anka, Buddy Hackett and the like) targets those who seek a relatively sedate
”resort experience.”
Regulars there fondly recall the days when Wilbur Clark fronted the joint for Moe Dalitz and how the city changed radically after Howard Hughes turned the ninth floor into his personal bunker. It was like watching history unfold. Big money, big plans
The Desert Inn has been in the throes of a $3.5 million renovation, but that figure sounds trifling compared with the heavy bets that casino operators are plunking down in anticipation of the city`s latest epoch.
Manuel Cortez, executive director of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (motto: ”Always on the Money”), says the business community recognized that the advent of Atlantic City casinos, state lotteries, off-track betting parlors, Native American-owned casinos, dog tracks, riverboat gambling and a general nationwide governmental yearning for gambling-tax revenue meant Las Vegas had to diversify or die.
”A few years ago,” Cortez said, ”there was a study that indicated only two out of 10 people in the United States will visit a gaming destination for the sole purpose of gaming, although probably 99 percent of the people in the U.S. gamble in one form or another.” (Yes, just getting up in the morning is something of a risk.)
The window of Cortez`s spacious office in the Las Vegas Convention Center commands a bleak view of the shuttered Landmark hotel-casino and a smattering of vacant lots. They seem to be crying out for those eight other people.
Cortez almost glows when he describes the huge, themed resorts recently opened, refurbishing or under construction. The Mirage and Circus Circus, of course. Excalibur, a Circus Circus Inc. enterprise that resembles a Lego castle and bristles with medieval kitsch. The Tropicana with its lavish pool area and water slide. Steve Wynn`s Treasure Island, a pirate-theme attraction going up near the Mirage. Excalibur`s glass pyramid, Luxor, rising next door to the castle. And the $1 billion MGM Grand, which will encompass a movie-backlot theme park and a Wizard of Oz fantasy land.
”They`re all geared to attract those people that don`t normally go to a gaming destination,” Cortez said. ”We`re trying to attract a market segment that we`ve not been able to attract before.”
Presently, he said, visitors tend to be 35 to 50, ”white-collar workers, good family people, active in sports.”
Some, he indicated, fail to get the point. They drift in for the entertainment, the cheap food, the scenic marvels in the surrounding area, the golf, the tennis, the mild climate.
People from other countries often are especially dense in this regard.
”Gambling to them is really not an attraction,” Cortez said. ”Rather, it`s a sidelight.”
Las Vegas remains a stopping-off point for Europeans and Asians making their American Grand Tour. They simply have to see the town, but seldom do they linger.
Meanwhile, Americans with children either pop in for a ”mini-weekend”
or take the kids elsewhere. When they have more time, Cortez said somewhat ruefully, ”they`ll travel to Disneyland or Disney World for a week or two weeks.”
The counter ploy is to make Las Vegas itself into a mega-theme park, figuring that once people come here for their familial diversions, they will leave a few bucks in the casinos.
”Gaming is the engine that drives it all,” Cortez reminds us.
And Americans almost everywhere but in Utah and Hawaii now can place a small wager right in their home towns. Optimists such as Cortez see opportunity even in that situation. Legalized gambling elsewhere is ”creating new generations of gamblers who will want to come to Las Vegas, where gambling as we understand it today originated.”
”I think that gaming expanding throughout the country is going to become the training ground for our market,” said Daniel Shumny, vice president of hotel sales for the MGM Grand project under construction. ”States like Illinois and Iowa with their riverboats expose a lot of new people to gaming, and Vegas is like Mecca.”
Grandiose MGM Grand
Financier Kirk Kerkorian will be ready for those pilgrims in 1994, when he opens what promises to be the most spectacular complex in the history of Las Vegas, the 5,021-room MGM Grand Hotel-Casino-Theme Park near the south end of the Strip.
Kerkorian, so one story goes, invested $1 billion in the project when bankers failed to come up with acceptable terms. Another story has it that potential investors considered his elaborate scheme too much of a crap shoot. So far, MGM Grand is 112 acres of raw dirt, the former sites of the Tropicana golf course and Kerkorian`s MGM Marina hotel-resort. But the construction, planning and marketing staffs, all holed up in a stucco warren of converted apartments on the western edge of the property, bubble with enthusiasm
The eyes of Daniel Shumny grew big as he talked about the Grand vision. As MGM Grand`s vice president for hotel sales, he already can imagine those rooms filling up with people inexorably drawn to the vast array of attractions on the drawing board.
Enter the lion
From the Strip and the corner of Tropicana Boulevard, customers will enter through the mouth of a golden MGM lion nine stories high and follow a yellow brick road through scenes from the Wizard of Oz, an Emerald City filled with animated vignettes depicting the adventures of Dorothy and her friends, and a lavish Munchkin buffet.
Emerald City gives way to a 171,500-square-foot casino, divided into themed areas: Oz, Hollywood, Monte Carlo and Sports. The 33-acre theme park, while not a working backlot such as those at Universal Studios, will be vaguely cinematic, giving visitors the illusion they are riding or walking through ”sets” or witnessing stunts.
Naturally, the MGM Grand complex will be sprinkled with theaters, show lounges, arenas, swimming pools, exhibit spaces, shops and parking facilities, but theming is expected to make the place unusual.
For example, Shumny promised a new ”family” of cartoon characters with their own story line that may appear in a syndicated television series that will ”tie them in with the promotion of the facility, specifically the theme park.”
Appeal to children
”We`re not going to promote gaming to children, obviously,” he hastened to add, ”but I think we`re going to promote the theme park and family activities to all customers coming to Las Vegas. All of a sudden we can compete with Orlando because those who hadn`t thought about coming here because they had the feeling Las Vegas was anti-family, now can say, `Gee, they have a theme park.`
”Studies show that 95 percent of the city`s customer base right now is adult. That`s not going to change drastically. I`d be surprised if that goes down to 90 percent in the next five years, so we`ll still have the perception that it`s an adult situation but that now you`ve got a reason to bring the kids.”
Casino operators want to retain that perception of the ”adult situation” because adults can gamble and children cannot. The strategy, Shumny said, is to extend the average stay from three nights to four, banking on the idea that the kids won`t get bored and that adults will begin to feel comfortable at the slots and tables.
Japanese lessons
As they do in so many areas, the Japanese have been showing Las Vegas where it needs to improve if it ever hopes to capture the generic vacation market and still keep the casinos humming.
”Japanese,” Shumny said, ”typically only stay one night because they use this as a jumping-off point for the real Grand Canyon (the theme park will contain a river ride that speeds along the gorge of a faux Grand Canyon). They come to Vegas, they see a show, they go to the Grand Canyon and they`re off to San Francisco. A theme park would give them a reason to stay at least two nights-see our Grand Canyon and then see the real Grand Canyon.
”Japanese try to get in as much as they can in a 7-to-10-day trip to America. Therefore, they`re not good gamers. They have gaming at home, they don`t understand our games, they don`t speak the language, they feel intimidated. When your hotel is full, and you have 15 percent of your rooms occupied by Japanese, you`re not maximizing your gaming opportunities.
”If they`re here longer, they might loosen up. They might try it. I still don`t think they`ll gamble much, but they`ll get more of their money spent on souvenirs and theme park admissions and food and beverages. So we maximize our revenue with these other hooks that we offer.”
And, guess what, Mom and Dad! The MGM Grand will reduce lines at the theme park rides by eliminating overflow crowds. When the park reaches capacity, the box office will sell admission tickets with a specific time printed on them. It`s fun by appointment.
The major theme parks can`t do that because they would have nowhere else to send their waiting customers. Las Vegas (always on the money) does.
