One of his favorites is titled “Towels,” in which Wynn introduces himself to Sinatra in a hotel suite. “I’m Steve Wynn, and I run this place,” Wynn says, and Sinatra slips him a $5 bill and says, “Make sure I have enough towels.” “Towels?!” Wynn says in a single moment picked from a dozen takes. “I kept saying ‘towels,’ over and over, with as much pain as possible,” Wynn says, laughing. “What really made that spot was the music. We needed to get grand rights for ‘New York, New York,’ from Kander & Ebb. They didn’t just give away those rights.” But Sinatra used his powers of fame and persuasion. “Frank intervened; it took him to get that done for us. We paid $75,000 a year to use ‘New York, New York,’ and it really made the commercial. If you saw it without the music, it was not nearly as funny,” Wynn says, adding that the impact was felt far beyond that one TV spot. “That’s where I learned that music in the hotel is so important in setting the mood.” So when you hear the music at Wynn/Encore, you can thank Sinatra for that, too. Another favorite memory: Wynn and Sinatra were working across the street from one another on Park Avenue in New York City. Sinatra called and asked Wynn to lunch at Gino’s, the famous Italian restaurant (long ago closed) many blocks away on Lexington and 60th. Frank and Barbara Sinatra joined Steve and Elaine Wynn for lunch that day, and took a limo to the restaurant. By then, Wynn had long been suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, which limited his ability to see in the dark. “We come out of the restaurant, and it’s not dark yet. The girls get in the limo, but I say to Frank, ‘I want to walk.’ It was a beautiful day, May or June, and Frank says, ‘Okay, but I’m going with you, you might walk into a lamppost,’” Wynn says. “Now, the sun is out, and I can see as well as he can, but he takes my hand and we walk from Lexington to Park, then 11 blocks down Park Avenue, with him holding my hand.” Quite a pair. “People are walking by, doing double-takes, and I feel like I’m 12 years old,” Wynn says. “We were on television all the time, and he’s Frank Sinatra … and he looked at me and said, ‘I used to be a single.’ And you know what? I didn’t say a damn word. I loved it.” Wynn says that he later learned Sinatra would commonly say of the casino entrepreneur, “One thing about that kid: He pays attention to everything in the joint. I love that.” “That was his take on me,” Wynn says. “So, in other words, he watched me be as fanatical about detail as he was about his music. And that was how we came together.”
18 LasVegasWeekly.com December 3-9, 2015
> the power of frank Sinatra’s surprise introduction of Dean Martin at the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon at the Sahara in September 1976.
Jerry Lewis ∑ “One thing people don’t realize is
that I looked a lot like Frank when I was young. Photos of us from those days are almost identical,” Lewis says. “I met him when I was very young, back in 1943. ... He came to see my show. I was appearing at the Glass Hat at the Belmont Plaza in New York, even before I worked with Dean, I’ll have ya know. And Frank walked in one night with his mother and a few people in my party.” Sinatra knew of Lewis. “He heard I was doing an impression of him, which I did that night. I sang to a recording of his, ‘All or Nothing at All,’ and I did him very well that night,” Lewis says. “He and his mother came in a few times during the engagement. He liked the show, he liked me.” The two became close enough that Sinatra was apt to call Lewis and ask him to fly nearly across the country on a moment’s notice—for no specified reason. “He called me one day, this was about 1957, right in there, and I had to interrupt production of a movie I was making at the time,” Lewis says. “He said, ‘Pack up. We’re flying out.’ We wound up at an auditorium in Gary, Indiana. We walked into the hall, there’s a 30-piece orchestra onstage.” The night was a charity show for a police officer killed on duty, who had left behind a wife and four children. Sinatra had committed himself and Lewis to perform a single benefit show for the Gary police fund. “We did a couple of hours, the place went nuts, and afterward we
> detail men A promo shot of Wynn and Sinatra taken during the singer’s run at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City.
heard what we raised—$480,000 in one night. … This was a tremendous inspiration for the work I was doing on behalf of the [MDA] telethon, which had already started. It was a major event in my life, and Frank did this five or six times during my career.” Lewis says Sinatra’s power of
personality led to one of the more remarkable celebrity reunions ever, played out on the 1976 MDA Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon broadcast from the Sahara. During that show, Sinatra, who was onstage in conversation with Lewis, abruptly called for an old friend to join them. Of course, it top photograph by associated press