“Re the ABM,” he scrawled to Maheu. “I urge you thank the president profusely for his offer to send Kissinger, but tell him I do not consider that this is necessary and I do not think it would advance the situation.
“Bob, to have this man here could only embarass me.
“It would place me in the position of refusing to see an envoy of the president, and, no matter how you try to dress it up, this is the way the president will view it.
“Please, regardless of how you do it, kill off this trip in some way.”
The offer that Nixon must have assumed would so flatter Hughes that it would ensure the payoff—and end his opposition to the ABM as well—instead left the recluse shaken.
As yet unaware of the debacle, but taking no chances on the $100,000, half an hour later the president sent further evidence of his good faith. All through July Nixon and Kissinger had been considering final plans for a series of mammoth nuclear blasts, designed to test the ABM warhead. No official decision had yet been reached. But now, on July 16, the commander in chief sent advance word to his hidden benefactor.
“Howard,” Maheu flashed to Hughes, “we are reliably informed that the AEC has finally given up the battle and will have all tests of a megaton or more held in Alaska. We are also informed that, for security reasons, they cannot, at this time, make any public announcement confirming their capitulation.”
Howard Hughes had won his desperate battle to ban the bomb. Or so it seemed. Richard Nixon, after all, was growing in stature.
It was time to celebrate.
11
Howard Throws a Party
It was to be the greatest party Las Vegas had ever seen, and Las Vegas had seen a lot of great parties. But this party was going to be thrown by Howard Hughes.
All through the spring and summer months of 1969, as Hughes and Nixon moved to close their big deal, the billionaire was planning a party. It was tentatively scheduled for the same Fourth of July weekend that the hundred-thousand-dollar payoff was finally arranged. Indeed, Hughes was far more preoccupied with the big party than with the big payoff.
The occasion was the opening of the Landmark, his latest hotel acquisition, and the first of his purchases to break the antitrust blockade—approved by a suddenly cooperative Justice Department three days before Nixon moved into the White House.
But it was more than that. It was a celebration of the triumph of the Hughes-Maheu partnership. Nothing could stop them now.
And yet that party would open a wound between them that never healed, one that festered for months. There would be other wounds—wounds terminal for Hughes, for Maheu, and for Nixon—but it was the explosion over the Landmark party that marked the beginning of the end.
The Landmark was the ugliest hotel in town, an ungainly bubble-top tower with an interior decor that struggled to combine outerspace murals, ancient Incan wood panels, and Italian marble statues of other famous “landmarks”: the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, Big Ben.
There was something strangely off-key about the entire place. A thirty-one-story haunted house, it had stood empty for eight years until Hughes bought it for $17.3 million from its bankrupt owners. With an air-conditioning system that never really worked and a constantly malfunctioning glass-walled elevator that crawled uncertainly up an outside wall of the tower, the Landmark had a permanent air of impending catastrophe. It seemed more like the setting for a disaster movie than the stage for a grand party.
But to Robert Maheu it looked beautiful in the spring of 1969.
“Howard, if you ever decide to leave the Penthouse, you will be flabbergasted at the sight from the top of this bubble,” he wrote, so carried away with his enthusiasm that he actually sought to lure Hughes from his lair. “It is magnificent during the day and unbelievably beautiful after dark. You get the feeling that this edifice was constructed at the very dead center of the valley, and that all the mountains surrounding the valley are in equidistant position.”
It was an uncharacteristic burst of poetic sentiment. However, within weeks, this beautiful vision had degenerated into an ugly brawl, one that would last for months.
“Instead of you and I clawing each others’ eyes out over the Landmark,” Hughes wrote Maheu as the planning for the grand party began to strain their marriage, “why dont you collaborate with me in endeavoring to find a formula for the opening that will satisfy both of us.”
Like all their big fights, this one was over something trivial, but in this case both the triviality and the fight were taken to operatic extremes. Perhaps the very notion of an “opening” was frightening to Hughes, a man whose life was devoted to keeping things closed. This would be his first party since arriving in Las Vegas, indeed the first since he had drifted into seclusion more than a decade ago. And while Hughes himself would not, of course, be at the party, still he was in some sense going public.
But there was more to this particular opening. It was Hughes going mano-a-mano with his arch-rival Kirk Kerkorian. Right across the street from the Landmark stood Kerkorian’s International, the biggest hotel in Las Vegas, taller than the Landmark, and it was scheduled to open the same week in July. The key issue was which day to hold the opening, whether to throw their party before or after Kerkorian’s. What Hughes wanted was a real blast that would blow Kerkorian right out of the water.
“The public can definitely be persuaded to believe that the opening of the Landmark will be the greatest event since the Last Supper,” wrote Hughes.
“On the other hand, to actually accomplish a fantastic opening of a brand-new hotel-casino with all of its complexities and all the things that may go wrong on opening night—that is something far more difficult.
“And, it only takes one incident in which one stupid dealer accidently insults just one of the many, many newspaper writers which you and I will no doubt decide should be brought out here from New York, Washington, London, Paris, etc., and then the fat will be in the fire.
“So, I say it is possible to control what people will expect the Landmark to be,” he concluded, “but I feel it is impossible to control with any certainty the outcome of the actual opening night.”
Quite a dilemma. Hughes, however, had a solution. He would not approve any date for the opening.
“Re the date of the opening, why dont you leave that open,” he told Maheu. “If the show and all other elements shape up very rapidly, fine, but I urge that a July 1st date not be committed any further in any publicity or word of mouth. I just dont want it to be embarrassing if the opening should be a little later.
“With my reputation for unreliability in the keeping of engagements, I dont want this event announced until the date is absolutely firmly established.”
Maheu was concerned. It was difficult to plan a Las Vegas gala and yet keep it secret; it was impossible to plan without knowing when it would take place.
“If we are not going to open on July 1, we would very much appreciate your giving us a fixed date (whenever),” he replied, gently urging Hughes toward a decision. “We truly believe that July 1 is a good target. If on the other hand you have a reason why July 1 bothers you, you need not give us that reason, but we beg you to give us a fixed date.”
Hughes had a reason, and he was pleased to give it. What he would not give Maheu was the date.
“I would hate to see the Landmark open on the 1st of July and then watch the International open a few days later and make the Landmark opening look like small potatoes by comparison,” explained Hughes. “Also, I would hate to see the International open with Barbara Streisand while the Landmark has no name on the marquee.