It took a few days for the phone to ring. I had expected it. I just didn’t expect quite what I heard from the other end of the line.
Robert Earl, the impresario who just relaunched the Planet Hollywood brand as well as his own career after ruining both in the 1990s, was hopping mad. I can’t say I was surprised.
Over the weekend, I penned a piece for the Sunday Telegraph in London about the Planet Hollywood grand “opening” and all the celebrities who were to attend the bash of all bashes. I even quoted Robin Leach, who gushed on his blog that “this may well go down as the biggest showbiz weekend in Vegas history.” In a scant 500 words, I provided Earl himself 20 percent of my space to speak and elsewhere gave great detail about what Earl’s been up to with the former Aladdin.
But I knew trouble was coming when I saw the headline to my piece on the Internet before leaving for Saturday night’s party: “Planet Hollywood's Vegas casino rolls out. Robert Earl's celebrity friends will be at the party -- again -- but it feels phony.” Yes, “phony.” It’s British.
That headline was, indeed, weird. I hadn’t made any such pronouncements about whether the sensibility of the event seemed false, but that was the impression most people would take away from the headline. It was problematic, yes.
It came about, though, because I opted to turn to one of the Vegas-watchers I respect, Hunter Hillegas from RateVegas.com, for balance. As a journalist, I’ve developed a list of observers whose expertise and independence is unimpeachable while still being eminently quotable. Hunter has become one of mine and he happened to be available on short notice in the four hours I had to write the piece.
Here’s what Hunter had to say about Earl’s reworking of the property and the self-conscious flooding of celebrities into the hotel: “It feels very fake. He's got a lot of celebrity friends, but it still feels totally phony to me. The kind of people he's getting are on the way out, they're not up-and-comers. I have serious doubts of the prospects of Planet Hollywood on a long-term scale.”
When Earl called me, I figured he would be angry about the headline. He had every right to be. But as someone who has been in the public eye and in business for so many years, I also assumed he would know that I don’t write headlines and that my piece itself was a balanced look at the story. The vast majority of it was what he ought to have viewed as “positive,” and he should’ve been able to tolerate some criticism.
Still, the entire piece was tainted by the headline, and I conceded that point to Earl. But that’s not where he stopped. He ranted on about who the hell this RateVegas.com guy was, why he ought to have credibility and how I could possibly defend this “piece of sh-t.”
"Did you speak to Steve Wynn or Jim Murren or any of the others who have said they would like to do business with me?” he asked.
I did not. In 500 words and with six hours to do the piece, there really wasn’t much time or space. But even if I had, the perspective of an advocate for tourists and an opinion maker like Hunter remains valid. Earl himself was asked by me in our chat on Friday for the story whether he understands the criticisms about him, to which he said: “I 100 per cent understand people's skepticism. But we're eroding that very, very quickly." And that’s where I left the piece, giving him the last word.
None of that mattered. Earl found the entire piece to have a mean-spirited tone, asking me if I had read the timeline box that also appeared with the piece. Again, not anything I had a part in, but it seemed to me to be a straightforward accounting of the ups and downs of the Planet Hollywood brand. Evidently, Earl is upset by a factual retelling of history.
What was most bizarre about the conversation was that Earl twice told me that it was his “life’s mission” now to find out how “this happened” and to find out “everything there is to know about” Hunter, his business dealings, his conflicts of interest. Because, you know, Wynn and Murren wouldn’t have had any.
I offered Earl my editor’s email address. He didn’t want it, implied he had all the contacts over there he needed. Okey dokey.
He also expressed his grave disappointment with me. Which is the part I just don’t get. The piece was fine and fair. Tilted, probably, in his favor. And he knows I don’t do the headlines. Yet he will never speak to me again, he declared.
What’s funny is that people often wonder how I’ve developed such a solid source relationship with Steve Wynn. And I have to tell them that it started when I panned the Wynn Las Vegas in a Chicago Tribune piece in 2005. He called me up, not unlike Earl, and bawled me out. That happens. But what happened next was that Wynn decided he wanted a better opportunity to explain his hotel to me. He invited me over for a walk-about that lasted three hours.
There isn’t a time that I talk to Wynn these days when he doesn’t rub my face in the fact that things I criticized about the hotel turned out to be the things that have made it an exceptional experience for his guests. But he never begrudges me my right to disagree with him and seems, in fact, stimulated by the fact that I do. And, in the long run, even though I still think the walkways are too narrow and “Le Reve” is le lousy, we’ve both benefited.
In the case of Earl, the irony is that I didn’t render an opinion. I reported. On my blog, I did write fondly about his party and have, over the months, given high marks to his redesign of the place.
It’s never pleasant when a source is angry with you, although it is an occupational hazard. But when Robert Earl tells me he’s never seen a worse, less fair piece about him, he’s being hyperbolic at best. He led a publicly traded company that went from $3.6 billion in value to bankruptcy. Surely others before Hunter Hillegas have taken a few shots.
Steve Friess is a Vegas-based writer who contributes regularly to Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times, Vegas and many others. Contact him at [email protected]