Later on I wanted to locate the avionics division of Hughes Aircraft there and I had business meetings in Nevada with Bob Gross and Zeckendorf and dozens of other men. In 1950 I rented a bungalow out there. By then the town was moving right along. But I still had no real interest in buying in. I did pick up a little real estate – fifty or sixty thousand acres here and there. I did that in Arizona, too, in Scottsdale, because I could see that area had the potential for tremendous development. I’ve still got that land in Arizona – I’m damned it I know what’s happening to it.
Then, around 1960, I became seriously interested in Nevada. I looked into the future and I saw the tremendous pace with which the airline and the aircraft building industry was accelerating. The SST was an inevitability.
By the mid-1960s I was ready to move. What I lacked then was sufficient liquidity, and that was supplied when I dumped my block of TWA stock on the market. Then I had half a billion dollars ready cash to play around with.
I moved into a hotel, the Desert Inn, rented the top floor, the ninth floor, and set up headquarters. One day they announced to me that they needed part of the ninth floor for some big gamblers who were coming to Vegas for Christmas, and they always had those rooms, and would I mind giving them up? Well, I did mind, and I already had the Desert Inn on the list of properties I wanted to buy – but this business of their asking me to vacate some of the rooms on the ninth floor seemed to me like a golden opportunity to make one of those gestures that endear you to the hearts of the local citizenry and also throw a bit of a scare into the local politicos. So I said, in effect, ‘No, I’m damned if I’ll move. I’ll buy the hotel before I do that.’
And I bought it for $13 million cash. But it took a while, because the place was owned by a syndicate, and I insulted the head man, some racketeer named Moe Dalitz. I had a private meeting with this guy Dalitz, who I disliked. The meeting took place a short time before Christmas, because he said to me, ‘Mr. Hughes, it’s my birthday in a few days, and I’d be honored for you to come to a little birthday party I’m having.’
I said I’d try to make it. Naturally, I had no intention of doing so. He said, ‘It’s going to be in your honor as well, Mr. Hughes, because I have the same birthday as you.’ I felt a certain sense of revulsion at that idea. I said, ‘I haven’t celebrated my birthday since I was twenty-one years old. Birthday parties are for children,’ and I walked out of the room.
I had the same set-up there in the Desert Inn that I’ve always had where I live. I’m indifferent to my surroundings as long as the basic comforts are there. My own apartment on the ninth floor was sparsely furnished, except that when I first arrived and started buying stuff I somehow acquired a huge Persian carpet that had belonged to Adolf Hitler. It was a beautiful old carpet and it cost thirty thousand dollars. It wasn’t worth that much, of course, but someone in my organization no doubt got a fat kickback. Hitler had eight of them made for him back in the Thirties, woven by eight master weavers from the Arab countries. This one wound up on my bedroom floor in the Desert Inn. I used to pace back and forth on it and sometimes laugh like hell when I realized what I was doing. Good thing the newspapers didn’t know about that. They would have had a field day.
Other than the extravagance of Hitler’s carpet I had my amplifying equipment and closed-circuit television installed. I did have the drapes changed. They were too flimsy. I don’t like the idea of the awareness of time passing, so I had very heavy drapes put in to keep out the light. That’s something I’ve done all my life. I’ve refused to be a slave to time. And one way I’ve been able to get around it is to insulate myself against light from the outside so that, since I have no clocks and no watch, I don’t know what time it is. I run by an internal clock. When I want to sleep, I sleep, and when I want to work, I work. And when I want to pick up the telephone and call somebody, I call them. I don’t know if it’s noon or five o’clock in the morning or what.
That inconveniences a lot of people, doesn’t it? To be called at three and four o’clock in the morning?
I’ve discovered that when I call a man in the middle of the night, wake him out of sound sleep, I’m liable to find out precisely what I want to know, whereas if I ask him in the daytime when he’s wide-awake and prepared, he’ll be more guarded. I’ve got a lot of interesting answers out of people at four o’clock in the morning, much closer to the truth, because they’re befuddled, and their defenses are not up to par. You may think that’s unsympathetic and Machiavellian of me, but it’s a fact that truth comes out more readily from a man’s lips between the hours of midnight and dawn.
This also applies to some of my business deals which were concluded after long sessions in uncomfortable surroundings, when my opponent, I’ll call him that, was exhausted and broken down and gave me concessions which I couldn’t otherwise have obtained. I realized after several meetings with a man at three or four o’clock in the morning, the poor guy would be beat up and exhausted, and undoubtedly say to himself, ‘I can’t stand another one of these meetings with this Hughes guy, I’ve got to close this deal right now,’ and he’d close it more or less on my terms to avoid another session and another series of phone calls. Men are slaves to sleep. It’s a terrible weakness.
Please don’t think I always plan it that way. I’m not cruel. I’m oblivious to time. And I never twist anyone’s arm. Zeckendorf and Rockefeller bitched forever about those meetings in Las Vegas, but nobody put a gun to their heads and forced them to come.
The idea of the Desert Inn hideaway was to live simply. I saw very few people. My apartment was stocked with food and medicines for a month’s stay if I wanted to be alone, and there were many times that I did. Fresh foods and mail and books would come through the door in a special arrangement we had. Weeks would pass when I would refuse to see anybody or even answer memos. When I made telephone calls nobody knew where the hell I was telephoning from. I didn’t need newspapers. If I want the news, if I want to know what a mess the world is in, I turn on the television.
What about the maids?
If you don’t sleep in a bed, you don’t need a maid. Anyway, I’m used to making the bed myself. I’m nearly sixty-six years old and I’m not an acrobat, but I’m not helpless. You think I want dirty hands touching my sheets? If anyone makes my bed other than me, it’s someone I know very well. And he or she is wearing white gloves.
I’ve got no interest in gambling joints and gin palaces, except that they provide an interesting theater to observe human foolishness, but after the Desert Inn I bought a controlling interest in the Sands, and then the Castaways and the Silver Slipper, and eventually the Landmark, and one or two other places, including the Krupp Ranch, and a couple of little airlines around there, like Alamo Airways. Oh, sure – also Harold’s Club in Reno. I also bought a few mining properties. I got my people well set up vis-a-vis the local officials in the gambling department of the state. Governor Laxalt made a public announcement that I was the greatest thing ever to happen to the great state of Nevada.
It was impossible to do this discreetly. In fact, it was not my purpose to do it discreetly. My decision was, if I was going to succeed in my overall purpose, the image of Las Vegas had to be changed. Now, it’s totally impossible to root out all the corruption in a place like that. I didn’t even try. But since the American people think almost entirely in images, and you can convince them that red is blue and black is white if you drum it at them hard enough, we worked at it diligently. We couldn’t erase the idea that Las Vegas was the sin capital of the United States, but we could certainly erase the idea that it was Mafia-controlled. And it no longer is. It’s Hughes-controlled.
Around that time, didn’t you provoke Frank Sinatra into an argument, and have him thrown out of the Sands Hotel?
He got annoyed because I’d cut off his credit at the Sands.
You don’t call that provocation?
We adopted a strict policy of cash on the line for the slow payers, of which Sinatra was definitely
one. I didn’t see myself in the role of a private loan institution for freeloaders and aging glamor boys. I had nothing against Sinatra personally, although he may have born a grudge against me from the time I helped Ava Gardner escape his clutches. I guess he did try to make peace – he once sent me a television set as a Christmas present, which astounded me, and I gave it to one of the Jamaican maids in the Beverly Hills Hotel. I had no relationship with the man. He was just a loudmouth blusterer, a crooner who liked to play tough guy. Lost his voice, which is why he retired. Now he pumps himself full of Jack Daniels sour mash and silicone. He has hair planted in his scalp, like grass on a lawn in a heat wave. What can you say about a man like that except that he’s an idiot who can carry a tune?
To get back to my purchases: all of them were minor and preparatory.
My over-all purpose in Nevada had to do with the coming of the SST, the supersonic transport. I wanted Las Vegas to be the western port of entry to the United States for the SSTs. In order to accomplish that I had to have some clout in the state of Nevada. That’s why I bought all those properties, the hotels and the mines, to establish myself and my people as a fixture and an asset before I set the wheels in motion on the major project. I saw the SST as an inevitability – and I still do – but I didn’t believe, as most other people did, that the inevitable west coast port of entry was the Los Angeles area. When you’re dealing with the size and speeds of aircraft like the Concorde and the Tupolev and the new Boeing – the three SSTs that are in various stages of manufacture and design at the moment – you’re dealing with entirely new concepts, and it’s fatal to think along conventional lines.
Los Angeles International Airport is already straining at its seams and they could never expand it to handle the traffic. They had more than 600,000 landings and takeoffs at L.A. International last year, which is nearly double what Kennedy Airport handled, and JFK has nearly twice as much acreage as LAX. All the other areas around the city are far too populated, because with the SST you’ve got the problem of sonic boom. The Department of Airports out there has been trying to develop an intercontinental airport at Palmdale, in the desert, but they’re having problems with the ecologists.
On the West Coast the right place is Las Vegas, because the desert’s for sale cheap, you’ve got no weather problems, and not many people care about the lizards as an endangered species.
Las Vegas is exactly one minute further by air from Tokyo, for example, than Los Angeles; so there was never any question, as some people tried to claim later, that it was ‘too far to go.’ I’d explored the whole problem thoroughly. I knew what I had to do. It was simply a matter of fitting the pieces together, like you assemble a child’s building toy.
First of all it was necessary to get the state officials on my side. That’s why I bought in. They knew I had something else in mind other than owning a few thousand slot machines, and since they were dying to broaden the industrial base of the area they went along with me.
Secondly it was necessary to have an airport, or at least a place to build it. I bought the North Las Vegas Air Terminal. I always like to own an airport near where I’m living.
Was your acquisition of Air West part of that SST plan?
It was a ripe plum – it cried out to be plucked. The airline was over its ears in debts with disastrous management problems. It was originally formed from a merger of three peanut lines – Pacific, West Coast, and Bonanza – and they were having a hard time integrating their schedules and facilities. The combined airline, which operated all over the Western United States, up into Canada and down to Mexico, would have fitted right into the scheme – a perfect feeder line. I offered $90 million and said I’d pick up their debt, which was another sixty million.
But you’d have thought Khrushchev and Mao were putting in a bid for TWA and Pan Am the way some people reacted. The Air West board of directors started to scream. I could never quite figure it out, except that maybe they didn’t want the heavy hand of Howard Hughes pushing the buttons and making them jump. The excuse they gave was that they didn’t think the CAB would give me permission to own another airline after the TWA-Northeast fiasco, but they were wrong. They might have stopped me if the airline hadn’t been so close to bankruptcy, but, in the end, the power of the dollar won out. They said, ‘Okay, Mr. Hughes if you insist. We’ll let you save our skins.’ The preliminary vote had been thirteen to eleven against selling to me. The board waited until exactly three minutes before my offer officially expired – then they voted seventeen to seven to sell.
Then, with all the effort you put into it, why didn’t the SST scheme work out?
There are two basic reasons. The first one’s not so important, but it had to do with the failure, at least for the moment, of Boeing’s development of the plane itself. I spent so many hours of my time working to implement that vision, only to have those shortsighted politicians in Washington cut the ground out from under the project’s feet. Once that happened there was a general lack of enthusiasm for any concrete plans for super-airports. You don’t need an SST airport if you haven’t got any SSTs to land on it. Well, you do, of course, because the Concorde and the Tupolev will be operational eventually, but the United States government has never been keen to sink billions of dollars into projects that will only benefit foreign manufacturers.
But that wasn’t the chief reason that I struck out swinging, at least for the moment. Lyndon Johnson was President when I started things going in Las Vegas. I’ve never met the man but we’d spoken many times on the telephone, and we were pretty much in accord on things, except for the way he so sneakily got us up to our eyeballs in trouble in that Vietnam adventure – and also, I might add, for the fact that he gave the go-ahead to the Atomic Energy Commission to blow up half of Nevada. Other than those two disagreements I had good reason to believe that Johnson would swing his weight behind me when it got down to the nitty-gritty as to where the western SST port of entry would be. You could even say I was counting on him.
However, this was 1966 and 1967 when I got deep into this thing, and if you’ll recall it looked like Johnson was going to run again for reelection and probably win. Then he backed out, which few people, and certainly not I, had foreseen, and Mr. Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968.
His election was one of the great disasters, not only to the best interests of the American public, but to me personally. It was known by then that I was lobbying for Las Vegas against Los Angeles for the SST port, and the California politicians and industrialists naturally yelled bloody blue murder against me. Dick Nixon is from California, and when he gets his ass booted out of the White House eventually he’ll undoubtedly go back to California. He’s the one who, behind the scenes, did his best to stab me in the back on the Las Vegas vision. I’m sure it’s partly revenge for what happened in 1960 when the details of the loan to his brother came out, and it cost him the election.
I’m a patient man, and we’ll see what happens in the future in Nevada.
What sort of life did you live for five years on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn?
Behind steel doors and drawn curtains, tended by my five faithful Mormons, growing my fingernails and toenails eight inches long, shuffling around in Kleenex boxes, and watching old movies all night long. By the way, I’ve always wondered: if you had eight-inch toenails, how could you fit your foot inside a Kleenex box?
That’s what I’ve read and I’m sure you’ve read it too. That’s all so far from the truth that it’s almost worth keeping up the pretence just to provide me with an occasional chuckle – but that’s not why I’m sitting here telling you the story of my life. My purpose is to sweep away the myths and tell the unadorned and maybe not-so-glamorous truth.
I was in Las Vegas probably for a total accumulated time of eighteen months out of those whole five years, and I treated the ninth floor of the Desert Inn like one of my ten or twelve bungalows scattered around the western hemisphere. It was a convenience, a comfortable place to stay f
rom time to time, and nothing more, I had a private elevator and a private exit. Only I had the key. I had to do that because there was always the sensation of panting hordes moving in the corridor outside, waiting for His Eminence to speak. If I ever pulled the drapes and looked out at the street, fifty cameras would go click. Several newspapers offered as much as $25,000 to anyone who could get a photograph of me. Can you imagine?
Why did you hire so many Mormons as close associates during that period?
I had a fellow named Bill Gay as my chief executive assistant. He had been a vice-president at Toolco. He was a Mormon and he wanted his own kind around, no more profound reason than that. I personally had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t have cared less. The newspapers have often referred to them, in connection with me, as the Mormon Mafia. Well, they’re Bill Gay’s Mormon Mafia, not mine. I just found that in general the guys he hired were reasonably competent and discreet and didn’t ask too many questions, probably because they don’t have the imagination to ask too many questions. They don’t drink or smoke. They’re some of the dullest people I ever met, and that suits me fine.
The other significant lieutenant I had was Bob Maheu, an ex-FBI agent who ran the Nevada operation. In all the five years he worked for me I wrote him a lot of letters and talked to him often on the phone, but I never met him face-to-face. That suited me too.
Of course you can get into some peculiar situations living the way I lived then, and something happened once that could have been a minor disaster. It turned out to be a fiasco but not such a funny one when you think what might have happened. There was a kidnapping.
This was in 1967, and it’s one of the most bizarre things that’s ever happened in my life. First I have to tell you that I employed doubles from time to time. Not one but several. They made it easier for me to leave the hotel and travel.
This time I went away to meet Helga in Mexico, at Zihuatanejo, that Pacific coast fishing village. I’d bought a cottage there on the beach, in another name. People had no idea where I was going. My normal practice when I went on such trips was to tell my people: ‘I’m going into a period of total seclusion. I’m not to be bothered, to be phoned, to receive any communications, under any circumstances, unless I communicate.’ They usually thought I was on the premises because one of my doubles – in this instance his name was Jerry Alberts – took my place, ate my food, read the books and watched the movies I had ordered.
Howard Hughes Page 39
