The Flamingo Hotel flamingo: Will-George made the bird, and the "opening night" story is only as old as a 2022 auction

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 2, 2026

A porcelain flamingo with "Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas, Nev." stamped on its base is now offered at five-figure prices as a gift Bugsy Siegel handed to two hundred guests on opening night, December 26, 1946. The bird is real, and so is the stamp. The opening-night story has a traceable origin, and it is a 2022 auction catalog, not anything written in 1946.

What the stamp on the base says, and what it leaves out

Turn the bird over and the oval base carries a sepia transfer stamp: the word "Flamingo" in the hotel's looping script, "HOTEL" in capitals beneath it, and "LAS VEGAS, NEV." in smaller type below that. The photographs in this guide show the shop's own example. The stamp sits inside the recessed foot, it appears to lie under the glaze rather than on top of it, the glaze around it is undisturbed, and there is no second mark of any kind on the base. That absence matters. A Will-George flamingo made for retail carries the pottery's own name on the bottom, often "Will-George" with "Pasadena" or "California" in gold or in the clay. On the hotel-stamped bird the maker's mark is gone and the hotel's name stands in its place, which is the normal arrangement for a premium made to order: the customer's name goes where the maker's name would be.

So the attribution to Will-George rests on the mold, not on a signature. The stance, the S-curve of the neck, the airbrushed grading from white breast to deep rose at the back and wingtips, the black-tipped beak, and the base modeled as a clump of teal reeds all match the pottery's retail flamingos line for line. Dealers, two auction houses, and every online listing agree on the maker, and the match is close enough that the attribution is not in serious doubt. What the stamp cannot tell you is when. The hotel used the name "Flamingo Hotel" from the day it opened until 1971, and Will-George was in business until 1956, so the stamp alone places the bird anywhere in a ten-year window.

Will-George: two brothers, a ventriloquist, and a flamingo

William and George Climes founded Will-George in 1934 in William's garage in Los Angeles. Per the Kovels, the operation moved to Pasadena in 1940 and to San Gabriel by 1948; a widely copied collector history puts the Pasadena move in the late 1930s and ties it to money from Edgar Bergen, the radio ventriloquist behind Charlie McCarthy, who the Kovels confirm "was a partner" for a time. After the war the brothers parted with Bergen and renamed the business The Claysmiths, but kept marking the ware "Will-George," so the name on a base does not change at the corporate break. The company closed in 1956. William went on to design for Hagen-Renaker until his death in 1960; George worked for Redondo Tile and then Gladding, McBean until his death in 1966.

The output was porcelain and earthenware figures, best known for birds and animals, with a smaller line of vases, lamps, and figures of people. The flamingos came in several poses and at least three sizes. Auction and dealer records list standing birds at 7½ and 10 inches, "floater" and "drinker" poses with the head lowered, a 15½-inch pair sold with a matching pottery pond, and cigarette boxes and planters built around the same bird. The bird on this page is the standing figure with the head carried high and turned slightly to one side, the pose most often pictured in listings.

The Flamingo opened in December 1946 without a hotel

Billy Wilkerson, the founder of The Hollywood Reporter, bought the land in 1945 and brought in Siegel's partners' money in February 1946. Siegel took the project over, formed the Nevada Projects Corporation that July, and ran the cost from a planned $1 million to roughly $6 million. The casino, showroom, and restaurant opened on December 26, 1946. The guest rooms did not. Hotel guests were sent down the road to the El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier, and the resort closed on February 6, 1947 to finish construction, reopening March 1. Siegel was shot dead in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1947, and Moe Sedway, Gus Greenbaum, and Davie Berman took control of the resort.

Larry Gragg, the historian who wrote the standard biography of Siegel, fact-checked the opening for The Mob Museum in December 2021. The thunderstorm in the 1991 film did not happen; McCarran Field logged 0.12 inches of rain and no thunder. The crowd was not thin; a columnist counted 28,000 people over three opening nights, there was a traffic jam at the entrance, and George Jessel hosted a show with Eleanor Parker, Charles Coburn, and George Raft that went out on nationwide radio. Siegel worked the room in a black tuxedo with a pink carnation. What went wrong was the money: the casino lost through January, and two of Siegel's checks to his builder, totaling $150,000, bounced. Gragg's piece lists its sources, including FBI memos and the trade columnists who were in the room, and it does not mention a gift to guests of any kind.

The hotel kept its name through every owner that followed. Sanford Adler bought it in 1947; a Miami group paid $10.5 million for it in 1960; Kirk Kerkorian bought it in 1967; Hilton took over in 1971 and renamed it the Flamingo Hilton. The original three-story hotel building came down in December 1993.

The "200 gifts" story traces to a 2022 auction, not to 1946

Wikipedia's article on the Flamingo states that "approximately 200 VIPs to the opening each received a hand-painted ceramic flamingo statue, gifted to them by Siegel." The footnote on that sentence is a Las Vegas Review-Journal story by Taylor Lane dated June 14, 2022, previewing an auction. That auction was "The Mob: A History of Organized Crime's Most Notorious Artifacts," held by Julien's in Beverly Hills on August 27 and 28, 2022. The consignor was Jay Bloom, the businessman behind the short-lived Las Vegas attraction The Mob Experience, which went bankrupt in 2011. Julien's catalog described a pair of "twin ceramic flamingo statues, hand-painted," gifted by Siegel to guests on opening night, estimated at $2,000 to $3,000, and the Review-Journal relayed the catalog's claim that only 200 were given out and few survived.

That is the whole chain. The 2022 catalog is the oldest statement of the 200 figure this research located; the newspaper repeated the catalog; Wikipedia cited the newspaper in January 2024; and dealer listings now cite all three. Potter and Potter, offering a single stamped example in May 2023, chose its words carefully: the birds are "long believed to have been ordered" by Siegel for the opening. An eBay listing at $7,225, a second eBay listing tracked by PicClick at $5,949, and an Inscriptagraphs listing at $9,999 drop the hedge and state the opening-night gift as fact, with Will-George named as the maker, 200 as the run, and no documentation for either number. No 1946 or 1947 newspaper account, hotel record, Will-George order, or guest's recollection naming a ceramic flamingo turned up anywhere in this search, including in Gragg's fact-check, The Mob Museum's own Flamingo histories, and a 1996 Las Vegas Sun retrospective built on an interview with Rose Marie, who performed on opening night.

None of this proves the story false. A hotel that put a pink flamingo on its sign, its matchbooks, and its chips would be a natural customer for a California flamingo maker, and a batch of birds could well have been on hand in December 1946. The point is narrower: the story's documented age is two years, the hotel used this name for twenty-five, and a buyer paying an "opening night" premium is paying for the two years, not the twenty-five.

How to tell a real Will-George flamingo

• Look for the reed base. Will-George set its standing flamingos on an oval base modeled as a clump of upright reeds or grass, glazed teal to green, with the legs disappearing into the reeds rather than standing free. Keeler birds stand on a low mound; Maddux birds often share a base between two birds.
• Check the shading. The pink is airbrushed, grading from near-white on the breast and belly to a saturated rose on the back, neck, and wingtips, with a soft edge between the tones. Hand-brushed pink with a hard edge, or flat pink all over, points to another maker.
• Examine the head. The beak is modeled with a down-turned tip painted black, the eye is a small dark dot set in a pale socket, and the crown shades back to white. The modeling is crisp enough to read as a specific bird, not a generic one.
• Read the bottom, then weigh what it says. A retail bird carries "Will-George" with a city name, in gold or in the clay. The hotel bird carries the hotel stamp alone. A bird with both marks, or with a hotel stamp on top of the glaze that can be scratched with a fingernail, needs a harder look.
• Expect a fine white body. Will-George is described in every reference as a porcelain and earthenware maker, and its flamingos show a smooth, bright white body at the unglazed foot rim and at any chip. A coarse, buff, or chalky body at a chip belongs to a different pottery.

The look-alikes: Keeler, Maddux, and the unmarked bird

Southern California turned out porcelain flamingos by the thousand in the late 1940s and 1950s, and three makers account for most of what survives. Brad Keeler's birds are the most collected and carry a mold number and often his name; this shop's guide to spotting a real Brad Keeler flamingo covers the glimmer in the eye and the base that separate his from the rest. Maddux of California made larger, showier pairs on shared bases, and the Keeler versus Maddux comparison sorts those two. Will-George is the third, and its reed base and airbrushed grading are its signature.

The look-alike that matters most for this guide is Will-George's own unmarked bird. The same mold, the same glaze, with the pottery's gold mark worn away or never applied, is a perfectly good Will-George flamingo worth what a Will-George flamingo is worth. Add a hotel stamp and the same bird is offered at ten to a hundred times that figure. The difference is entirely in the stamp and the story attached to it, so the stamp deserves the closest examination of anything on the object: under the glaze, in the recessed foot, with the glaze pooling naturally around the lettering. For the general method of reading a stamped base, including what a transfer mark looks like compared to a later overglaze addition, see the guide to what the mark on the bottom actually proves.

What these flamingos actually sell for

Confirmed auction results for ordinary Will-George flamingos sit well below the asking prices on the hotel bird. A pair of 7½-inch birds from a named collection, estimated at $200 to $300, hammered at $60 at Ripley Auctions in July 2024. Two 15½-inch birds with their matching pottery pond, catalogued with the Siegel story attached even though the lot did not claim a hotel stamp, sold for $700 at Bradford's in July 2022. A group of four birds, the largest 7¾ inches, carried an estimate of $100 to $200 at Sheafer King in June 2025. Dealer asking prices for marked retail birds on 1stDibs and Chairish run higher than any of those results, as dealer asking prices generally do.

For the hotel-stamped bird there is one public result. Potter and Potter sold a 9½-inch example on May 18, 2023 for $1,375 including the buyer's premium, on 14 bids against a $500 to $700 estimate, with the lot described as fine and the base stamped exactly as the shop's example is. Julien's estimated its pair at $2,000 to $3,000 in August 2022, and no published result for that lot turned up. Then there is the asking side: $595 and $5,949 on two eBay listings tracked by PicClick, $7,225 on a third after a markdown from $8,500, and $9,999 at Inscriptagraphs, none of them offering documentation. A hotel-stamped Will-George is scarcer than a retail one and carries a premium on any reading of the evidence; the one auction result puts that premium at roughly twice the estimate and well under a quarter of the lowest four-figure asking price. How much further it goes depends on whether a buyer is paying for a scarce hotel souvenir or for a December 26, 1946 handshake from Siegel, and only the first of those is on the record.

Where the records disagree

Three points stayed open.

First, the Pasadena date. The Kovels put the move from Los Angeles to Pasadena in 1940; the collector history that most dealers copy puts it in the late 1930s and credits Edgar Bergen's investment for it. The two agree on Bergen's involvement and on the 1934 founding and 1956 closing, and the difference changes nothing about the flamingo. It does mean a bird marked "Pasadena" is dated by the mark to a span of roughly 1938 to 1948 rather than to a single year.

Second, the stamp's wording. One eBay listing describes its bird's backstamp as reading "Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas, 46-48," which, if accurate, would be a dated stamp and a strong piece of evidence for an early order. The shop's example reads "Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas, Nev." with no numerals, and so does the base photographed in the Potter and Potter catalog; the eBay listing could not be opened to check its photographs. Whether a dated variant exists, and what the numerals mean if it does, is an open question worth settling with a clear photograph of such a base.

Third, the opening-night crowd. Julien's "200 VIPs" and Gragg's "28,000 people over three nights" are not in conflict on their face, since a hotel can single out two hundred guests from a crowd of thousands, but nothing in the period record describes any such selection, and the 2022 catalog does not say where its figure came from. The consignment itself became the subject of a lawsuit by Siegel's granddaughter over other items in the same collection, which bears on who owned what rather than on the flamingos. It is still a reminder that an auction catalog's provenance paragraph is a sales document and not a historical one.

The honest label for this bird

A Will-George porcelain flamingo, standing pose, on a teal reed base, with the Flamingo Hotel's name stamped under the glaze in place of the maker's mark; made in Pasadena or San Gabriel, California for the Las Vegas hotel sometime between December 1946 and the pottery's closing in 1956. That is what the object itself supports, and it is a good object: a special order from the first luxury resort on the Strip, made by a small California art pottery with a ventriloquist's money behind it, surviving in its original glaze with the stamp intact. The opening-night story can ride along as what it is, a claim first published by an auction house in 2022, until a period source turns up to confirm it.

For more on California flamingos, see the guide to Brad Keeler's flamingos, and for the plastic bird that came a decade later, the guide to the pink lawn flamingo Union Products signed instead of patenting. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.