Elaine Wynn, Billionaire Arts Patron Who Helped Modernize Las Vegas, Dies at 82

New York Times

17-04-2025

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.
Ms. Wynn was the aesthetic partner in the venture, overseeing the architecture, the interiors and the employee uniforms. She was the one who argued to set the resort back from the sidewalk, to give it a gracious entrance and show off its distinctive Y-shaped design, which would later be much mimicked by other casino owners.
'Don't Reno-ize the strip,' she told Mr. Wynn.
And when her husband wanted to put a dolphin habitat behind their house, it was Ms. Wynn who persuaded him to move that idea to the Mirage.
At a time when the wives of powerful men were decorative adjuncts, Ms. Wynn was 'an equal partner in the success of Wynn Resorts,' said Mary Boies, a lawyer at Boies Schiller Flexner and a longtime friend (with her lawyer husband, David Boies). 'Steve was the money, and Elaine did the design and the people.'
Ms. Boies added: 'She set the template for all that followed in Las Vegas. Neither would have worked without the other.'
The Wynns went on to build a portfolio of ever more elaborate resorts, including the Bellagio, with its collection of blue-chip art; the Wynn Macau, in China; and Encore Las Vegas. But their relationship was challenging — in ways that would not become public until much later.
Mr. Wynn was charismatic, mercurial and even visionary, despite a degenerative eye disease. Ms. Wynn was the steadying force. The couple divorced in 1986, during the building of the Mirage, but continued to live and work together.
'A lot of marriages reach that critical point when the man wants the wife to stay the same as when he first met her, to be the nurturer, supporter, cheerleader,' Ms. Wynn told GQ magazine in 1990. 'There has to be a shift if that relationship is to survive.'
They remarried a year later.
In 1993, the Wynns' daughter Kevyn, then 26, was kidnapped from her home in Las Vegas. Mr. Wynn paid a $1.4 million ransom for her release, and she was found bound in her car in a parking garage but otherwise unharmed.
He did not alert the police or his wife when the kidnapper phoned him, fearful for his daughter's safety. He waited until she was safe and in his arms, and then phoned Ms. Wynn.
'I think the height of my admiration and respect and love for Steve centers on that episode,' Ms. Wynn told The New York Times Magazine in 2012. 'I never, ever questioned that he did the right thing. He spared me.' (The kidnapper was later arrested in Newport Beach, Calif., buying a Ferrari with $100 bills.)
When Mr. Wynn, in a notorious incident in 2006, stuck his elbow through the canvas of 'Le Rêve,' Picasso's 1932 painting of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, it was Ms. Wynn who calmed him. He was in his office showing off the painting to Barbara Walters, the Boieses, the author Nick Pileggi and his wife, Nora Ephron, and others, when it happened. Mr. Wynn had bought the painting with Steven Cohen, the hedge-fund manager, for $139 million, the highest price ever paid for an artwork at the time.
'I can't believe I did that, but thank God it was me!' Mr. Pileggi recalled him saying before calling Ms. Wynn. Mr. Pileggi was close enough to hear her soothing tones.
'I thought,' he said in an interview, ''Wow, this is some relationship.' Elaine did not enter the frenzy. That's the kind of person she was. Nora adored her.'
'Did I create an environment that allowed him to thrive?' Ms. Wynn mused in 2012. 'Did I create an anchoring to the personality that made us have good equilibrium? That's what I'd say I hope my contribution is.'
By 2010, the Wynns had divorced again, this time permanently, splitting their shares in the company, which amounted to a controlling stake of 36 percent, then valued $1.4 billion. Ms. Wynn remained on the board but stepped down as director of Wynn Resorts, and out of the shadow of her husband.
She turned her focus to supporting the arts and education, as national chairwoman and a trustee of Communities in Schools, an organization that works to lower dropout rates. She also served on the Nevada State Board of Education.
Ms. Wynn was an early contributor to President Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, and he appointed her to the Kennedy Center's board, where she served until the first Trump administration. The Obamas remained friends, as the former president and Ms. Wynn shared a passion — in Ms. Wynn's case, a fierce passion — for college basketball. (She was a Duke fan.)
In 2016, she provided a $50 million donation to kick-start the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's $650 million expansion, designed by the architect Peter Zumthor. She also helped fund the installation of the land artist Michael Heizer's 'Levitated Mass' on the museum's campus, as well as his monumental work in the Nevada desert, 'City,' as it neared completion after many decades.
She began to buy art, besting her former husband with her 2013 purchase of the Francis Bacon triptych 'Three Studies of Lucian Freud,' which she won at auction with a bid of $142.4 million, after commission, beating Mr. Wynn's record of paying the highest price for an artwork.
'First I was worried I'd want to buy it,' she told Forbes magazine in 2016, recalling when she first saw the triptych. 'Then I was worried I might not get it.'
Elaine Farrell Pascal was born on April 28, 1942, in New York City, one of three children of Lee (Stollman) Pascal and Jules Pascal. She grew up in Miami Beach, where her father ran package tours. A Lauren Bacall beauty by 16, she was named Miss Miami Beach in 1960.
When she was a freshman at the University of California, Los Angeles, she and Steve were set up on a blind date by their parents — the date was dinner, with their parents, at the Miami Jai-Alai Fronton, now the Casino Miami. The Pascals and the Wynns had abutting poolside cabanas at the Fontainebleau Hotel, and the husbands were gin rummy buddies.
It was an instant match, by all accounts.
They married in 1963 and settled in Maryland to oversee Mr. Wynn's bingo parlors. Ms. Wynn transferred to the George Washington University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1964.
In addition to her daughters, Ms. Wynn is survived by seven grandchildren and a brother, Joel Pascal.
Ms. Wynn recalled the energy of Las Vegas when she first arrived, the zest of a place on the make, and the loose community of headliners and showgirls there, as she told Cathy Horyn of The Times in 2006. And yet, she added: 'I felt threatened by Las Vegas. It seemed very fast for a middle-class Jewish girl.'
When the Wynns divorced for the second time in 2010 and split their shares in the company, Ms. Wynn agreed to vote her shares with her husband, so he could maintain control of the board. But after a few years she was forced off the board and had to sue to regain her shares.
Then, in 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported repeated allegations of sexual harassment by Mr. Wynn from multiple employees, including a manicurist who received a $7.5 million settlement after claiming he had forced her to have sex with him. Mr. Wynn, who denied the allegations, resigned as chief executive, leaving his wife as the company's largest shareholder.
'I could just quietly sell my shares and go off into the sunset and pursue philanthropy,' Ms. Wynn told James B. Stewart of The Times that year. 'But my mantra is, it's not where you start in life, it's where you end up. And I'm not about to go off and leave this company that I helped build, as tarnished as it has become.'
At her death, Forbes magazine estimated her net worth at $2 billion, and Wynn Resorts had market cap of about $7.9 billion.
For years, Ms. Wynn and Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, had been discussing building an art museum in Las Vegas. It would be the city's first. Last year, she told him, 'It's time.'
The museum, in partnership with LACMA, will be built in the city's new arts district, Symphony Park, and designed by Francis Kéré, a Pritzker-Prize winning architect from Burkina Faso.
'My days are numbered,' Ms. Wynn told Robin Pogrebin of The Times in September. 'I thought, What's my final gift? I want to leave an imprint other than my name on a hotel casino.'