Clifford Irving - Howard Hughes - The Autobiography

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.