Bell also testified that Laxalt personally solicited contributions: “From time to time during Paul Laxalt’s administration he asked me to convey to Mr. Hughes the desirability of making political contributions to certain candidates. He actually visited me personally with reference to supporting particular Republican candidates.” In a series of interviews, Bell added that Laxalt requested the funds in visits to the Frontier, on the telephone, and while they played tennis together, and recalled that the governor “pushed very hard” to get Hughes money for his designated successor Fike, who, according to Bell, personally came by to pick up his cash.
The list of Hughes’s demands is quoted from Bell’s deposition.
Laxalt’s letter to Attorney General Clark is reproduced in a report of the Senate Watergate Committee. To the governor’s claim that Hughes’s purchase of the Stardust was necessary to drive out the mobsters who owned it, the Justice Department replied: “We feel sure that Nevada’s interests can be equally well served by means which do not violate federal antitrust laws.” The department also noted that Hughes said he planned to retain all the old personnel at the Stardust.
4 Network
The scene of Hughes watching “The Dating Game” is reconstructed from a transcript of the March 29, 1969, show and from a handwritten Hughes memo of the same date quoted later in this chapter (p. 155).
Hughes’s TV viewing habits were described by two of his Mormons and also gleaned from information in his own memos. His creation of the “Swinging Shift” is detailed in a series of memos.
Hughes bought KLAS in 1967 from Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. “Right after Hughes appeared in Las Vegas, I began getting calls from his Mormons,” recalled Greenspun. “At first they asked that I keep the station open a little longer. Then they wanted to know if we’d put on westerns or airplane pictures. Finally I said, ‘Why doesn’t he just buy the damned thing and run it any way he pleases?’”
On February 14, 1968, the FCC granted Hughes a license for KLAS without holding any hearings, although it had always required other applicants to appear in person. Commissioner Nicholas Johnson issued a stinging dissent: “Before we grant the management of what may become the largest company town in American history one-third control over its television communication, we owe it to the public to air these issues in open hearing.” Maheu meanwhile reported to Hughes: “We ran into a problem with the FCC examiner who indicated the necessity of a hearing with you present as sole stockholder. We handled that situation at the Commission level. Sen. Bible was very helpful.”
The ABC tender offer Hughes called a two-hundred-million-dollar deal was actually a deal for $148.5 million. With ABC selling at $58.75 a share, Hughes offered $74.25 a share for two million shares, 43 percent of the outstanding stock. However, his memos make it clear that he ultimately planned to buy a controlling interest in ABC, at least 51 percent of the stock, perhaps far more.
My account of the ABC board meeting is based on interviews with then ABC vice-president Simon Siegel and general counsel Everett Erlick, both of whom were present. “It was a total surprise,” said Erlick. “Our key strategy was to force Hughes into public, but we never knew why he dropped the bid.”
Lyndon Johnson’s personal interest in the Hughes-ABC battle was recalled by a member of the White House staff and an associate of one of the president’s private attorneys, both of whom noted that Johnson always avoided contact with the FCC for fear it would raise questions about his own TV holdings in Austin. ABC’s Erlick also said that “LBJ had people watching it, but never got directly involved.” Johnson’s belief that Communists controlled the TV networks is quoted by Doris Kearns in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Signet, 1977, p. 331).
Four of the seven FCC commissioners confirmed in interviews that the FCC was prepared to approve Hughes’s takeover of ABC if he appeared in person. “I regarded him as a much saner man then than I would now,” said Kenneth Cox. “We assumed that he would appear, and the FCC had already approved his purchase of KLAS, so we were on record in finding him qualified.” Even the maverick Nicholas Johnson, who opposed the KLAS license, was ready to approve the ABC deal. “Obviously he was mad as a hatter,” said Johnson. “But we didn’t know it at the time. Someone had to own ABC, and there are some who thought he’d do better at it than some guy brought in from some business school who used to work for Allied Chemical or something. It seemed to us to be merely a business deal.”
None of the commissioners was aware of Hughes’s renewed plans to buy ABC in March 1969, but one noted that the network’s worsening financial condition might have made it even easier for Hughes to get FCC approval. “There was concern that ABC was so weak it would go under,” said Robert Lee. “We would have had to weigh the problem of one-man control against the network’s need for money.”
The “beautiful white girl” who won “The Dating Game” was a black actress named Alice Jubert. The child who chose her was the six-year-old son of “Mission: Impossible” star John Copage.
5 Fear and Loathing
The Tony Awards show was broadcast Sunday, April 20, 1969. The Great White Hope was named best play; its star, James Earl Jones, was named best actor; and the woman who played his white mistress, Jane Alexander, was named best supporting actress.
My account of the August 23, 1917, Houston race riot was drawn from contemporaneous press accounts and Robert V. Haynes’s A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Louisiana State University Press, 1976).
Jean Peters described her postmarriage relationship with Hughes in deposition and court testimony, and one of his personal aides provided further details in an interview. Another aide, Ron Kistler, who served Hughes at Goldwyn Studios and lived with him for three months at Nosseck’s in 1958, recounted the Porgy and Bess episode in a sworn deposition and also gave testimony on Hughes’s strange behavior at the projection studio.
“He arrived wearing a white shirt, tan gabardine slacks, and brown shoes,” recalled Kistler. “Those were the clothes he wore all the time he was at Nosseck’s until finally the clothes got so filthy and foul-smelling that he took them off. Then he became a nudist…. He had a lot of telephone talks with Jean Peters. He told her he was in a hospital undergoing treatment for a disease the doctors couldn’t diagnose.”
Hughes’s no-messages decree is transcribed in a Romaine Street log dated August 13, 1958. His breakdown at the Beverly Hills Hotel was described by Kistler in his deposition, and by another aide in an interview.
All of the “germ warfare” memos quoted are from “Operating Memoranda” compiled in a loose-leaf binder entitled “Manual of Instructions/Office Procedures,” and also referred to as the “Romaine Street Procedures Manual.”
The incident in which Hughes burned his clothes was recounted by Noah Dietrich in an interview. His relationship with “The Party” was described by Kistler; by the chief of his harem guard, Jeff Chouinard; and by an operative working for Chouinard who tapped her telephone on Hughes’s orders. The wireman recalled the teen-age mistress calling Hughes an “impotent old slob,” and Chouinard quotes her in his book (written with Richard Mathison) His Weird and Wanton Ways (Morrow, 1977, p. 153). Despite his playboy image, Hughes had always been shy with women, and a large number of his most famous affairs seem never to have been consummated, at least according to the accounts of several Hollywood actresses who later wrote about their relationships with him. Jean Peters has never discussed the intimate details of their marriage, but it is clear from her court testimony and from interviews with his aides that Hughes had not shared a bed with his wife for five years before he moved alone to Las Vegas.