Wynn waxes nostalgia over Mirage Resorts

LAS VEGAS - He said he wasn't nostalgic, but he had to be.

Steve Wynn stepped away from his stockholders, slipped out through a back hallway, then out into the stream of visitors at his $1.6 billion Bellagio resort.

Only it was no longer his.

Minutes earlier Wynn, who helped change the face of the gambling industry through his Mirage Resorts Inc., had presided over his company's final stockholders' meeting.

Stockholders voted overwhelmingly to sell their company to MGM Grand Inc. for $21 a share, a $4.4 billion deal.

The vote - 117.1 millions shares for, 1.6 million against - marked the end of one chapter in Wynn's meteoric life, the beginning of another.

For 27 years he headed a company that transformed Las Vegas. He bought land on the Las Vegas Strip for $1.1 million, then sold it for double the price to bankroll a stake in the Golden Nugget hotel-casino downtown. In 1989 he opened the Mirage, sparking a building boom that has continued unabated. Nine years later he opened his showplace Bellagio, a megaresort five years in the making.

He leaves Bellagio on Wednesday, making way for MGM executives whose boss, billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, is another gambling industry icon.

''I'm upbeat, not melancholy,'' Wynn said as he walked down a hall toward the resort's executive offices. ''I've always been someone who focuses on the next project.''

Indeed.

When the Mirage was just a concrete skeleton coming out of the ground in 1987, Wynn was asked to compare himself to his nemesis, Atlantic City casino owner and developer Donald Trump.

''He likes to be thought of as the owner of buildings; I like to be seen as the guy who designs and builds them,'' Wynn said.

Wynn, who counts Walt Disney among his heroes, raised the bar on Las Vegas resorts when he built the Mirage, then took entertainment to a new level here when he hired entertainers Siegfried & Roy to an unprecedented $58 million contract to headline at the resort.

''To have this opportunity to do what I want is the reason I sold my shares,'' Wynn said. ''It gives me the vehicle to go do what I want.''

What he wants is to work his magic across the Strip, at the legendary Desert Inn resort, which marked its 50 anniversary last month. Wynn agreed to purchase the Desert Inn for $270 million, saying it was a birthday present for his wife, Elaine. He received about $483 million for his Mirage stock.

''The only part I ever enjoyed was the building, the design,'' Wynn said. ''I've always been the design guy.''

Wynn said he and his design team already are ''up to our elbows'' in design work on his new acquisition.

He said the Desert Inn package ''is substantially better than anything we've ever owned.''

The package includes the 715-room hotel, the Strip's only golf course, and prime land suitable for another major resort. The 215 acres in the package includes a 2,000-foot frontage on the Strip, compared with Bellagio's 1,200 feet.

Wynn said there will be some nostalgia in that he will miss the employees, and the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, where he showcased some $400 million in works from the masters.

He said some 630,000 people visited the gallery from the time it opened in October 1998 until it closed Sunday.

''I used to get such a joy out of seeing the reaction of the people,'' Wynn said somewhat wistfully. ''It far exceeded our expectations.''

Elaine Wynn, a Mirage board member, said Tuesday was ''the end of a chapter of our lives. But we're still going to be in Las Vegas. We're just going to be across the street.''

One of the stockholders at Tuesday's meeting, Al Devore of Chicago, praised Wynn for his role in building the company. Wynn's brother, Kenneth, whispered that Devore had worked with Elvis Presley and coined the phrase ''Elvis has left the building.''

''And tomorrow I'm leaving the building,'' Wynn said.