“Howard Cannon called me this afternoon to inform me that he and Senator Bible have been told all day long—by fellow Senators—that they can depend on full support and assistance in sustaining their position that we obtain the Stardust.
“I’ve been in constant touch with George Franklin and Governor Laxalt, and they are both ready to challenge the Justice Department ‘single-handedly.’ ”
Laxalt, in fact, made good on his pledge. He immediately shot off a letter to the attorney general, threatening to join forces with his hidden benefactor.
“If suit is instituted,” warned the governor, “we would be faced with no alternative other than to intervene and oppose the action with all the resources of the State.”
It was all to no avail. Ramsey Clark stood firm.
And Hughes was weakening. His ten-year battle over TWA had left him with a permanent fear of litigation, and he lived in dread of a subpoena.
“Suppose we take possession of the Stardust, and suppose we then notify Justice we want to talk,” he wrote. “Suppose they say: ‘Fine, let’s talk!’ So we talk, and while we are talking a story appears in the Sun that a U.S. Marshall is looking for me with a subpoena.
“Now, Bob, I dont have to tell you that this community is used to heroes who fall on their faces.
“Sinatra had the world in the palm of his hand during certain portions of his vivid, colorful life, only to fall off the pedestal and into horrible disrepute immediately afterward.
“So, as I say, this town is conditioned to the extremes of glorious success and failure to the criminal degree. Also, dont forget, Bob, that most people regard a subpoena or a court summons as equivalent to guilt and conviction. I assure you they dont bother to read the fine print.
“I repeat, they are used to seeing the guys on top fall off their thrones around here. So, when a story appears about me involving a subpoena, you can bet your life everybody in Clark County is going to have only one thought:
“ ‘Well, it had to happen sooner or later! Those big guys on top always wind up making some lousy little mistake, and then they get trapped with their hand in the cash register.’
“Dont forget, Bob, there is a crime crusade going on, and all of those loyal supporters of the Kennedies are just looking for somebody to nail to the wall.”
Knocked off his throne and nailed to the wall. What an inglorious end to his grand adventure! No, Howard Hughes would not be denied his domain. He would expand it.
It was not enough to own Las Vegas. It was not enough to own Nevada. It was not enough to own Laxalt. Hughes would have to reach beyond his besieged kingdom and buy America.
He had been spying on it all the time—through television.
4 Network
It was Saturday night. Date night. Howard Hughes, alone with his television, stared blankly at the square of light.
“From Hollywood … the dating capital of the world … in color … it’s ‘The Dating Game’!” A fanfare of upbeat music. Wild applause. A half-enclosed round stage turned, coming full-circle to reveal the grinning host of the show. All teeth and double-knits, he stepped off the revolving disk as the music reached its crescendo, making his grand entrance through a superimposed heart.
“I feel I should have walked onstage with a Band-Aid across my mouth this evening because we have so many secrets up our sleeve,” announced the game-show host, with a teasing pull at his cufflinks. “Why all the mystery?” he asked with a sinister chuckle. “That’s a mystery, too!”
Hughes watched silently. The laughtrack tittered appreciatively, then roared, but the billionaire didn’t even smile. Neither the TV show nor the wild incongruity of his listening to its fatuous emcee simper and smirk about secrets seemed to amuse him.
“I can tell you that game one brings to our ‘Dating Game’ stage one of television’s brightest young actors,” the announcer continued, drawing out the word young suggestively, now positively bursting with the secret to which he alone was privy. But he was not yet ready to divulge it. Instead, leering, he introduced a “swinging threesome” of starlets “designed to gladden any young bachelor’s heart.” Once more the stage turned, this time to bring into view the mystery bachelor’s three potential “dates”—“an actress who loves to cook,” a dancer (who also loved to cook), and a Playboy bunny.
Hughes watched the display impassively. Women no longer interested him. But now something happened that definitely seemed to pique his interest. From offstage—“we’ve kept him isolated in a soundproof booth”—came the “young bachelor,” arriving to the rising laughter of the studio audience, finally let in on the big secret.
A small black child walked across the stage. Hughes stared at him in dismay.
The game-show host prattled on, enjoying the joke, never knowing the incredible impact that his secret would have on one viewer who had some secrets of his own, who at that very moment was deciding the fate of the TV announcer’s entire network.
A network of his own. The idea had become an obsession.
Hughes watched television compulsively, around the clock, tuning in everything from “Sunrise Semester” (which he detested) to the “Late Show” (which he loved). He watched until the stations shut down, and even then often left his set on, falling asleep to the pictureless hum, waking up to test patterns.
Television was not only his sole source of entertainment but also his chief source of information. Hughes literally monitored the world through TV. It was as if he had a closed-circuit system spying on the feared outside, and virtually all he knew of the alien planet beyond his bedroom was the flickering images on the video glass.
The TV, always on and always at top volume, was his constant companion. He frequently wrote memos seeking to manipulate national policy or making multimillion-dollar deals while sitcoms or B-movies boomed in the background, sometimes making momentous decisions based solely on a chance encounter with a news broadcast, a commercial, even a game show.
Memo after memo would begin, “I just saw something on TV …,” to be followed by an order, a complaint, or a plan of action.
Sometimes it was merely a suggestion that others tune in an especially good program: “Ask Maheu to look at 13 on his set. This is the finest color television transmission I have ever seen. This looks like an oil painting.… Some of these scenes look almost as if they were paintings taken from one of the best known museums.” (Not at all surprising, given the fact that Hughes was watching a special on Michelangelo.)
Other times it was to complain that he had to rely on television for his information: “Once more my nervous system is subjected to the strain of seeing a news item I am not prepared for … Bob, I must be the least informed executive in the whole damned country concerning his own business. I have to learn more from the news media than anyone I know in a comparable position.”
But once Hughes proposed selling a major segment of his empire—the Hughes Aircraft Company, one of the nation’s leading defense contractors—to a firm he knew only from a TV commercial: saw a broadcast today with some advertising for a company called AVCO, and it seemed to me that they are in just about every business under the sun except making toilet bowls. So, maybe AVCO would be a good prospect.”
And often the billionaire’s viewing habits would have consequences far beyond his own domain. Seeing the world through television brought it down to manageable size, and Hughes was intent on controlling the little people who paraded across his screen.
“I hear nothing but politics on TV,” he wrote Maheu with childlike petulance.
h”You are in charge of all political activities for my companies and me … yet I have had no single word from you as to which of the many political aspirants is someone we want in office and which is not.
“You promised I could pick the next governor.
“It seems to me that we should have had by now a hand picked candidate in every one of these races—someone who would be loyal to us.”
Whether he was watching a
political campaign, an assassination, or the war in Vietnam, it was always with both the dispassionate remove of a man long inured to the fate of characters in TV dramas and the intense involvement of a contestant on “Let’s Make a Deal.”
“Did you see CBS News at 11:00 PM just completed?” he wrote Maheu one evening. “If not, please get a summary of the portion devoted to helicopters in Vietnam. More helicopters are being used than was ever contemplated and more helicopters are being lost than was estimated. CBS went on to say, over and over again, that this is a helicopter war.…
“Bob, for you to have your Whitehouse relationship, while, at the same time, our Aircraft Division sits empty-handed with the best helicopter design in the world—the whole situation is just the damndest enigma I ever heard of.
“Cant you do something about it?”
Yet for all his efforts to control the world through television, Hughes himself was ultimately held in thrall by the machine. He was as trapped in its beam as in his penthouse prison, the true dimensions of his cell not the fifteen-by-seventeen-foot confines of the hotel room but the nineteen-inch diagonal of the TV screen.
Television was his other narcotic. Hughes needed it to blunt the pain of both his paranoid visions and his true conditions. Certainly his most central and deadening addiction, after money and power, was not the codeine he injected into his arms, legs, and groin, but the TV he shot into his brain in quantities sufficient to overwhelm even a well-balanced mind. Hughes clung to his TV set like an addict to his spike. Although he usually had several sets in reserve, the need to send one out for repair was almost more than he could bear:
“Let the TV man see if he can repair the Sylvania that just left my room, but only in compliance with the following:
“I dont want it placed anywhere near the number one Sylvania machine, and I want the TV man not to be working anywhere near or in the vicinity of the no. 1 machine.
“In other words, I dont want the man to be even within”—he started to write “twenty or thirty” then crossed it out—“40 or 50 feet of the no. 1 machine, because I dont want even the remotest, tiniest possibility of the TV man swinging an arm around, or backing up without realizing how close he is, and coming into contact with the no. 1 machine.
“If it should turn out to be impossible to repair the machine without taking it to his shop, then I will be willing for the TV man to take it (the no. 2 machine), provided he does not pass anywhere near the no. 1 machine, and provided the no. 1 machine is not touched in any slightest way and remains here in the hall or across the hall.
“In other words, provided the no. 1 machine is not disturbed in any way whatsoever, either by the TV man, the watchman, or any one else whomsoever.”
Hughes’s seeming reverence for the “no. 1 machine” would not last. Never fully satisfied, he was constantly changing sets, always wanting a sharper picture, better color, higher audio, and, especially, more remote control. With more money than anyone in the country, perhaps in the world, perhaps in all history, Hughes wanted no personal possessions, no luxuries, no worldly goods, nothing but a really good color TV. And still the perfect set eluded him. At times there was a veritable showroom of discarded RCAs, Zeniths, and Sylvanias—fallen idols gathering dust in and around his room. And still he’d send his aides in search of the ideal television.
“Lets get a brand-new very latest type portable,” Hughes instructed the Mormons in one of an endless series of memos. “When we have a really perfect result lets get rid of all the miscellaneous sets we have here and across the hall. Leaving only 2 of the very latest. Lets see if we can get a set with remote contrast or brightness. I am forever wanting this. Also I understand they have an auto fine tuning adjustment now. They claimed the remote had more functions than any other.
“Lets really try to get the best.
“Before we close the deal,” he added, in this as in all business affairs retaining final authority, “I want to know the price and the discount.”
As it turned out, the price was $3.65 million. And there was no discount. But Hughes had a new “no. 1 machine.”
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ‘Swinging Shift’—programming until dawn for your late, late entertainment!”
Howard Hughes settled back to watch the show. He should have been happy. He finally had what he wanted. An all-night program he himself had created, introduced with an announcement he himself had written, presenting movies he himself chose, on a television station he himself owned.
KLAS-TV (channel 8) was his new “no. 1 machine.” Hughes had been dickering to buy the local CBS affiliate almost from the moment he arrived in Las Vegas, and now it was his. No longer would the “Star-Spangled Banner” sign-off leave him alone with his dread at one A.M. No more would his Mormons have to beg for the westerns he wanted or the airplane pictures he loved. Never again would he have to face a blank screen.
Hughes was in control.
Not even Maheu would share that power. “This is one small corner of the kingdom that I expect to report directly to me,” he informed attorney Dick Gray, his chosen instrument of communication with the station. “I want Maheu to have nothing at all to do with this department.”
Still there were problems. Instead of a balky TV set, Hughes now found he had a balky TV station. Frantically, he tried to tune it in:
“Please contact the station manager of ch 8 and tell him the complaints of poor and unsatisfactory technical operation of the station have reached a point where they cannot be ignored any longer.
“1. Careless and unskilled operation of what would be equivalent to the projection machine in a movie theatre … almost as if the operator was momentarily engaged in some other duty or almost as if he were uncertain what film or tape was scheduled to be shown next, or as if he could not find the item next required.
“2. Consistent snapping in of the sound track of commercials at a sound level 10, 15, or even almost 20 db. above the sound level of the preceding film or tape. There must be twelve different commercials that blast in at a good 10 db above the normal entertainment level.…
“I am fully aware of the pressure from advertisers to keep the volume of their commercials up in order to blast through the many viewers who use their remote control to squelch the commercial. However, for every one viewer who squelches the volume at every commercial, there are ten or maybe fifty who do not carry the remoter around in their pocket and who are not so trigger-quick as to be able to squelch out a commercial like the Dunes that pops in with a blast that almost shatters your nerves.”
Not quite quick enough on the trigger, his nerves shattered, Hughes could not even control the brightness and contrast on his own “Swinging Shift” movies:
“3. For the last three days, approximately, the transmission has been technically deficient in a manner that has resulted in the screen being periodically darker than any normal value. So dark in fact, that, in the Bette Davis film ‘Stolen Life’ and in the RKO film ‘Half Breed’ the screen was almost black throughout its entire area for long periods of time.…
“Now, also through a large part of ‘Half Breed’, the sound was way sub-standard, both in volume and also in quality.
“The dark picture was still noticeable this AM.…”
What made it all the worse was the humiliation of having his machine malfunction in public:
“I suggest you tell the station manager that the ownership of the station is publicly known to rest with the Hughes Tool Company, and that the Hughes Tool Company is known to have available to it the assistance of the Hughes Aircraft Company, probably the foremost organization engaged in advanced electronics in the entire world.
“Under these circumstances, it is just unacceptable that the quality of signal broadcast by Channel 8 be as far sub-standard as it is.
“So, if it is too much of a problem for ch 8 engineering personnel, the Hughes Tool Company will send a team of technicians to Las Vegas from Culver City, and they will damn well h
ave this station operating satisfactorily.”
But there were other problems not even the ultimate TV repairmen could solve, and Hughes grappled with them daily. Nothing escaped his attention. No detail was too small, as he had to contend now with distasteful commercials, then with “off-beat characters” delivering editorial opinion, even with “the programming slump which occurs from 6 to 6:30 AM.”
Treating KLAS as if it were his private TV set, Hughes not only demanded final say on all shows but actually spent hours poring over lists detailing each episode of each series running on the station. A flurry of memos followed:
“Please determine whether the black and white Lucy Show has been the regular scheduled program for the 12:00 o’clock to 12:30 time period.”
“Please ask Gray to ask Smith if it would not be better to use one of the remaining segments of ‘Hawaiian Eye’ instead of starting a new policy of running anything like ‘Run for Your Life’ which was in prime time only a week ago.”
“OK, by all means use ‘Hawaiian Eye.’ But please ask Smith to hold onto both segments of ‘Run for Your Life’ and ‘Man from Uncle’ as long as he can, as I want to explore the possibility of showing these before they are shipped.”
Time and again the beleaguered station manager had to await Hughes’s decision on proposed new programs, which were routinely rejected without explanation, always at the last possible minute. A memo pleading “the manager urgently requests an answer as to whether or not he can include the show ‘Playboy After Dark,’ ” would finally come back days later with Hughes’s scrawl:
“Absolutely NO.
“But I want it handled very carefully. I want no trouble with the Playboy people.”
Then there would be sudden outbursts from the penthouse, as when an enraged Hughes one evening discovered syndicated commentator Paul Harvey on the KLAS “Big News”:
Citizen Hughes Page 16
