By Humberto Guida, Photographs: Greg Gorman

s much as he hates to be introduced as such, Harry Morton is the dapper 24-year-old son of Peter Morton, the man behind the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. He's a scion of a family replete with self-made successes, starting with his grandfather, Arnie Morton, founder of Morton's Steakhouse chain, and his uncle Michael, who heads the N9NE Group in Las Vegas.

It's therefore safe to say that accomplishment comes with the territory of being a Morton, though Harry insists that the pressure for him to succeed is self-inflicted. His family, he says, only wants him to be productive in whatever he does. Having graduated from NYU with a degree in hospitality, Morton seasoned his career with marketing and nightlife ventures at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, where he guided the success of its nightclub Body English and helped lure Jeff Beacher's comedy-variety show from Manhattan to Vegas. And now he's ready to branch out with a Mexican restaurant chain called Pink Taco and a new liquor brand called Tantra. In between bites at a Morton's Steakhouse in West Hollywood, Morton chatted about his entrepreneurial spirit, what he believes will be the biggest year in his life, and his disdain for being labeled an heir.

"I have no interest in being an heir or being famous because I'm my dad's son; that doesn't mean anything to me," Morton says. "I've got to go do my own thing. A lot of people like to be the heir of something. I don't blame them --a lot of people use it to their advantage. But I get bored with being known for my last name."

It might seem as though the "do your own thing" theme is a rational attempt to validate the perks that come with a position like his -- hell, we're eating at his grandfather's restaurant -- but with that class-president smile, he insists there's a sense of humility and a work ethic that separate him from his former classmates at Harvard Westlake School in Beverly Hills. "I grew up around people whom you could call heirs -- at that school, it was every rich son and daughter, and I get grouped in with these people," Morton explains. "I want to stand out from that crowd. I could never be the guy who rests on his dad's successes and sits around the pool all day. I know people like that." Unlike your typical heir in Los Angeles, Morton adds, he doesn't drink, do drugs or go out five nights a week -- "but I'm not naming names," he says with a laugh.

Which isn't to say that Morton doesn't share the traits of your typical rich and famous in L.A.: He has a model's face but without the posturing; there's no Zoolander "Blue Steel" expression. And unlike privileged Angelenos who show up for meetings in jeans and sneakers, Morton prefers a business-meets-sporty approach, wearing slacks, a vanilla buttondown and leather shoes. He's also a restless spirit, more New York than laid-back L.A., although he attributes this characteristic to ADD; he can't sit through a movie, he says, unless at least 30 people have told him it was unbelievable (for the record, he last saw Syrianaand liked it). He also tends to start a sentence only to veer into another when he thinks of a better answer. And while his thought process seems to be lightning-quick, in actuality he moves through life at a very deliberate speed. In the business world, that translates into charisma, and Morton's type of charisma has worked for the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino from a marketing standpoint: His involvement in Body English, which garners more than its share of boldface-name press, as well as his role in securing Beacher's Madhouse in its move from New York to the Hard Rock, helped cement his professional status.

"I knew Jeff Beacher in New York when he was a furniture salesman," Morton recalls. "His show started getting hot, and he was inviting me to see it. I was like, Ehh. Then everybody I know was telling me I had to check it out, that it was insane, but I wasn't into comedy. Finally I saw Beacher's act and thought, This is it."

Why has Beacher's show -- which mixes comedy with hip-hop, sexy dancers with a sword-balancing, seven-foot-tall Russian homosexual -- taken off the way it has? "The Hard Rock customers don't want to see Siegfried and Roy, so Beacher's show had all the elements we wanted," Morton says. "The more badly behaved the crowd was, the better the show would be -- the drinking, the nudity, the whole ethos of what the show was built on made it a perfect match for the Hard Rock. And Beacher always wanted to come to Vegas. It turned out to be a really sweet deal, especially for him."

As proof of the latter, Morton recalls a night out at Il Mulino recently. "The host saw me and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Morton, give us five minutes for your table, we're getting someone out right now.' Then he saw Beacher, and suddenly it was, ‘Oh, Mr. Beacher, right this way.' I love Jeff, so it was nice to see someone you like achieve something big."

Now Morton wants to achieve his own dream, and the first steppingstone is Pink Taco. The idea came about in marketing meetings for a new restaurant at the Hard Rock; originally approached with a bit of laissez faire, the restaurant's concept took off, and it developed a rep for having one of Vegas' best Mexican menus. Suddenly people from Texas and Arizona were calling Morton asking about franchises.

He doesn't plan to franchise for now -- why should he, he says, when he can open new locations himself? Additional Pink Tacos will open their doors in Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 15th and in L.A. on November 1st.

So is the restaurant business going to be the cornerstone of his legacy? "No, it won't," he says. "I haven't fully decided what my legacy will be. Gaming is really what I enjoy the most; that's why my first stop after I finished NYU was Vegas. I like the restaurant business because I've been around it so much all my life. But gaming is where the action is. You never know what a day at the casino will be like; it never stops, never closes, 365 days a year. There's a lot more swing. With a restaurant, you open it, you watch your numbers, you control your costs, and you sort of know, theoretically, how it'll run. With gaming, you never know."

The one venture Morton feels more personally drawn to is the suggestively named liquor, Tantra. "One thing I have learned is that sex sells," he says. "It's a vodka-infused sake, which also means we can sell it in places that only offer wine and beer." At this point Morton puts down his fork and knife and begins gesturing excitedly, and even he realizes it. "You can tell by the way I'm talking about it that the liquor business is something I could get into on a permanent basis."

Ironically, Morton has quit drinking for no particular reason other than saying, "I can't achieve what I want to achieve and drink [at the same time]." Perhaps for the same reason, he notes, he prefers work to relationships these days; not that he has any trouble introducing himself to women, especially in Las Vegas, where he once met Jessica Simpson at Body English by sending over six bottles of champagne.

Ultimately, Morton is the kind of guy who is open and up-front -- unless you push him. Talk to him long enough without pressing him and he'll tell you everything; try and pry something from him, however, and he shuts down. That's the case when people attempt to get Morton to talk about the members of his family who passed away last year, including grandfather Arnie and his late stepsister, Domino Harvey, the famous model-turned-bounty-hunter, whose biopic, Domino, hit theaters last fall. On his own, he does offer a brief personal sentiment: "It was tough; it was a real sad thing, and I don't like that there are people trying to pursue me about that, asking questions and turning it into gossip."

In the end, he doesn't take it seriously, he notes. "I don't listen to it; it's b.s.," he says. "I've been put in those gossip columns because I am Peter Morton's son. But to be honest, now that they're putting me in as myself, I feel better about it." He pauses for a second before finishing the thought. "I like to be recognized for something I've done, not for the sake of celebrity."

It's precisely these circumstances that have made Morton's father, Peter, an intensely private man. Harry says he, too, wants to get to the point where he doesn't have to be so accessible, but for now he feels he needs to be in order to support his businesses. "I have to sell a product. I have to run a successful company," he says. "You know when you realize that you're in it for keeps? When someone else's money hits your bank account, and now you owe them."

Aside from giving investors their money's worth in his Pink Taco and Tantra ventures, Morton intends to be heavily involved in the new nightclub planned as part of the Hard Rock's $1.2 billion expansion, a project that includes five towers, 30 bungalows, a spa, a condo-hotel, a Mister Chow's and four other restaurants. It's the kind of laundry list that would cause most people to keel over, but Morton doesn't show a glint of being overwhelmed. With that in mind, I ask him if he remembers the turning point in his life, the moment that made him want to work so hard.

Morton doesn't hesitate. "It was one summer -- it must have been the summer of '89 [when Morton was only eight years old] because Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgoodwas number one," he recalls. "I stayed on the couch the entire summer watching MTV every day; I never got up. My parents vowed that would never happen again."

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