I stopped the car. This was in the midst of a lot of publicity about me and TWA, and I didn’t want to go in, so I asked Bob if he’d do me a favor and go in and buy me a package of Mallomars. ‘If you can’t get Mallomars,’ I said, ‘I’ll take plain butter cookies or graham crackers. And a container of milk.’ Bob said he’d be glad to do it.
So he went in, and I waited, and I waited, and no Bob. I thought, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Finally, ten minutes later, I got out of the car and went into the 7-11. Inside, one man had Bob by the elbow, and Bob was talking hard, talking for his life, it looked like, to another man.
He’d stuck those damn Mallomars inside his windbreaker and zipped it up. That’s not a candy bar – a package of Mallomars is bulky. And the damn fool had got caught.
Did he try to steal the milk too?
No, he’d paid for the milk. That must have been against his principles, to steal milk.
I stood there. What could I do? Go up there and say, ‘I’m Howard Hughes and you must let this man go. He’s the president of Lockheed Corporation.’ I don’t know whether Bob had identified himself as Robert Gross, president of Lockheed, and I didn’t want to embarrass him, and I didn’t want to be hailed into court as an accessory to a Mallomar theft in a supermarket. That would have made page one everywhere.
How far had he gotten with the Mallomars?
They grabbed him on the outside, near the door. They always wait, I understand, until you’re past the checkout, otherwise you can sue them for false arrest.
I soon realized that Bob didn’t want to identify himself as one of the leading corporate executives in the United States. He wanted to pay these people off get out of there as quickly as possible. That’s what he was trying to do when I walked into the supermarket. But he didn’t have enough cash with him. He had maybe ten or fifteen dollars, and that wasn’t enough to get these hick-town people off his neck.
Didn’t he have a checkbook?
Of course he did, in the car, in his briefcase, but how could he give them a check and sign it Robert Gross? That would have allowed them to blackmail him for the rest of his days. He needed more cash. You don’t buy yourself out of a situation like that with ten dollars.
They had posted a man at the door, some beefy young guy in a T-shirt, to see that Bob didn’t scoot out. Bob sidled up to me and told me what had happened and that he had to have something substantial to pay these people off. ‘Howard, I’ve got to have a hundred dollars.’
I don’t carry that kind of cash on my person, of course, but I did in the lining of my hat. I had my hat on the back seat of the car. They let me go – they had nothing against me except that I was the friend of the thief, and I went out to the car, tore open the lining of my hat, found a hundred-dollar bill and brought it back in.
I thought you said that you only carried thousands and singles in your hat.
I was lucky this time, or Bob was lucky. I had a few hundreds. If I’d only had thousands it would have cost Bob a thousand dollars, because I’m sure they wouldn’t have made change for him. They probably would have had him arrested for passing counterfeit money. I gave Bob the hundred-dollar bill and he gave it to the store manager, and they examined the bill a long time and finally said,’ Okay,’ and let him go.
We went outside together. He was red in the face and sweating. He said, ‘Here’s your damn Mallomars. Next time go in and buy them yourself.’
‘I didn’t tell you to steal them, you goddamn idiot.’ I made him a long speech: ‘You ought to know that crime doesn’t pay. You should be grateful I had the money to bail you out of this. I could just as easily have turned tail and run and let you go to jail. How would it look if I was associated with a shoplifter? It would ruin my reputation.’
And that’s true: I doubt very much if Equitable Life would have loaned me $40 million if I’d been involved in a shoplifting scandal, even for a package of Mallomars. But of course, mostly I was just kidding Bob, and he knew it. On the way to Los Angeles we laughed about it, although it was kind of a strained laugh on his part. I often wondered afterwards if he went on with his candy stealing, or if that was the high point of his criminal career.
Anyway, the following year, 1953, I became involved in another selling attempt, which was chiefly the result of a misunderstanding between me and Spyros Skouras. I’d been talking to him in a Greek gin rummy club that he frequented, and I said I was interested in expanding my medical institute, and I might sell out everything in order to do it. What I meant was that I might transfer all my assets to the medical institute once it got going, but he misunderstood and thought I wanted to sell everything I owned and become a philanthropist. Spyros didn’t speak English perfectly and I couldn’t understand half of what he said when he was talking fast, and maybe I didn’t hear some of it and just nodded – you know how that can happen. You just nod and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’ Your mind is somewhere else.
Next thing I knew, Spyros called me and said, ‘William Zeckendorf, the urban developer and the owner of the Chrysler Building in New York, and Laurance Rockefeller, the family’s venture capitalist, want to come out and visit you. They’re interested.’
‘Interested in what?’
‘Buying you out. You told me you wanted to sell, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘Send them out.’
Now, I thought, I can get a free price on the whole thing – Toolco, the aircraft division, RKO, TWA. I even threw in the brewery. Spyros arranged a meeting. I gave them the full treatment. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was meeting with William Zeckendorf and Laurance Rockefeller, because that would have provoked all sorts of rumors, so I told Zeckendorf he was to meet my people at such-and-such a street corner and then transfer to another car. We talked there for a while. Then I thought they might like a plane ride. I flew them down to Las Vegas in my B-19 bomber, which I’d outfitted with a bed and big easy chairs, a bar, even a partners’ desk.
Sometimes I use this so-called eccentricity of mine to my advantage in business dealings. If you move people around enough, make a cloak-and-dagger operation out of it, that throws them off balance. I was also concerned that we were being spied on in Los Angeles, and therefore Vegas would be safer. So I told them to meet me at Santa Monica Airport at one o’clock in the morning on a runway, and wear dark clothes. White shirts are very conspicuous at night.
Was there a deal in the works by the time you arrived in Las Vegas?
There was an offer. They were serious, except that Zeckendorf wanted to make part of the payment with California real estate, and I already had plenty of that. They started out around a billion and change, and eventually I worked that up to around a billion and a half.
I said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ I wanted to see if they’d jack it up to $1.8 billion which is roughly what I figured it was worth – what I hoped it was worth. But one and a half wasn’t bad, either. It got bogged down somewhere up around there. They went back to New York, and finally I told the switchboard at 7000 Romaine that if Zeckendorf called, I couldn’t be found. I think it was around then that I went to Cuba to see Ernest Hemingway.
Zeckendorf yapped to the newspapers – he was insulting, said it was unpardonable of me, and I was a man without a conscience for having changed my mind that way. That was a baldfaced lie, because I’d never changed my mind – my mind was made up from the beginning that I had no intention whatever of selling. As I said, it all sprang from a misunderstanding on the part of Spyros Skouras, because he was a Greek and couldn’t speak English very well and I got bored listening to him and just nodded and said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Zeckendorf must have known about the Dillon Read deal falling through in 1948. He wouldn’t meet my price, and I certainly didn’t feel sorry for him. It was me who paid the hotel bills in Las Vegas.