Elaine Wynn, who built a glamorous casino-and-resort empire with her former husband, Steve Wynn, transforming Las Vegas into a global destination, and who went on to become a powerful education advocate, arts patron and Democratic fund-raiser, died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.
The cause was heart failure, her daughter Gillian Wynn said.
By the time the Wynns arrived in Las Vegas in 1967, it had lost its Rat Pack sheen and was primed for a reset. The couple were newlyweds with a new baby, but they already knew a thing or two about the gambling business.
A few years earlier, Mr. Wynn had been on his way to Yale Law School when his father, who owned a string of bingo parlors in Maryland — and had a serious gambling habit — died suddenly, leaving his eldest son with the business and a load of debt. The couple worked the bingo parlors together, paid off the debt and then moved to the desert, where Mr. Wynn had been offered a tiny stake in a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.
Within a decade — and with a few real estate deals under his belt, including buying a vacant lot from Howard Hughes, the agoraphobic billionaire — Mr. Wynn had taken over the Golden Nugget, a down-at-the-heels casino, and begun gussying it up. Soon, he was crafting an empire, helped early on by Michael Milken, the disgraced junk-bond king.
The Wynns then began to remake the Strip with their capstone property, the Mirage. They envisioned it as a luxurious resort — something much more than a casino. When it opened in 1989, with more than 3,000 rooms on 65 acres, it was among the largest and most expensive resorts in the world, built for $630 million (close to $1.7 billion in today’s money).
The theme was tropical. The lobby had an aquarium wall. Out front, a volcano in a lagoon erupted every night. There were also exotic animals — in a dolphin habitat and research center, as well as a four-acre jungle habitat for big cats (and, at one point, an elephant), otherwise known as Siegfried and Roy’s Secret Garden, after the resort’s flamboyant headliners.