Caesars Palace, the Roman Dream, and the Jump That Went Wrong

Jay Sarno was a heavyset, sweating, gambling-addicted dreamer from Missouri who had built motels across the South and lost fortunes at the craps tables of the very town he was about to remake. He did not want to build another box with neon out front. He wanted to build a feeling. The feeling he chased was indulgence, the sense that the guest was not a customer but a guest of honor, someone the world had finally decided to flatter.

Sarno borrowed roughly twenty-three million dollars, much of it through the Teamsters pension fund that quietly financed half the Strip in those years, and he poured it into marble, fountains, and columns. He named it Caesars Palace, and he was deliberate about the missing apostrophe. This was not Caesar's palace, the property of one emperor. It was Caesars, plural, a palace for every Caesar who walked through the door. You were the emperor now.

He hired cocktail waitresses and dressed them as Roman goddesses. He imported eighteen-foot Italian cypress trees and statues copied from antiquity. He built the driveway long and grand so the approach itself would soften you up before you ever reached the tables. Sarno understood something his rivals did not. People did not come to Las Vegas to gamble. They came to gamble while feeling like the kind of person to whom gambling could not possibly matter.

Caesars Palace opened on August 5, 1966, and the party was as excessive as the building. Reports of the time described tons of imported food, oceans of champagne, and a guest list studded with stars. The fourteen-story tower curved gently inward toward the Strip, the fountains threw water into colored light, and the whole thing announced that a new era had arrived, one where a casino could be a destination instead of a stopover.

The timing mattered. The old guard of Las Vegas, the bootleggers and bookmakers who had built the first generation of carpet joints, was beginning to fade. Money was getting more corporate, more visible, and the showmanship had to grow to match it. Sarno's palace was the bridge. It still ran on the old financing and the old instincts, but it looked forward to the spectacle-driven Strip that was coming.

Inside, the formula worked immediately. High rollers loved being treated like royalty, and Caesars made an art of the comp, the free suite and the free meal that kept a big bettor at the table. The place printed money. But Sarno, a compulsive gambler himself, kept feeding much of it back into the building and onto the felt. What he needed was a way to make the whole country know the name, and that opportunity arrived on a motorcycle.

Robert Craig Knievel, who called himself Evel, was a former insurance salesman and small-time stunt rider from Butte, Montana, who had figured out that America would pay to watch a man risk his life. By late 1967 he was looking for the jump that would make him a national name. He found it in the fountains at Caesars.

The story of how he booked it has the flavor of pure Vegas hustle. Knievel reportedly called the casino posing as a lawyer, then as a reporter, building up the impression that some important organization was interested in a daredevil leaping the Caesars fountains, until the casino's president agreed to meet the man himself. Whatever the exact sequence, the deal got done. Knievel would attempt to clear the fountains, a gap of roughly one hundred and forty feet, on his motorcycle.

He wanted the jump filmed for posterity, and here a piece of Hollywood luck entered the story. The actor and director John Derek agreed to shoot it, and to keep costs down he put his then-wife, a young and not yet famous Linda Evans, behind one of the cameras. She was positioned to capture the takeoff. What she ended up filming became one of the most replayed pieces of footage in the history of American spectacle.

On the morning of December 31, 1967, going into New Year's Day, Knievel said his prayers, took a sip of liquid courage by some accounts, and rolled to the top of the takeoff ramp. The crowd watched the fountains. He came down the ramp, hit the lip, and flew.

He almost made it. He cleared the fountains, but he came down on the safety ramp wrong, the landing went out from under him, and the motorcycle bucked him off at speed. What followed was brutal. He tumbled across the asphalt of the Caesars parking lot, bones snapping as he went, and finally came to rest as a crumpled heap. The cameras caught all of it, the perfect arc and then the horrifying collapse, in unbroken footage.

The injuries were catastrophic. He shattered his pelvis and femur, broke his hip and wrist and both ankles, and suffered a concussion that, by the dramatic version he later promoted, kept him in a coma for nearly a month. The medical details have been argued over for decades. What is not in doubt is that he was gravely hurt and that he lived. And in living, he became a legend, because the footage of the crash played and replayed across the country until Evel Knievel was a household name.

Here is the part that still gets me. The jump failed. By the only measure that should matter, the man crashed and nearly died. And it made everyone involved more famous than success ever could have. America did not fall in love with a man who cleared the fountains. It fell in love with a man brave or foolish enough to try, and reckless enough to be broken in front of the cameras.

Caesars Palace got exactly what Sarno had been chasing. The name went around the world, attached forever to an image of daring and disaster outside its fountains. You could not buy that kind of attention. A stuntman bought it for them with his own bones.

Sarno himself did not get to ride the property to old age. He and his partners eventually sold Caesars, and Sarno went on to build Circus Circus down the street, another wild swing at reinventing what a casino could be. He died in 1984, in a Caesars suite, of a heart attack, in the palace he had dreamed up. There is something fitting about that, the gambler taking his last breath inside his own fantasy.

Knievel kept jumping for years, breaking more bones than any human should survive, and he turned the Caesars crash into the origin story of an entire career. Decades later his son Robbie returned to the Strip and successfully cleared the same fountains, closing a circle his father had opened in blood. The original footage outlived them both.

What Caesars proved is that the Strip rewards spectacle over sense. Sarno bet that people wanted to feel like emperors, and he was right. Knievel bet that people wanted to watch a man defy death, and he was right too, even when death nearly won. Between the two of them, a Roman fantasy and a Montana daredevil, they wrote the rule the modern Strip still lives by. Make them look. Make them remember. Worry about everything else later.