Steve Wynn's world, September 11, 2001, 6am: the gambling mogul owns the Desert Inn casino in Las Vegas (soon to become the first Wynn resort), he has a net worth of about US$500 million and he is lounging in a bathrobe in his kick-ass media room, watching My Fair Lady.
'I couldn't sleep,' he says, sitting in the Golden Flower restaurant at Macau's new Encore casino, which he opened last month. 'The phone rang in the middle of the movie. The phone never rings in my private quarters, not that early. It was Paul Anka [the crooner who wrote My Way for Frank Sinatra and became a 1950s teen idol with hits such as Lonely Boy]. He told me, 'Steve, you gotta turn on the TV.' I thought he was drunk. Paul never gets up before 11am. He had to scream at me before I'd switch channels. I changed to one of the US networks just as that damn plane hit the second of the twin towers.'
That was less than 10 years ago but for Wynn, and the United States, it seems like another age. As Wynn watched Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison do their Pygmalion thing, Macau had just one casino operator and the US was comfortable in its global supremacy. Now, Wynn's two Macanese casino resorts account for more than 70 per cent - and growing - of his company's revenues, the US is horribly in debt to China and the woman by his side is no longer Elaine Wynn, a change of circumstances that cost him more than US$700 million.
'I got divorced [in] January,' he says, a little mournfully. It's two days before the dinner at the Encore and we are in his spacious office, with its chocolate-brown velvet walls and paintings from his extensive art collection. 'I had been separated for a year after 46 years of marriage and dating Elaine for three years before that. That's 49 out of my 68 years.'
The Wynns have been reluctant to discuss the divorce, which led to a 50/50 split in their holdings of Wynn shares and has been described as 'the most expensive divorce in American history'. Elaine, who was a driving force in developing the Wynn brand and is often called the Queen of Las Vegas, has been especially tight-lipped. The couple's divorce papers were sealed the instant they were filed in Las Vegas but today, Wynn wants to talk about love, past and present.
'[Elaine] is a lovely, great woman who is still my partner and my best friend,' he says, then abruptly changes course. 'I fell in love after I was separated. And my girlfriend is loved by my two daughters and my seven grandchildren.'
The woman in question is Andrea (pronounced An-Dray-A by Wynn) Hissom, who was born in 1964, the year after Wynn married Elaine, who has yet to embrace her ex-husband's girlfriend.