In 1961, Jay Sarno had a dream that bordered on being visionary. Sarno was a successful hotel operator, builder and designer. He had a string of motor hotels, the "Cabanas", that had won prestigious awards for excellence in design and service. His California Cabana in Palo Alto was named the outstanding motel in America one year.

But the California Cabana's true mission was "just a practise run for Caesars" Sarno told interviewer George Stamos over thirty years ago. Sarno often traveled the Southwest on business and he stopped in Las Vegas frequently. He always noticed that the planes had fewer passengers when he left Las Vegas.

He surveyed the hotels at the time and was "unimpressed with their physical facilities and their western decor." He had an idea for doing something in a Roman-Grecian motif.

He originally liked the name "Desert Palace" for his new hotel.

Sarno and a good friend, Stanley Mallin, had met at the University of Missouri where both men where studying business. They served in World War II together and became life-long business partners. After the war, they teamed up as tile contractors in Miami which was enjoying a building boom. But Miami depended upon seasonal tourists so the money did not always flow their way. Sarno was not always an easy partner to work with. He was a bit impractical. Mallin remembers:

"We needed a truck to haul tile and he took the money we had for that and bought a convertible." (Interview with K.J. Evans).

But Sarno had good ideas. He had grown up in the motel business and with America on the move in those post-war years, motels, especially motor hotels that combined the drive-up convenience with luxury (for the times) accommodations and service were doing brisk business.

Sarno and Mallin had one major problem, banks would not lend them money.

The two partners went looking for other lending sources. Along the way they met the legendary Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Teamsters Union. Along with Hoffa they met the union's money manager, Allen Dorfman. According to Mallin, Hoffa and Sarno hit it off from the beginning. Both were "hard-driving, impulsive, almost compulsive" (K.J. Evans interview).

The first loan from the Central States Pension fund went to build the Atlanta Cabana motor hotel in 1958. Jo Harris had just finished architecture school at Georgia Tech when she heard about the new motor hotel being built. She approached Sarno about a job as interior designer.

"Jay said, `I like your work but if anybody is going to work for me I expect her to be my girl,' " Harris remembered. (interview with K.J. Evans) "I said, `I've been to Miami and I know that if I wanted to be a prostitute I could earn six times what you're offering me.' I wanted to be hired for my ability, plus I was married.

"So that was the end of that, but two weeks later he called and said I wouldn't have to be his girl. He offered me $100 a day, which was all the money in the world." Harris would design for Sarno as long as he lived.

The Atlanta Cabana was a hit and Sarno and Mallin turned their eyes westward to California. They built the Palo Alto Cabana and another one in Dallas.

On a trip from California to Dallas, they stopped in Las Vegas. Sarno, a gambler since his early youth, loved the casinos but found the hotel accommodations lacking.

He and Mallin began planning their "Desert Palace". According to George Stamos, Sarno and Mallin initially entered into an agreement with Kirk Kerkorian. Kerkorian owned the land across from the Dunes and across the highway from the Flamingo Hotel. As the deal evolved, Kerkorian's finance company, Tracy Investment Company, became the landlord with the Desert Palace Corporation leasing the property.

Financing was secured through the Teamsters Pension Fund. Financing was in order by 1962.

Sarno chose Miami architect, Melvin Grossman to design his new hotel. Grossman was an internationally known architect. The R.C. Johnson Construction Company, a local business, teamed with Morey Mason Company of Miami to do the construction work.

It would be the first new hotel constructed on the now-famous Las Vegas Strip in nine years and overnight it would become the hottest hotel and casino in town.

But before that happened there were skeptics everywhere that believed that the European style hotel that Sarno had in mind would be a boondoggle.

In early 1965, Sarno moved his family to Las Vegas and construction began in earnest on the hotel.

According to Alan Hess, the new hotel 'broke from the roadside motel tradition to introduce a plan borrowed from Baroque cities."

Up to now, the majority of the hotels had used the roadside prototype calling for buildings to be arranged casually on the site. A sign or facade was shifted to attract on-coming traffic. Sarno broke with that tradition to make a bigger, bolder statement.

"The usual frontage parking lot was amended by a long axis of fountains marking an entry drive; the parking lots were pushed to the side for this grand effect. The focus was on a monumental structure with symmetrical wings reaching to embrace the limousines cruising up to the porte cochere. Above loomed a convex fourteen-story tower." (Alan Hess, Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture).

Caesars faced the Strip with a royal presence. Surrounded by desert and mountains behind it, the hotel looked no other on the famed boulevard.

Grossman, using the plans of the Palo Alto Cabana, as a reference got to work. The Palo Alto Cabana featured a long axial entry off the commercial strip of El Camino Real, a curving facade faced in black granite and wings faced in two stories of glass. Behind all that was a nine-story tower with pattern screens for privacy.

The hotel sat 135 feet back from the highway. The original porte cochere was a flat canopy backed by black-tiled screen, flanked by reproductions of Classical statues in scalloped niches. It was, as Alan Hess has noted, more Baroque Rome than Imperial Rome but Popes Palace would not have drawn as many gamblers.

The outer facade of the high-rise used "Sarno" blocks as privacy screens.  Its latticework design lowered internal room temperatures while presenting an attractive front.  The rooms got the bulk of the morning Eastern sun.  At night, the tower glowed turquoise. 

Behind the Roman fantasy though were the typical roadside motel rooms.  Low-rise room wings circled the pool terrace on the west side of the hotel.

On the inside, the casino, the largest built at the time, reflected Sarno's philosophy.  

"Over the years that I have been creating hotels, I've discovered that the oval is a magic shape...this is conducive to relaxation." Sarno told writer George Stamos in an interview in 1979.  "If you examine Caesars you will find it is oval shaped.  I even incorporated the oval design in the dice tables, which affects the dice angle geometry."

The large casino had an intimate feeling to it that Sarno confessed was no accident, "It is an optical illusion created by the twenty false columns encircling it."  He loved statues and fountains and Caesars had them both.

There was a shallow oval-shape dome over the gaming pit.  In the best Vegas tradition, the casino was window-less and relied on sparkling trim light to give it shape. 

All the shops, restaurants, pool entrance and the Circus Maximus showroom radiated off the casino.  "It meant that to go anywhere you had to go past the casino and it gave a sense of being around the action all the time." Jo Harris told writer K. J. Evans.   There was the Noshorium Coffee Shop, Cleopatra's Barge which sat in its own mini-Mediterranean Sea, one corridor led to the 1200 seat showroom where Andy Williams was set to open. 

This plan encouraged visitors and guests to explore the nooks and crannies. 

"The statuary that I used at Caesars was cut from the finest, purest, grade-A Carrera marble from Florence." (Sarno/Stamos interview). 

Alan Hess reminds us that "Caesars was a true popular culture appropriation of high-art forms overtly mixed with historical forms in a way that a high-art architect never would have done in this period." (Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture).

A roadside sign was still needed though to advertise the headliner, the lounge acts and the hotel.  Sarno asked for bids from local sign companies.  Young Electric Sign Company (Yesco) submitted a design by Kermit Wayne, Jack Larsen and their design team. 

Originally the design called for two attraction boards laced through the four Iconic columns; later a single, bigger board and two freestanding columns for support were added.  As Alan Hess says, "The result is emblematic of the attitude of theme architecture.  The artists used enough of the vocabulary of Classicism to make the images recognizable, then stretched that vocabulary to serve a new cultural context.  The columns were too large for a temple but just right for Las Vegas. "

Brian "Buzz" Leming, a young neon designer, worked as part of the team and remembers them going to Wonderworld on their lunch hour and digging through the bins of soldiers to find Roman soldiers.  Why?  Because Wayne and Larsen wanted to give some scale to the mock-up of the sign they were designing. (Interview with Brian Leming, 2004).

Sarno liked the soldiers so much he insisted that full-scale figures of vestal virgins and centurions be added to the base.

At the last minute, Yesco owner Thomas Young turned down the job because of the shaky finances of Sarno and Millan.  They had balked at paying half the cost before fabrication could begin.  Another Ad-Art stepped in to and did the job with no money down.  The sign ended up costing $30,000.  The sign Ad-Art designed was essentially (including the statues) as Yesco's.

It was 1966 and opening day was looming on the horizon. By the time the hotel was done, the Strip no longer resembled a random collection of hotels scattered down the highway.  "The roadside had evolved into a loose organization that defined an emerging urban form." (Alan Hess).

Reynar Banham, writing for the Los Angeles Times, noted "The Strip is grandly becoming a string of island palaces in a sea of dark, connected by a canal of leisurely automotive transport." 

Andy Williams and the Ritz Brothers were set to open the beautiful Circus Maximus showroom.  Invitations to dignitaries, both local, national and international, as well as celebrities had been sent out. 

On August 5th, 1966, Caesars Palace grandly opened its doors and Sarno and company held their breath, hoping that there new hotel would be a hit.

Special thanks to George Stamos, Alan Hess and UNLV's Special Collections 

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ALL HAIL CAESARS!

THE EARLY YEARS!