Rent-A-Star

Lindsay Lohan faced an agonizing choice. Last year, during a late-night bull session with a nightlife impresario, she made this confession: She needed help. “We were talking about her 21st birthday, and she said she couldn’t decide between having the party in Las Vegas or Dubai,” the man recalls, almost wistfully. “I said, ’Whatever you want, I’ll make it happen.’ Then I didn’t hear from her again.”

Yet up and down the Vegas Strip, the starlet’s voice could be heard. Nothing gets visions of sugarplums dancing in a club owner’s head like the phrase Lindsay Lohan’s birthday party. On the Strip, a celebrity guest list means big profits, and so a battle royal has been unfolding, with Lohan’s birthday party for the latest and most shimmering prize.

For her part, America’s demon-wrestling sweetheart seems to know exactly how the game works. “We offered Lindsay $250,000 to donate to her favorite charity if she would have her birthday at one of our clubs,” says a Hollywood publicist who wrangles celebrities for events at the Palms hotel and casino. “She said no! She told my assistant — my assistant is best friends with Lindsay, goes to meetings with her for rehab and everything — she actually said —” here, her voice goes pinched and singsong, like a sitcom brat’s “—I’m going to get a million dollars for my 21st birthday.”


Not so long ago, the likes of Lohan wouldn’t have been caught dead in the desert. In the early 1990s, Vegas was the place to be only if you had a thing for blue hair or all-you-can-eat buffets. Then, around 1995, the town’s first non-gaming nightclubs opened, and finally, there was something to do in Vegas besides gamble and visit strip joints. By 1998, the most popular first-wave club was Drai’s — an outpost of a Los Angeles restaurant owned by Victor Drai, a former producer who’d made a bundle with the Weekend at Bernie’s movies. And in 2001, Vegas club culture reached a critical turning point when billionaire George Maloof Jr. — and his business partner Michael Morton, whose family owns Morton’s steakhouses and founded the Hard Rock Café — opened two aggressively celebrity-friendly clubs, ghostbar and Rain, both in the brand-new Palms.

Today, Vegas is what New York was to the ’70s and L.A. was to the ’80s: the strobe-pulsing heart of nightlife in America. This year’s list of the country’s top 100 clubs in Nightclub & Bar magazine featured 13 from Vegas — including Pure Nightclub at Caesars Palace, TAO at the Venetian, Light at the Bellagio and JET at the Mirage. With glittering redundancy, weekend after weekend, this top tier of clubs dispatches jets to L.A. to replenish stock of not-so-secret weapons in their high-stakes war for business: battalions of party-ready stars.

Celebrities come to Vegas to chow on birthday cake: Ashlee Simpson’s 21st (Pure, 2005), Leonardo DiCaprio’s 25th (Rain, 2002), Paris Hilton’s 26th (body English at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, 2007). They come to dance with Madonna (post-concert party, TAO, 2006) or catch an impromptu set by Usher, Lil Jon and Ludacris (Tryst, 2007). They come to make fresh starts each New Year’s Eve: Just after their breakup in 2006, Pam Anderson and Kid Rock hosted midnight countdowns across the street from each other, at TAO and JET.

However hedonistic they might look, these fun and games are really business transactions. For celebrities, says Pam Anderson’s manager Jeff Pollack, appearance fees are “… fantastic. It’s a win-win situation for talent to get paid to be somewhere that they want to be anyway. I love win-win situations.” For clubs, celebrities attract non-famous customers jonesing to rub up against a real heavyweight — or at least furtively glance at one across a very crowded room. “I like the star appeal of the clubs here, the exclusiveness of it,” says Erica Thomas, a curvy 27-year-old from Detroit who hopes to get a hit of fame when she comes to the desert. “Seeing stars makes for great conversation, helps you relive your vacation.” Sighing, she savors her own future nostalgia: “’Remember when we saw Nelly … ?’”

With 40 million tourists like Erica visiting Vegas each year, clubs are keen to make sure the famous keep coming. Such arrangements go back to the Rat Pack, when casinos included clauses in stars’ contracts stipulating that, after performing, they had to mingle with the customers.

But today, Vegas nightlife has entered a vortex of one-upmanship in which stars receive increasingly outrageous perks — and in some cases, cold hard cash — just to pose for a few pictures and booze it up in a banquette. Mario Lopez gets about $25,000 for a gig like this (dancing costs extra); Jamie Foxx goes for $50,000; and Paris always gets six figures for her birthday.

Celebrities, in time, have learned to expect they will be paid for having fun. And, adds Robin Leach, whose Luxe Life blog on Vegaspopular.com chronicles the city’s champagne-wishes-come-true, “Celebrities don’t have much allegiance in this game. Paris Hilton might go to Pure for three consecutive visits, and then all of a sudden she has a bigger, better deal at another nightclub. All’s fair in love and business.”


Diddy was supposed to make the entrance to end all entrances. Dangling from a zip-line beneath a helicopter hovering 53 stories in the sky, he would drop through what’s touted as the planet’s only retractable nightclub roof, at Moon — atop the “Fantasy Tower” at the Palms.

“I always wanted one of these,” says Michael Morton, the club’s bald, basset-eyed co-owner, demonstrating how the roof slides back at the flick of a switch. But, he reveals, his grand plan was foiled by one small thing: “Diddy’s afraid of heights.”

It was a rare snafu for the Palms, where George Maloof Jr. has made a career of redefining Vegas nightlife. When the Palms opened, the clubs on the premises were so posh, a new term — “ultra lounge” — was coined to market them. Rain — where sheets of water fall from the ceiling — and ghostbar — on a glass-floored balcony cantilevered 55 stories above the ground — lured stars like lemmings, a trend that has only intensified since the Palms opened both the Playboy Club and Moon in 2006.

Today, the Palms is a veritable scratching post stuffed with celebrity catnip. It includes a clutch of eye-popping, oft-comped luxury suites and amenities such as recording studio that’s been used by Michael Jackson and Britney Spears — with whom Maloof, a brutishly handsome former University of Nevada, Las Vegas football player, spent a very public weekend after she left Kevin Federline.

But Morton says that hospitality at the Palms nightclubs does have limits.

Late one night in the Palms’ Playboy Club, Morton points out a cigar-chomping Adam Sandler and a fat guy whose name he can’t remember (“I know he’s from Entourage”) surrounded by lovely ladies in Roberto Cavalli bunny uniforms. “We didn’t pay these guys to come here,” Morton declares, expansively. “We don’t pay anybody. That doesn’t mean we don’t send jets, give them great restaurant and club experiences. George might put them up in the Sky Villa suite. Our job is basically, give ’em what they want.”

Morton maintains that these stratagems are mere salvos in the war between hotel casinos that the late UNLV history professor Hal Rothman described as “battleships of capital.” “We’re all steering across the ocean,” Morton says, “trying to blast each other out of the water.” But his clubs, he insists, “do not write checks.” For his competitors, by contrast, “it’s become a business model to pay celebrities to come.”


Steve Davidovici is a 43-year-old ex-prizefighter from Brooklyn whose career stretches back to ’80s Manhattan, where he hosted Brooke Shields’s 16th birthday party at the Palladium. After a workout at Gold’s Gym, he parks his black Ferrari in the driveway of his house in a gated neighborhood of Vegas and, stabbing at a salad in his den, describes the lessons he learned back in the days of disco. “This business is all about having cool people in your place. People with money.” And, he adds, “the guy with the best parties wins.”

These articles of faith still guide him now, as a principal partner of the Pure Management Group, which owns and manages seven Vegas establishments, from the low-end Coyote Ugly to the company’s crown jewel, Pure.

With investors like Shaquille O’Neal and Celine Dion, among others, Pure was concocted as a pastiche of cool: “South Beach living room with London music,” Davidovici explains, in the amped voice of a quarterback calling signals at the line.

Davidovici seems almost unstintingly candid about the mercenary charm it takes to succeed in his business. He freely admits that Pure pays major stars such as Britney Spears for big events like this past New Year’s Eve appearance; but he says it was “less than half” of the $450,000 that she reportedly received for the now-notorious evening, at which she either passed out (according to gossip columns), got “real tired” (according to her publicist) or “walked out on her own two feet just fine” (according to Davidovici). Yet he maintains that Pure “almost never” pays garden-variety stars to hang out on normal weekend nights. He says he’s paid Paris Hilton exactly once, for her 25th birthday party last year. “And why shouldn’t she make some money sometimes?” he says with a straight face.


Most nightclubs in Vegas are owned by groups of investors who rent space from hotel casinos — and who also pay their landlords a percentage of revenue. On top of this, casinos make bank when partygoers sloshed on $600 bottles of Dom decide at 4 A.M. to drop a few grand more on the roulette wheel before turning in for the night.

A hot club can also help a hotel’s image skew young and, maybe, replenish the casino’s aging faithful. That allays Vegas kingpins’ fears that casinos will die out when the baby boomers croak. (When Diddy agreed to host a party at Tryst, the club at the Wynn Las Vegas resort, only if he got the door receipts — about $100,000 — a club manager turned him down. Then the manager’s phone rang: “Why did you guys not take the Puff Daddy?” asked the hotel’s 65-year-old owner Steve Wynn.)

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the number of visitors to Vegas ages 20 to 29 has climbed just a couple of percentage points since the club wars started. But these businesses are generating impressive profits: Tryst, for example, cleared $35 million after taxes in its first year of operation. Even the town’s old guard, like Kelly Clinton, a former Engelbert Humperdinck backup singer who’s now entertainment director at The Stirling Club, a hangout for the likes of Wayne Newton and James Caan, grudgingly admits the value of the new Vegas party culture. “I like that Las Vegas is on the map again as a cool place to be. But I do miss the part of Las Vegas that was about the headliners.” Brightening, she adds, “I heard Bette Midler is coming back.”


Back in the Playboy Club, when Michael Morton hears that Steve Davidovici denied paying celebs to turn up at his club during the week, he goes a wee bit mad dog. “That’s fuckin’ bullshit,” he growls, punching himself in the leg. “I shouldn’t get pissed off, but I don’t know why they lie! There’s a Web site where they’ve got pictures and prices, and you can see exactly how much it costs to buy these stars for a night — Esterman.com. And Esterman works so much with Pure, he won’t even work with me!”

Mike Esterman is a celebrity booking agent whose Web site features videos of clients including Carmen Electra, Kevin Federline, Tyson Beckford and American Idol’s Kimberly Caldwell. Reached by phone, Esterman’s first comment about his business is “I can’t give away all the secrets, man. It’s just putting the nails in my own coffin.”

But then, like a man without a superego, he barrels on, spilling prices: “Fergie’s been 50 grand, but now she’s got that third single moving up the charts, so she’ll probably move up to 75 pretty shortly. That’s just personal appearance, no performance. And Carmen? Carmen’s getting 75 to 100. Carmen has become a hot commodity because of all she’s done. Like, you know, there’s a commercial — is it Taco Bell? Maybelline? Lancôme?”


The final destination on a fabulous night in Vegas is still the club that started the whole scene. At 4 or 5 in the morning, all the cool kids arrange themselves in leopard-upholstered booths at Drai’s, in the basement of the Barbary Coast Casino. Victor Drai, who also owns Tryst at the Wynn, says that the age of Vegas cool has arrived, not because stars are getting paid, but because the Hollywood jet set needs Vegas. “L.A.’s so boring,” he moans in a Parisian accent thicker than Brie. “In L.A., clubs have to close at 2 o’clock. But you come to Vegas, and problems are solved! You don’t have to drive! You can party all night!” Drai is the only club king whose hands are truly spotless of celebrity payments. “Stars are very cheap, you know,” he says. “They come to my club, and they pay. I don’t care who they are. They’re richer than me, so fuck them.”

Which brings us back to the million-dollar Lindsay Lohan question, to which Pure’s Steve Davidovici scoffs: “You gotta be kidding. We are not in business to lose money. That would be four months of profits for that one night. Economically, it makes no sense.“

But Davidovici’s in this for the long haul, and, he says, “My clubs and I want to have a relationship with Lindsay for a long time.” Does that mean he got her birthday party? He smiles. Asked how much he’s paying, he smiles even bigger.

Stevie D.’s new club, LAX, with investors including Christina Aguilera, opens at the Luxor hotel “roughly somewhere between July Fourth and Labor Day,” says its owner. America’s demon-wrestling sweetheart turns 21 on July 2.