JUST WHAT VEGAS NEEDED

By RICHARD CORLISS/LAS VEGAS

Bob Stupak surveys his realm, the $550 million Stratosphere Tower, Hotel and Casino that rises 1,149 ft. above Las Vegas like a gleaming blue syringe in the neon night sky. For a moment, his taste of triumph is soured by a nagging memory. "A few days ago," the 54-year-old entrepreneur says, "I had a nightmare that the tower was cracking and starting to lean. Luckily, I woke up before it fell over. Which I guess means something is going on self-consciously."

Self-conscious? Stupak? Even in Vegas, city of naked, naive ambition, where the gods Whim and Ego bestride the Strip and hubris is just Greek for chutzpah, Stupak is a figure of such bejeweled swagger that confessing a nightmare of disaster-movie proportions can seem like a boast. The dream speaks to the compulsive gambler's fear of winning what he most desires, while planning even gaudier schemes. "Tell your editors that I'll donate $1 million to their favorite charity," he barks at a Time reporter, "if they put my picture on the corner of the cover. Two million for the full cover. And that's negotiable."

Among Vegas' poker-faced master builders--Steve Wynn of the Mirage and Treasure Island, Bill Bennett of Circus Circus--Stupak is something of a wild card, a joke or a curse, a relic of the days when the town was run by guys whose middle name was "the." He enjoys banter about guns, was almost cast in Martin Scorsese's gangster epic Casino, and still refers to Mob characters like "Lefty" Rosenthal and Tony (the Ant) Spilotro as "the boys."

While Wynn and Bennett were Disneyfying the Strip with automated pirate shows and indoor theme parks, he catered to blue-collar gamblers at Bob Stupak's Vegas World, using vacation packages to fill the tacky rooms and move the garbage buffet. (In 1991 he was fined $125,000 for misleading advertising.) But now Stupak is playing with the big boys. He wants to stay at the table and to be seen betting all his chips. "I know one thing," he says. "It's better for people to know you than not to know you. To be in Las Vegas, you have to be different--outrageous."

This week the outrageous Mr. Stupak unveils his outsize, outlandish, outer-space vision in an orgasmic burst of fireworks and flackery. The fourth tallest building in the U.S. (fifth, if you count the World Trade Center twice), the Stratosphere opens with 1,500 rooms and 97,000 sq. ft. of casino space, and a promenade with a handsomely designed World's Fair theme. By year's end Stupak hopes to have completed an additional 1,000 rooms, a retail mall, a giant pool and a King Kong-size gorilla ride--a 70-ft.-high mechanical ape that will climb up the building with happily terrified passengers inside.

But Kong is for later. The Stratosphere's immediate and unique enticement is the 12-level, spaceship-shaped "pod" at the top of the tower. Along with the conference rooms, wedding chapels and inevitable revolving restaurant there is an observation deck whose huge slanted windows allow you to lean over and peek at the ground; because the building's spine is barely visible beneath, you feel you are hovering over Vegas in the Enterprise. Ascending three more levels, you find two things that no one before Stupak thought to put atop a skyscraper: a roller coaster and a space-launch reverse-bungee jump.

The coaster ride, High Roller, is a mild high, a fifth of a mile high. The coaster circles the pod three times in just under a minute, reaching a granny-at-the-wheel top speed of 35 m.p.h. That's fast enough to italicize the giddiness and slow enough for you to dare to look out on the Vegas panorama. Toward the end the track climbs; your car takes a few nice, scary jolts--and you briefly join Stupak in his nightmare.

For the Big Shot, the Stratosphere's piece de resistance, you are harnessed into one of 16 seats facing in all four directions and mounted on the building's ultimate tower. Without warning you are shot up, as if sprung from a killer rubber band, 160 ft. into the sky at 45 m.p.h. and four Gs. And then, dear Lord!, you slam back down at negative gravity, your body pleading to soar through the restraints. Up and down you go a few more times in decreasing extremes. The whole thing, which lasts 31 sec., is a great, bearable kick. It's like experiencing, at warp speed, a manic-depressive attack. It is, one imagines, a lot like being inside Bob Stupak's head.

That must be a tense, excit-place. Stupak, a high school dropout, landed in Las Vegas in 1972. He cruised along in the town's minor leagues with Vegas World until 1989, when the Sahara, just a block away, quadrupled the size of its sign and moved it closer to Stupak's casino, tempting his customers away. Stupak wanted the one-upman's revenge. The Eiffel Tower, Seattle's Space Needle, the towers in Tokyo and Sydney, Australia, were all profitmaking monuments, he noted. A similar structure--but bigger, of course--would be his answer to modern Vegas' edifice complex and its Hey-Why-Not School of Architecture, with pyramids, guitars and the New York City skyline inspiring the look of new hotels. Stupak set about turning Vegas World into the Stratosphere Tower.

That was five years ago. There were flaws in the geometry; a wooden scaffolding caught fire; confidence in a money-raising public offering collapsed. Stupak had to sell all but 17% of his ownership, and the project was taken over by the Minnesota-based Grand Casinos firm. Locals dubbed the enterprise the Stupak Stump and the Tower of Bobel. But say this about the Stratosphere: the man did it. In time it may fly or fall; today it is the instant dominant Vegas symbol. The Stratosphere could be Stupak's Tinker Toy gift to the gaming industry, or it could be the ultimate sardonic gesture--a giant metallic finger to those who have doubted him.

At week's end the Stratosphere staff--some of them designated in corporate lingo as redog ("Roving Entertainers Delighting Our Guests")--was negotiating the cable-strewn floors. In Roxy's Diner, a '50s-style eatery, punk and geek waiters were studiously spinning yo-yos and polishing their patois ("neat," "ugly stick," "chick" and the immortal "your mother"). Says the Stratosphere's president David Wirshing: "No one's ever built a tower in conjunction with a facility like this before. There'll be all sorts of unknowns, and a few inevitable hitches." He might take heart from the notoriously ragged 1993 opening weekend for the Luxor down the street and the early glitches at the MGM Grand that Barbra Streisand enumerated onstage when she headlined there.

Stupak, who says, "I had a mission to build this tower," would certainly be buoyed by the glazed panic on a teenager's face as she is strapped into her Big Shot seat, and the giggling of her friends as they stumble off. Thrills, terror and idiot delight are the lures of Vegas. The Stratosphere gives you that and more: the feeling, as you gaze down on the city from your Olympian aerie, that you're above it all--that you own the joint. From here the Wynn and Bennett empires look like small properties on an electric Monopoly board. And this week, at least, Stupak can feel as if he owns Park Place and Boardwalk.

--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Las Vegas

With reporting by JEFFREY RESSNER/LAS VEGAS