Howard Hughes (38 page)

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 from 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.

I wasn’t feeling too well down in Zihuatanejo, and Helga had to leave earlier than planned, so I left. I made a stop in Houston on the way back. I went back there with some sentimental idea of catching a glimpse of Sonny. But Sonny was swallowed up in that mass of
fifty-story
buildings that had gone up since I left there.

You didn’t contact anybody there?

Who? I didn’t know anybody. I took a cab out to Yoakum Boulevard, to have a look at the old house, but the old house was long gone, which I should have known it would be. Some school, St. Thomas’s, had been built on the lot.

Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. Not because home has changed so much, but because home’s not there anymore. So I came back to Las Vegas and the Desert Inn sooner than expected.

And the place was in a turmoil. Jerry Alberts had been kidnapped.

I couldn’t understand how this had happened. Jerry was under strict orders not to leave the ninth floor. Maybe, I thought, he got bored. Maybe he went out to see to some woman. No one knew. This, of course, was the thinking that was going on when I came back, when it was discovered that
he
had been kidnapped. You see, until then, Bill Gay and the Mormons thought
I
had been kidnapped. They had no way of knowing it was really Jerry. They only had the vaguest idea that I employed doubles. That was my private system of checks and balances.

What had happened was that about three days after I had left for
Mexico, my people received a ransom note asking for a million dollars. This situation had never arisen before, but the men had their instructions. First they tried to establish contact with me in my apartment – an emergency signal – but there was no answer to it. The protocol then was to break in, and they discovered that I was missing.

Now I’ll jump ahead a little bit and tell you this from my point of view. I returned, as I said, considerably earlier than I had planned. I probably was away ten days in all. When I walked in, that is, when I established communication with my people again, their mouths hung open and they said, ‘But, Mr. Hughes, how did you escape?’

I misunderstood. I said, ‘How I left is none of your business – I’ve told you that before.’

They yelled: ‘But, Mr. Hughes, you’ve been kidnapped!’

I said, ‘Is that so? Tell me about it.’

The story came out about the ransom note.

But this was six days after they had received the note. I said, ‘Why haven’t you paid the ransom?’

You can believe there were some red faces. They had all sorts of excuses for that. First of all they weren’t sure it was me.

Did you still use the ‘Pay Damn Quick’ code?

Yes, and the note that was supposed to have come from me, accompanying the ransom letter – while it was a good forgery of my handwriting, nevertheless it didn’t have in it the letters ‘PDQ.’ That was one reason they gave. Also they said they were trying to negotiate with the kidnappers, to get some proof that they really had me.

I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, I could have had my throat slit by now.’

My point was that despite the code we had arranged, I wasn’t satisfied with the reaction I had got from my people, because for all they knew I might have been given drugs by these kidnappers and unable to remember what I was supposed to put down.

When I got back and explained that it was Jerry who had been kidnapped, each of these Mormons said to me: ‘I wanted to pay, Mr. Hughes, but not the other – not him.’

We were faced with an extraordinary situation. The kidnappers had
Jerry, who they believed was Howard Hughes – at least that’s what we assumed, even though I realized that Jerry would have told them he was a double – and they were demanding a million dollars for the wrong man.

Someone said, ‘Don’t pay, Mr. Hughes. After a while they’re realize they have your double and they’ll let him go.’

‘They may not believe him,’ I said. ‘They may kill him if I don’t pay.’

You met and discussed all this with your people?

I didn’t meet them face to face. It was discussed on the telephone. But they knew damn well it was me, and they knew damn well I wasn’t calling from some place up near Reno, where the kidnappers were supposed to be. They knew I was right there on the ninth floor on the other side of the wall.

Finally we worked it out. These people, whoever they were, got in touch with us and were told they had the wrong man. They believed it finally, because Jerry had insisted, and although he was my double he didn’t look precisely like me – he had a little nervous tic which I don’t have, thank God – and his voice was quite different, much deeper than mine. I spoke to one of them on the telephone. They realized they’d made a mistake, but they said, ‘If you want this man back alive, it’s going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars.’ Why they selected that sum, I don’t know, but they did.

It was paid in cash, twenties and hundreds left under a cactus bush outside of Reno. It was all done like a cheap Hollywood gangster thriller, and Jerry was delivered unharmed, a little bruised and dirty – he hadn’t bathed in a week – and apparently very grateful that I had saved his skin.