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Tales of Vegas Past: From dream factory to vulgar pleasuredome

By Gregory Crosby

By the late 1960s, the dream factory that was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had fallen upon very hard times. In 1969, its debts had reached an astronomical $85 million, and its shareholders cast about in search of a "white knight" to rescue the legendary yet floundering magic of one Hollywood's great and glamorous studios. Instead, they found themselves taken over by a billionaire who had just built one of the largest hotels Las Vegas had ever seen, the International. The pilot-turned-financial titan Kirk Kerkorian took over the MGM studio with a bold raid on the stock, paying upwards of $100 million for the prize. But Kerkorian wasn't necessarily planning to bring MGM back to its glory days. Rather, he planned to bring its faded but impressive sheen to the burgeoning glamour of the Strip.

Having had to divest himself of the Flamingo and the newly built International over a run-in with the Securities and Exchange Commission (it refused to allow a sale of International stock because of Kerkorian's failure to disclose information about the Flamingo's previous shady owners), Kerkorian was planning his return to Vegas in a big way. The MGM Grand, named after the studio's star-studded 1932 melodrama Grand Hotel, would be the proto-megaresort, an opulent $107 million, 26-story hotel, with 2,084 rooms (making it the world's largest hotel), a 1,200-seat showroom, shopping arcade, plush movie theater and jai alai fronton. Star power was on hand for the April 1972 groundbreaking, where Raquel Welch and Cary Grant pushed down a plunger to set off a ceremonial dynamite charge. Opening on December 5, 1973, with Dean Martin in its showroom (reportedly a tit-for-tat in allowing him to star in MGM's weak thriller Mister Ricco), the MGM Grand set the trend for the big hotel-casino designs to come, with every amenity located in one, central complex beneath two huge towers.

But the MGM Grand had only a passing relationship to the studio that lent its name. Originally, the various public rooms of the hotel were to reflect the style of a famed MGM film, like Show Boat. The disco would be modeled after the futuristic set of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Kerkorian's man in Vegas, Fred Benninger, balked. "People who come to Vegas want gold and burgundy," he claimed. "They want it to look like a whorehouse, not a movie set." The kind of "theming" that would become routine in Vegas two decades later, where every resort was designed to resemble a movie set (one with banks of slots, of course) was a little too far ahead of its time.

Beyond the classic films screened in its theater, where couples lounged in sofas and enjoyed cocktail service while watching Clark Gable stagger through the earthquake-ruined San Francisco or the Marx Brother wreak havoc in A Night at the Opera, and a nod here and there to the sound stages of days past, the MGM Grand was indeed a simply bigger and flashier "carpet joint." It quickly became clear that the still-struggling studio served it, and Kerkorian's other hotel ventures, rather than the other way around. Kerkorian had little interest in making movies, and within two years of the MGM Grand's opening, it was the most profitable part of the studio's operations.

It would have been a nice irony if the hotel, which Stephen King once described as "one of the world's more vulgar pleasuredomes" (and went so far as to locate it as the headquarters of the villains in his apocalyptic novel The Stand), had somehow saved the magic factory from which it sprang. But the studio limped on through the 1980s only to close, its assets and film libraries sold off (though Kerkorian bought them back in 1996).

Through various ups and downs, including the worst fire in Las Vegas history in 1980 and the sale of the resort to Bally's in 1986, Kerkorian tenaciously clung to the MGM brand. Eventually, in 1993, he went on to re-create the MGM Grand in a bigger and certainly more vulgar incarnation, once again creating the largest hotel in the world, with 5,000 rooms and acres of casino space. But despite the new hotel's sickly green glow, meant to suggest the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz, the MGM Grand is still more testament to the drive of Kirk Kerkorian than to the movie studio that once reigned supreme on the world's screens.