There are moments that never go away, that become part of who you are, no matter where your life leads. One of those moments occurred for me about two months after we took over The Nugget, on March 5, 2004, when Tony Bennett walked into the joint. I remember the moment like it was yesterday—and I wish it were yesterday.
Although I had no idea what Tony was about to pass on to me, I immediately sensed that something was up because the world slowed down right in front of my eyes. Tony was wearing a gold sports coat, blue tie, and a pocket square, and he looked like I hope to look when I’m seventy-eight years old. There was a serenity coming off of him, and maybe it struck me all the more because I’d been working nonstop for two months with reality TV cameras trailing me sixteen hours a day. There were nights I was so exhausted I didn’t even go home. I just flopped in a bed in one of our hotel rooms as one day tumbled into the next.
Just shaking Tony Bennett’s hand and hearing him say hello made me smile. It’s a piece of art, his voice. It’s so pleasant that you can’t help but stop and appreciate it when he orders tuna for lunch. Not long ago, Tony put out a CD of duets with some of the greatest musicians in the world. He performed his hits with Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, Celine Dion, Bono, K. D. Lang, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Elton John, James Taylor, and, I suppose I could list them all. But my point is of all the songs on the album, there was only one that wasn’t a duet. When Tony Bennett recorded “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” he sang it alone. Was there anybody else in the world who could sing Tony Bennett’s signature?
Nobody could’ve represented what we were trying to bring to The Nugget better than Tony. Our rebranding celebration was all about “Vintage Vegas.” But there’s also a quality of eternal youth in Tony that Tim and I wanted to bring to Fremont Street.
I’ve got to admit that I was proud of myself. Ten years earlier, I was driving into town with a hundred bucks in my pocket. Now, two months after we’d taken over The Nugget, I’d booked Tony Bennett for a weekend of performances and a gala to benefit Andre Agassi’s foundation. Once again, it comes back to substance. It was Andre and Perry who’d made the connection. Tony is a big tennis fan, and he loves Andre’s game the way the rest of the world loves Tony’s voice.
Tony, Andre, Perry, Tim, and I had lunch like five old friends. Afterward, Tim and I walked Tony toward our empty showroom. It’s an old room. Tony knew it well. He’d seen Frank Sinatra perform on the same stage decades before. You couldn’t find a more intimate place to play in Vegas. There are only 425 seats. Nothing like it really exists in Vegas anymore, and nobody in the world understood that better than Tony.
That’s because Tony had seen the city grow up. There wasn’t a single tall building when he’d first arrived back in the ’50s. Everything was ranch style back then. Louis Prima was the draw of the day in the Sahara’s lounge. The movie stars were crazy to hear Louis scat, so they came from Hollywood. Frank Sinatra created the Rat Pack with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. as an after-hours lounge act to compete with Louie. Dinah Washington would come into town with two suitcases, say, “I’m here, boys,” and sing until the sun came up. It was that kind of town. The owners of the hotels became friends with the performers. Early on in his career, when Tony wasn’t drawing much of a crowd, he offered to return a portion of his salary to the owner of the hotel he was playing at. The owner refused to take it. The friendships are what Tony never forgot.
The success of Las Vegas lured in the corporations. They built big hotels with glitzy showrooms and created extravaganzas that attracted thousands—even millions when you added all the performances up. They put a precise value and ticket price on every seat and filled their registers. Which was great, except that when Tony arrived in Vegas to sing, he no longer knew who the boss was. It was impossible. Each joint had eleven bosses.
There were no small, intimate showrooms like ours left for a Tony Bennett. Maybe you’d find a few off the beaten path that could barely feed some unknown comics. But a theater with only 425 seats could no longer support a star night after night. We were able to make it work that weekend because we weren’t worrying about tickets or prices. We wanted the world to look at us. And when it did, Tony Bennett is what we wanted the world to see.
Tony stepped up to our stage that afternoon and started walking around. It’s not like he was studying the floor the way a golfer looks at a green before a tricky putt. But he was paying attention to it, almost like he was listening to it. Tim sat in a chair. I was standing next to him. Then all of a sudden Tony started to sing “Fly Me to the Moon”—a cappella. Slowly I felt myself sink to the steps beneath me, and I sat on the floor. The moment took me away, but it was so memorable I can tell you exactly what it felt like. Tony’s dad used to climb to the top of a mountain when he was a young man in Italy and sing. It’s said that everyone in the valley below would stop what they were doing, look up, and listen. When Tony sang a cappella that afternoon, I felt like one of those villagers.
Time had not only slowed down, it had gone backward.
Tony picked up a mike, and the band joined in. Over the weekend, there would be many standing ovations. But my favorite moments came in this impromptu rehearsal. How many people get a private performance from the guy that Sinatra called the best? It must’ve been how Steve Wynn felt being around Frank. What I loved most was watching Tony’s diligence. There’s a story that goes back to the days when Tony and Frank were in their prime, and they were booked to do a benefit at a hotel. The singers left their rooms and headed down to the showroom through the kitchen because that was the way many of the hotels had it set up years ago. The two of them were waiting in the wings to go on, when Frank turned to Tony and said, “How do you like that? Another kitchen.” Well, this was another stage, just as that was another kitchen, but Tony was paying attention to every little detail, going over the sheet music with his band as if he were a kid preparing for his first performance.
Watching Tony, you couldn’t help but pause and reflect. He would ultimately lead me to an understanding of how my partnership with Tim works. But at the time, I just sat there thinking about all the things that had to happen in Tony Bennett’s life for him to be in our showroom at that very moment.
Tony likes to refer to himself as the original American Idol. When he first got married, they say there were two thousand women outside the church dressed in black in mock mourning. He recorded his classic, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” in 1961. But not long afterward, the airwaves were filled with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, and war-protest songs. If the ’60s represented a cultural revolution, then music was at its cutting edge. Tony’s label didn’t know quite how to respond to the changes. By 1969, Tony was pressured to do an album called Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today. The classy artist we all visualize in a tuxedo was suddenly repackaged on a psychedelic album cover. The experience made him feel lousy. But even worse, as time passed, it seemed the public no longer wanted to hear his music. By the end of the ’70s, he had no recording contract, he got caught up in cocaine to dull the pain of his mother’s death, and more money was going out than he was bringing in.
I’m not revealing any secrets here because Tony is open about this in his autobiography. One night, after his accountant called with news that the IRS was starting proceedings to take away his home, he overindulged, and passed out in the bathtub with the faucet on. His wife at the time suspected the water was running for too long, and when she went into the bathroom she found Tony unresponsive, pounded on his chest, and had him rushed to the hospital.
Tony came through a wiser man. Not long afterward, he called his sons for help.
Danny and Dae had grown up sitting on Duke Ellington’s piano stool. They had many talents, but not their father’s gift for performance. They started a country rock band in the ’70s that you probably never heard of even though the name was quite distinctive—Quacky Duck and His Barnyard Friends. It didn’t last long.
But Danny was good with numbers and understood how the industry worked. And Dae was a natural in the recording studio. Danny met with his dad’s accountants. He structured a deal with the IRS to keep Tony’s house. Then, as Tony’s manager, he began to reinvent Tony’s career.
Well, that’s not the best way to put it. What he did was go to work on Tony’s legacy. Tony stayed Tony. Danny just introduced Tony to young audiences through MTV, Late Night with David Letterman, The Simpsons, and college concerts. The kids, accustomed to punk, disco, and new wave, had never heard anything like him. They were just as mesmerized as their parents and grandparents had been.
By the mid-1980s, Tony was re-signed by Columbia Records. He could be seen at the MTV music awards and lifting up Grammys. Tony hadn’t bridged the generation gap—it was said he’d demolished it. Danny had maintained Tony’s musical integrity while boosting Tony’s popularity. At age eighty, Tony’s album of duets would be at the top of the charts along with the Dixie Chicks.
Demand for Tony’s performance at The Nugget was overwhelming. I remember us cramming in as many extra seats as the room could handle. As the performance approached, I focused on certain areas of the hotel the way Tony had paid attention to our stage and the sheet music. I stepped into the kitchen and tasted the shellfish. I made sure the ice sculptures would go out for our VIP crowd at just the right time so they wouldn’t melt. I wanted everything to be perfect for Tony. When I asked him what I could get for him, he had only one request: some bottled water.
When Tony came out on our stage that Friday night and the crowd rose to its feet, the image that sticks with me is of Tim. I remember him looking over at his mom and Uncle Jack and swallowing hard. It was one of the proudest moments of his life. The kid who’d moved at age six to Las Vegas with a family that didn’t have “two nickels to rub together” was now the owner of a casino featuring Tony Bennett. I’ll never be able to describe how good it felt to help Tim have that moment.
The party never seemed to end that night. I must have started for home at about five o’clock in the morning. If I was tired, I didn’t notice. Everything that transpired that day had given me a heightened sense of awareness. As I drove south on I-15 and left downtown, the color of the sky was what the locals call “Vegas blue.” It’s a very unique tone of blue—somewhere between baby and navy—that signals the end of the night and the coming of the morning. It doesn’t show up every day. When it does, a lot of people don’t notice it because they’re just coming in after a long night, and they’ve had too much to drink or lost a lot of money and they’re wiped out. Vegas blue is a reminder that the city is built on a beautiful desert. A lot of people think of Vegas as a façade. But until you’ve seen Vegas blue, you’ve never really seen the city. The moon was bright. I stared up at that moon and wondered how many times I’d driven home at three o’clock in the morning with Bally in the backseat and not even noticed?
One of the things about constantly striking out on new business ventures is you’re always confronted with different situations. That means you’re probably going to make mistakes. Believe me, you won’t have to turn too many pages to find some. But there’s a yang to that yin. When you push yourself into new worlds you’re also putting yourself into a position to meet a Tony Bennett and a Danny Bennett.
The lessons I learned from Tony never stopped, and they always seemed to catch me off guard. One day over lunch, for instance, he called me an artist.
There are a lot of words you could use to describe me. But not once in my first thirty-four years had anyone ever called me an artist. Much less one of the great singers of our time—and a renowned painter! I remember painting an evergreen tree in first grade. One quick stroke down in brown for the trunk, followed by a few swift green lines across for branches. As soon as I finished, I bolted out the classroom door to play kickball. A very brief exhibit on Carol and Fred Breitling’s refrigerator was as far as I ever got in the art world.
But Tony was serious. He brought up a conversation that he’d once had with Cary Grant in which they’d agreed that entrepreneurs were the artists of the future.
I never went to business school. Maybe if I had, I would’ve been familiar with the business-as-art metaphor. I’ve heard that when Steve Jobs was overseeing the invention of a Macintosh computer, he used to stare at the design of a Porsche in a parking lot for inspiration. Ed Borgato likes to compare Warren Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, with a Jackson Pollock painting. A splash of Geico Insurance here. A splatter of Dairy Queen there. Throw in some Helzberg Diamonds. A little Fruit of the Loom. Dabble on the Buffalo News and Nebraska Furniture Mart. Add a big splash of United States Liability Insurance Group. If you look at the roughly fifty stock holdings in the portfolio from a distance as colors and shapes on a canvas you could easily see a masterpiece in profit. So, yes, Warren Buffett is an artist in his world as Steve Jobs is in his.
I could even see Tim as an artist. You definitely got that feeling when you walked into his office during the final years of Travelscape. It was dark except for pinpoint beams of light that came from the ceiling and focused on an array of computer screens lining his desk. The temperature in that room was fixed just above freezing. The Sniffer used to wear a coat when he went in to see Tim, and joke that it was so cold he could see the vapor of his own words when he spoke. There were people who worked for us who were actually scared to knock on Tim’s door—as if afraid to disturb the thoughts of a temperamental writer in his garret. So you could make a case for Tim using a company as paper and pen to create his own drama.
But me? I couldn’t see anything I did that compared even remotely to art. I viewed my job more as an extension of myself on the basketball court. I was the point guard who kept everyone involved. After all these years, I still felt like I was diving for loose balls as they headed out of bounds, and then slamming them off my opponent’s kneecaps so our team could get an extra possession. Which, the way I looked at it, is all about smarts and hustle. So when Tony Bennett called me an artist, it really made me stop and wonder what the hell he was talking about.
It was through Tony’s son that I came to understand. Danny had done more than revive his father’s career. He’d given his dad the freedom to sing and paint whenever he wanted without ever having to worry about money again. He’d protected his father’s integrity so that Tony could sing and paint with a clear conscience. He’d given an artist the time and the freedom to be an artist. When Tony talks about this gift, an expression of awe fills his face, as if his son’s work is a work of art.
It’s not that I reinvented Tim’s life after we became partners. But there are moments when I can really relate to Danny. Of course, I never could have given Tim that moment at Tony’s concert without all that he had given me. But that was the nature of our partnership. He had vision, and I had the ability to open doors, bring people and information inside, and help make his ideas a reality.
If things were reversed, if Danny were on stage and Tony were making the deals, we wouldn’t be seeing either of them at the Grammys. My partnership with Tim would be a disaster if I were locked in a cold, dark room and left to miraculously turn numbers into huge ideas. Or if Tim had to remain in the center of a group of people and pay attention to details. Tim was the kind of guy who found himself in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard with a woman smashing her high heels on his car and her husband’s toupee in his hands. What better copilot was there for him than the son of a man who knew how keep an airplane level in turbulence?
Combined, Tim and I are definitely entrepreneurs in the best sense of the word. Our talents give people opportunities they might not otherwise have.
There are an infinite number of ways for an entrepreneur to impact someone’s life. You could put out computer software, like Bill Gates, and make your product so important that people can no longer live without it. You could give people an incomparable moment by flying them into space—like Richard Branson. Or you could take over a hotel, create jobs, and put money in the pockets of employees who then have a chance to go after their own dreams. When you give someone an incomparable moment or a chance at a dream, that’s when what you’re doing borders on art.
If there were only one person at The Nugget that we were able to give that moment, it wouldn’t have taken Tony Bennett long to recognize him. Tony is very conscious of how difficult it is for a young singer to find a place where he or she can learn the craft and get exposure. For the reality TV show, Tim and I brought a young singer into our lounge named Matt Dusk. Just as Tony was the old master in a tuxedo who could be appreciated by young crowds, Matt was the young singer in a tuxedo who emulated the old masters.
Tony Bennett was one of Matt’s idols and one of the reasons he wasn’t back in Canada running his dad’s box factory. So when Tim and I told him we’d try to get Tony to come see him sing in the lounge, he was overwhelmed.
All day long, Matt’s band was teasing him about it, saying they’d just heard that Tony was in a certain part of the hotel, and then cackling as Matt ran off on a wild goose chase to go meet him. On Saturday night, Matt went on stage and sang, but Tony was running late. Matt went through his prepared numbers and, thinking Tony wasn’t going to show, he got ready to call it quits by singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” He was in the middle of the song when he saw Tony come through the door.
There was this comical “1-2-3” moment when Matt alerted the band to switch in midsong to a new number. He just couldn’t bear to be caught stealing Tony’s song in front of Tony. It’s a moment Matt still laughs about today. But Matt will also be able to tell his grandkids about the moment Tony Bennett applauded as he finished his show. That’s a moment I think of when you ask me what an entrepreneur can do.
Being an entrepreneur meant giving Matt the chance to meet Tony Bennett. It’s showing The Golden Nugget to six students I mentor at the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy and allowing them to see their lives as a canvas that can be a work of art. It’s giving every employee at the hotel the chance to merge diligence and creativity in their jobs. What we did at The Golden Nugget was unique. No corporation could have created what we did in the same way. We’d wrapped the old days into the new and made it personal. If we didn’t have Dinah Washington coming through the front doors with two suitcases and saying, “I’m here, boys,” we had Tony Bennett’s daughter playing in our lounge. Tony understood exactly what we were striving to do, because we’d brought back the day when the performer could be friends with the boss. We’d both given each other what we love about yesterday.
Over time, we became closer and closer with Tony. Which is why I felt like I could ask him if he’d do a little sketch of Tim and me.
Tony’s artwork is amazing. If you looked at his painting Monet’s Gardens No. 2, you might think it came off the brush from a famous nineteenth-century French impressionist. His watercolor of the Golden Gate Bridge moves you as much as “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” does. Tony’s artwork is so good it hangs in galleries and museums around the world. But when Tim heard that I planned to ask him for a sketch, he was aghast.
“You can’t do that, Tom! It’s like asking somebody to borrow money. What if he says no? Everything is screwed up after that.”
“I think he might like to do it,” I said.
“Do you know what the odds are that he says no? Plus, you’re gonna put him on the spot. You don’t want him to say yes because he feels obligated.”
“I’m not gonna put him on the spot.”
“Tom, don’t do it. It will be really embarrassing.”
But as much as Tim hit the brakes, I just couldn’t let him stop me. One night, the three of us were at dinner and I started to bring it up. Tim threw up his arms in a funny way and distanced himself from the table. “Tony,” he said, “I got nothing to do with this!”
But I simply asked him.
“Sure!” Tony said.
“Reallyyyyyyyy?” Tim asked, and his voice got so high and squeaky at the end of that “really” you’d have thought it was coming from the squarest of squares from Barnsville.
“Yeah,” Tony said, “send me some photos. I’d love to paint a portrait of you guys.”
Some time passed. Then one day, the painting arrived. If my partnership with Tim was not a work of art before that day, it is now.
“My most prized possession,” Tim will tell you, “even if it is in Tom’s house…”