by Luke Davies
It was the new phase of my life. This time. For certain. No more nonsense. I’m not quite sure how the years rolled on. But when I moved to the desert in 1966 to begin my New Life, it was as a monk that I went, to my high cave, my eyrie, the top two floors of the Desert Inn in Vegas, with my acolytes, my Latter Day Saints, my men of good cheer, my minions, my Mormons; and I left sweet Jean behind in California: where the shopping was good.
I saw myself as pure being in the pure geometry of the desert.
In Las Vegas we blacked out the windows and made ourselves at home. (By day the glare of that desert place would set the brain to throbbing. At night I could barely stand the thought of all that neon, let alone the sight.) The habit continues to this day. I’m light-sensitive. Jack can see that. And I needed to rest.
I had become so exhausted after so many years of avoiding court appearances regarding TWA v Hughes that I sold my entire TWA holding, and in May ’66 I received a check for $546,549,171. So I was a little cashed-up in Nevada.
In my simple tiny room I experienced such a sense of vastness. I wanted for nothing. Simply nothing. I had my bed, my Barcalounger, my television, my projector, my screen, and my medicine kit.
I had broken every record, I had flown around the world, I had slept with all the girls. Now I just wanted to breathe for a while, gently, unobtrusively.
I sat in the dark. The films were delivered and taken away, delivered and taken away. I watched the girls up on the screen. I remembered blow jobs, fine dinners, flashbulbs, this one’s lipstick, that one’s slender neck, negligees draped across the chaise longue, drives in the Hamptons. Sometimes I could barely concentrate on the storylines, so cascading were the memories. My little room was a theater.
All the girls, gone forever. When I got sick of the movies I would turn on the television. One day on KLAS I saw Yvonne De Carlo in a program called The Munsters. I’d forgotten all about De Carlo. She’d been a beautiful girl in ’46, and we’d spent at least several lovely weeks together. There was that faraway day when she’d worn a pleated dress of heavy silk, under which I had buried my head as I held on to her thighs and she had stood, giggling, No …! Howard, no! It is a good position in which to begin to get worked up but the actual physics are not good in that one can’t easily get one’s tongue in there unless the woman crouches an inch or two and bows her legs a little like a cowboy, a position she then can’t sustain for too long. And you get a crick neck. But Yvonne De Carlo was game. The dress swayed around me in the semi-dark, every pleat like a synchronised bowstring. There was the rustling of fortune in my ears. I peeled away her underwear. Her buttocks were cold and firm beneath my hands. I breathed her in and hugged my face into her. We tumbled onto the bed. This was Vancouver in 1946. Her home town; I’d followed her to Yvonne De Carlo Week. Once I focused on getting hold of something I really found it hard to just let the issue go. Watching her twenty years later only served to confirm that even Yvonne had drifted irrevocably, tragically, from the center, from the center of things.
I loved watching movies at the Desert Inn. But after only a very short time Moe Dallitz, the manager, was regretting taking us in, since the Mormons and I didn’t gamble. Even though we paid our rent and room service, Moe considered two entire floors an extravagance, that being two whole floors that might otherwise house, feed and fuck any number of high rollers. He commenced eviction proceedings. He didn’t know what hit him.
To solve the little problem, to get him out of my hair, I bought the damn hotel, in March ’67, for thirteen million. And sacked Moe Dallitz, of course.
So. Then I had the taste for it. All this was a kind of momentum. My thrills were multifold. I know, I know, I said I had gone there to rest. But my thrills were multifold! I had flown all around the world, but real estate was to become my new expanding horizon. You only had to pick up the phone. After the Desert Inn I bought the Sands for twenty-three million. Then I bought The Castaways in October for 3.3 million, The Frontier in December for twenty-three, The Silver Slipper for 5.4 in April ’68, then The Landmark for seventeen, and Harold’s Club in Reno for ten.
It was play money. The IRS thought they were closing in; they always thought that. The Vegas licensing people started paying an awful lot of attention to me. But money is the city’s most respected commodity. And with Maheu my security man and the Mormons running interference, one always had the feeling one could, to some extent, switch off. Or at least, in a high desert cave, focus on the higher truths.
Oh, and I bought the local TV station, KLAS, for $3.6 million, Jack, because I may have had an empire to run, but I’d gone to Nevada to rest and to drift, as I said, and the late-night programming left a lot to be desired. I wanted to have some say in that myself.
THE CLEAN MEN
I HAD THE entire top two floors of the Desert Inn, yet one simple room sufficed for my domain. I liked that sense of security, of a full floor of buffer zone beneath me. I had Mormons on shifts, manning phones, guarding hallways and elevators. The same set-up I have here, in fact. The same set-up I have everywhere I go.
You might be wondering, Jack, why this obsession with the Mormons. It’s really very simple. How I hired them in the first place was that I came to understand that meticulous is good. It was back in ’47, I was retreating from Hughes Aircraft and Hughes Tool, from the day-to-day running of it all, the money was multiplying, the Senate hearings had wearied me, I wanted to be less visible, and after the XF-11 accident and my terrible injuries, I wanted to conserve my energies. I asked Nadine Henley, one of my secretaries, to find me a personal assistant, someone who could look after all matters, who could stand between me and the world outside. Meticulous is good, I said to her. And she had found Bill Gay, who had been preparing files for us for the hearings, and who, she said, was upright. Upright is good. He happened to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Jack, the Mormons. That’s all there was to it; it began, just like that. You want to rely on someone. You want to know that it all gets done. Someone does a good job. They don’t drink. They don’t smoke. You want a good job done round the clock. You ask about their friends. They all turn out to be Latter Day Saints. They’re methodical and loyal; it helps that they’re such clean people, too. So you start hiring. There is so much to do and so much to take care of. Just being alive, just trying to concentrate, it is all so difficult sometimes.
Eventually these men were my right arm, my left arm, my soul, my conscience. But what I actually needed, beyond all that, was an alter ego. This is where Bob Maheu came in. Bob had a solid background in intelligence, was connected in D.C., was a strong man and could get things done. He’d been involved in trying to get rid of Castro, a communist and a wop, when I had a drilling concern on an island on the Cay Sal Bank that I’d leased from a young Texan cowboy called George Bush, who owned Zapata Oil. Maheu had thought they could launch the Castro hit from the Cay Sal Bank. I never found out what happened there; I liked to keep my distance from the CIA. But of course, the last time I noticed, Castro was still alive.
In fact I first hired Maheu simply to run surveillance on Ava Gardner while she was going through her divorce with Sinatra. That was just a fun thing to do. A test-run for Maheu. Of course Ava was a very nice woman and I saw at the time the possibility of reigniting things; surveillance was therefore a given.
He passed this first simple task with flying colors. Frankly, I think he felt it was a little beneath his dignity, but he never complained, and his reports were always thorough. Eventually Maheu did all my work and dirty work, became my primary representative and number one problem-solver. He dealt with whatever came up. So in a sense he was the most important man in Nevada.
But that’s funny, about Sinatra, because there’s a connection there with the Sands. I was telling you I bought the Sands on my little spree. Now, Sinatra was under contract there at the time, and running up too much credit on the casino floor. You see, there was a history between Sinatra and me. You may already know that, Jac
k. One-sided, but a history nonetheless. The skinny wop had been sore at me, and had bad-mouthed me, for twenty years. From his perspective, he’d once lost Ava Gardner to me. I think it meant something to him, Jack, as if it tied us together in some kind of pathetic rivalry. This is twenty years earlier, for God’s sake! Some people can’t let go of things! Truth is, Sinatra meant very little to me. He was just an entertainer. He moved in worlds I owned. I didn’t think of him from one decade to the next. I never really knew the man, never met him as far as I can recall, no more than a handshake perhaps in a crowded nightclub, but from what I knew of him I couldn’t for the life of me understand what Gardner might have seen in him. Ah, the mysteries of women.
So, I’ve just bought the Sands, and Sinatra’s running up too much credit on the floor. And the question filtered up to me, just how much can we spring him for, and filtering back down was my answer, given with great pleasure: Frank Sinatra has reached his official credit limit. Well, he caused no end of ruckus. He demanded to speak to me. He felt he’d been publicly humiliated. He ripped the phone lines out of the hotel switchboard and then made the mistake of overturning a table on my casino manager, Carl Cohen, a solid man, who promptly knocked poor Frankie down, separating him from a couple of teeth. The incident was good for a laugh.
They were fun times, Jack, me up there in the penthouse directing traffic. In a neighboring casino, mind you. I was asking for quarter-hourly updates! I was on such a roll, I could almost feel the energy of that clash, of mad drunk Sinatra coming back for revenge, riding a golf buggy through the plate glass windows, screaming, Let me talk to the bastard! Let me talk to the bastard! Lemme get my hands on him!
BRONZE BELL TRAVELING
THROUGH SPACE
NO, I COULDN’T see what Gardner saw in him. Let alone why she would marry him. Because Sinatra was a greaseball. And Ava Gardner was a very classy lady. Back in the forties when we hit our stride together she was on her way up at MGM and recently separated from that insecure braggart Mickey Rooney. I liked her mostly because she seemed so uninterested in me; somehow this rendered the lovemaking even more full of sparks. I’d been so used to women agreeing to my proposals with open arms; after that the problem was always how to placate them while putting in place the eternal postponement. So Ava Gardner, all North Carolina dirt-farmer lust, all take-you-or-leave-you, was a novelty.
She stood up for herself. Case in point, perhaps I’ll tell Jack about the early days, when we had something of a messy episode. My surveillance had revealed that Ava would still occasionally fuck Rooney, a runt compared to me, and I was somehow offended—or one night at least, when I first found out, offended may not be the word, enraged would be better. So I stormed into her home. She didn’t know I had a key, but of course I had a key—I’d put her into the apartment. I crept along the corridors. I quietly turned the key in the lock. I stood in her foyer and listened for noise. Nothing. I burst into her bedroom. She was alone, asleep. She woke and shrieked. It took her a confused moment to work out what was happening. My adrenalin had nowhere to go.
Where is he? I shouted, fists clenched, though already in those first few seconds I was realizing it was a forlorn question.
I had rather hoped I’d make a scene and knock a quivering, naked Mickey Rooney to the ground. Instead, it was only Ava in a nightdress, sprung to life, shouting at me, pummeling me with her fists.
You horrible, horrible man! You’re pathetic, she said. How dare you, how dare you! she screamed.
And something snapped and I shook her, or at least tried to make her stop hitting me, and then I slapped her, hard. Okay, perhaps I hit her. More than once perhaps. But fast and sharp. I didn’t mean much by it.
The look on her face. I could see the sting. Her eyes filled with shocked tears. Then her chest suddenly swelled. There was an ornamental bronze bell on her bedside table. She reached for it and swung wide and hard and brained me. I saw it sail toward me, as if slowly, this heavy bell traveling through space on the full reach and arc of her swinging arm. I did nothing. I didn’t flinch. Crunch. I felt teeth crack, I felt something shift in my jaw. My body catapulted rapidly sideways then, until my eyes were intimate with the carpet and I could see the dusty shoeboxes under her bed. I tasted blood and perhaps blacked out. It was a tremendous blow. I’m quite sure all her kindness resurfaced. I carry with me still the vague memory of a face towel and the caress of warm water.
You silly man. You silly, silly man, I heard, opening my eyes as from a dream. Oh Howard, I heard, why do you bring this on yourself?
Let’s all relax, I gurgled.
That’s your problem right there, she said. You just can’t let be.
I lost two teeth to Ava, just as Frank Sinatra would to Carl Cohen twenty-five years later, so this represented no doubt a kind of balancing of the forces of the universe. She had split my head and broken my jaw. Apparently my men carried me to the car, to treatment and safety. Apparently I had gurgled to her to fetch them, parked in the dark across the road. We flew, my men and I, in one of my Lockheed Constellations, to the hospital, to San Francisco, because there was absolutely nowhere to hide in the Los Angeles hospital system.
The whole episode was a terrible misunderstanding, an awful moment. I regret very much hitting her; I see the pealing of that bronze bell on my battered skull as a just desert. A week later, back in Los Angeles, she apologized for hurting me and I apologized for arriving without prior arrangement. Ava, I said, it’s just that I can’t stand the thought of you seeing someone else. It’s just that I care for you so much!
That’s all well and good, Howard, she said. So why don’t we just make an arrangement that neither of us is to see anyone else?
Well, she had me there, the old devil! I had to laugh, which believe me is not at all easy with your jaw wired up.
She fed me soup for a week or two, spoonful by loving spoonful. She nursed me back to health! It was like a practice run for the following year, when it was mostly Ava who looked after me in hospital, after I crashed so extravagantly that day in Lake Mead. I haven’t told you about that yet, Jack. That’s the thing about Lake Mead, it’s hard to get in the proper sequence. You leave it behind only to have it rising up to meet you. The cold-water tang in the back of your throat.
Anyway, she spoonfed me back to health and we were in each other’s good graces again. I laid off the surveillance. Or perhaps she made me promise that I hand back the key. And perhaps I promised her that I’d already thrown it out. I never tried my luck with an unexpected visit again, but we did have some good times for another year or two. I had well and truly expended my Ava energy by the time Sinatra came sniffing around her.
Extravagance. I think it means more than enough.
Memo, 1967: Malarial
with anxiety
They’re planning to build the new Holiday Inn right smack in front of the Sands. To make it much worse, they are planning to make it a showboat sitting in a huge lake of water. A showboat with a pond of stagnant infested water.
If they are considering using water from Lake Mead, the effluent in the water would smell to high heaven. Jesus! When I think of that lake of sewage disposal on the front lawn of the Sands. Ugh! It may even smell up our Sands Golf Course. You can’t recycle water. It is not so much the technical purity or impurity, it is the revolting, vomitous unattractiveness of the whole thing. It is sort of like serving an expensive New York cut steak in one of our showrooms and having the waiter bringing the steak in to a customer on a beautiful plate, but, instead of the usual parsley and half a slice of lemon and the usual trimmings to make the steak attractive—instead of this, there is a small pile of soft shit right next to the steak. Now, maybe technically the shit does not touch the steak, but how much do you think the patron is going to enjoy eating that steak? I think he would lose his appetite very fast.
In any case, whatever the source of the water, there would be the additional problem of mosquitoes. They would not be able to have water running in a
nd out, so it would become stagnant and an ideal place to breed mosquitoes. Bob, I am quite malarial with the anxiety of it. How can we quash this thing?
Everyone seems to want to build a hotel here in Las Vegas. The philosophy of the community seems to be: lend a helping hand to everyone who wants to build a new hotel or casino, the more the merrier!
Please remember, Bob, that it was this philosophy—that there is no bottom to the barrel—it was this philosophy that led to the 1929 stock market crash and seven of the worst years this country ever faced.
It was this same philosophy that led to the construction of a miniature golf course on every corner in Los Angeles, and the horrible, tragic crash of this industry—taking with it all the little people involved.
YOU GET THE THING YOU
WANT, BUT …
I WILL NEED to tell him, more than almost anything, about frustration. You get the thing you want, but when you get it, it is not what you thought it would be. Disappointment always follows anticipation. I’ve tried to capture that moment again and again. But there is no present, no exact here. Leaning over a bridge, you drop a leaf into a raging river, and it’s already, instantly, carried away by the current: already the past, you see. With Empirin Compound, as with anything else, I am striving for the keys to the … to the bridge to the … to another side, to the newer thing. In narcosis, near blackout, there’s a moment when you’re almost there. You teeter on the brink, you are almost in the present. And you wake up later, cranky. Out of the nod, all ill at ease. Where was that thing? Where’s it gone? Why wasn’t I there? It’s like a mountain without a peak. Damn. Damn.
