Sunday, December 05, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN': The Scene and Herd

Las Vegas nightclubs take on a Los Angeles sheen, with higher prices, celebrities

A Forty Deuce dancer performs burlesque during opening night, when the lounge became the newest competitor in a city crammed with nightspots. Carmen Electra and a friend make their way to a $150 VIP seat at the new burlesque lounge, Forty Deuce at Mandalay Bay. Playboy model April Sampson poses with Forty Deuce owner Ivan Kane at the club's invite-only grand opening party. If it's lucky, the other newest lounge on the Strip, Mix Las Vegas, will attract the holy grail of demographics: pretty people with money to burn on "bottle tables" that cost hundreds of dollars a night. Robert H. Frey, managing partner for Pure, a club under construction at Caesars Palace, says clubs and lounges set the vibe for hotels: "If you ask people what they remember about a hotel, they usually talk about food, shows and clubs. Unless they win a lot of money." Photo by John Gurzinski. The VIP crowd during the grand opening of Forty Deuce check out a burlesque dancer's peekaboo routine. Photos by K.M. Cannon.

The lounge is a box of shadows, except for spotlights beaming onto a burlesque dancer of pale white skin and fishnet hose. She strips off her halter top. There goes her skirt. She grabs a black metal bar and swings on it, scissoring her legs. Peekaboo. I see you.

Men hoot, women holler. It's an opening night crowd at Forty Deuce, an invitation-only soiree for free drinkers with juice in Las Vegas: hotel executives, nightclub promoters and their better-looking dates.

It came from Los Angeles -- not just Forty Deuce, which is a steamier replica of a Hollywood originator, but a lot of the party people. Carmen Electra stirs in her $150 seat behind security men who appear as immovable beasts. The actress, Heather Graham, is a no-show. But "The Green Mile" actor, Michael Clarke Duncan, grants pleasant interviews to TV people.

Outside the lounge, on the red carpet, actor Eric Balfour, of "The O.C." and "Six Feet Under," tells an alternative-news reporter what he likes about the star dancer at Forty Deuce: "This is a girl who can shake her ass at 120 beats per minute, and that impresses me."

Later, one of the more seasoned clubbers in attendance, salon executive Staci D. Reza -- who has graced club and lounge openings for more than a decade -- observes of Forty Deuce, "It's another way Las Vegas is trying to be L.A.

"A year ago, Vegas was questioning if it was going to go L.A., and then it did -- over the top. We have no reason to go to L.A. anymore. We have the same shops. We have the same people. We just don't have the ocean," she says. "So many people want to be in L.A. without actually being in L.A."

And so, Las Vegas' sea of nightspots is packed with followers. This is the scene and herd. And tonight, not only do they strut into the official grand opening of Forty Deuce, but also to another invitation-only "soft opening" -- the pre-grand opening -- of Mix Las Vegas. The club is upstairs from Forty Deuce on the 43rd floor of Mandalay Bay, giving party people the chance to lounge-hop two parties at once, which does not count as a phenomenon in Las Vegas anymore.

They arrive at Mix by glass elevator. By day, this place is a swanky restaurant that seats 200, with a ceiling-to-floor chandelier that girdles the entire eatery in thousands of Venetian crystal bubbles.

By night, the Mix lounge fits 298. It is slinky with long, dark-leather couches, a white leather champagne bar and dozens of bottle tables -- buy a bottle of booze, and you get to sit.

As explained by General Manager Patrick Syka, who is French by birth but a longtime student of business in the States, "We treat (bottle-table customers) better, because they order $800 in bottles, instead of going to the bar and ordering a beer."

Like almost all clubs and lounges in Las Vegas, women get in for free, and men pay $20 admission, $25 on the weekend. One cocktail costs upward of $15.

Clubs keep track of how many women, the hunted, they let in. Plenty of nights, they outnumber the hunters, who wait in line for hours to see them. Everyone's single or wants to be, it looks.

At tonight's party at Mix, a Playboy model is surrounded by male callers. One tells her he has the biggest penthouse in the city, or something like that. She was one of the magazine's "Women of WorldCom," the phone company, in 2002. When asked her name, she spells it as AprilSampson.com. She speaks with a sweet and bright articulation. She has remarkably spherical bosoms, the bulk of which are saying hello to open air.

Mix has a funny-looking second floor, a VIP section that's supposed to represent coral, but it looks more like a ragged red sponge, or a half-eaten strawberry. The people there -- mostly in their 20s and 30s -- appear to be working hard at looking sexy, judging by their poses and starched or barely-there designer labels.

But the obvious structural draw of Mix is its big deck protected by glass walls that enable the lovelies and wannabes to cast a cinematic eye down upon the brightly lighted Strip.

A blonde of impressive facial quality seductively presses the length of her body against this glass prophylactic and grinds, as if she is having sex with the entire city of Las Vegas. Unlike Forty Deuce's dancers, she will not be appearing nightly, although quite certainly many of her kind will be.

At midnight, the Mix makes a rookie's mistake and closes all at once, sharp lights replacing the dim din -- this never happens in open-all-night Vegas -- sending hundreds of people to wait and flirt by two glass elevators. Clubs make mistakes like this in the beginning. That's why they have soft openings, to work out kinks.

Once the glass elevators deposit a pocketful of people back to the first floor, a collective of three locals saunters off of it. They have been clubbing since the early 1990s. One of them is Reza, 32, a born-and-raised Las Vegan. Her verdict is Forty Deuce is intimate-sexy, and the Mix is club-sexy.

The Mix is officially stationed not in Mandalay Bay but in Mandalay Bay's attached sister hotel with its trademark-burdened name of The Hotel, which has no casino in it, unlike, say, the Palms with its once-ultratrendy lounge, ghostbar.

"This place is gonna be the ghostbar, times 10," Reza predicts. "First of all, it's in The Hotel, so you're not running into grandma with her slot card. And the view blows the ghostbar away. And the place is, like, four times the size of ghostbar."

Reza briefly reminisces about the greatest of the modern lounges, the extinct Velvet Lounge in The Venetian, a red-curtained place that spun sexy trip-hop music on a patio that overlooked the Strip. Velvet Lounge died after L.A. people discovered it, and it was turned into a thump-thump nightclub with hard-house dance music, beefy doormen and villainous scum for customers -- or so say some clubbers who once loved the place.

"Since that's been gone, all the beautiful people are not in one place, because there are so many places to go," Reza says. "You want to go where there are beautiful people. You want to go where they have great energy. You want to go where they have great music."

That something-something is what Velvet Lounge had going for it, and for a time V-Bar in The Venetian, and it's what many say they like about the MGM Grand's boutique lounge, Tabu, where women dance on low-slung tables. Every club has its day. If it's lucky.

Reza gives a brief rundown on some of them. Ice: "Pretty cool." Tangerine at Treasure Island: "Rude bouncers." Rumjungle at Mandalay Bay: "Everyone who just turned 21 yesterday hangs out at rumjungle." Ra at Luxor: "Come on. To go into the Luxor? To go to a club?"

Reza knows she sounds judgmental.

"I am pretty snobby, but I remember how things used to be, and none of this was there, none of this attitude, pretentious crap," she says.

Reza complains that the Californication of the increasingly expensive scene means locals can't afford the luxury to sit down in a hotel club or lounge anymore. In most clubs, just about the only place someone can sit down is at a bottle table. And mostly it's Los Angeles men, corporate credit-card tourists and bachelor/bachelorette parties that have the cash to buy a $15 cocktail or a $100 bottle of vodka.

Reza says most nightspots look and sound alike, too.

"How many times can we hear that Bacardi song?" She's referring to 50 Cent's rap hit, played ad nauseam, "In Da Club."

Some clubs are suspected of playing, every night, the same small rotations of market-tested dance songs.

Reza, fresh off the glass elevator, now sits at no cost on a railing in a hotel hallway near Forty Deuce. She looks up with disgust at a man wearing a tragedy.

"He has the velour sweatsuit and sunglasses," she says. You can hear the comic "ick" in her tone.

Another new club that Reza probably will check out soon is Pure at Caesars Palace. Its target opening date is New Year's Eve. That night's admission: $125, an industry standard price for Dec. 31. Mariah Carey and some of her friends will stroll inside, by contract, and she will sing at least one song. Onstage, if Carey looks left, she will see people sitting on four beds, as many as 20 people per bed. If she looks right, she will see glass elevators that lead one floor up to the roof, which has its own name, The Terrace.

People who take the elevator to the roof will see the Las Vegas Strip, from the light-bulby Flamingo to the hoity Bellagio, down to golden Mandalay Bay. Customers will be penned-in on the porcelain-tiled Terrace by glowing, glass railings. They may sit on bottle beds for the price of a few hundred dollars.

If they take the glass elevator back down to Pure to see Carey take a breath, they will see her inhale air that is pumped into the club through secret 8-inch tubes snaking out of a hidden air-cleaning system that measures roughly the size of a railroad car.

Pure cost $14 million to $15 million to build.

Just to install soda lines to all the bars in the club cost $70,000.

It has a room just for celebrity customers.

Some VIP booths will have a see-through screen set up for couples so either significant other can walk behind the opaque backdrop and perform a seductive dance in silhouette.

The club will conduct a national talent search to find women entertainers. They will perform in swings and in large champagne glasses, among other devices.

Everyone will be scrutinized by 60 security cameras.

The 170-employee club will hold 3,000 people. A room up front is called the Pussycat Dolls Lounge, named for the cabaret troupe that Carmen Electra sings and dances in. Electra also was reportedly paid $100,000 to open the burlesque-tinged nightclub, Tangerine.

Pure comes with built-in celebrities and their juice. Singer Celine Dion -- who performs next door at Caesars Colosseum -- is an investor, as is native Las Vegas tennis hero Andre Agassi and his wife, Steffi Graf, who keep a low profile in the city otherwise, and basketball giant Shaquille O'Neal, who is said to be planning to spin DJ sets at Pure, sometimes.

Investors could make good money on cocktail and bottle-bed fees. In return, the hotel feeds off the cachet of having a hot club stacked with youth, trend-setters and the mere suggestion of celebrity, all of which lures high rollers and other rollers to casino tables and rooms.

The face of Pure is Robert H. Frey, managing partner. Before this, he opened Tangerine, as well as Coyote Ugly in New York-New York, where women dance on bars under a curtain of bras and neckties while female bartenders pour drinks into the open mouths of male heads squeezed between the bartenders' knees. He also opened Rio's BiKiNiS, where women in bikinis splash about inside giant cocktail glasses. Frey calls women "girls" a lot, as legions of Las Vegans do.

Pure will go after a demographic he defines as "anyone cool, hip and looking to have a good time."

On a wintry day, Frey, 40, stands on the roof of Pure, still under construction. His hair short, his hands down, his manner professional, his enthusiasm curbed, Frey admires the view. He was born in London, though he has lived in Las Vegas since he was 8 months old.

"The fun part is you're creating an environment for people to enjoy themselves. You get to mold that experience," he says.

"That's why nightclubs have become so important to hotels. They set the vibe for a hotel. If you ask people what they remember about a hotel, they usually talk about food, shows and clubs. Unless they win a lot of money.

"You can't build clubs like this elsewhere, because you don't have hotels" like Caesars Palace or Mandalay Bay in other American cities.

Failing is not a cheap proposition. Like Pure, Mix is said to have cost $15 million to build, although this may count a big lease and 1,350 labels of wine, the most expensive fetching $10,000 retail.

In the spring, the new chichi Tao is to take the place of the fallen Velvet Lounge. And in the same season, four clubs and lounges are slated to open all at once in the newest, curvy addition to the skyline, Steve Wynn's Wynn Las Vegas.

All these new places will compete with dozens of extant popular and waning clubs and lounges, from the business-class Light at the Bellagio to the gay-friendly Krave at the Aladdin and the valet-only Ice, which is the setting of a reality TV show about clubs called "The Club" -- a "massive ratings disappointment" for the Spike TV cable channel, according to Reality TV World magazine.

How will the city's clubby constellation of shooting stars and potential black holes fare? Frey answers this question with the flat restraint of a club dealer who gives the appearance of not being addicted to his own goods.

"What's gonna happen," he says, "is the good operators are gonna survive, and the others will fall by the wayside."