“Now, Bob, I have never made my views known on this subject. And I certainly would not say these things in public. However, I can summarize my attitude about employing more negroes very simply—I think it is a wonderful idea for somebody else, somewhere else. I know this is not a very praise-worthy point of view, but I feel the negroes have already made enough progress to last the next 100 years, and there is such a thing as overdoing it.
“I just dont want to see you badgered into some concession, because once you do consent to some such concession, you can never cancel it and put things back the way they were.
“I know this is a hot potatoe,” Hughes concluded, “and I am not asking you to form a new chapter of the K.K.K. I dont want to become known as a negroe-hater or anything like that. But I am not running for election and therefore we dont have to curry favor with the NAACP either.”
Outside, far beyond the gaudy strip of gambling casinos and high-rise hotels, far removed from the make-believe world of glittering neon, fabulous showrooms, Olympic-sized swimming pools, hundred-dollar bills and fat cigars, there was another Las Vegas, housing the city’s blacks. They had been kept in a ramshackle ghetto out on the edge of the desert—a grim American reality three miles distant from the great American dream—and that’s where Hughes wanted them kept. In crumbling homes and segregated schools, with no jobs for one out of five adults, and nothing at all for the kids, the nearest recreation facilities being ten miles away.
By the late sixties it no longer seemed possible to ignore. Not even in Las Vegas. Federal courts ordered the classrooms integrated and bills were introduced in the state legislature to end discrimination in housing as well.
Hughes was aghast.
“Do you have any report from the people in Carson City re the civil rights or fair housing legislation?” he demanded. “I just heard one TV news report that stated the latest fair housing bill is the very most extreme anywhere in the U.S. That sounds pretty frightening.”
His lobbyists in the state capital went to work, and two weeks later Maheu had good news: “Howard, Tom Bell was successful in knocking out the Fair Housing Bill in its entirety.” But even Bell, law partner of the governor’s brother and the billionaire’s paymaster to Nevada lawmakers, could not so easily end the threat.
Within another two weeks, a new—albeit, far weaker—housing bill was introduced, this one ostensibly backed by Governor Laxalt himself. Hughes was both shocked and enraged:
“Bob, what is this about Laxalt’s open housing bill? I thought he was a friend and I thought Bell had told him how I feel about that issue.”
How could the governor so callously ignore the wishes of the state’s leading citizen? Had Hughes not been generous? And just to take care of thirty thousand blacks, who probably never contributed a dime. Hughes fired off a second memo to Maheu, this time enclosing evidence of the governor’s perfidy:
“Please read all—every word—of this article. This worries me. If Laxalt goes this far in his leaning toward benefits favoring the colored race, it may influence other legislation.
“What worries me most is that I am just hovering on the brink of further huge investments in Nevada, and Laxalt’s friendship is an important part of this decision.
“If Laxalt knows I dont want this legislation, and he goes ahead and pushes it anyway, that is peculiar friendship.
“It says in this article that the bill would not pass except for Laxalt’s urging.
“Please call him or ask Bell to contact him at once. It may be impossible to reach him in the AM and tomorrow may be too late.… I would like to go ahead with all my Nevada plans, but this worries me a great deal.…”
Just in case the governor was not moved by the promise of new investments, or the implied threat of not making them, Hughes now offered the real bait to bring the normally obliging statesman back to his senses:
“You may send Laxalt through Bell absolutely unlimited assurances of unlimited financial support. He does not need the colored vote and I want him to know this loud and clear!”
Apparently the message got through. Loud and clear. Maheu reported the victory to his boss later that day, April 16, 1969:
“Tom Bell just called to inform they have just definitely killed the open housing bill. He wanted you to know that Laxalt was very ‘quietly’ helpful in accomplishing this. In other words Howard, he delivered to Tom the critical vote which enabled Bell to kill it in committee.”
Very quietly indeed. The local press reported a far different story: “Governor Paul Laxalt’s fair-housing bill was killed in the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday by a 4–3 vote. It was one of the first major defeats of Laxalt in the ’69 legislature.”
In the bitter debate that preceded the committee vote, one of the bill’s supporters warned that Nevada was courting another Watts. State Senator James Slattery, one of the lawmakers who came to Hughes’s rescue (and who had received $2,500 from the billionaire), responded: “If they’d had the guts to go in with machine guns and kill two or three hundred in Watts, you wouldn’t have had it. They were breaking the law.”
Apparently, Hughes himself also failed to heed the warning. A few months later he was once again trying to hold back the waves. This time by standing in the schoolhouse door.
“I just heard the ch 8 program re integration, and this is frightening,” wrote the recluse.
“I understand the necessity of compliance (to the extent absolutely necessary) with the Supreme Court’s decision, at least until such time as it may be modified.
“But I certainly am not very happy about this 800 thousand dollar loan the schools are seeking to make and the rest of the overboard more than necessary compliance with this far-out integration plan.
“Please tell me what can be done about it.”
In fact, nothing could be done that the like-minded city fathers hadn’t already done. A federal judge, explained Maheu, had ordered that $7 million be spent to integrate the schools. The local school district was holding the line at the $800,000 figure that Hughes found so outrageous. It was, Maheu assured his boss, “minimum compliance.”
Two months later, the inevitable finally happened in Las Vegas.
It had been almost a year and a half since Hughes had worried in the aftermath of King’s assassination, “I wonder how close we are to something like that here?”
Despite the horrible conditions, despite the callous indifference, Las Vegas had escaped the riots that raged through most of urban America.
But on Sunday night, October 5, 1969, the ghetto at the edge of the desert exploded. The rampage of looting and arson continued for three days. Two hundred blacks were arrested. Two men died.
The violence never threatened the Strip. In fact, it never went beyond the boundaries of the distant slum. But it left Hughes shaken.
“Howard,” Maheu wrote soothingly, “I can almost guarantee you they would hit other properties long before ours.”
Hughes, it seemed, had a secret ally high up in the enemy camp. “Although there are those who do not believe it, he is truly the most respected and ultimate leader of the colored group,” added Maheu.
And who was this secret protector of the man who killed the open-housing bill, who tried to block school integration, who refused to employ blacks and wouldn’t even allow them to appear on his television station?
Sammy Davis, Jr.
He was the last of the “Rat Pack,” the only one to stay on at the Sands after Sinatra stormed out, and the one black on Hughes’s payroll. Indeed, he had just signed a new five-year contract with Hughes.
“Very recently,” confided Maheu, “he gave me his assurance that no damage would ever come to you from ‘his people.’ ”
But now arose a new danger from which not even Sammy Davis, Jr., could protect him.
6 Armageddon
It was already well into the evening of a very bad day when Howard Hughes finally reached for his afternoon newspaper, carefully extracting the middle copy from
a pile of three, thus avoiding contamination from the two exposed editions.
Peering through his “peepstone,” a battery-powered magnifying glass that lit up the page, Hughes prepared to scrutinize the paper, his deep-sunk eyes narrowed to catch every threatening nuance hidden in the small print.
The headline hit him without warning: “HISTORY’S MIGHTIEST A BLAST NEAR VEGAS.” It leaped into focus through his lens, the screaming mass of thirty-six-point type absurdly enlarged, and struck the stunned recluse with full megaton force.
“This is the last straw,” he scribbled in a rush of fear and anger. “I just this minute read that they are going to shoot off the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated in the U.S. And right here at the Vegas Test Site.
“I want you to call the Gov. at once and the Senators and Congressman,” Hughes ordered Maheu. “If they do not cancel this one extra large explosion, I am going direct to the President in a personal appeal and demand that the entire test program be moved.…”
It was war.
A massive hydrogen bomb with an explosive force greater than 1.2 million tons of TNT had been buried deep beneath the Nevada desert, just one hundred miles from Howard Hughes’s bedroom. One hundred times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, big enough to shake four states, and practically right next door.
It was Tuesday, April 16, 1968. The bomb was set to be detonated in ten days. This was the moment Hughes had been dreading for more than a year, ever since the Atomic Energy Commission, with a malevolent sense of timing, launched a new series of major underground weapons tests just one month after he arrived in Las Vegas. The first, a megaton blast shortly before Christmas 1966, rattled the Desert Inn and left Hughes shaken. Since then, however, only low-yield devices had been fired, and the mollified recluse thought he had the AEC’s promise that no future ground-shaking explosions would be conducted at the nearby Nevada Test Site.
Now, suddenly, this sneak attack.
In horrified disbelief, Hughes picked up his newspaper and reread the government’s bland announcement: “Persons up to about 250 miles from the detonation may feel a slight earth tremor immediately following the explosion, particularly if they are on upper stories of high buildings or other tall structures.”
A message of doom clearly directed right at the penthouse. Ten days to zero and counting.
In his own kingdom, Howard Hughes was no longer the most powerful invisible force. The bomb was. Atomic fission—the ultimate in out-of-control power—was the ultimate terror to Hughes, who above all needed to be in absolute control.
He was determined, at all costs, to stop what he called “the bombing.” It became his greatest obsession. He would carry his battle through every level of government and finally into the White House, offering bribes to presidents and presidential candidates, trying, in fact, to buy the government of the United States, all in a desperate effort to stave off nuclear devastation.
Hughes had finally found a menace worthy of his madness. He had spent years casting about for a danger to justify his dread, drifting from germs to blacks to impure water, and now his paranoia had become so finely tuned that it focused on the central horror of our age. A full decade ahead of the rest of the nation, he recognized the infinite threat of nuclear power, and seeing it alone was, of course, in mortal terror.
The bomb was not hidden to Hughes. Indeed, the nuclear tests were the only happenings in the world outside that he could actually feel, the only external force from which he could not hide. His ninth-floor aerie vibrated from the explosions, the entire building swayed, the chandelier in his attendants’ office swung like a pendulum, the windowpanes in his own blacked-out room rattled behind the blinds, and the shock waves left him trembling in his suddenly unstable bed. All else beyond the penthouse was merely a TV show. This actually reached directly into his seclusion.
“When we came here, you will remember, it was a close decision between this area and one other,” Hughes wrote, reminding Maheu that he had almost instead gone to the Bahamas. “I finally chose this one, oddly enough, to avoid the hurricanes. Well I promise you I did not come here to avoid hurricanes only to be molested by some stupid ass-holes making like earthquakes.”
More threatening still was the unfelt, unseen, silent enemy—atomic radiation. Yet another form of contamination, it was all the more terrifying because, like the long-dreaded bacteria, invisible. There was no way to ward off the deadly rays, no possible “insulation.” Kleenex and paper towels could protect him from germs. Isolation, armed guards, and loyal Mormons could protect him from people. But nothing could protect him from the radiation.
That same radiation, he was certain, was seeping through the underground strata, poisoning the earth beneath Las Vegas and polluting the water whose purity so obsessed him.
“The whole operation just makes me want to vomit,” wrote Hughes, sickened by the thought. “I cannot for the life of me understand Laxalt permitting these bastards to dessicrate and lay forever waste, poisoned, and contaminated all of those miles and miles of beautiful virgin Nevada soil.
“I am not saying the bomb is unsafe in terms of leaving a crack in the middle of Fremont Street into which somebody might fall. I have said from the start that the real damage from these explosions was in the contamination of underground substances and the pollution of the very bowels of the earth on which we live.”
In fact, Hughes was so afraid of the insidious atomic rays that he worried about aides he never saw or even spoke to becoming likewise contaminated.
“Please issue instructions to all of our people not to go anywhere near that test site,” he ordered. “And, to the extent possible, to stay away from the AEC meetings and briefings.”
A feared threat and a hated rival, the bomb was also bad for business. Hughes was certain it imperiled his entire two-hundred-million-dollar investment in Las Vegas.
“Who can possibly contest the fact that thousands upon thousands of tourists will be lost to Nevada if the testing continues and if Nevada becomes identified with the ghastly spectre of nuclear devastation?” he demanded.
“I have insisted from the start that any damage would be in the form of destruction to the attraction of this community as a peaceful paradise-like resort, at which people could get away from, and not be reminded of the gruesome, ever-present, over hanging threat of the ghastly image of the scarred and mutilated bodies which remained after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
“As I say, the future image of this area should, hopefully, represent a vacation resort of the very ultimate quality—not a military experimental testing ground for exterminating devices.”
While Hughes spoke of scaring off tourists, it was the billionaire himself who saw Las Vegas as Hiroshima. Although he often expressed his fears in terms of profit and loss, the lurid language of his memos and the shakiness of his scrawl betrayed a very real, very personal terror.
The fears were, in one sense, more than reasonable. Others may have learned to live with the bomb, or at least to ignore it after a 1963 treaty banned atmospheric explosions, the mushroom clouds disappeared, and the tests went underground. But Hughes, who well understood the potency of hidden power, was not beguiled.
“Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere were once considered entirely safe, and those who opposed them were laughed at,” he argued.
“Now, nobody in the free world would consider exploding a nuclear bomb in the air or in the sea.
“Who is to say that, in the future, contaminating the earth upon which we live may not be frowned upon just as much.”
Eventually a presidential panel would agree that the underground blasts posed grave risks. And ten years later, the forced release of suppressed documents would reveal an appalling truth: for a quarter-century the government had known its test program would condemn thousands of American citizens to disease and even slow death.
Ahead of his time, even prophetic in recognizing the dangers of nuclear experimentation, Hughes, howev
er, was not opposed to nuclear weapons, nor was he really opposed to nuclear tests. He was opposed only to testing those weapons in his own neighborhood.
Indeed, the bomb was merely a focus for all his diffused fears. Nightmare visions of nuclear annihilation exploded in his mind. Time and time again Hughes would return to the “gaunt, ghastly horrors and tragedies of nuclear warfare with all its ghastly residue of burned, maimed, mutilated and scarred human flesh.” Life in the penthouse became a never-ending scene from On the Beach.
And under that strain, Howard Hughes became a mad prophet of doom. He already looked the part, and had he been a man of equal madness, lesser means, and greater moral fervor, he might have taken to the streets, become a sidewalk savior, waving a placard, carrying to the masses his message of impending devastation.
Instead, he remained in hiding and scrawled his apocalyptic visions on his bedside legal pads.
“If the gigantic nuclear explosion is detonated,” he warned, “then in the fraction of a second following the pressing of that fateful button, thousands and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of good potentially fertile Nevada soil and underlying water and minerals and other substances are forever poisoned beyond the most ghastly nightmare. A gigantic abyss too horrible to imagine filled with poisonous gases and debris will have been created just beneath the surface in terrain that may one day be the site of a city like Las Vegas.
“I say Nevada is no longer so desperate for mere existence that it has to accept and swallow with a smile poisonous, contaminated radio-active waste material more horrible than human excrement.”
More horrible than human excrement. For the anally-fixated, chronically constipated billionaire, this was the ultimate imprecation.
Even before the impending test was announced, Hughes had had a premonition of doom. A month earlier, five thousand sheep had been killed in neighboring Utah when an Army biological-warfare experiment had gone awry. The frightened recluse instantly identified with the martyred flock. He took their slaughter as an omen, a clear sign that he too was in danger.
Citizen Hughes Page 21
