The Sun King of Sin City

TimesLIVE

27-05-2025

There's never been a comprehensive biography of Sol Kerzner, and this one is long overdue. After journalist Allan Greenblo's book Kerzner Unauthorized was banned outright in 1997, writers and, of course, publishers, have been leery of the subject, even after he died in 2020.
He picked a fine time to die, did Kerzner, just as the pandemic got its hands around the world. It muffled the news of his death and the flamboyant genius quietly passed on with few obituaries.
Kerzner's longtime associate, confidant, and sometime enemy Peter Venison spins out his life story. It goes like the clappers, just like Kerzner's life did, from his childhood in Durban to the heights of private jets, mansions around the globe and marriage to a Miss World.
Venison doesn't shy away from the depths, too, the heavy drinking and womanising, the profanity, boardroom coups and the taint of corruption that stubbornly clung to him.
Solomon Kerzner's parents were poor Jews who fled Lithuania and first gained a foothold in Bez Valley, Johannesburg, selling fruit and vegetables, before moving to Durban, where they ran a kosher boarding house. Kerzner was beaten up so often at school as a 'bloody Jew' that he learned to box and eventually became a welterweight champion at varsity. The ingrained pugilism would drive him all his life.
With hospitality in his veins, he worked for a few short years as an accountant before diving into the hotel trade. He bought his first hotel, a rundown establishment called The Astra, and turned it around by introducing a dinner club and dances. But Kerzner, in his early 20s, had bigger ideas. After visiting the US, he ripped off the shape and style of a famous Miami hotel and built not on Durban's popular Golden Mile beach but in a village up the coast called uMhlanga Rocks. The Beverly Hills was the first five-star hotel in SA, the first with every room facing the sea, the first with a nightclub downstairs.
'Who needs a f**king view in a nightclub?' he said.
The bedrooms were relatively small because Kerzner wanted guests out and about in the hotel, lazing by the vast swimming pool and dancing the night away at the Copacabana Club. It quickly became the place to be seen and was a magnet for celebrities. With the heady success of the Beverly Hills, he rolled on down the coast to build the Elangeni and Maharani in Durban, and that was when the world sat up and started taking notice of the brazen, foul-mouthed hotelier.
It's these early chapters that are the most interesting in the book, compared to the later ones that curdle into deal after deal, manager after manager and paradise after paradise, all blurring in the reader's mind. We've become so used to lavish resorts — many that were built by him — that it is interesting to read how he imagined them in the first place, how daring and innovative he was.
Kerzner believed staying at a hotel should be an experience, rather than it only being a place to lay your head. Guests were to be blown away, he insisted, and staff had to go many an extra mile to satisfy his standard of service. For instance, since most guests ate breakfast in-house, he instructed his head chef to make it memorable. And, so, the interactive, laden buffet breakfast was born, with chefs cooking eggs the way you like it. It's a style that's become ubiquitous the world over.
He was renowned for using the word 'f**k' as a noun, a verb and an adjective, all in the same sentence
Ever the Vegas acolyte, Kerzner believed entertainment and celebrities were vital to the recipe. He understood what an influencer was before there were influencers.
Though he'd never had any architectural or construction training, he had an instinct for it, choosing the best sites for the best viewpoints, such as Beacon Island in Plett and Le Saint Géran in Mauritius.
Of course, no telling of Kerzner's story would be complete without Sun City and the Lost City, described by one commentator as a 'gaudy honeypot of fake beaches, fake jungles, fake everything' that ran on 'a high-octane fuel of gambling, alcohol, porn and girlie shows'. Despite the international cultural boycott of SA, with his deep pockets Kerzner signed up musical acts such as Queen and Rod Stewart.
He was riding high, the sultan of Sin City, and soon he was looking across the sea to new opportunities, to Mauritius, Comoros, Morocco, Dubai and the Bahamas.
Difficult, foul-mouthed and a workaholic — 'He was renowned for using the word 'f**k' as a noun, a verb and an adjective, all in the same sentence' — he was nevertheless a devoted father. The greatest tragedy of Kerzner's life was the death of his son Butch in a helicopter accident.
This is a terrific book by someone in the inner circle, who witnessed the chaos and the triumphs of the man said to have been one of the greatest visionaries and entrepreneurs the world has ever seen. The Sun King.