CORRECTION: A previous version of this story mistakenly said that the Mirage group grew to include gaming landmarks, and that Ms. Wynn spent decades in the gaming industry. In both these instances, the word should be gambling. Additionally, Ms. Wynn’s work included overseeing the fundraising arm of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, not the University of Las Vegas. Originally moved April 17.
Elaine Wynn, who came to Las Vegas when her husband, Steve, parlayed bingo parlor holdings into a casino empire and herself became a formidable presence in the city’s business and philanthropic life, died April 14 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.
The Elaine P. Wynn & Family Foundation announced the death but did not provide a cause.
Ms. Wynn’s influence reached beyond Las Vegas as a cultural steward, including serving on the Kennedy Center board during the Obama administration and as a deep-pocketed art collector whose wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.9 billion. At a Christie’s auction in 2013, she paid $142.4 million for a triptych, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” by British painter Francis Bacon.
“I had buyer’s remorse,” she told Forbes. “But only for 30 minutes.” The paintings were loaned to the Portland Art Museum.
For decades, Ms. Wynn was regarded as an elegant and art-savvy counterpoint to the more bare-knuckles style of her husband. He leveraged a 3 percent stake in the Frontier casino in the 1960s to take over the Golden Nugget in the early 1970s and then expand to Atlantic City.
The capstone was the $630 million Mirage – which opened in 1989 to help revitalize the Las Vegas Strip as one of the first new gambling and entertainment palaces in years.
The Mirage group grew to include gambling landmarks such as the Bellagio, which included a world-class art gallery that Ms. Wynn helped build and curate with pieces by Pablo Picasso and impressionist masters such as Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh. The Bellagio promoted its art the way other casinos advertise headliner stage acts.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Ms. Wynn and her husband became a revolving door: They divorced in 1986 and remarried in 1991. Two years later, their 27-year-old daughter, Kevyn, was kidnapped for ransom outside her home in Las Vegas. Steve Wynn dropped off $1.45 million in cash – taken from the casino cage – at a spot near the Mirage. He found his daughter unharmed in a car parked at the city’s airport.
Ms. Wynn was unaware of the events unfolding. She was awoken by a call from her husband once Kevyn was safe. “I never, ever questioned that he did the right thing,” she recalled. “He spared me.” One of the kidnappers, Ray Cuddy, was arrested while trying to buy a $200,000 Ferrari in cash near Los Angeles; he and two accomplices were convicted.
The Wynns divorced again in 2010. That left Ms. Wynn with a fortune from the settlement but without voting shares on the board of the $13 billion parent company, Wynn Resorts, whose holdings at the time included the Wynn Las Vegas resort and the Wynn Macau in the former Portuguese colony now under Chinese rule. The Mirage and the Bellagio were sold in 2000 to MGM Grand, along with much of the art collection amassed by Ms. Wynn.
Ms. Wynn was voted off the Wynn Resorts board in 2015. She came storming back in 2018 after her ex-husband was accused of sexual harassment targeting resort employees.
Among the disclosures was that he paid $7.5 million to a manicurist who alleged to friends that he had forced her to have sex. Steve Wynn did not face criminal charges and denied the allegations. But he agreed to step down from Wynn Resorts, sell his 12 percent stake and restore voting rights to Ms. Wynn’s shares.
Suddenly, Ms. Wynn became a symbol of the power shifts amid the #MeToo movement – even though she testified that she had been aware of sexual misconduct claims against her then-husband but did not speak publicly about them.
“He denied that anything of a sexual nature took place. He explained that he was being extorted by this individual,” Ms. Wynn told the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in a 2019 hearing for a casino that opened outside Boston. “It was not true.”
On the Wynn Resorts board, she exerted her clout to oust members she felt were cronies of her former husband. “I could just quietly sell my shares and go off into the sunset and pursue philanthropy,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “But my mantra is, it’s not where you start in life, it’s where you end up.”
She stepped down from the board in 2020, saying she wanted to devote time to projects in art and education. Last year, city officials agreed to designate a downtown site for a new Las Vegas Museum of Art, a planned $150 million project spearheaded by Ms. Wynn and Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Ms. Wynn helped vet the design competition, won by Francis Kéré, an architect born in Burkina Faso who was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2022 for his African-inspired designs. The concept for the museum – Kéré’s first major commission in the United States – suggests a copper-colored desert mesa. Plans also call for an open-air plaza and a sculpture park.
The initial gallery collection will come from works held by the Los Angeles museum, where Ms. Wynn had made significant donations, including a $50 million gift in 2016. Completion is expected in 2028.
In July 2024, Ms. Wynn appeared at the closing ceremonies for the Mirage, which was acquired in 2022 to be converted into Hard Rock Las Vegas. “This is what we do in Las Vegas,” Ms. Wynn told the Nevada Independent. “We reinvest, we refresh.”
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‘Leave an imprint’
Elaine Farrell Pascal was born in New York City on April 28, 1942. She spent part of her childhood in Miami Beach, where her father sold package tours for resort hotels. Her mother cared for the home.
While studying political science at George Washington University, she met her future husband on a blind date in Miami arranged by their families in 1961. He was an English literature major at the University of Pennsylvania. They were married in 1963.
She graduated the following year while her husband put off law school to try to save the debt-crippled family business – a string of bingo parlors – following his father’s death. He managed to sell off the bingo halls and used the money to bankroll the investment in the Frontier casino.
“We decided if we were going to be in the gaming-entertainment-amusement business, why not go to where it really exists in a much greater capacity,” Ms. Wynn told author Jack Sheehan for a 2009 biography on banker E. Parry Thomas, “Quiet Kingmaker of Las Vegas.”
The Wynns arrived in Las Vegas in 1967, near the apex of the Rat Pack era when the Sands and the Flamingo ruled the Strip. “I felt threatened by Las Vegas. It seemed very fast for a middle-class Jewish girl,” she told the New York Times.
She credited the banker Thomas – who gave critical financial support to Steve Wynn – for helping give her the confidence to speak up about the couple’s business affairs. She took part in the site-selection process for the 3,000-room Mirage, which rose from a vacant tract purchased from the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Ms. Wynn also noted that she overruled her husband’s idea of having the Mirage’s entrance close to the sidewalk.
“I said that we had to push it back, that people wouldn’t get the benefit of the architectural design if they didn’t have a frame of reference,” she recounted. “I said, ‘Don’t Reno-ize the Strip,’ and I convinced him.”
Ms. Wynn later had the final word on many of the decisions on aesthetics, including tens of millions of dollars in art purchases, the design of the resort’s restaurants and spas, and the employee uniforms.
Outside the casino world, her work included overseeing the fundraising arm of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and serving as state co-chair of Everytown, a group calling for universal background checks for firearm purchases.
Survivors include two daughters, Kevyn and Gillian; and seven grandchildren.
As the Las Vegas Museum of Art project took shape, Ms. Wynn often told journalists about how she looked back on her decades in the gambling industry as something of an end to a means.
“My days are numbered,” Ms. Wynn said last year. “I thought, what’s my final gift? I want to leave an imprint other than my name on a hotel casino.”