The Gambler

William C. Rempel

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062456793
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Offers an entertaining look at Kerkorian's outsize life… an interesting portrait of a billionaire." – Wall Street Journal

The rags-to-riches story of one of America's wealthiest and least-known financial giants, self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian—the daring aviator, movie mogul, risk-taker, and business tycoon who transformed Las Vegas and Hollywood to become one of the leading financiers in American business.

Kerkorian combined the courage of a World War II pilot, the fortitude of a scrappy boxer, the cunning of an inscrutable poker player and an unmatched genius for making deals. He never put his name on a building, but when he died he owned almost every major hotel and casino in Las Vegas. He envisioned and fostered a new industry —the leisure business. Three times he built the biggest resort hotel in the world. Three times he bought and sold the fabled MGM Studios, forever changing the way Hollywood does business.

His early life began as far as possible from a place on the Forbes List of Billionaires when he and his Armenian immigrant family lost their farm to foreclosure. He was four. They arrived in Los Angeles penniless and moved often, staying one step ahead of more evictions. Young Kirk learned English on the streets of L.A., made pennies hawking newspapers and dropped out after eighth grade. How he went on to become one of the richest and most generous men in America—his net worth as much as $20 billion—is a story largely unknown to the world. That's because what Kerkorian valued most was his privacy. His very private life turned to tabloid fodder late in life when a former professional tennis player falsely claimed that the eighty-five-year-old billionaire fathered her child.

In this engrossing biography, investigative reporter William C. Rempel digs deep into Kerkorian's long-guarded history to introduce a man of contradictions—a poorly educated genius for deal-making, an extraordinarily shy man who made the boldest of business ventures, a careful and calculating investor who was willing to bet everything on a single roll of the dice.

Unlike others of his status and importance, Kerkorian made few public appearances and strenuously avoided personal publicity. His friends and associates, however, were some of the biggest names in business, entertainment, and sports—among them Howard Hughes, Ted Turner, Steve Wynn, Michael Milken, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Elvis Presley, Mike Tyson, and Andre Agassi.

When he died in 2015 two years shy of the century mark, Kerkorian had outlived many of his closest friends and associates. Now, Rempel meticulously pieces together revealing fragments of Kerkorian's life, collected from diverse sources—war records, business archives, court documents, news clippings and the recollections and recorded memories of longtime pals and relatives. In The Gambler, Rempel illuminates this unknown, self-made man and his inspiring legacy as never before.

1
Gambling on the Wind

Early June 1944

Riding the Hurricane Express

Skies over the North Atlantic were mostly clear when the unarmed twin-engine DH-98 Mosquito climbed out of Goose Bay, another factory-fresh fighter-bomber on its way to help the British repel Hitler’s war machine.1 The pilot, an American civilian employed by the Royal Air Force Ferry Command, banked out over the Labrador Sea and powered his agile aircraft toward a rendezvous with “the hurricane express”—a fierce but friendly tailwind blasting out of Canada at nearly seventy-five miles per hour. RAF meteorologists called it “the Iceland Wave.” By whatever name, the rushing wind stream promised a faster-than-normal ocean crossing, possibly even another world record, since the captain was taking a rather daring direct route to Prestwick.2

Under normal circumstances, the Mosquito’s limited range made such a plan suicidal. A straight line to the coast of Scotland was about twenty-two hundred miles—nearly a thousand miles beyond the plane’s maximum fuel range. Even with a temporarily installed two-hundred-gallon gas tank lashed to the floor of its empty bomb bay, this fighter-bomber would need a hefty tailwind to avoid ditching hundreds of miles short of land.

Young Captain Kirk Kerkorian was feeling lucky. A month earlier he rode that same air current and shattered the existing nine-hour speed record for an Atlantic crossing by nearly two hours. It was exhilarating, the way winning big at poker was exhilarating. He liked it—the thrill of victory, the rush of adrenaline, the payoff. For a quiet, seemingly mild-mannered guy, Kirk was surprisingly comfortable with risk. At least that’s what his poker face suggested.

His first claim to a speed record was very brief, however. Another Mosquito pilot departing Goose Bay at the same time had used slightly different altitudes and course variations that got him to Scotland twenty-three minutes ahead of Kirk. To RAF Wing Commander John D. Wooldridge3 went the honors and the headlines for crossing in six hours and forty-six minutes.

Now, back for his second consecutive Mosquito ferry run, Kirk found the supercharged wind stream still roaring eastward. And despite Ferry Command admonitions against pursuit of speed records,4 he knew conditions were right to try again. Besides, it was the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday. What a great present to give himself.

His new calculations for the direct route to Prestwick were promising. If the tailwinds held up, he figured, he would have plenty of fuel left over when he reached the Scottish coast. It was a gamble—but a sound bet, based on math and experience. Kirk put his chips on the shortcut. The gambler went all in.

Ferry Command pilots were a competitive bunch, none more so than Kerkor (Kirk) Kerkorian, youngest son of an immigrant fruit peddler from Los Angeles. His skills as a flier had already overcome substantial educational shortcomings. He was an eighth-grade dropout. He used fake high school documents to get into an elite RAF training class in Montreal. Once admitted, he was a standout among the international aviators in his class.

During his first few months ferrying planes across the Atlantic, Kirk assumed the commander’s seat in a variety of makes and models—from the Lockheed Hudson that everyone trained on to the newer Martin Marauder B-26 and the Mitchell B-25 from North American Aviation.

Kirk’s first takeoff on a transatlantic flight came with his first serious scare. It originated at Dorval Field in Montreal. He was already rolling down the runway when he realized that his twin-engine Hudson didn’t feel right. Of course, it had a spare gas tank in its belly that wasn’t there on routine training flights. But Kirk also hadn’t set his flaps for the extra weight. At rotation speed when he expected to take flight, his tail still didn’t have lift enough to get off the ground. He reached for his trim tab, adjusting quickly as the Hudson lumbered toward grass at the end of the runway. Liftoff came much later than it should have—but not too late. The Hudson5 soared off safely toward the Canadian coast, and Kirk would never make that mistake with his flap settings ever again. The most effective education of a rookie Ferry Command captain—unforgiving real-life experience—had begun.

For this latest ferry transit, Kirk’s Toronto-made de Havilland 98 Mosquito would require all the skill and experience he could cram into its snug little cockpit. The “Mossie,” as the Brits called it, was the newest set of wings in the British air fleet. It had earned mixed reviews. The plane was notoriously delicate in bad weather and suffered the highest per capita crash rate among the various planes flown by the Ferry Command. Any measurable ice buildup on its high-speed, high-performance wings risked catastrophic stalls. Pilots, in moments of dark humor, groused that it couldn’t handle ice enough to chill a decent martini, shaken or stirred.

Some veteran Ferry Command pilots turned down or otherwise avoided assignments to fly the Mosquito. Not Kirk. He loved it—the speed, maneuverability, its climb rate. He considered it the hottest plane in the fleet.

And it was by far the fastest plane in the European theater, capable of speeds approaching four hundred miles per hour. No Luftwaffe aircraft could catch it. And it could intercept the fastest German buzz bombs—the V-1 rockets just starting to rain down on London. It could fly at high altitudes, beyond the reach of antiaircraft guns, up to twenty thousand feet. And it could be mass-produced without depleting already short supplies of metals. Like a canoe, the airplane was built primarily of wood, its fuselage constructed with a double-birch plywood skin over a balsa and spruce frame.

To fliers like Kirk it was “the Wooden Wonder.” He never bothered to do the math that also made it the most dangerous plane in the ferry fleet. During one spate of winter months, only one out of four Mosquitos made it. A crew had better odds playing Russian roulette.

More than two hours into his second spring gamble with a direct run to Prestwick, Kirk’s confidence had been rewarded. Good weather and a hearty tailwind had him and his navigator crewmate on track for a sub-seven-hour crossing. They figured to land before dark, avoiding a more hazardous nighttime approach in a plane with few navigational aids.

The view outside was nothing but sky and an endless white-capped sea, not much to talk about. There were occasional course adjustments and then the navigator’s midcourse notice of the “equal time point”—more commonly known outside aviation as the point of no return. It wasn’t far beyond that critical marker when the navigator first detected the waning booster wind. The Canadian kid, at least five years Kirk’s junior, repeated a series of locational fixes before confirming his ominous discovery: the hurricane express had stopped.

Kirk reacted immediately, throttling back the engines and adjusting the Mosquito’s prop pitch for maximum fuel efficiency. There would be no speed record this day. The new priority was reaching dry land before the gas tanks went dry. The plane slowed to what seemed like a crawl. Hours ticked by. Kirk switched to reserve fuel supplies. Their forecast arrival time came and went. They were still hundreds of miles out, over water so cold they wouldn’t last twenty minutes if they had to bail out now. Daylight was fading fast and a low, thick overcast spread below them.

Finally, they were in radio range of Prestwick. But the news was dismal. The overcast was deep and the ceiling dangerously low. It was unlikely to lift anytime soon. From the air above that thick gray blanket of clouds, land and sea were indistinguishable. There was no way to glimpse the Firth of Clyde, spot the coastal towns, or locate a welcoming runway. In darkness and fog, attempting to land was a fool’s wager. But the fuel gauge was pinned at empty. The Mosquito’s engines could stop at any moment.

Kirk kicked open the jettison hatch on the cockpit floor. Bailing out was a terrible choice . . . but his only choice.

2
The Kid from Weedpatch

Five Years Earlier

Alhambra, California

It was nearly noon, a midweek workday in the fall of 1939. The two-man crew from the Andrews Heating Company was taking a break from installing ventilating gas wall heaters. Crew chief Ted O’Flaherty, a twenty-five-year-old navy veteran from Louisiana with an obsession for flying, liked to use his lunch hour to squeeze in flight lessons or a few practice takeoffs and landings at the old Western Air Express field in the San Gabriel Valley.1

His twenty-two-year-old assistant, Kirk Kerkorian, always seemed uninterested, hanging back, watching from the ground as he ate his sandwiches brought from home. But after months of gentle prodding and cajoling, Kirk had finally agreed to ride along. He would even pay half of the plane rental—a dollar for a quick sample flight.

Ted was feeling downright evangelical. He loved sharing the wonders of flying. He also liked to preach the promise of aviation’s future. Rapidly...