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That mythic Las Vegas space, the high-roller suite, is alive and well--and fishing for a new breed of big-time gambler.
By Tom Vanderbilt
April 2002
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A statue of Elvis--the highest roller of them all--in the lobby of the
Las Vegas Hilton, where he kept a suite on the 30th floor. Elvis
reportedly shot his room's television with a Colt .45 when a Robert
Goulet talk-show appearance angered him.
Photo by Wes Isbutt/Studio West Photography
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There are few more celebrated creatures in modern Las Vegas mythology than
high rollers, those "whales" rigorously courted to participate
in a highly charged exchange. The casinos provide a staggering level of
comfort and privilege--epic suites drenched in neoclassical grandeur, private
shopping trips on Rodeo Drive, liberal use of the private jet--while the
high roller submits his capital investment to the whims of chance and his
own gambling ability. He is a sort of Sasquatch amid the neon, and sightings
are legion--everyone knows that Australian media magnate Kerry Packer has
won or lost upward of $20 million in a single night. And the further
one actually is from a high roller, the more firmly one claims intimate
knowledge. "The whales are not usually good gamblers," a taxi
driver avers upon picking me up from the airport.
The house usually comes out ahead in this deal, so despite occasional predictions
that the whales have gone extinct, casinos continue to build the preserves
that will lure them to the table. Drawn by the mere intrigue of the phrase
high-roller suite, I find myself standing at what I take to
be the epicenter of Vegas high-rollerdom: the 15,400-square-foot Verona
Villa, the largest hotel suite in North America. Perched atop the three-pronged
1969 Las Vegas Hilton, where Elvis Presley once held court in his fabled
top-floor suite, the room is certainly larger than life. Casino specialists
Conversano & Associates have designed a riotously rococo megastadium
of ornate frescoes and Italian marble floors, with five sunken
Jacuzzis basking under chandelier-adorned vaulted ceilings. It is the ultimate
invocation of what Noel Coward articulated upon first seeing the hotel
rooms of Las Vegas: "They are all fairly large and much of a muchness."
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High-roller suites, like this bucking-bronco-equipped one at the
Venetian, are reserved for "whales," gamblers willing to play
hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. "The average bet would be
$5,000," says a hotel vice-president.
Photo by Jeff Green
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It is here that the hotel's assistant director of marketing, Cullen West,
delivers the bad news. "The last two years the hotel has shifted to
more of a convention environment, so we're not necessarily after the whales
like we once were," he says as we walk past an enclosed terrace where
a man sits carefully trimming a swath of grass between the lap pool and
the koi pond. West hands me a press release announcing that "for the
first time ever, the Las Vegas Hilton has opened its premium suite
inventory to overnight guests." Meaning paying overnight guests:
high rollers never pay for their rooms. So out go the baronial excesses
of the smoking-jacket-clad baccarat player (Indecent Proposal was
filmed here) and in comes a roomful of Silicon Valley networkers. Sigh.
As consolation, West tells me the room rents for about $17,000 a night and
takes pains to show me the "2,000-pound marble table," which required
airlifting into the Sky Villas when they were being constructed back in
1994, at a cost of $45 million.
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Since many high rollers come from the Middle East, where nudity can be considered
offensive, nude statues--although they abound in public areas at hotels
like Caesars Palace--are kept out of the rooms.
Photos: Left, Jeff Green; right, Corbis Images
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In few places is the new embraced with such fervor as Las Vegas, and so
the high rollers have not disappeared, they have simply decamped for the
newer, more glittering abodes of the Bellagio and the Mansion at MGM Grand.
Here it is said that every hotel project happens in response to the one
just before it--and the same goes for high-roller suites. The Hilton Sky
Villas were themselves a response to the suites Steve Wynn built at the
Mirage in 1989 and Treasure Island in 1993. At the former property Wynn
defined the new arriviste high roller, recording bets of $1
million each from an unprecedented 400 people in the first year. Caesars
Palace (long a high-roller redoubt) responded to Wynn's success with a set
of Forum Penthouse suites (a name that held despite some discussion). In
1998 Wynn's brand-new Bellagio chimed in with its Garden Suites, to which
the MGM Grand--the world's largest hotel--played its trump card: the $200
million, 29-villa Mansion, a private enclave that features stenciled cedar
beams, butlers trained in England, and antiques and artworks ranging from
a sixteenth-century altarpiece to drawings by Matisse.
Jerry Beale, a principal at Wilson & Associates who worked on the Mansion
and Caesars, says MGM set a new standard of opulence. "I don't think
anything like it will ever be done in Vegas again," he says. "They
are so far above the mentality of the other players." To decorate the
Mansion, Beale trekked across Europe and Morocco on shopping expeditions.
The budget, he says, "was so high we could do almost anything."
With its antique purchases, the MGM even strayed from a cardinal rule of
high-roller design: don't buy anything you can't replace. "Sometimes
when high rollers lose--or even when they win--they get unreasonable,"
Beale says. "They say, 'I like this carpet.' The hotel will then roll
up that carpet and say, 'Where would you like it shipped?'"
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